Advice Thread OOC Future Tech Only

[SquareDisc City]

So it's electrical conduction via the metal. Which is not plasma. It's not an ionized gas conducting the energy. I'm really not seeing why this is so difficult for you to understand.

The metal is heated by the current so much that it turns into plasma, and continues conducting the current. I'm really not seeing why this is so difficult for you to understand.

[Nova Atlantis]

I'm going to say yes. True, it's an invincible shield, but only in a certain direction. Also, *cough* interdiction *cough*

Likewise, depending on how close/quickly you open that wormhole, a ship using a similar type of wormhole/subspace drive has a window of opportunity to escape to safety. I'd say, as long as there's wiggle room, you're fine to do whatever you want.

[Yes Im Biop]

Lightning the Biggest jolt's carries million's of volt's and million's of amps.

Lightning very different from a taser.

But to my point. The thin wire will for a millisecond or so before melting into white hot slag

So it's electrical conduction via the metal. Which is not plasma. It's not an ionized gas conducting the energy. I'm really not seeing why this is so difficult for you to understand.

Why are you obsessed with a Tazer?

Which will turn into plasma the second the jolt hit's it.

Thank you square

[Essos]

Hey guys. I've been rather desperate to break into future tech for some time now, having attempted (and failed) to do so on at least three or four occasions since 2010. Here over the past two weeks, I've had the fortunate of working with an old pal of mine, Rethan in the roleplay Securing a Future, which is basically serving not only to service a storyline Rethan's working on, but also as the introduction to my FT race, the Nicyl. The start of my factbook on them was lobotomized with the recent IIWiki crash unfortunately, so pretty much everything I have is being developed as I go in this thread or others that may come. I have three posts in the thread so far—if anyone could give me a critique or a few pointers, it would be more than welcome.

As I post this though, I wanted to talk about something that's endemic it seems to a lot of other people trying to break into the FT scene. I've been growing and developing a bunch of different mythologies for my nations in the MT area since late 2009, and have always struggled mightily with including technology or strategy into posts. In other words, because I lack the basic knowledge of military hardware or formations, my posts have always been geared towards looking at characters more so than the nation as a whole. My mythos' have changed more than a dozen times, but I have a slew of characters (Caius Anaximander, Calixte) that are sort of like my bread and butter. Well, my entry into FT has proven more of the same.

I love watching and reading good sci-fi offsite in real life, but I have never taken the time to learn some of the conventions or understand the technology behind it. As such, I've tried to focus in on characterization again, but this seems to be like the mark of death to other FTers. No matter how hard I've tried in the past, I seem to sputter along by myself for a few weeks before giving up the ghost and going back to MT, where at least I'm known enough to have some people who want to participate. Outside of sitting down and learning the science behind FTL or weapons systems that seem to dominate FT these days, how can someone without that knowledge still integrate into the community without looking like a complete jackass, or write at such a pathetic level so as to drive away anyone that would want to write with them?

Knowledge of physics is really a secondary requirement. More important is persistence and and having an engaging story. I've never finished a thread in something like 7 years on NS, but I continue to post, because I enjoy it. More important than anything else, don't give up.

If you're really concerned about physics, or weapons or other such things, I suggest posting specific questions that you have, and we'll see what we can do to help.

[Nova Atlantis]

-snip-

You know, I've been in your position for most of my existence on NS at this point---my presence seems to be a kiss of death on threads. Most dry up by page two or three (a big one by Steel Butterfly/Gholgoth I was invited to didn't make it past page one). Like you, I've never been much one for studying the actual Hard Sci-fi tech. I've always been a soft sci-fi. If I had to label myself a genre, I'd probably consider myself 'action-adventure'.

But...here's a thought. If this problem is so endemic, have we ever considered what it would take to mitigate it? Maybe more long-term group brainstorming or something? Does FT still do long-planned-out arcs like it used to?

[Spirit of Hope]

-snip-

You know, I've been in your position for most of my existence on NS at this point---my presence seems to be a kiss of death on threads. Most dry up by page two or three (a big one by Steel Butterfly/Gholgoth I was invited to didn't make it past page one). Like you, I've never been much one for studying the actual Hard Sci-fi tech. I've always been a soft sci-fi. If I had to label myself a genre, I'd probably consider myself 'action-adventure'.

But...here's a thought. If this problem is so endemic, have we ever considered what it would take to mitigate it? Maybe more long-term group brainstorming or something? Does FT still do long-planned-out arcs like it used to?

That sounds like something I'm interested in. I know some of the older players in MT-PMT still do something along this line, i.e. a semi-planed out thread with a few invited players.

[Daskoxian]

You know, I've been in your position for most of my existence on NS at this point---my presence seems to be a kiss of death on threads. Most dry up by page two or three (a big one by Steel Butterfly/Gholgoth I was invited to didn't make it past page one). Like you, I've never been much one for studying the actual Hard Sci-fi tech. I've always been a soft sci-fi. If I had to label myself a genre, I'd probably consider myself 'action-adventure'.

But...here's a thought. If this problem is so endemic, have we ever considered what it would take to mitigate it? Maybe more long-term group brainstorming or something? Does FT still do long-planned-out arcs like it used to?

That sounds like something I'm interested in. I know some of the older players in MT-PMT still do something along this line, i.e. a semi-planed out thread with a few invited players.

MWRP was doing that for Alone in the Darkness, but the group dissolved 10-20 pages through and the RP was abandoned. It was good while it lasted, though.

[Essos]

That sounds like something I'm interested in. I know some of the older players in MT-PMT still do something along this line, i.e. a semi-planed out thread with a few invited players.

MWRP was doing that for Alone in the Darkness, but the group dissolved 10-20 pages through and the RP was abandoned. It was good while it lasted, though.

Actually it was absolute garbage. Short posts, terrible grammar, and the presence of undesirable posters basically left the thread a hideous train wreck waiting to happen.

[Rethan]

For those looking for a long arc story, I'm working on something atm. So far, track record for completion hasn't been great, but with the final two threads of the arc I hope to have a better result. If you want to be involved, I can put you on a list of people to contact when it begins, or you can watch this thread here.

[SquareDisc City]

My own experience has been that most RPs dwindle and die rather than coming to a proper end, so I kind of expect it.

[Yes Im Biop]

MWRP was doing that for Alone in the Darkness, but the group dissolved 10-20 pages through and the RP was abandoned. It was good while it lasted, though.

Actually it was absolute garbage. Short posts, terrible grammar, and the presence of undesirable posters basically left the thread a hideous train wreck waiting to happen.

You love insuling people how have you lasted long?
Yeah that RP would of been if it hadent died

[Daskoxian]

MWRP was doing that for Alone in the Darkness, but the group dissolved 10-20 pages through and the RP was abandoned. It was good while it lasted, though.

Actually it was absolute garbage. Short posts, terrible grammar, and the presence of undesirable posters basically left the thread a hideous train wreck waiting to happen.

I was mostly focusing on Hlad, Saur, Krean, Dolm, TheFall, and I. Which was the majority, I believe.
/threadjack

EDIT: And Trin.

[Kreanoltha]

MWRP was doing that for Alone in the Darkness, but the group dissolved 10-20 pages through and the RP was abandoned. It was good while it lasted, though.

Actually it was absolute garbage. Short posts, terrible grammar, and the presence of undesirable posters basically left the thread a hideous train wreck waiting to happen.

I can concur with that as I was a member of the garbage. It was absolutely horrible.

[Korvos]

So, I was alerted by some experienced roleplayers that I really need to work on the length of my posts. I agree completely with that, but I don't know how to. Help, please?

[Essos]

So, I was alerted by some experienced roleplayers that I really need to work on the length of my posts. I agree completely with that, but I don't know how to. Help, please?

Recall, my suggestion was to look at what other people are posting, and look at what you're posting. Compare the two and see what you need to do to get up to the sort of posts others are making.

For those looking for a long arc story, I'm working on something atm. So far, track record for completion hasn't been great, but with the final two threads of the arc I hope to have a better result. If you want to be involved, I can put you on a list of people to contact when it begins, or you can watch this thread here.

Alert me at need. I know I contributed to one thread falling apart, but I was not alone in that failure, and feel only minimal guilt.

[Dolmhold]

I can concur with that as I was a member of the garbage. It was absolutely horrible.

I did join MWS to RP FT. I learned about 10% of how to RP there, mostly from outside sources.

I then joined FT-Bravo. Now I'm at where I am right now.

Looking back, the MWS RP group had a severe lack of standards, for one, and a lack of tyrants to stamp out godmodding and bad RPing. As I was under some kind of "follow the general trend" feel with the thread and group, you can see what my RPing was there, and the lolzy techwank I did. It was akin to the Flaming Wombat in quality and consistancy, which was not too much of a surprise since Hlad was a Wombat regular. There were no good models to follow/look up to, that is until Miehm, RT and the like sort of threadjacked it.

Overall, the quality of the RPs were garbage, although I have seen worse at times, and totally incoherant. I had so many run-on sentences that should rightfully be split into separate sentences that... ugg... I can't read any of what I wrote back then out loud. Overall, MWS was not a good group. For newcomers to FT, may I suggest NOT joining up in a band of other newcomers and instead joining a RP with someone who has more experience in RPing? It goes a long way.

[SquareDisc City]

I enjoyed the one MW RP I was involved in, Awakening Flames, but it didn't really fit what I'm looking to do with my nation in general with how off-the-charts the power scale was.

As for writing quality, well I think we'll all look back on stuff we wrote previously and wonder what on Earth we were thinking.

[Daskoxian]

I can concur with that as I was a member of the garbage. It was absolutely horrible.

I did join MWS to RP FT. I learned about 10% of how to RP there, mostly from outside sources.

I then joined FT-Bravo. Now I'm at where I am right now.

Looking back, the MWS RP group had a severe lack of standards, for one, and a lack of tyrants to stamp out godmodding and bad RPing. As I was under some kind of "follow the general trend" feel with the thread and group, you can see what my RPing was there, and the lolzy techwank I did. It was akin to the Flaming Wombat in quality and consistancy, which was not too much of a surprise since Hlad was a Wombat regular. There were no good models to follow/look up to, that is until Miehm, RT and the like sort of threadjacked.

Overall, the quality of the RPs were garbage, although I have seen worse at times, and totally incoherant. I had so many run-on sentences that should rightfully be split into separate sentences that... ugg... I can't read any of what I wrote back then out loud. Overall, MWS was not a good group. For newcomers to FT, may I suggest NOT joining up in a band of other newcomers and instead joining a RP with someone who has more experience in RPing? It goes a long way.

It was like an opium den…

[Escalan Corps-Star Island]

I wasn't scarred too badly. . .

[The Akasha Colony]

I can concur with that as I was a member of the garbage. It was absolutely horrible.

I did join MWS to RP FT. I learned about 10% of how to RP there, mostly from outside sources.

I then joined FT-Bravo. Now I'm at where I am right now.

Looking back, the MWS RP group had a severe lack of standards, for one, and a lack of tyrants to stamp out godmodding and bad RPing. As I was under some kind of "follow the general trend" feel with the thread and group, you can see what my RPing was there, and the lolzy techwank I did. It was akin to the Flaming Wombat in quality and consistancy, which was not too much of a surprise since Hlad was a Wombat regular. There were no good models to follow/look up to, that is until Miehm, RT and the like sort of threadjacked it.

Overall, the quality of the RPs were garbage, although I have seen worse at times, and totally incoherant. I had so many run-on sentences that should rightfully be split into separate sentences that... ugg... I can't read any of what I wrote back then out loud. Overall, MWS was not a good group. For newcomers to FT, may I suggest NOT joining up in a band of other newcomers and instead joining a RP with someone who has more experience in RPing? It goes a long way.

I remember when I joined Awakening Flames I was concerned the tech level was too low relative to what I normally ran. But within a page, it grew so large, I didn't want to bother expanding my nation to fit, so I stopped posting.

Although when it comes to bad RP, there's a 'certain' alt history thread here in II that I think deserves to be up there.

[Steel Confessors]

So, I was alerted by some experienced roleplayers that I really need to work on the length of my posts. I agree completely with that, but I don't know how to. Help, please?

Since no one seemed to try to help out here, I'll toss in my two bits.

As the others mentioned yeah, it does help to look at what others do. Generally it gives you a rough idea of what to look for in terms of quality posts, as generally they are quality posts. Try to work up towards them but at the same time, take your own spin on it. No one wants the same rehashed post over and over from different sources. Put your own views, opinions and interests to give it your own flavor and taste to it. It'll leave a better impact for everyone else.

Also, try to expand on little things you could use. Like, in FT it really helps to better explain technology that your society functions on and give a bit of a hint towards how it impacted your society, the reactions of your people, as well as gradual changes and refinements. However, try to not go too in depth. It can help and add some flavor to your post, not to mention length, but it can easily become something as bland as a college thesis. Use it to add flavor.

Expand on your characters. Show a slight nervous tic they have. Perhaps Johnny is all fine and dandy but he has a particular habit of throwing salt whenever he sneezes. Create a history about him/her/it. Make the character feel like someone you could meet. The easiest way is through character development but you only really see that later on in the roleplay. Add little bits of their personality. It really goes a long way.

Really, focus on what you can add to the roleplay to make it more interesting. Add that little bit of political intrigue or drama that everyone seems to love. Go into explicit detail about a character's appearance or their equipment. Hope this helps!

[Vernii]

Is multiteraton antimatter missiles in the 950 teraton range, and fired in ten thousand missile salvos, ussualy several hundred salvos in a matter of minutes, accompanied by fighters weilding multigigaton directed nuclear weapons, wormhole generators, singularity generators, and sectional sheilding capable of withstanding 5 exatons of energy considered weak, or overpowered for a single titan class vessel? Especcially since the other rapid fire weapons are in the muiltiterraton range, and the forward weapons are potentially in the exaton range, while the defenses are designed to take out millions of missiles at a time?

You can do whatever you want, the rest of us are under no obligation to deal with it though.

[Balrogga]

I meant the following:
Would using a wormhole generator to generate wormhole with the "entrance" infront of an enemy ship, and the "exit" in front of a black hole; there by having the blackhole suck the enemy in, be an okay tool?

No, the gravity well of the black hole would cause the wormhole to collapse.

Would using a wormhole generator to allow quick transit of a reserve fleet ontoo the battlefield as reinforcements be okay?

In theory but the FT community considers that a dick move and frowns upon it. It takes time to transition through a wormhole, for fair play sake. It is not instant travel. Even the Ta'Nar takes ten minutes to travel through theirs and they have been at it since OOC 2004, an IC equivalent of thousands of years by some scales

Would using a wormhole as a defensive tool by creating a tunnel in space, "wormhole", to interdict enemy fire and move it away from the vessel by having the exit of the wormhole facing away from the vessl, be okey?

I've had the concept in use for many RL years for my Ta'Nar, I call it the Mobius Aperture. The Ta'Nar might consider your attempt to imitate their defensive maneuver as either a complement or an attempt to copy them. Depending upon the situation and their reaction, the results might be quite funny to behold. Remember if you do this you cannot fire your weapons because they are also blocked, and as pointed out above, a gravity source would cause the aperture to collapse releasing that energy all over your freshly washed space ship. Think of the stains.

[Our Most Resplendent Goddess Sen]

Is multiteraton antimatter missiles in the 950 teraton range, and fired in ten thousand missile salvos, ussualy several hundred salvos in a matter of minutes, accompanied by fighters weilding multigigaton directed nuclear weapons, wormhole generators, singularity generators, and sectional sheilding capable of withstanding 5 exatons of energy considered weak, or overpowered for a single titan class vessel? Especcially since the other rapid fire weapons are in the muiltiterraton range, and the forward weapons are potentially in the exaton range, while the defenses are designed to take out millions of missiles at a time?

Yield inflation much? I mean, do you even grasp the scale of the numbers you're throwing out?

[YellowApple]

Would using a wormhole generator to allow quick transit of a reserve fleet ontoo the battlefield as reinforcements be okay?

I'm personally okay with this to an extent. I do RP with a sprawling network of permanent wormholes (a.k.a. "static superluminal transit nodes"), as well as wormhole-based FTL ("dynamic superluminal transit"). However, I almost always apply Murphy's Law and make sure that something goes wrong if I'm using dynamic wormholes (most commonly, some glitch occurs where the contents of the wormhole-based transmission are pushed either forward or backward in time and/or in a completely different universe, therefore causing substantial delays), and even the static ones will occasionally fail (usually, they'll lose their main power and run on a battery backup, giving enough time for anyone/anything already in them to exit and for the node to be sealed off before power is cut completely). I also implement charging times on these dynamic wormholes - after all, creating two interconnected black holes large enough to not spaghettify a ship and stable enough to not collapse and slice the ship in two and at anywhere near my intended target takes quite a bit of energy.

Another restriction I impose upon myself is accuracy. Since I'd be reaching a destination faster than said destination's light is reaching my original position, there's not only a significant calculation cost as I have to precisely compute where the star I'm seeing now is located several hundred/thousand/million/billion years from when the light was first transmitted, but also the unlikelihood of actually reaching that position accurately via line-of-sight alone. Building a static node works around this issue, but at the cost of getting the necessary materials and engineering brainpower to that distant location, which takes quite a bit of time to do.

Basically, this would all depend on who you're RPing with; while I'm totally cool with it, others will, as Balrogga pointed out, consider it a dick move to just warp in a bunch of ships out of nowhere. My recommendation is that - if you do go this route - definitely impose some limitations and apply the Code of Bro.