Advice Thread OOC Future Tech Only

[YellowApple]

Here's a topic that I don't think has been discussed in a while: How do you handle the differences in day and year length among the worlds of your stellar empires?

YellowApple, Inc. just disregards traditional day/night cycles, and instead uses kiloseconds and megaseconds (except that YellowApplans use base-16, so one "kilosecond" is actually 4096 seconds - 1000 seconds in base-16 - and one "megasecond" is 4096 kiloseconds). 16 kiloseconds is equivalent to 18.2 hours (18 hours, 12 minutes, 16 seconds), and is thus the standard YellowApplan "day" length. This applies everywhere, even on Earth.

[Vernii]

Space Russia employs giant rockets to give all of its planets 24 hour days and 365 day years, because the universe is going to tick how we damn well tell it to.

Briefly discussed a similar but non-joke idea with Vipra actually, regarding using a variable-transparency soletta and mirrors to give a world a single globe spanning time zone, and then the potential to do the same to every world in an empire. Its the type of thing that would make sense for a megalomaniac government ("All time zones are General Zod's time zone!") or one obsessed with efficiency.

[Esternial]

Here's a topic that I don't think has been discussed in a while: How do you handle the differences in day and year length among the worlds of your stellar empires?

For the Imperium, the capital world of Vernii sets the standard of Imperial time, at a 26 hour day and 360.16 day year. The military and imperial-level government bureaucracies run on this standard. Vernii itself (and all habitats within the Gregor system and Free Expansion Zone) uses a modified Gregorian calendar consisting of twelve months of thirty days each and a leap day every six years. The other four systems however, have their own local time-keeping and calendars for system-level administration and business. Erewohn for instance (second most populated system in the Imperium) runs on a modified version of the French Republican Calendar, a 22 hour day, and 406 day year. This makes holidays rather interesting to keep track of. In the interest of promoting a national culture, all five planetary New Year's are celebrated on the Imperial Calendar.

Space stations and habitats are easier to keep track of at least. If they are in a system with a populated planet, they adopt whatever the local time-system is. If there is not a populated world, they use Imperial time. All military starships use Imperial, converted over into military standard (the clocks go up to 2600 hours). Civilian starships are free to use whatever time-system they want, but all administrative paperwork associated with them is done in Imperial.

Those gifted with the Corrupted Panacea have no need to occupy themselves with the meaningless concepts of months, weeks or day and night. There is only time itself, slowly ticking away as they spread the Elixir of Eurydide. However, early infected individuals still retain their own understanding of the terms, but once they grown into their forms of perfection they need not worry themselves with such meaningless terms. The Biomass still retains this knowledge, yet it is of little use, for it never sleeps.

So you could say we have a variety of different calendars, or none at all. In the end it does not matter whether it is day or night. We do not discriminate, all are eligible to receive our gift.

[Yes Im Biop]

Here's a topic that I don't think has been discussed in a while: How do you handle the differences in day and year length among the worlds of your stellar empires?

Biop Run's off of a 29 Hour Standard day as well as a 400 Day year to Match Biopian normal time.

[OMGeverynameistaken]

Space Russia employs giant rockets to give all of its planets 24 hour days and 365 day years, because the universe is going to tick how we damn well tell it to.

Briefly discussed a similar but non-joke idea with Vipra actually, regarding using a variable-transparency soletta and mirrors to give a world a single globe spanning time zone, and then the potential to do the same to every world in an empire. Its the type of thing that would make sense for a megalomaniac government ("All time zones are General Zod's time zone!") or one obsessed with efficiency.

I imagine the Chinese would try something similar if they had the resources. They do try to make all of China operate on one timezone

[Steel Confessors]

The time zone idea is actually quite interesting. The Confessors though go off 'Unit Time'. Basically it consists of the basic seconds and minutes but on the base 10 system so 10 seconds make a megasecond and so on so forth until you reach a 'minute' a kilo second. Its really based upon the half-life of some unstable isotope that degrades in something akin to a second. So, every unit then operates upon that. Time zones aren't regarded as everyone operates off the same 'Unit Time'.

Also, I was watching the show Fringe and had an idea. The show itself is on the basis of Fringe experiments but one that consistently shows back up is the trials of a drug called Cortextrophan that was supposed to improve the perception and abilities of the children dosed with it and enable them to tap into hidden potential of their brains creating things like Pyrokinesis, Emotional Atom-Bombs (Meaning that the guy gave off waves of emotion based on him that could potentially cause massive groups to commit suicide), and transference and manipulation of underlying energy.

And this got me to thinking. What if the Confessors created a batch of such troops from their vassal states. They would abduct children aside from the Kid tithe they produce anyways to help fund the war machine of the Confessors and then give them a steady dose of this perception altering drug then be given the proper stimulus to produce specific results such as Pyrokinetics or those that are psychic in some other manner. Then of course taking that brain out and storing it in an android as per the Lapith and Nemean. They'd then be used as a force multiplier or operative in specific scenarios.

Thoughts on this? Go ahead or that's just silly?

[Yes Im Biop]

I love Fringe, And I don't see any problems seeing as most of the stuff in that show is based on Theories.

[Steel Confessors]

I love Fringe, And I don't see any problems seeing as most of the stuff in that show is based on Theories.

Well, really none of it is truly based on Theories. Or at least in the common vernacular I suppose they are. They are based on Hypotheses and really whatever the writer chooses to use in that specific scenario to cause the audience to gasp or scratch their heads in confusion or even applaud for the creative thinking.

And since it's all based on just random snippets that sound nice and good I'd rather take a look at it from other's perspectives and see if their is any salt to it.

[The Akasha Colony]

Time in the Alliance is normally reckoned at the federal level using a standard 24+ hour system. The '+' is because Arzor has a slightly longer day than Earth, but not by enough to add an additional hour, and it is found to be easy to divide 24 hours into multiple denominations for work shifts and the like, with some 'change' leftover that usually gets tacked onto the night shift. This is how most humans in the Alliance reckon the passage of time.

Of course, there are differences in the day-night cycle across the different worlds, so federal holidays like Unification Day are observed on the same day as the capital world (Arzor). This results in a holiday whose date on other worlds floats around a bit, something like Chinese New Year relative to the modern calendar. State and territorial holidays are observed on the relevant day in their local time.

An increasing number of people have started reckoning subjective time as well, due to the increasing prevalence of cybernetics and thought-aids that can increase or slow down the subject's rate of thought. Time dilation in some space travel applications also makes this an important measure. For inanimate objects (e.g. ships), this is usually measured in the standard seconds-minutes-hours (but not days, hours are the highest unit), while for thinking/processing machines/beings (computers, people), it's measured in computer cycles since that's a better measure of the rate the information is being processed, and thus how quickly/slowly time seems to pass.

[Oppressorion]

The time zone idea is actually quite interesting. The Confessors though go off 'Unit Time'. Basically it consists of the basic seconds and minutes but on the base 10 system so 10 seconds make a megasecond and so on so forth until you reach a 'minute' a kilo second.

10 seconds = deca-second
100 seconds = centi-second
1000 seconds = kilo-second
1000000 seconds = mega-second

[Steel Confessors]

The time zone idea is actually quite interesting. The Confessors though go off 'Unit Time'. Basically it consists of the basic seconds and minutes but on the base 10 system so 10 seconds make a megasecond and so on so forth until you reach a 'minute' a kilo second.

10 seconds = deca-second
100 seconds = centi-second
1000 seconds = kilo-second
1000000 seconds = mega-second

Right. I tend to get the prefixes mixed up. Whoopsie.

[Kreanoltha]

Time in the Republic is based off of a forty-eight hour day. These hours are composed of sixty minutes, of sixty seconds which are based off of defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom at 0 K. The year is 730 days in duration. While this is simply the solar day of the only planet in the Republic, the other Republican territories are cityships. They keep the same time via internal atmosphere and climate control. IE the day is that long because it is programed to be.

[Ularn]

At an interplanetary level, the UIF uses conventional Terran measurements for time; twenty-four hour days and sixty-minute hours. Unless explicitely stated otherwise, any mention of time in interplanetary communications can be taken as referring to T-days or T-years. Even though the UIF has few if any ties with Terra itself, the prevalence of the planet and its offspring on the galactic stage means communication is vastly simplified by adopting the same system. Oddly, the curious jumble of quantities used in the Terran time system (24 hours, 60 minutes, etc.) - while counter-intuitive to humans with their base-10 number system and maintained more because of tradition and modernization being cost-prohibitive - actually lends itself well to the base-12 mathematics used in the UIF.

On individual planets, a local clock and calendar are used. Usually this consists of breaking up the planetary day (one 360^o rotation of the planet) into twelve "hours" of a-hundred-and-forty-four minutes. Weeks - when used - are usually six days long and months and years are based on the planet's rotation of the primary star and whether or not it has any moons.

[Hurun]

Okay...so a question... me and an other player were discussing one of my weapons. Now the weapon in the air is what I like to call a Fast Firing MAC, which I described as a series of MAC cannons, but like a Gatling gun, pre-loading and pre-charging their round. I said they contained a dumb round but it was locked on with a magnetic lock. He said this was over powered. So advice?

[The Legion of War]

Okay...so a question... me and an other player were discussing one of my weapons. Now the weapon in the air is what I like to call a Fast Firing MAC, which I described as a series of MAC cannons, but like a Gatling gun, pre-loading and pre-charging their round. I said they contained a dumb round but it was locked on with a magnetic lock. He said this was over powered. So advice?

Woah there buddy. You said it was an auto MAC...

A hundred rounds a minute sounds automatic to me. That's over a round a second.

[Hurun]

Okay...so a question... me and an other player were discussing one of my weapons. Now the weapon in the air is what I like to call a Fast Firing MAC, which I described as a series of MAC cannons, but like a Gatling gun, pre-loading and pre-charging their round. I said they contained a dumb round but it was locked on with a magnetic lock. He said this was over powered. So advice?

Woah there buddy. You said it was an auto MAC...

Well you called it an Auto MAC, but I re-read my post's IC'ly and that was what I was calling it, so I involuntarily gave you the wrong info there...sorry. Forgives? I am trying to see if this is an over powered weapon.

[Norcroft]

Norcroft is a steampunk-themed nation thats on the cusp of being a FT-class nation. Any advice as to how I should write the canon?

[The Legion of War]

Woah there buddy. You said it was an auto MAC...

Well you called it an Auto MAC, but I re-read my post's IC'ly and that was what I was calling it, so I involuntarily gave you the wrong info there...sorry. Forgives? I am trying to see if this is an over powered weapon.

Well a hundred rounds a minute sounds like it's automatic... Which is pretty much the same thing as fast firing.

So it was more or less of a synonym

[Hurun]

Well you called it an Auto MAC, but I re-read my post's IC'ly and that was what I was calling it, so I involuntarily gave you the wrong info there...sorry. Forgives? I am trying to see if this is an over powered weapon.

Well a hundred rounds a minute sounds like it's automatic... Which is pretty much the same thing as fast firing.

So it was more or less of a synonym

True lol

[The Akasha Colony]

Okay...so a question... me and an other player were discussing one of my weapons. Now the weapon in the air is what I like to call a Fast Firing MAC, which I described as a series of MAC cannons, but like a Gatling gun, pre-loading and pre-charging their round. I said they contained a dumb round but it was locked on with a magnetic lock. He said this was over powered. So advice?

It all depends on what kind of scaling you're going for, although the massive weight penalties associated with the rotating barrels would probably make the gun not worth its cost relative to simply using a faster-firing conventional barrel. It would be balanced by the extreme size, as well as limited tactical usefulness and massive power requirements, hence requiring a very large ship to be all but completely dedicated just to carrying that weapon around.

All told, no weapon is FT is overpowered so long as it scales properly with the weapons being used by others. A MAC firing a hundred rounds a minute (not 'MAC cannon,' because that's redundant) might be overpowered in a low-FT setting, without shields and such, but against a Star Wars or Star Trek level mid-FT nation, realistically it'd be shrugged off (or dodged using lolfuckphysics engines). Against a far-FT nation, you may as well be leaning out the airlock and flipping them the bird for all it will do.

[Vernii]

I have issues with MACs for various reasons. Namely, the damn things are a complete bitch to deal with in terms of heat and recoil, and that all becomes an enormous issue to deal with before you even reach the lower level relativistic velocities. Accelerate a projectile to .15c? Doesn't sound that bad until you realize its within a kilometer or a few of acceleration, and then things get messy. Recoil? Inertia on the projectile? Yea...

Toss in the fact that Halo style MAC rounds aren't even independently maneuvering, and you have a lot of trouble for no gain. Target detects your incoming round via radar and burns emergency thrusters? A miss by five meters might as well be the same as a miss by 5,000 kilometers.

Kinetic weaponry is a dead end, period. You have a radar? You have point defense lasers? Congrats, you have everything needed to beat incoming kinetic rounds because they have a godawful thermal bloom, a predictable radar track, and they don't maneuver. Easiest target anyone can toss at a starship.

[Spirit of Hope]

I have issues with MACs for various reasons. Namely, the damn things are a complete bitch to deal with in terms of heat and recoil, and that all becomes an enormous issue to deal with before you even reach the lower level relativistic velocities. Accelerate a projectile to .15c? Doesn't sound that bad until you realize its within a kilometer or a few of acceleration, and then things get messy. Recoil? Inertia on the projectile? Yea...

Toss in the fact that Halo style MAC rounds aren't even independently maneuvering, and you have a lot of trouble for no gain. Target detects your incoming round via radar and burns emergency thrusters? A miss by five meters might as well be the same as a miss by 5,000 kilometers.

Kinetic weaponry is a dead end, period. You have a radar? You have point defense lasers? Congrats, you have everything needed to beat incoming kinetic rounds because they have a godawful thermal bloom, a predictable radar track, and they don't maneuver. Easiest target anyone can toss at a starship.

I would disagree, but only to the extent of missiles. They can continue to accelerate, maneuver to keep on target and to dodge defenses. Plus they have essentially unlimited range (sorta) as long as they have fuel.

[The 44th Indp Legion]

I have issues with MACs for various reasons. Namely, the damn things are a complete bitch to deal with in terms of heat and recoil, and that all becomes an enormous issue to deal with before you even reach the lower level relativistic velocities. Accelerate a projectile to .15c? Doesn't sound that bad until you realize its within a kilometer or a few of acceleration, and then things get messy. Recoil? Inertia on the projectile? Yea...

Toss in the fact that Halo style MAC rounds aren't even independently maneuvering, and you have a lot of trouble for no gain. Target detects your incoming round via radar and burns emergency thrusters? A miss by five meters might as well be the same as a miss by 5,000 kilometers.

Kinetic weaponry is a dead end, period. You have a radar? You have point defense lasers? Congrats, you have everything needed to beat incoming kinetic rounds because they have a godawful thermal bloom, a predictable radar track, and they don't maneuver. Easiest target anyone can toss at a starship.

I would disagree, but only to the extent of missiles. They can continue to accelerate, maneuver to keep on target and to dodge defenses. Plus they have essentially unlimited range (sorta) as long as they have fuel.

now, a MAC-launched missile would be something worth it's weight if you could pull it off.

[Spirit of Hope]

I would disagree, but only to the extent of missiles. They can continue to accelerate, maneuver to keep on target and to dodge defenses. Plus they have essentially unlimited range (sorta) as long as they have fuel.

now, a MAC-launched missile would be something worth it's weight if you could pull it off.

I wouldn't go with a MAC launched missile, I'm sure it would be devastating, but you wouldn't be getting much out of it. You would have to be facing towards the target to fire the weapon effectively and you would only gain a small increase to the weapons power, especially when compared to multiple missiles moving together.

[Oppressorion]

Kinetic weaponry is a dead end, period. You have a radar? You have point defense lasers? Congrats, you have everything needed to beat incoming kinetic rounds because they have a godawful thermal bloom, a predictable radar track, and they don't maneuver. Easiest target anyone can toss at a starship.

...No? If you get enough speed, then your missile is too fast to dodge and lasers won't do a thing because they don't carry momentum and thus don't affect velocity - all you've done is changed 'big thing coming at us really fast' to 'two smaller things coming at us really fast'.