Future Tech Advice and Assistance Thread [O.O.C.]

[Hobbeebia]

The continuous discussion about what new players might do, especially the whole pulling ships out of infinity thing, and thwe desire to counter these new nations with strict rules is just silly. It doesn't matter if you have the largest rule book in the game, there is only one fact that needs to be noted: this is a game. A text based roleplaying game where the only reason any one player can do anything is because players x, y, and z all acknowledge him. If you don't like a player or his posts in ft threads, ignore him. If he acts like somone who wants to win an RP, don't RP with them. If they don't seem like it and you RP with them and they try to win by pulling stuff out of hyperspace, then correct their behavior in the OOC.

In MT, we require stuff like that all the time. My main nation is Taziristan, which resides in the Western Isles. There, we require budgets, numbers of soldiers, tanks, planes, and ships. We need logistics, combat, and reserves. Yet, people still pull crap out of their butt and try to win a Roleplay. All you can do is try to correct their behavior OOCly and no amount of required number posting is gonna help you.

As for basing size off of NS stats, that's just a giant middle finger to new players. My puppet would have to exist for MONTHS before I even got a thousand of these undefined standard ships. I could never take part in a war RP, I could never even hope to compete with anyone older than 6 months after I was founded. How about, instead of limiting RP opportunities based on time on NS, we keep doing what it seems like you guys have been doing well for a long long time: let new people do what they want and acknowledge only those that look like they care.

Another thing I'd like to add is that the older people proposing these rules are completely ignoring the opinions of the new people. If you want to impose rules on us, how about treating us as roleplayers with opinions instead of a problem that needs solving.

Never once did anyone on here during that discussion attempt or even suggest trying to impose the discussed rules on to anyone. It was more a discussion of the merit of such standards and our affinity towards them. Was it heated- sure, but thats to be expected when people are passionate about something. I dont look differently at any of those nation who opposed my views and still respect them perfectly fine as roleplayers.

[Achesia]

I think probably lower-level AIs or expert systems would be put in each missile to oversee some of its maneuvering and targeting, while some would be handled by the ship it was launched from via some Advanced Technology Faster-Than-Light Comms thingo (since the missile's mass and volume would be mainly devoted to fuel and payload). In turn, the ship launching would probably be in constant contact with some sort of sensor vessel or mother ship, since it would probably be just a big weapons carrier deployed from a tender.

I don't think missiles require AI... like, at all. I know it sounds cool but AI simulates sapient intelligence and is good at that. It would be less ideal for a single task, which a missile has. A properly coded guidance system will be far more efficient at being a guidance system than an AI.

And that's to say little of doing the equivalent of birthing a child and then attaching a bomb vest to it and saying "look, go over there" with your finger on the detonator - that's pretty f'd up.

At the very least, I'm going to RP as though that's happening.

You monster.

Thomas the Drone Missile and the One Way Trip.

In your local book stores in the childrens section today.

[Thoricia]

The continuous discussion about what new players might do, especially the whole pulling ships out of infinity thing, and thwe desire to counter these new nations with strict rules is just silly. It doesn't matter if you have the largest rule book in the game, there is only one fact that needs to be noted: this is a game. A text based roleplaying game where the only reason any one player can do anything is because players x, y, and z all acknowledge him. If you don't like a player or his posts in ft threads, ignore him. If he acts like somone who wants to win an RP, don't RP with them. If they don't seem like it and you RP with them and they try to win by pulling stuff out of hyperspace, then correct their behavior in the OOC.

In MT, we require stuff like that all the time. My main nation is Taziristan, which resides in the Western Isles. There, we require budgets, numbers of soldiers, tanks, planes, and ships. We need logistics, combat, and reserves. Yet, people still pull crap out of their butt and try to win a Roleplay. All you can do is try to correct their behavior OOCly and no amount of required number posting is gonna help you.

As for basing size off of NS stats, that's just a giant middle finger to new players. My puppet would have to exist for MONTHS before I even got a thousand of these undefined standard ships. I could never take part in a war RP, I could never even hope to compete with anyone older than 6 months after I was founded. How about, instead of limiting RP opportunities based on time on NS, we keep doing what it seems like you guys have been doing well for a long long time: let new people do what they want and acknowledge only those that look like they care.

Another thing I'd like to add is that the older people proposing these rules are completely ignoring the opinions of the new people. If you want to impose rules on us, how about treating us as roleplayers with opinions instead of a problem that needs solving.

Never once did anyone on here during that discussion attempt or even suggest trying to impose the discussed rules on to anyone. It was more a discussion of the merit of such standards and our affinity towards them. Was it heated- sure, but thats to be expected when people are passionate about something. I dont look differently at any of those nation who opposed my views and still respect them perfectly fine as roleplayers.

It was nothing more than some players trying to build strawman arguments against others that uphold what has become a community standard etiquette of roleplay amongst FT RPers, and then then trying to make themselves into the victim repeatedly

The continuous discussion about what new players might do, especially the whole pulling ships out of infinity thing, and thwe desire to counter these new nations with strict rules is just silly. It doesn't matter if you have the largest rule book in the game, there is only one fact that needs to be noted: this is a game. A text based roleplaying game where the only reason any one player can do anything is because players x, y, and z all acknowledge him. If you don't like a player or his posts in ft threads, ignore him. If he acts like somone who wants to win an RP, don't RP with them. If they don't seem like it and you RP with them and they try to win by pulling stuff out of hyperspace, then correct their behavior in the OOC.

In MT, we require stuff like that all the time. My main nation is Taziristan, which resides in the Western Isles. There, we require budgets, numbers of soldiers, tanks, planes, and ships. We need logistics, combat, and reserves. Yet, people still pull crap out of their butt and try to win a Roleplay. All you can do is try to correct their behavior OOCly and no amount of required number posting is gonna help you.

As for basing size off of NS stats, that's just a giant middle finger to new players. My puppet would have to exist for MONTHS before I even got a thousand of these undefined standard ships. I could never take part in a war RP, I could never even hope to compete with anyone older than 6 months after I was founded. How about, instead of limiting RP opportunities based on time on NS, we keep doing what it seems like you guys have been doing well for a long long time: let new people do what they want and acknowledge only those that look like they care.

Another thing I'd like to add is that the older people proposing these rules are completely ignoring the opinions of the new people. If you want to impose rules on us, how about treating us as roleplayers with opinions instead of a problem that needs solving.

You are correct and it's always been something that has rubbed me the wrong way and it's always been my experience that the players that perpetuate the NS stat nonsense usually have antiquity under their name.

My rule of thumb when it comes to players is talking things through with them until i get a general feel of their attitude and what their demeanor is like because I have always advocated that how a player conducts themselves is far more important than their join date

[Viticoma]

EDIT: Hurt feeling mended

As for missile guidance:

No need for it. Just broadside them and unlease a torrent of hellfire via dumb rocket packed with more explosives!

[Hobbeebia]

Best go ahead and alter that post one more time- You got reported for dum dum dum... Flaming

[Hobbeebia]

EDIT: Hurt feeling mended

As for missile guidance:

No need for it. Just broadside them and unlease a torrent of hellfire via dumb rocket packed with more explosives!

LOL
Thats probably not going to help your case

[Trasildor]

The continuous discussion about what new players might do, especially the whole pulling ships out of infinity thing, and thwe desire to counter these new nations with strict rules is just silly. It doesn't matter if you have the largest rule book in the game, there is only one fact that needs to be noted: this is a game. A text based roleplaying game where the only reason any one player can do anything is because players x, y, and z all acknowledge him. If you don't like a player or his posts in ft threads, ignore him. If he acts like somone who wants to win an RP, don't RP with them. If they don't seem like it and you RP with them and they try to win by pulling stuff out of hyperspace, then correct their behavior in the OOC.

In MT, we require stuff like that all the time. My main nation is Taziristan, which resides in the Western Isles. There, we require budgets, numbers of soldiers, tanks, planes, and ships. We need logistics, combat, and reserves. Yet, people still pull crap out of their butt and try to win a Roleplay. All you can do is try to correct their behavior OOCly and no amount of required number posting is gonna help you.

As for basing size off of NS stats, that's just a giant middle finger to new players. My puppet would have to exist for MONTHS before I even got a thousand of these undefined standard ships. I could never take part in a war RP, I could never even hope to compete with anyone older than 6 months after I was founded. How about, instead of limiting RP opportunities based on time on NS, we keep doing what it seems like you guys have been doing well for a long long time: let new people do what they want and acknowledge only those that look like they care.

Another thing I'd like to add is that the older people proposing these rules are completely ignoring the opinions of the new people. If you want to impose rules on us, how about treating us as roleplayers with opinions instead of a problem that needs solving.

Never once did anyone on here during that discussion attempt or even suggest trying to impose the discussed rules on to anyone. It was more a discussion of the merit of such standards and our affinity towards them. Was it heated- sure, but thats to be expected when people are passionate about something. I dont look differently at any of those nation who opposed my views and still respect them perfectly fine as roleplayers.

Yet your target is new players. And you've talked multiple times of requiring these rules in this argument. That would require imposing them on new players.

[Hobbeebia]

Because the topics had a tendency to affect new players. I wasn't trying to make it seem like they had to convert or be ignored. Far from it, although looking back through some of my posts I can see where I probably gave that impression. I'll own that. I'm commonly on here while working, much like some of my counter-parts on here and doing it while driving probably didn't help in the slightest.

[Excidium Planetis]

I don't think missiles require AI... like, at all. I know it sounds cool but AI simulates sapient intelligence and is good at that. It would be less ideal for a single task, which a missile has. A properly coded guidance system will be far more efficient at being a guidance system than an AI.

And that's to say little of doing the equivalent of birthing a child and then attaching a bomb vest to it and saying "look, go over there" with your finger on the detonator - that's pretty f'd up.

At the very least, I'm going to RP as though that's happening.

You monster.

AI are not always sapient. When people think "AI" they usually jump to "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that", but something as simple as Deep Blue the chess computer counts as AI. As Wikipedia says:

Capabilities currently classified as AI include successfully understanding human speech, competing at a high level in strategic game systems (such as Chess and Go), self-driving cars, and interpreting complex data.

I'm sure we can all agree that destroying a self driving car is not morally wrong.

The thing is, AI missiles have an advantage over guided missiles. Guided missiles are designed to follow a target, AI missiles are designed to make rational decisions to maximize the chance of success at their goal... in this case, to blow something up. These actions will change based on the situation, sometimes flying straight at the target is not the best option available.

[SquareDisc City]

It doesn't matter if you have the largest rule book in the game, there is only one fact that needs to be noted: this is a game.

On the contrary, I would argue that NS roleplaying is largely not a game, not in the usual sense of 'game'. Even a sandbox game still has defined rules and mechanics, whereas NS RP generally does not have that.

I don't think missiles require AI... like, at all. I know it sounds cool but AI simulates sapient intelligence and is good at that. It would be less ideal for a single task, which a missile has. A properly coded guidance system will be far more efficient at being a guidance system than an AI.

Ends up being a case of what you mean by 'AI'. The sapient humanlike sort is usually known as a 'general AI' or 'strong AI', and yes you get a whole can of worms if you put one in a disposable missile. But much less capable programs can also be called 'AI', such as chess and Go programs or the enemy AI in video games.

As for missile guidance:

No need for it. Just broadside them and unlease a torrent of hellfire via dumb rocket packed with more explosives!

Works at relatively short range or against a sitting duck target, but as I see it the advantage of missiles and drones is they're long-range weapons.

[Hobbeebia]

Up until the one being fired at recognizes the missile salvo then: Moves and counterattacks, Moves and defends, Exits battlespace via short jump, Etc...

Missile based weapons I think are more medium range weapons personally. Once a battlespace has been set up and possible FLTi has been deployed it becomes harder to dodge those missiles and you then have to do as another said- either tank the hits or thin the herd with point defenses.

[Trasildor]

Because the topics had a tendency to affect new players. I wasn't trying to make it seem like they had to convert or be ignored. Far from it, although looking back through some of my posts I can see where I probably gave that impression. I'll own that. I'm commonly on here while working, much like some of my counter-parts on here and doing it while driving probably didn't help in the slightest.

Aye, I have the same issue.

[The United Dominion]

I don't think missiles require AI... like, at all. I know it sounds cool but AI simulates sapient intelligence and is good at that. It would be less ideal for a single task, which a missile has. A properly coded guidance system will be far more efficient at being a guidance system than an AI.

And that's to say little of doing the equivalent of birthing a child and then attaching a bomb vest to it and saying "look, go over there" with your finger on the detonator - that's pretty f'd up.

At the very least, I'm going to RP as though that's happening.

You monster.

AI are not always sapient. When people think "AI" they usually jump to "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that", but something as simple as Deep Blue the chess computer counts as AI. As Wikipedia says:

Capabilities currently classified as AI include successfully understanding human speech, competing at a high level in strategic game systems (such as Chess and Go), self-driving cars, and interpreting complex data.

I'm sure we can all agree that destroying a self driving car is not morally wrong.

The thing is, AI missiles have an advantage over guided missiles. Guided missiles are designed to follow a target, AI missiles are designed to make rational decisions to maximize the chance of success at their goal... in this case, to blow something up. These actions will change based on the situation, sometimes flying straight at the target is not the best option available.

Nothing you said about AI missiles is something that requires AI. A better guidance computer that has it detect an incoming object (or set of objects) and evade is something that can be done without AI.

And if we're considering the threshold for AI in an FT context to be Deep Blue or video game NPCs, then congratulations, literally everything is an AI and the term is meaningless.

Edit: adding bold

[Cyborgs and Sentient Machines]

On the topic of unguided FT weapons, what about using railguns like torpedoes?

Do to the slugs not travelling at the speed of light, you need to launch a wide spread of them in the hopes that one of them will hit.

One of the advantages of using kinetic weapons is that they don't get weaker with range like energy weapons, nothing slows down a slug in a vacuum so it will keep going until it hits something.

The other advantage of using weapons that have mass is that you can hit something hiding behind a planet because of gravity.

Lets say a target is 10 light minutes away.
A light minutes is the distance light travels in a minute.

Let's also say that the railgun fires a slug going 80% the speed of light.

10 light minutes after you fire, your target will see you fire, at which point the slug will have traveled 8 light minutes, and so it is 2 light minutes from the target.

Let's say the target can move twice the speed of light.

So the target has 2 minutes to move out of the way.

So since it can travel twice the speed of light, it can travel 4 light minutes in 2 minutes.

So in order for you to get a hit on the target, you would need to launch a spread of torpedoes in a 4 light minute radius around the target for this scenario.

Now in order to achieve this spread, you would probably need a pack of torpedo ships.

Now I think submarine esque warfare in FT could make a cool story, so long as you are interested in cat and mouse scenarios, and I think kinetic weapons are under used.

Now if you are a nerd like me, you will want to make an equation for this.
So here I go.

r is the radius
d is the distance in light (insert units of time)
X is the speed of the slug in % of c (c is the symbol for the speed of light)
v is the velocity that the target is capable of moving at.
/ means divide and * means multiply


r = d * (100%-X%) / 100% * v

Now if anyone spots any mistakes, I would be happy to be corrected, I made this post rather late.

Know if someone wants to ignore the maths, that's fine, it's my opinion that a seasoning of reality makes the story richer.

[G-Tech Corporation]

I always think of kinetics as a torpedo-like weapon too, Cyborg. By their very nature you have to use them in a predictive fashion unless engaging at extremely close range. I'm notorious for soft-FT with the people I write with, but I don't actually use any dumbfire munitions. All of my 'kinetic' weapons have some degree of guidance system in order to allow them to respond to target movements. In my opinion any alternative ends up getting silly in terms of mass usage for saturation fire just to have a hope of striking an enemy vessel in a realistic manner.

[Cyborgs and Sentient Machines]

I always think of kinetics as a torpedo-like weapon too, Cyborg. By their very nature you have to use them in a predictive fashion unless engaging at extremely close range. I'm notorious for soft-FT with the people I write with, but I don't actually use any dumbfire munitions. All of my 'kinetic' weapons have some degree of guidance system in order to allow them to respond to target movements. In my opinion any alternative ends up getting silly in terms of mass usage for saturation fire just to have a hope of striking an enemy vessel in a realistic manner.

It isn't exactly easy for something going a significant percentage of the speed of light to change course , unless you want up size the round yo the size of a fighter and have unmanned kamikazes, which on second thought sound nice.

[Hobbeebia]

If your already engaged with an enemy vessel the used of magnetic corridors for your slugs to follow would be just as effective. Mind ou it would only work against targets you know are firing back and forth. Trying to magnetically laze up a target is going to get you noticed very quickly.

[Greater Soviet Ukraine]

*snip*

If you want to use a railgun against a target on the opposite side of a planet it will need to be much slower, because anything involving c will probably be greater than the escape velocity of a planet/celestial body/whatever you're orbiting (unless it's a black hole of course, lightspeed would be the order of the day there). The most effective way to use it would be to fire it so the target and rail meet up while going in opposite directions. Of course, the rail would be fairly easy to avoid/miss and it would take longer because we're using orbits to skirt around the planet, but a spread of rails would be pretty hard to notice until it's very close up and the few km/s of speed built up would be pretty effective.

[Jovian Lunar Empire]

The trick to using purely-dumb kinetics in orbital arcs would be to do something truly foolish and cause kessler syndrome. Obviously, that's sub-optimal, so guidance is necessary.

Also, orbital path and velocity are functionally synonymous, so yeah, you wouldn't be going at fractional c, and you also would, as others have noted, want to affect a direct head-on collision. I would argue that in orbit-to-orbit fighting some combination of guided systems and field-effect weapon would be necessary. This is a famously unsolved problem in defense (largely because of the UN convention which forbids militarizing space, thus obviating the need to solve it) once you factor in that there is no atmosphere for an explosive weapon to push against.

If I were shooting around a planet, I would want to use as low-detectable a weapon as possible, that still had sufficient delta-v to adjust its orbit as needed, and have it come in at an odd angle and fuse it to "detonate", if that is the right word, on contact with the enemy vessel. If you control the planet, it might well just be easier to shoot up from the surface.

[SquareDisc City]

In my opinion any alternative ends up getting silly in terms of mass usage for saturation fire just to have a hope of striking an enemy vessel in a realistic manner.

In CoaDE I've found that not to be the case. Typical gun rounds are a few grams or tens of grams (so rifle round sized basically), maybe a few kilos for the real big guns, speeds of 1-10 km/s, and so even spraying fire which mostly misses the target the mass used isn't so bad. Basically the weight of thousands of bullets is small compared to the weight of the railgun itself. That said CoaDE is just one setting and one not much like NSFT.

A projectile with guidance but limited delta-V will be more accurate at longer range, but at the cost of, well, cost and complexity. I think a nation using them could end up facing similar problems to the US military, in terms of the cost of precision weapons compared to the benefit of using them. (And that's the kind of thing that can play into an RP, with how people at home feel about the cost of the war and so on). Especially as contrary to the famous Mass Effect line, I think that if you miss your target in space then unless you hit the planet or moon real close you'll probably never hit *anything* for billions and billions of years.

And a projectile with guidance and lots of delta-V, well that's a missile

there is no atmosphere for an explosive weapon to push against.

Explosives do work OK in space though. Flak/shrapnel bombs will send fragments flying everywhere, and they can be put on a fast missile or fired from a railgun to add extra forward space and make a kind of space shotgun. A 'bare' bomb basically ends up like a giant flashbulb and while it's a bit inefficient at doing damage, nukes compensate with raw power. And of course there are all the more exotic ideas like nuclear shaped charges, casaba howitzers, nuclear guns that blast a solid projectile at 50 km/s, and so on.

[Cyborgs and Sentient Machines]

*snip*

If you want to use a railgun against a target on the opposite side of a planet it will need to be much slower, because anything involving c will probably be greater than the escape velocity of a planet/celestial body/whatever you're orbiting (unless it's a black hole of course, lightspeed would be the order of the day there). The most effective way to use it would be to fire it so the target and rail meet up while going in opposite directions. Of course, the rail would be fairly easy to avoid/miss and it would take longer because we're using orbits to skirt around the planet, but a spread of rails would be pretty hard to notice until it's very close up and the few km/s of speed built up would be pretty effective.

The trick to using purely-dumb kinetics in orbital arcs would be to do something truly foolish and cause kessler syndrome. Obviously, that's sub-optimal, so guidance is necessary.

Also, orbital path and velocity are functionally synonymous, so yeah, you wouldn't be going at fractional c, and you also would, as others have noted, want to affect a direct head-on collision. I would argue that in orbit-to-orbit fighting some combination of guided systems and field-effect weapon would be necessary. This is a famously unsolved problem in defense (largely because of the UN convention which forbids militarizing space, thus obviating the need to solve it) once you factor in that there is no atmosphere for an explosive weapon to push against.

If I were shooting around a planet, I would want to use as low-detectable a weapon as possible, that still had sufficient delta-v to adjust its orbit as needed, and have it come in at an odd angle and fuse it to "detonate", if that is the right word, on contact with the enemy vessel. If you control the planet, it might well just be easier to shoot up from the surface.

I think this is a misunderstanding, when I said if the enemy was hiding behind a body in orbit, I didn't mean for myself to be in orbit around that same body too, I'll create an illustrations to show what I mean.

[Greater Soviet Ukraine]

*snip*

Well regardless, even if you weren't in orbit, you couldn't just shoot through the planet.

[Greater Soviet Ukraine]

there is no atmosphere for an explosive weapon to push against.

Explosives do work OK in space though. Flak/shrapnel bombs will send fragments flying everywhere, and they can be put on a fast missile or fired from a railgun to add extra forward space and make a kind of space shotgun. A 'bare' bomb basically ends up like a giant flashbulb and while it's a bit inefficient at doing damage, nukes compensate with raw power. And of course there are all the more exotic ideas like nuclear shaped charges, casaba howitzers, nuclear guns that blast a solid projectile at 50 km/s, and so on.

Fragmentation devices could cause a lot of collateral damage due to kessler syndrome through overuse, because now you have a cloud of really fast pellets zooming aimlessly across low orbit. And nuclear guns wouldn't be that effective, because you would have to have a pretty wide error margin and line of sight since if you miss it's going on an escape trajectory.

[Cyborgs and Sentient Machines]

*snip*

Well regardless, even if you weren't in orbit, you couldn't just shoot through the planet.

Wat?

[Cyborgs and Sentient Machines]

i.imgur.com/kPmvvZC.jpg?1