Semi-OT: A General Tech Question Thread for me :)

[dogscoff]

Another cute FTL trick to explain away the "why aren't the skies crawling with advanced spaceships" question is the "everyone gets it at the same time" hypothesis. This may or may not be scientifically plausible (I bet you could crowbar it into semi-plausbility if you were really determined) but it fits very nicely into the SE4 universe. It goes something like this:

Literal FTL is impossible. Warp drives, gravity drives, hyperspace- it's all bunk. The only possiblity for FTL travel is a wormhole, but they require insane quantities of energy to create artificially, and few- if any- civilisations are lucky enough to get one within range of their home system.

Therefore, all the sentient species in the galaxy/ universe develop in isolation. Some are still swinging around in what pass for trees on their planets bashing one-another with rocks; others have fully exploited their homesystems, cruising along at the stagnant peak of their civilisations and are just now thinking about sending STL probes or colonisers to nearby systems; others are just at the chemical-rocket-powered dawn of their interplanetary era, blah blah blah.

Suddenly, one day, it all changes. Some mysterious event occurs. Perhaps an unbelievably ancient and advanced species on the other side of the galaxy has harnessed some unimaginably powerful energy source and started tinkering with artificial wormhole creation; perhaps some not-quite-so-advanced race found a natural wormhole and started screwing around with it; perhaps it was some as-yet unhypothesised natural cosmic phenomneomeneon that suddenly decided to take place all on its own. Maybe God, having collected enough insects, decides to stick them all in the same jar and see who gets eaten first. Who knows? All we know is that somewhere, a single event kick starts a galaxy-wide chain reaction. A network of wormholes (*cough*warp points*cough*) begins to spread across the galaxy. Wormholes are springing spontaneously into being, stretching out from gravity well (star system) to gravity well. Each system that is touched by this network spawns one or two or three more wormholes, creating an exponential expansion from the unknown point of origin. The whole thing happens quickly. One day, humanity is all on its own, minding its own business, busily mining the asteroid belt and bombing one another over who gets to stick a flag in Europa. Overnight, a big, blue, wierd, great wobbly thing appears in space just outside Pluto's orbit, and then a few days later more appear. Suddenly, the human race is just a few jumps away from other star systems and other races who, despite being at hugely varied levels of technological development, all find themselves at the dawn of FTL travel at almost precisely the same moment in the galaxy's history.

It's at about this point you either start up se4 and click "new game", or start writing.

And if you use that, I want a free copy of your book.

[Hunpecked]

Dogscoff is right about the need to synchronize FTL introduction in fictional universes such as SE IV. In fact, if you also make this FTL tech the basis for STL propulsion, weapons, "shields", communications, etc., then all intelligent races start at essentially the same tech level, whether they've been in space for a year or for a million years.

Of course, as others have pointed out, even at STL speeds some species should have already overrun our galaxy.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Is there a way to make a frequent random effect that makes warp points?

[Fyron]

narf poit chez BOOM said:
Is there a way to make a frequent random effect that makes warp points?

After a fashion. You can spam the Events.txt file with open warp point events and increase the frequency of events in Settings.txt. Note that you can only ever have one event per turn.

[Wolfman77]

I tried that with spatial anomallies once. Had about 200 events in the file but they only ocured every 10-20 turns. Is that one event per turn for every empire or all empires combined?

[Suicide Junkie]

You also need to increase the chance-per-turn of an event in settings.txt.

There is a setting each for low, medium, and high event frequency.

[AgentZero]

Oi, folks, back on topic! We're supposed to be helping out Starhawk here. Just a few thoughts on 'tech balance' from my 3rd Dynasty Universe (the one Hell is for Heroes is set in. Look forward to a few new chapters this week, btw). In that universe, humanity is signifcantly more advanced than any other race in the galaxy, aside from one which is ridiculously more advanced but has little interest in the affairs of 'inferior' races. However, humanity isn't terribly aggressive in this universe, since they got lucky in the grand scheme of things and have a large number of habitable worlds. I've got a spreadsheet somewhere with all the details, but just winging it, the Terran Imperium (as it is known) consists of 2,252 habitable worlds, of which only 1,823 are colonized. In contrast, the Tauran Empire, which is roughly the same size cubic-lightyear-wise has 1,452 worlds to it's name and has colonized them all. This creates tension between the two empires, since the Taurans want to expand, but humanity isn't about to start giving away bits of it's empire, even if it hasn't really got a use for them.
Terran ships tend to be fast, heavily armoured and pack so much firepower it would liquify your brain to even think about it. The Taurans on the other hand tend to just cobble together ships with an eye towards building them quickly, rather than having them last very long once it hits the fan.
Other races have mainly been confined to a few star systems, and eargerly greet any conflict between Terrans and Taurans (yes, the name similarity is on purpose) as an oportunity to slice off a little piece of the big pie.

As for the whole whether or not an FTL race would have found us by now, I think most arguments are flawed by assuming that an alien race would have even remotely the same motivations as our own. Furthermore, while I find the notion that we are the only sentient life in the universe absurd on simple grounds of probablilty, even if there is more than one sentient race per galaxy in 99.99999999999% of the universe, ours could still be one of the many where only one sentient race has evolved.

And someone just answer one question for me because I honestly don't know the answer: Our solar system is located in one of the arms of the Milky Way's spiral, now does that make it part of the older (first to form) or newer parts of the galaxy?