Brian,
You make some good points. And I agree with you on some of them, though I
think you are somewhat stuck in conventional thought patterns. You make an
assumption about the ship being a thermodynamically closed system. Not really
outrageous as a starting point, but well worth questioning.
With either the wormhole sump or n-space
sump, you potentially defeat that basic axiom and then you have a place to
send the excess
energy - look at it as focusing your radiations.
We've already discussed how you could radiate mostly in one direction.
Well, take that to another step and radiate the power away into either a) a
chunk of your own universe further off (wormhole sump) or b) someone else's
universe. Doesn't affect
thermodynamic laws - it creates a situation
where they do not apply. They aren't broken so much as sidestepped.
And though I don't have the link handy, some smart laddy just came out with
some pretty wazoo math to support a drive that compresses space (apparently
some WizKid who liked ST enough to want ot justify warp
drive - and had the mental capacity to back it
up). This doesn't mean warp drive is a probability, just goes to show that
there may be plenty of ways to respect established physical laws while
circumventing their
limitations - because we establish scenarios
where they do not apply.
If you don't balk at Jump Drive (taking a human into some otherspace,
maintaining enough of his local environment so he doesn't die instantly, and
bringing him back some place spacial far distant), then the idea of bleeding
off heat into some "other realm" should seem almost pedestrian.
Now, if you turf jump drive, turf acceleration
compensators/anti-grav, and then you want to
argue that you can't bleed heat, I'm with you. But until that point, I don't
feel terribly aesthetically offended to say "we'll solve that one, given our
other obviously outrageous advances".
YMMV, but I believe there are PSBs that can work (partly because they resemble
the magitech you mentioned, and AG and JumpDrive that I cite).
It's all about what you want to do. Jon has left us the freedom to build what
we want. Let us not try to "coral" some sort of "truth" (no implication that
that is where you were headed,
BTW - I appreciated your scholarly input). Then
we'd be playing GW games. Freedom to choose is part of what makes Jon's games
fun. He's (at
least as far as setting/PSB/which rules to
include) pretty much the Open Source Big Cheese of gaming.
Tomb Who still believes in fantastical things like
honour, chivalry, non-US spell checkers,
> on 8/11/01 3:43 PM, Thomas Barclay at kaladorn@fox.nstn.ca wrote:
> Brian,
I think you've hit it. The closed system assumption is one that I've been
making mostly to keep things easy. If a ship is not a closed system, due to
being able to interact at a distance with either your own or another universe,
I started having troubles figuring out exactly what the limitations of these
ships were. One quote that I quite like, and that tends to describe how I
approach things, is from Exordium, when a character is discussing a new
technology. To paraphrase, it goes something like this: "Their biggest mistake
is that they have based all of their new tactics on the strengths of their new
technology. The way to approach a technology is not to use its strengths to
try to accomplish your mission, but to learn its weaknesses and to find out
how to accomplish your mission in spite of them." I tend to go with that, and
thus I'm less interested in what can be done than in what can't be done,
because I think that that's a much more useful way to talk about future
technologies. It tells me less to know that there might be a "pocket
dimension" that heat can be dumped into, than it does to know what can't be
done with that pocket dimension. Then you have to figure out how to do things
in spite of those limitations. To be honest, I find that more interesting.
> Well, take that to another step and radiate the
And this falls into my second major blind spot -- my education in
physics. While it's taught me a lot about how things change (so far, at
least), I've learned at least as much about how things stay the same. And, in
general, for every neat new idea that works out, there are a bunch that don't.
There do, however, tend to be constants. The first is that you never see a
technology that will do everything that people imagine at its beginnings. The
second is that you can never get something for nothing. I admit it's
irrational, but I tend to cling to these even in the face of SF. Mostly, it's
because of my first point above. A bit more on that later.
> If you don't balk at Jump Drive (taking a human
Not exactly. You can introduce FTL without mucking around with anything else.
You have to modify causality (or special relativity), where modify is
read as re-interpret (and quite possibly conservation of mass, energy,
momentum, and, most important, angular momentum), but it's somewhat possible
to have a rabbit-hole form of FTL that doesn't disturb anything else too
much. I tend to assume jump works that way.
> It's all about what you want to do. Jon has left
True. My personal preference is to work from the limitations. I would much
rather have a situation where you KNOW that you'll be detected on entering the
system, and you have to figure out how to accomplish your
mission even given that. It might involved using low-thrust and
pretending
to be a merchant. It might involve heavy use of Q-ships. Heck, it might
result in the distinction between merchant and warship being eliminated
entirely, with everyone trying to pretend that they're something they're not.
Alternately, if your blackbody emmissions are your only problem,
non-magitech still gives you (possible) ways around that. You have to
decide when the BEST time is to use your cooling. For how long. What to do
with your window of opportunity. I simply find it a lot more interesting to
play from the limitations than to handwave them away (actually, I sometimes
include FTL in that, but I suspect that no one else wants a rousing game of
"Orion" at the moment).
> Tomb
Agreed on most of those, although my education in computer science has pretty
much removed any hope in the last....
-Brian Quirt
Oh yes, and as for your cold beer, that's a good idea. After all, beer has
properties far removed from its merely physical characteristics. If you wanted
a heat sink to use (and one that would involve sacrifice, and tough
decisions), you could do worse than beer. I can see it now.... "Captain, we
have to decloak." "Just a bit longer. We're less than two hours from the
border station. In another hour, we'll be past their patrol fleets." "Sir, the
beer is already at 15 degrees. It's rising at almost one degree every minute.
In another hour, we won't have any that's fit to drink. We have to decloak
now."
Write up the PSB for that list and you become an SFCONSIM-L Immortal.
> ------------ Original Message -----------
LOL!
On Sat, 11 Aug 2001 23:31:02 -0400 "Laserlight" <laserlight@quixnet.net>
writes:
> Compared to reliable software
Well, I guess that *is* reliable...
Gracias,