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| Orion's Arm | |
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| Topic Started: May 16 2011, 11:22 PM (1,811 Views) | |
| colddigger | May 16 2011, 11:22 PM Post #1 |
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Joke's over! Love, Parasky
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" A major barrier proved to be the fact that the Terragens came from the sky. Many ordinary To'ul'h and quite a few of their greatest leaders had the same reaction that even the most sophisticated humans might have had if emissaries had emerged from the fiery bowels of the earth..." http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/4802a95fb92f2 Here's an interesting lil' wiki involving a future galaxy where humanity has developed quite a diverse empire for itself. Or at least its AIs have. (Not sure if I've already linked to this site before or not...) |
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Oh Fine. Oh hi you! Why don't you go check out the finery that is SGP?? v Don't click v Spoiler: click to toggle | |
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| T.Neo | May 17 2011, 01:12 PM Post #2 |
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Translunar injection: TLI
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I actually find Orion's Arm pretty entertaining. Entertaining in a silly way, but still entertaining. There's a lot of interesting physics stuff in there, even if it's farfetched. It's really just Space Opera shoehorned into Hard SF and overdosed on transhumanism. But damnit I want one of those monopole gamma ray drive thingies. The speculative biology is pretty poor though. I think they suffer from too much xenocentrism. EDIT: Spoiler: click to toggle While a lot of the ships in OA either look like something out of a Star Wars videogame or something I modelled in only 10 minutes, this image has to qualify as the coolest looking 'futuristic', semi-realistic spacecraft out there... Edited by T.Neo, May 17 2011, 01:32 PM.
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| A hard mathematical figure provides a sort of enlightenment to one's understanding of an idea that is never matched by mere guesswork. | |
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| Holben | May 18 2011, 06:34 AM Post #3 |
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Rumbo a la Victoria
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I went straight to http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/494398e092234 to assess it. They didn't even factor rates of reaction and denaturation into their article, and proposed sapient life at 125 degrees C. I was miffed. |
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Time flows like a river. Which is to say, downhill. We can tell this because everything is going downhill rapidly. It would seem prudent to be somewhere else when we reach the sea. "It is the old wound my king. It has never healed." | |
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| T.Neo | May 18 2011, 08:41 AM Post #4 |
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Translunar injection: TLI
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Yeah, it's pretty xenocentric. All about wacky biochemistries and stuff, without actually going into the depths of the problems such biochemistries face. |
| A hard mathematical figure provides a sort of enlightenment to one's understanding of an idea that is never matched by mere guesswork. | |
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| Space Gorilla | May 20 2011, 01:59 PM Post #5 |
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Primate Thinker
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i think the alien stuff are not that bad in that project (Although I partially agree with the critical comments regarding the aliens in OA), but there is too little intelligent alien life (or any alien life whatsoever), and some of the aliens I have a hard time imagining them as holding tools, even less driving (or even building) alien space craft. At least that's what I initially didn't like about the project. |
Me on Deviant Art! ![]() Deus Max (Official) Deus Max (OOC) | |
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| T.Neo | May 20 2011, 06:21 PM Post #6 |
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Translunar injection: TLI
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Well, there are several reasons for the dis-abundance of alien life, primarily that OA is meant to focus on 'terragens', and to be a Space Opera universe where mostly humans and related entities are the major players, instead of alien species. I think there are supposed to be many planets with complex alien life on them, but they kinda fade into the background... also, OA actually has a very nice, realistic distribution of planets. If you look at our own system, we have eight planets and countless other objects; only one is habitable. And of the hundreds of other systems we've discovered (ok, we've discovered something like 500 exoplanets, most of which are solitary, though there are several stars known to host multiple planets) none that we know of have planets quite like Earth (still not too good an idea to rule things out too drastically; our planet detection methods suck). Since having a habitable planet is so advantageous, terraforming is attractive. The number of planets that can be terraformed is higher than the number of naturally habitable planets. It makes sense that terraformed planets could outnumber naturally habitable planets; there are two bodies in our solar system already that are targets for terraformation; Mars is relatively easy, Venus is quite difficult. And yet there are many more bodies here that can't really be terraformed- Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, the outer planet moons (mostly, the outer planet moons and Mercury are far less attractive candidates for terraformation than even Venus), etc. So it makes sense that uninhabitable planets will be the majority of planets, and of habitable planets, terraformed planets will predominate. And if you look at the forces that could conspire against complex life, the number of habitable planets with simple life would probably predominate over the number of planets with complex life (it's an unsure matter though, and depends a little on circumstance and a lot on stuff we don't know about). OA doesn't deal with complex alien life that often, because OA isn't about complex alien life. It's about trying to shoehorn all the People of Hats diversity found in Space Opera, into the medium of hard SF. I agree with you about their anatomies. Most of the time they make no sense at all. My particular least favourites are the Silent Ones. Not only do they look too ungainly to develop any sufficiently advanced technology, they look too ungainly to survive in an ecology. |
| A hard mathematical figure provides a sort of enlightenment to one's understanding of an idea that is never matched by mere guesswork. | |
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| Ànraich | May 24 2011, 02:05 PM Post #7 |
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L'évolution Spéculative est moi
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Really? I thought the Tholian ships from Star Trek looked pretty good. They're cool, but at the same time not completely ridiculous and impractical like the Enterprise. They could easily work in an atmosphere or space, plus they have GLOWING LIGHTS. I am not too fond of Orion's Arm. The speculative biology is pretty much just rule of cool, with some plausibility forcibly jammed into it. Their whole story is really confusing and doesn't make a whole lot of sense continuity-wise. It's just... Terrible, it's a terrible project. |
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We should all aspire to die surrounded by our dearest friends. Just like Julius Caesar. "The Lord Universe said: 'The same fate I have given to all things from stones to stars, that one day they shall become naught but memories aloft upon the winds of time. From dust all was born, and to dust all shall return.' He then looked upon His greatest creation, life, and pitied them, for unlike stars and stones they would soon learn of this fate and despair in the futility of their own existence. And so the Lord Universe decided to give life two gifts to save them from this despair. The first of these gifts was the soul, that life might more readily accept their fate, and the second was fear, that they might in time learn to avoid it altogether." - Excerpt from a Chanagwan creation myth, Legends and Folklore of the Planet Ghar, collected and published by Yieju Bai'an, explorer from the Celestial Commonwealth of Qonming Tree That Owns Itself
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| colddigger | May 29 2011, 02:36 PM Post #8 |
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Joke's over! Love, Parasky
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Rule of cool is fun for large projects (not that it's the right course of action of course), personally my favourite things in the project are the Vecs, the Ton-e-mites, and the Antwhatevertheirnamesare.
Edited by colddigger, May 29 2011, 02:45 PM.
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Oh Fine. Oh hi you! Why don't you go check out the finery that is SGP?? v Don't click v Spoiler: click to toggle | |
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| T.Neo | May 29 2011, 05:49 PM Post #9 |
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Translunar injection: TLI
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At least they're better than the Enterprise. That isn't saying much though. The basic concept behind this ship here is that to distance the crew from the radiation of the tether, the crew compartment is dangled behind it on a long cable. Ionising radiation drops off with the inverse square law, just like light does, so distancing the crew from the engines means you can reduce the need for heavy shielding quite a bit. However, putting the crew compartment up on a long boom is basically like sticking it on the end of a tall tower, and that tower could end up being pretty heavy. A structure in tension- such as a cable (though it can be a rigid truss) is can be far lighter, or far longer (or both). Basically by putting your spacecraft back to front, you can have an ultra-light design, as opposed to one that could mass millions of tons. The exhaust doesn't hit the ship because it's angled a few degrees outwards (it actually depends on exhaust beam collimation, but if you get it low enough you should be fine). Now, when you're travelling at high speeds- relativistic speeds, on an interstellar journey, when you want to slow down to a stop at your destination, just flipping the ship around could be too risky due to the risk of debris impacts (a stationary object is now travelling a considerable amount of lightspeed, from your perspective, and even a small particle can pack a large amount of kinetic energy). So you want another engine on the other side of the ship- on the same cable/truss, that's already pointing in the direction you want to thrust in order to slow down. So you just cut off the first engine, start up the second one, and you'e good to go. The second engine also makes a good spare if the engine in front dies for whatever reason. The ship in the image turns the deceleration engine 180 degrees on the Z axis of the ship, so that the exhaust beams of the forward engine don't vaporise it (and in turn, so its exhaust beams don't vaporise the forward engine). The funny little spiky things in the middle (around the crew module) are shields, placed so that they shield and deflect optimally the radiation from both engines. The basic concept comes from Project Valkyrie, a revolutionary interstellar spaceflight concept that has some very interesting aspects. It does, however, have a lot of undefined "magic happens here" or "this thing happens here but we're not nearly sure how to do it yet" spaces (such as the mass production of antimatter), but it's still a very interesting concept and one to keep in mind. Pretty much every Star Trek ship uses Art Major Physics, Art Major Engineering, and various other Art Major Sciences. They shouldn't be regarded as anywhere near realistic. There might be 'cooler' fictional spaceships out there, but IMO in terms of semi-realistic ones, this one takes the cake- visually speaking. |
| A hard mathematical figure provides a sort of enlightenment to one's understanding of an idea that is never matched by mere guesswork. | |
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2:23 PM Jul 11