I like it, but after a quick google search on warp drives (because I'm too lazy to read up on real life theories I looked at the Star Trek equivalent) leading to the Warp Drive wiki article, I got a couple of questions. In the article, it says stuff about the warp core and its use of matter-antimatter annihilation to produce massive amounts of energy for FTL travel. A regulator is used to balance it. So in this case, what would be the antimatter or matter? What would be the regulator. I ask this because this would also be important to ship technology in Antares. It is also important for IC fueling companies I'd figure.
I wasn't trying to steal Mass effect tech level, just that a lot of games with huge RP potential does add enough lore, or in Starbound's case lacks lore in too many areas. Just simply trying to get a better explanation for things. Then have what happens in fantasy where you ask a question say like how you can talk to someone in a badge, and the answer is "Magic", cause it can. Good question Smokestack. I remember reading the Erchius Horror Codex. It stated something along the likes of the Horror would fire steams of plasma (which it does when you are fighting the damn thing). Perhaps When enough energy (voltage) passes through the crystals, upon the inside of the crystal is it reflected around to the point where it discharges plasma steams. The engine house focuses toward the main engine(s). The various fuels are needed to produce wash over the crystal and plasma stream to increase plasma conversion. Say the Crystal is suspend between a magnetic field, with a torus on each side sending electicity in to the crystals. As more more is send in, and the crystals begins to refract more and more (hence wind up sound), once it is at max and starts to discharge plasma. A fuel state injector shots fuel toward the crystals washing over it. This causes two thing. First it focuses the plasma discharges as well as cause recrystallization of the Erchius crystals. Sense we only ever use the 20 crystals from the Erchius Mining Facility.
Gates is another question. They are in every system all over the map, yet they all lead to one place. The Outpost. How do we explain the gates?
I think we should implement teleporters, and make beaming dependant on teleport stations, but make the transportation process slow, as in it requires a few minutes to gather enough power to beam you from point A to point B. These teleporter pads should also be quite immobile. (Teleporters as in the in-game items in the nightlies / in development right now). http://zippy.gfycat.com/SarcasticBaggyHake.webm
On the note of armour; Since this is obviously a Sci-Fi setting with laser weapons and plasma rifles, wouldn't it make sense (even if it's game logic only), for the armour to be very advanced to counter that? In a way i'm proposing that basically the tier 5 and 6 armour sets are some sort of advanced light power armour. These armour sets are a lot heavier than the other tiers, but they use an internal power source (the same one we use for techs and beam weapons / ...), the heavier the armour, the more energy is needed to be able to move, so there's less energy available for techs and beam weapons. The Manipulator-Class would be the lightest variant, and grant the most energy, and would be used by wand users (or mages in the classic rpg sense), the Accelerator would be a balanced medium granting medium armour and medium energy, so this would be the armour type best suited for a marksman, and the seperator armour type would be the toughest, heaviest, and thus provide the least energy for techs and beam weapons, making it the best armour for melee combattants. Perhaps you can link the whole Erchius crystals <=> beam weapons <=> power source <=> armour <=> techs, ... together? Though last i checked i heard Wands were made non-cannon... We can in-universely nerf the strength of the tier 5 armour to be a non-overpowered high end specialist armour, and tier 6 can be the new nearly unreachable "impervium" standard we had before, being reserved to veteran characters/characters with a lot of followers (in a faction) / legit resources.
Not quite, as SG-1 the gate go to others gates as long as the destination is set. Were the starbound gates only to the outpost.
Can we please just ignore the gates and the outpost entirely? Every single solar system has a gate. Every. Single. One. Except apparently the homeworlds. Or else they were always there and no alien species ever discovered them in their own homeworlds. Or, even worse, that just showed up thanks to magic "unexplained science". They all travel to the same Outpost. The same exact place, but somehow it isn't overcrowded to the point of creating a black hole from travelers of THE ENTIRE GALAXY HEADING THERE. And kind of people go there? NPC's who... sell food, fuel and signs. Sorry. No. Let's just please ignore it entirely. It makes sense from a gameplay standpoint but for a serious RP server? No.
Or some outpost gates just lead to some old colonies of this progenitor race, but it was abandoned, and every server has 1 outpost, so maybe every server is like 1 part of the universe, one frontier so to say...
I personally like this idea, could fanagle some rough concept around using the erchius crystals and erchius fluid in tandem to achieve FTL speeds, We are not sure what to do with the gates. But they are kind of weird and IC there probably is not a gate in EVERY single system. But again, we are not sure yet, that's an issue we can tackle later though. I've never been fond of the idea of balancing something by simply making it slower and harder to power, I'd rather just implement teleporters as they are. They work largely from pads, and work for the most part instantaneously, and you can only beam to place you have the coordinates to. So at the moment you can beam to the outpost, ships, planets you are above, and your set homeworld. In the future we can add any planet you have been to to the list when Chucklefish implements their nifty little beaming rolodex.
We also planned to simplify this as much as possible, I had the idea of allowing players to pick whatever armour type they wanted, provided they could acquire it IC, but the standard formula(with plenty of room for variation) would be this: A simple light/medium/heavy system. Light armour would essentially be clothing and such, work clothes, leathers, not very protective but allows a full range of unimpeded movement(unless you are wearing skinny jeans or something) Medium armour would start to become actual armour, some mixture of kevlar or leather in the form of a protective body suit, with basic padding over vital areas. Or some kind of polymer armour, lightweight protective plates attached to flat areas over a kevlar/etc. undersuit. These could stop basic bullets and knives, absorb basic impacts safely, but still allow the user to move freely for the most part, they would be impeded slightly, but there would be little downside to wearing this. The only problem would be getting into it quickly and wearing it long term, as people shouldn't just be walking around in battle armour as a part of their casual daily lives. These suits could also easily be made airtight if it was necessary. Heavy armour would be impervious to most things, it is similar to medium armour, but with more additions. It would like be some sort of protective undersuit with padding over it, as well as heavy ablative plating to protect against heat and energy based weapons. It would be a very hard and rigid suit, the only flexible piece being those in the joints. This armour would be heavy, and hard to move in. You would be able to take most shots and live to tell the tale..to a point. You are not invincible, unlike people in medium and light armour, you cannot run, you cannot dodge. You make up for this by being able to takes 5 times as many hits as them, you are a bullet sponge, but only for a little while. Any type of concentrated fire on you would be the end of you. This armour would also require a fair amount of help and time to get into, meaning it is doubtful anyone would be wearing it unless they were expecting mayhem.
NO KEVLAR! Let us use liquid armor: Spoiler: Scientificky Explanation Scientificky explanation of shear thickening fluid and its uses with armor Shear-thickening Fluid The term "liquid body armor" can be a little misleading. For some people, it brings to mind the idea of moving fluid sandwiched between two layers of solid material. However, both types of liquid armor in development work without a visible liquid layer. Instead, they use Kevlar that has been soaked in one of two fluids. The first is a shear-thickening fluid (STF), which behaves like a solid when it encounters mechanical stress or shear. In other words, it moves like a liquid until an object strikes or agitates it forcefully. Then, it hardens in a few milliseconds. This is the opposite of ashear-thinning fluid, like paint, which becomes thinner when it is agitated or shaken. You can see what shear-thickening fluid looks like by examining a solution of nearly equal parts of cornstarch and water. If you stir it slowly, the substance moves like a liquid. But if you hit it, its surface abruptly solidifies. You can also shape it into a ball, but when you stop applying pressure, the ball falls apart. Here's how the process works. The fluid is a colloid, made of tiny particles suspended in a liquid. The particles repel each other slightly, so they float easily throughout the liquid without clumping together or settling to the bottom. But the energy of a sudden impact overwhelms the repulsive forces between the particles -- they stick together, forming masses called hydroclusters. When the energy from the impact dissipates, the particles begin to repel one another again. The hydroclusters fall apart, and the apparently solid substance reverts to a liquid. Before impact, the particles in shear-thickening fluid are in a state of equilibrium. After impact, they clump together, forming solid structures. The fluid used in body armor is made of silica particles suspended in polyethylene glycol. Silica is a component of sand and quartz, and polyethylene glycol is a polymer commonly used in laxatives and lubricants. The silica particles are only a few nanometers in diameter, so many reports describe this fluid as a form of nanotechnology. To make liquid body armor using shear-thickening fluid, researchers first dilute the fluid in ethanol. They saturate the Kevlar with the diluted fluid and place it in an oven to evaporate the ethanol. The STF then permeates the Kevlar, and the Kevlar strands hold the particle-filled fluid in place. When an object strikes or stabs the Kevlar, the fluid immediately hardens, making the Kevlar stronger. The hardening process happens in mere milliseconds, and the armor becomes flexible again afterward. In laboratory tests, STF-treated Kevlar is as flexible as plain, or neat, Kevlar. The difference is that it's stronger, so armor using STF requires fewer layers of material. Four layers of STF-treated Kevlar can dissipate the same amount of energy as 14 layers of neat Kevlar. In addition, STF-treated fibers don't stretch as far on impact as ordinary fibers, meaning that bullets don't penetrate as deeply into the armor or a person's tissue underneath. The researchers theorize that this is because it takes more energy for the bullet to stretch the STF-treated fibers. Treated Kevlar after impact from a bullet Photo Courtesy of U.S. Army/Photographer Sgt.Lorie Jewell Research on STF-based liquid body armor is ongoing at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the University of Delaware. Researchers at MIT, on the other hand, are examining a different fluid for use in body armor. We'll look at their research next.
Oh thank gods, I knew there was something better than kevlar but could not for the life of me remember it but yes, this!
Kevlar can still easily be used, but it wouldn't be the primary bullet resistant material. It's pretty common in a lot of products as a general reinforcer. A lot of gloves have kevlar in them for example.
Check out what I found, if this exists now, I'm pretty sure it'll be widespread in 400 years' time. http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/...ot-the-17000-rifle-with-a-linux-powered-scope
I do think it's worth urging people to not get too detailed with everything. We have to keep it all somewhat standardized with a large group of people, so if we implement all sorts of things that are specific to two or three characters on the server, it will just get confusing.
It's not about what could be or what is, it's about what's fair. Life isn't fair, but that doesn't mean our roleplay has to be unfair. Just because sophisticated technology exists doesn't mean that someone should be able to have free access to it and be able to use it to have an edge against other players.
Also, something like an autotrack scope would be incredibly difficult to roleplay. Seeing as a lot of the people who push for better technology are also the same people whose characters live for eternity through all odds, or have had to be dealt with in the past regarding powergaming or something of the sort, we have to restrict these sort of things. It may be frustrating, but it's what's had to be done in reaction to events on the server.
Also getting your character sniped in the head from a mile away might be possible but it certainly isn't fun.
