2nd attempt; space armarda

[Celeborn]

Hmmm...
*ponders these ideas*
very intresting...

 

[Smoking mirror]

Xen, thanks for the feedback, in response;
I think there will be another version of Imperial republic for the third era, using more technological advances, something like Tech-Imperium, just like the Empires of the 19th century were technological improvements of the early roman republic, just imagine what could be acheived if your emperor could be made imortal (or nearly) through genetic, biomechanical and nanotechnological enhancement, and have the colective memories of his own predecessors and advisors downloaded directly into his brain. With faster than light comunication to guide his fleets he would be almost godlike, so maby something like a combination of the old sun-king/god-king religion/governments of the aztecs or egyptians, combined with limited local autonomy would be something that was available with beter technology.

In relation to how to implement a higgs field modulator, for one it could be used to create a false shell around your ship, allowing you to take on the form of an enemy ship and infiltrate them (like the privateer from civv III).
Secondly, and much more interestingly, it would allow a small ship like a shuttle to "inflate" an artificial shell around itself, that would have all the characteristics of the real thing, so imagine a shuttle suddenly turning into an instant battle-cruiser, with armour plate made of walls of force. The shuttle itself would be small enough to travel through a small wormhole, and once it reaches the other side, inflate itself to battleship size. This is probably how ships of the third or fourth era would be.

In relation to time machines, and the idea of using the human brain to send mesages back in time, You can only make moves in time during the existance of the machine, so if the machine does not exist yet, it cant be traveled back to. However, once the device did exist you would be able to send hints and warnings back to your self to help with tactical decisions and technological advancements. You could use them as great wonders somehting like civ IIIs "theory of evolution" or "the great library", depending on the technology involved.

For instance even a powerfull time machine that allowed comunication to travel back and forth, would require a huge amount of energy, keeping it running for even a few years continuosly would present huge problems, but during that time the technological advantages gained would be great, allowing your civ to gain several years advancement almost instantly.

Reynolds also at one point suggests that starship engines can use a microscopic wormhole that extends back in time, to the birth of the universe, collecting fusion fuel to be used in the present. This is logicaly possible (I tied my brain in knots yesterday thinking it through) allowing a ship to function without a fusion fuel reserve, which would have to be harvested from a gas giant, or using dificult and dangerous antimatter drives. What this would give you is a ship that required no maintenance per turn. In the book it is an advanced technology sent back in time to help with interstellar expansion, so I don't think such drives should be available untill at least mid 2nd era, perhaps with a special great wonder that spawns an advanced ship every 20-30 turns or so representing early experiments with the quantum nature of the human brain. In the book this experiment is called Exordium.

 

[Smoking mirror]

So from the above ideas you can get the following small and great wonders;

Small wonder; The Imortal Emperor Specific to Imperial republic, but only available near the middle/end of the second era This could either be used as the crux of a new government, or as a small wonder boosting the potential of the imperial republic, he could give some government specific advantage, such as being the forbiden palace.

Great Wonder; Higgs field modifier research station Generates a medium strength lighthugger design with no civ colours for privateer a type role, perhaps one every 8-10 turns.

Great wonder; Absolute Zero Temporal comunication device Needs small wonder Antimatter production facility in city Acts the same as the great library, allowing your civ to catch up technologialy with all the other civs in its trading sphere.

Great wonder; Exordium Quantum comunication experiment Requires small wonder Conjoiner Council in city Gives you civ two free advances, also generates a conjoiner drive ship in the city every 20-30 turns.

 

[Smoking mirror]

Heres a look at what the higgs field ship would look like, it would not be much use as a transporter of troops or equipment as the field would need to be deployed all the time to provide enough room. Nor would it be a good interstella traveler as its engines arent big enough. Instead it would be like an instant battleship, transfered to another system by wormhole or traditional lighthugger and then deployed for combat.

A second model could be developed that had a interstella engine attached to the back of the craft, for long range independant operations.

This is just a quick mockup, using models I'd already built. Creating a whole set of third era ships would take some time.

 

[Xen]

an interesting thing the higgs feild ships... and I think i have an idea for the implimentation of them...

- that is, make them strong defender ships- poor range, and poor attack, as the actual hardware on the ship isnt paved for mass firepower, or long distance travel... this means that real ships will be the main attack force, while "Higgs ships" will be the main defenders, utilizing the heazy armour generated by the feild...

-though all this leads me to wonder, if a feild can be generated to produce the disired effect of a higgs generator, couldnt an "anti-feild" be generated as well?

also, I have some personal curiosity on the whole time-machine concept

now, I really dont have a great deal of knowledge on temperol science, though I have paced around thinking about time travel, and more over the possible effect of it on everything from time to time, which is why I am wondering abit on the "time-worm hole effect' you mention in the last paragraph of your first post... isnt messing around with the exact quantities of meterials from the time of universal creation a bit dangerous? I mean, it all sort of depends on if "time' is a circle, or a line in the great scheme of things, but I would suspect that either A)assuming that if a tech like that was created, and people began to do that, it could have very drastic conseqeunces on the rest of the timeline, as oyu would be takeing away from the materials used to create the universe as they know it that time...

B)if time is a circle, then technically, everything that has hapopend, or will happen is basically going on the same time, which means that if a tech like that was developed, and used, then it is *possible* that we right now have developed in a universe that is already missing these gasses, and has gone on with it...

as you can see, a rather interesting thing to deal with...

 

[Xen]

oh, and no problem for giving you feed back, i'm happy to give you another opinion on what is sure to be grade A stuff anyway!

 

[mrtn]

Just posting to say I'm reading this thread (too ) with interest.
About that higgs ship preview, I don't get it, what's the orange blob?

 

[Smoking mirror]

Yeah, I settled for answer B, as must have Reynolds. In the book the characters receive knowledge from an alternative future, a parallel reality if you will, warning them of the dangers of an alien race. In the alternative timeline, the human race was on the brink of extinction, but had some advanced techs that they were able to give to their alternate past. The characters (and the rest of humanity) manage to use the technology to beat thier ememy (eventualy) but are unable to do anything for their alternate selves.
So in the case of the wormhole engines, either the fuel is being collected from an alternate time line, or has already been colected from their own, and all future uses of the technology have been acounted for as they have technichaly already happened. (think of the film twelve monkeys, where every thing the character does has already been done by himself, so that his own decisions and actions are scripted by his future self). For instance even if you were able to aim the worm hole at what would later form into the earth, your very own action would have been a contributing factor in the set of events that allowed you to be here now affecting the past. So that if you do activate the worm hole, that was what created the earth and led to human development, and if you dont activate it, then that was what caused it to happen. You can't change the past with actions in the future, because the past has already happened. If you could go back your self and make a change that you knew would have an paradox effect, you would be at risk of breaking the laws of causality and editing your self out of existance thus causing the change not to happen anyway.

Also yes, the perfect weapon against a higs field modulator would be another higs field modulator, the deciding factor being the distance from the generator, so that they would be better in deffence than attack. (you could use it as a kind of projected force cannon too, sending bolts of artificial force slamming into an enemy target).

I've just been thinking however, that the higgs ship would not realy need bulky starship engines for propulsion. The ship could create an artifical grafity field acting on the ship, making it fall forwards. It would have to be fairly weak, to avoid crusing the human occupants, but because there is no terminal velocity in a vacum the ship could accelerate at the same rate as a lighthugger. Again the only constraint on acceleration would be the tolerances of the human body.

 

[Xen]

alright, if I'm getting the generalk explination right, it works somthing like this-

the small ship under, and inside of the orange blob is basically an engine, a cockpit, and a device know as a "Higgs feild/sheild generator"- this deice basically allows the ship to make a mall of force, acting as a great phisical sheild, at least up to par with the larger battle crusiers- the ships has even gone so far as to take on the general shape of one of the larger ships...

the orange blob around the ship is the Higgs feild in effect

 

[Xen]

I suppose, to help alleiviate the constrante of the stresses of the human body a sort of "force dampining feild' could be developed that basically weaken the forces that would constrain the speed at which humans can travel in space at...

 

[Smoking mirror]

In the preview, the orange blob is an area of effect of the higgs field. Its artificial mass/force.

It could I suppose look like anything, so for instance, the ship could make a feild that looked exactly like itself, only bigger.

In alastair reynolds books there is an alien race of cybernetic organisms called the inhibitors, which are made up of cubes of artificial force surroundong microscopic machinery. The Inhibitor machinery is decribed as cubes of black material, lacking tone or highlights. Some of the side effects of the field are like dark lightning of colours outside the normal spectrum, this happens mostly when the field comes under attack.

So perhaps blackwould be more realistic, though against the black background of the terrain the ship would become totaly invisible. So I've opted for something enigmatic, but highly visible "the orange blob", I also wanted to make the ship inside slightly visible.

 

[Smoking mirror]

Yes, the ship could travel normaly, having the run, and default animations of a normal advanced shuttle.

Once it fortifies however, the field is deployed and the ship takes on the atributes of a much larger ship. As more refined control of the filed is developed, artificial machinery such as weapons and engines could be constructed by the ship within the false layer, so that later era ships would just be small shuttles holding only the crew and the generator, that would expand up into a fully fuctioning battle ship, with living quarters, weapons, and navagational and targeting equipment.

if an inertia dampening field were aplied to the human body it would be able to withstand almost any level of aceleration, however, the human body would have to be altered (mostly the heart and pulminary systems) to operate in a low inertia envirioment. If the body were in cryogenic storage, this would also protect it from the effects of reduced inertia.

Heres a preview of the Higgs shuttle deploying its shield. This would be the fortify animation;

 

[Celeborn]

The way I see it personally, the past has happened no matter how you look at it, and so it cant be changed, but thats me..

And about that ship...

Higgsy!

 

[Smoking mirror]

One of the problems of these technologies is energy. Most would be difficult to power using just an antimatter reator, let alone a fission or fusion reactor.
One alternative would be zero point energy, the energy of the quantum vacum, effectivly almost limitless free energy from nothing. However, zero point energy is again something for a later era.

In reynolds books he paints picture of a distant hisory of the universe, where thousands of galactic cultures have already developed, and have all but died out millions of years before our own culture evolved. Part of their extiction was down to something called the dawn war, fought amongst the many different races using technologies of almost limitless power. After the dawn war a single culture emerged victorious in our galaxy, a race of machine inteligences, whose aim was to keep organic inteligence restricted to life on thier own planets. They are sort of like gardeners, keeping the garden from becoming overgrown and unruly.

Obviously at some point I have to decide whether to include aliens in this mod. for the moment I'd like to avoid it, make things quite complicated. So instead I may include the inhibitors as barbarians, restricting human expansion in to space. Almost all other alien races will probaly have been made extict by the inhibitors.

 

[Smoking mirror]

However, Reynolds does offer some interesting extict races;

The Amaratin are a race of bird like creatures, evolved from warm blooded dinosaur/lizards on a planet called Resergam. When the humans find Resergam it is a wasteland, burned clean by a solar flare caused by the inhibitors. The few remaining Amaratin have retreated to unbreachable bubbles of curved space-time called "shrouds", giant black balls in space that rip apart anything that atepts to enter. They exist only as downloaded copies of thier personalities running inside the shrouds, and also in a giant computer built into a neutro star by an even more ancient race.

A second extict race are the scuttlers, described as a mix between an insect and a lobster, the scuttlers evolved in a very evolutionary competative enviroment, where they developed the ability to reatach lost limbs. Eventualy this ability evolved to the point where any part of a scuttler could survive independatly for a limited time, and could be reattached to any other scuttler.
There were multiple species of scuttler, each different, but each able to accept limbs (even heads) from the other different species. Eventualy there were several hundered different veriaties/combinations of scuttler, whose main preocupation in life was to look different from every other scuttler they knew. Scuttler technological development was very slow, as mass production, one of the prerequisits for a technological revolution was totaly against thier nature.

There is another two alien races still living during the human expansion in to space, but who have learned to hide from the inhibitors. Actualy they may be the same race, but its not made clear in the books. The last race to be met is the "nest builders" not much is said about them, though their ships are decribed as looking slightly organinc, and partly transparent in places. Its the nestbuilders who help the humans to beat the inhibitors in the end.
The other race is called either the maggots or the worms, and are actualy a race of maggot/worms who have evoled for millions of years in to a space faring race. They are somewhat intelligent, and among thier number are giant veraieties, who show much higher intelligence. They have several advanced technologies most of which they appear to have been given by older now extict races, these include the inertia control technology and higgs field modulators described earlier and also a type of faster than light communication. They also have highly advanced biological technologies.

 

[Celeborn]

I cant remeber exactly how you plan to manage the cities, but i do remeber a shot you showed off a solar system that looked somthing like this...

 

[Celeborn]

Now the hills you see are where planets would be (that rhymes)...

Now myself would opt for a mod where you could only build on planets, but that would cause you to run in the problem of not having a wide enough range of said stellar bodies. IMHO you would need at least three types of planet, terran(water), this is the earth,venus like planets, Rock, mars mecuray and pluto, and last but not least gas, ie jupiter and the rest...

Now I was just messing around in the conquest editor and thought that you could use LM terrian to create the needed planets... and this is what i got..

 

[Celeborn]

Now I made hills the terran planet, and LM hills the rock planet, but I was stuck for what to use for the gas gaints and ended up using the marsh... now I dont know if that could work, but hey!

If your wondering about the funny lookin thing in the middle its supposed to be a pulsar...

Oh and I only made the planets and the star, the rest of the stuff in from the SpaceWars mod...

so yeah I figured if your not using the marsh then you could just remove to clear wetlands ability from it and you would have three types of planets, but I dont know what you want for your mod so ignore me if you want...

 

[Bob McDob]

Originally posted by Smoking mirror
heres a death animation for an armoured light hugger;

Little nitpick:

Unless the gravity near the centerline is vastly greater than the rest (if my physics isn't screwed up), the explosion should radiate out in all three directions. It'd help add some more realism to it.

BTW, very nice work on the ship designs.

 

[Gogf]

@Celebron, in the last space armada thread, there was this post. I found it quite a good idea. Of course, yours is also a good idea.... Now, Smoking Mirror just has to choose (or come up with a new one).