Here's the link to the boards at the moment (the reason I didn't give the link before is I still had to adjust some permission settings). If someone wants to make a post with the rules for the game itself, I'd greatly appreciate it.

On behalf of team A, I hereby officially accept the ruling of this court. We will not make the same mistakes of ambiguity next time, this argument can go on forever.

Lets decide the rules for next round and just start it asap. We could do one more round of the same thing, i guess. Team B still on the offense? We could say they captured two systems, so its 3/3 and team B is pressing on, but A can now be prepared for war.

Eh, nevermind. Team A still loses round 1, but I am going to debate these points until round 2 begins.

Koshinn, on Nov 15 2005, 09:31 PM, said:

The point of a government is to serve its people. The point of a military is to defend the country's interests. Their interest would be to survive, I would think.

Yes. We are doing as such.

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But anyway, Team B has much longer to accelerate than Team A's missiles do, so yes Team B could technically outrun Team A's missiles.

1. What are you talking about? Team B has to fly from the gates, to the planet (presumably at 1 AU), whereas Team A is firing from 8 AU. Also, dont pretend that a ship can accelerate as fast as an unmanned missile.

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Also, space isn't 2d. One can go around an asteroid belt. Yes you could stay in the asteroid belt basically forever, but your planet is under attack.

Yes, obviously. Maybe one of the critical points of our missiles were not made clear: They have a range larger than 8 AU. They also conserve a significant portion of fuel for the final stages of approach, so it doesnt matter if team B's ships do some fancy stuff well before then if it amounts to nothing more than a few degrees change. Hell, it totally doesnt matter if B's ships can fly faster than our missiles. Our missiles arent chasing them. They are coming at them from all directions, no matter what, B will be flying towards one of our missile launchers (so long as they are on the system plane. If they arent, then when they come back down, they will be. Mean value law, no matter what they will end up flying towards out launchers at some point).

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Basically it comes down to this, if the buildings could burrow under ground, that means they have a way to come up. If they do, they won't be terribly difficult to attack. Nothing survives a direct hit from a nuclear weapon.

Uh... except maybe 3 miles of solid rock? Just because the buildings retreat does not mean they retreat each as a single mass, nor does it imply a lack of depth. Look again at what proportion of the planets rescources we dedicated to both the retreat and the mining operation. These are deep, fractal tunnels spanning miles so deep underground the only way to reach them would be to nuke the hell out of the planet until it is uninhabitable. But since all of these underground bases are well stocked, this hardly hurts us. Except for pissing us off at you. Note also our entire industrial system is still well intact.

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They'll get hit eventually, Team B has tons of missiles.

Well I have a fancy idea for you. How about, either preemptively or the moment we see the first flare ships, a large number of our ships fire off missiles at our OWN planet. These missiles are of varying sizes and just enter orbit. (high orbit). When your mauraders come by, each one picks a target and starts nuking the s### out of your missiles. Remember, as we can aim for a head-on impact, it doesnt matter how much faster B is going.

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And although you might have missiles with a range of 10 light minutes or so, by that time Team B could have done any number of things to avoid them. Hell, Team B could invade Team A's planet without any resistance whatsoever.

Huh? Our missiles are homing. And B's ships glow very very brightly. There is no way B could produce cheaper decoy ships than we can produce missiles.

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No military on the planets, remember? Then again Team B didn't bring an occupation force.

Yeah. So what does B do? Nuke the planet till it gets bored/runs out of missiles? We are firing at them constantly, they simply cannot have infinite delta v's. And when it comes to the matter of landing parties, remember that they would have to have a velocity of (nearly) zero to land, which both means that they must be traveling very slowly right up until that time and rapidly decelerating (excellent time for our missiles to hit them), and they must also enter the system going slow enough that they can decelerate in time, or perhaps overshoot and come back. Either way, they are going slowly.

I won't pretend to know enough about EMP to reply to the last comment. Instead I will say this:

Team B's speed depends on conditioning humans to withstand 2G permanently, and 8~12 G maneuvers. They cited no articles explaining how or why humans could adapt, and I'm still trying to dig up my wired article about NASA studies on 2g survival that proved it to be infeasable for long term survival. If you can actually dig up an article saying that we could survive, i would believe you, but you just chalked it up to adaptation.

Nonetheless, the cap is maybe 20 g at the very, very max, and only for a tiny duration. Missiles can easily reach 20gs of acceleration for extended periods without too much trouble. If team B moves towards the asteroid field, we can produce continually cheaper and lighter missiles, therefore more and more, designed to run out of fuel the moment they impact enemy ships. Any missiles the enemy fires would be shot down by our smaller missiles. The moral of the story is that a manned ship cannot take the kind of acceleration a missile can, therefore for every manned ship there exists a missile that can take it down for a much lower price.

/edit: After much research (that team B ought to have done, mind you), I did come across this discussion indicating to the contrary:
http://yarchive.net/..._tolerance.html
So perhaps 2g is sustainable, but a missile can handle an arbitrary amount of acceleration indefinitely. I would still like to see something more definitive on this subject. I bet even the height of the chickens is a factor for the one study, and I'd also bet that cerebral functions are compromised under those conditions.

This post has been edited by NebuchadnezzaR : 15 November 2005 - 11:58 PM

For the record, I, Edwards, creator of the plan of Team B, will freely admit that if Team A has succeeded in divorcing their culture from the surface of a planet they will win the war. My strategy was based on the assumption that decimating the surface population of a planet would be possible, and would lead to the surrender of the system, if not the entire government. If they are no longer attached to a planetary surface, and are spread in small stations throughout the system, a blitzkreig attack will not work, and they will win through attrition.
Our best course of action at this point is to abort the assault, and retreat to our home system to completely re-work our strategy. Unfortunately, this would be a total political disaster, and might lead to the overthrow of our government, so we would be forced for non-military reasons to carry on the attack as long as we can, to little effect, even if we switch targets to the asteroid belt.

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As for next round, it would be better if it was not based on the results of this round. Team A's asteroid belts will not surrender, and I don't relish the thought of trying to wage a war from a set of heavily-contested systems. If we assume that Team B has managed to clear the asteroid belts, that would likely leave us with a severly weakened military at the start, and Team A with a massively increased military.
Besides, I like the idea of changing the focus of civilisation to space, rather than planets. I doubt that it would be possible to change it to any great degree in the homesystem (it is very expensive to ship billions of people into space, and also quite expensive to build places for them all to live), but it would work well in colonized systems. So well, in fact, that you might well have only a minimal population on planets, only enough to mine/grow resources that cannot be economically obtained in space.

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Also, it is a bit unrealistic to go into a war completely blind. In this last round, Team A's focus on the asteroid belt was so well entrenched that it would have been fairly well started as of last contact. Perhaps the teams should exchange preliminary reports on their cultures (as of several decades ago, of course) sometime before they release their strategies?
The other choice for realism would be to declare the groups to have had absolutely no contact for the past couple of centuries, in which case it would be supremely stupid for either side to attack without any knowledge of the enemy.

Edwards

Thanks, Edwards, for that concession.

I think it might be interesting to see where it goes from here, but not directly as a result of the previous round. That being, team B attacks team A again, from the same system, with the same number of ships, but armed with the knowledge that A will be hiding in the asteroid belt, and terribly uninterested in the planet. Team A will defend the asteroid belt with the knowledge that team B has some damn awesomefast ships at its disposal. The price of this knowledge is that, of course, Team A has to stay in the belt, and team B has to keep using the bright but fast engines (with the conditioned soldiers to match it. After much deliberation, I agree that humans could probably adapt to 2~3 g, and that it would make them muscular and strong boned as hell. The problem would be that the effects of zero g would be exagerated. Displacement of fluids results in way too much in the top half of the body, and humans so conditioned would also have extra fluids (to make sure the brain would always have enough). Therefore, whenever they spend too much time in zero, or even 1 g, these conditioned humans get one hell of a cold. Tremendous amounts of upper respertory swelling, and presumably splitting headaches. It would take a while for these symptoms to display, though. Just understand that you can only be conditioned for one optimal environment. Having this environment be 2g is very, very clever.)

Of course, we could always mix it up a little bit. Like now team A attacks, with all the planets reversed, and team B defends with the asteroid thingy. So YOU guys would have to figure out how to perfect the asteroid defense, and WE would have to figure out how to get 8AU out before dying. This is just a silly complication, we are happy defending, if you are happy attacking, we don't need to swap.

winces Ok, I know I said that I was resigning from my position, but...

Redoing this scenario with those sort of limitations sounds like a good idea, Neb. We should have the teams with the same basic technology, but with a bit of leeway in terms of tactics and details. For example, I don't think there would be any problem with A producing a few small corvette things for patrolling.

Got to go, now - about to play hockey.

Cool, thanks.

Does anyone else mind if we mix it up? Though team A did lose (and justly), many of the reasons were just sloppiness on our part. With these small errors corrected (plus further abandonment of the planet), it looks like team A has a pretty rock hard defense. Do you guys want to switch, see if you can add anything to it that will protect you from what I have cooked up in terms of an attack plan?

(Note: weapons, power systems, engines, and armor are all freely changeable. Just so long as the ship classes stay mostly the same. This redux doesn't chronologically follow round one, it just plays out an alternate reality of what the teams would have done with better intel. From here on, I think it would be good to have the rounds follow chronologically, so we can account for the expense of refitting older ships).

Course, we could always go in a completely different direction: No ftl transport at all. Each team has to figure out a way for societies to operate on the lightyear scale. Remember, just as the words "weeks or days" in team B's report didn't make it boring, using timescales of thousands of years won't be boring because all of the waiting will be cleanly edited out. I'm really just throwing this idea out there, as it seems to me the most likely game to generate real results. I can imagine attack fleets spending generations getting to their destinations, soldiers that spend their entire lives jousting with one another and training the new recruits, who they themselves will do the same until the final generation finally leads the army into battle thousands of years in design. Generals keep their armies in systems for thousands or tens of thousands of years, stripping everything they can. Since they know the enemy will have a thousand years of flight time to prepare, the attackers will build fleets composed of more than one or two entire systems worth of rescources, ringworlds around suns and entire planets reduced to nothing. No matter how long the enemy has to prepare, he will ultimately only have the rescources of a single system available to him, thus generally guranteeing his defeat.

1000 year outdated technology? This is mitigated by the fact that fleets themselves contain research labs and foundries. Up until the moment of combat, they produce only prototypes to test against themselves. At the very last minute, the entire fleet is rebuilt/refit with the very latest breakthroughs in technology. I think this would be an awesome game to play, it would just be mind bogglingly impossible to wrap our minds around. So while I would prefer the second idea most, I will settle for the simpler ones.

We also need someone to give the final word on jumpgates. Koshinn, you seemed fond of the sun idea. Should we make this law? I know this round the actual operation of the gates will be very important. Whoever wants to, just pull an arbitrary idea out of your ass and we can use it. Just try to balance the advantage of the defenders and attackers. (for the star thing, the attacker advantage is that ships entering the system are scrambled randomly within the sillouhete of the star. The defenders advantage is that it is so ######ing hard to use the gates, and 'skipping through' a system is nearly impossible, since it requires the attacker to loop all the way around, and at a very high speed. The defender also has the bonus that the ship distribution is random when it comes in, so vulnerable ships of the attacker might be way out unprotected.)

I'm just trying to stir the game up a bit, and make the job of the judges a little more challenging (seriously, thanks guys. Great job so far. I disagreed with parts of your ruling, but every mistake you found was indeed technically our fault. I'm glad this round went so well:))

We should start a new thread to advertise that people can now join the game, in case they were interested, but tired of reading our bantering here and stopped checking this thread. I would strongly recommend that you do not, however, post anything on any of the other forums here. Anything in the EVN forums would attract some of the uncool crowd. That isn't to say that everyone isn't welcome, everyone who asks can join. We just have a better percentage of openminded, creative people here.

Hmm

Since the hypergates randomly scatter ships around in a system, wouldn't the attackers need time to regroup? If you're trying for a concentrated thrust, you'd want all of your ships together–unless you have mostly all of a few types of ship that are capable of pretty much the same thing, and you want to hit as many targets as possible to cause mass chaos among the defenders.

Hmm and I have an idea to counter your asteroid-based defenses evil grin

Here, I made a s###ty paint drawing of how I see hypergates working. Ships aren't scattered throughout the system, only within a circle of the same radius as the star. They must start line up absolutely perfectly with the centers of gravity of both stars: the scattering is actually the result of sub-Planck scale differences in position/velocity. The tracking/guidance for this is automatic and assumed. You do need something on the ship to initiate the jump, and the minimum cap for this device is about a ton per 100 meters in diameter. Therefore its really negligable. The only reason for this is such that you shouldn't be able to railgun messages back across the gate, you need to send entire ships back.

Attached File(s)

• Jumping.JPG (22.71K)
  Number of downloads: 32

NebuchadnezzaR, on Nov 16 2005, 08:06 AM, said:

Here, I made a s###ty paint drawing of how I see hypergates working. Ships aren't scattered throughout the system, only within a circle of the same radius as the star. They must start line up absolutely perfectly with the centers of gravity of both stars: the scattering is actually the result of sub-Planck scale differences in position/velocity. The tracking/guidance for this is automatic and assumed. You do need something on the ship to initiate the jump, and the minimum cap for this device is about a ton per 100 meters in diameter. Therefore its really negligable. The only reason for this is such that you shouldn't be able to railgun messages back across the gate, you need to send entire ships back.
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Yes I do like that sun idea from way back. The distances between the suns are so immensely far that entering a jump point would be a precise thing within inches such that only one ship can jump at a time. The other consequence of this would be that there's no possible way to tell where the ship will emerge, as Neb said, it could be anywhere in the opposite silouhette of the sun. You'll never ever be perfectly straight into the gate, so therefore you have a huge area you could appear in. I'd draw a picture but... yeah.

Anyway... Yeah, if Team A had included a lot more detail in the design of their weapons (like 8 AU constant burn range...) they could/might have won.

Speaking of reports on your technology, I am quite interested in how your missiles are maintaining high acceleration over AU distances, and whether you've taken fuel mass into account in the production. And you'd better not be assuming that you can cloak the engines...

Anyway, having the same roles as in the last round sounds good. You have such a good defensive system that it would be a shame not to at least try to destroy it before giving up.

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Now, on a completely different note, that STL scenario could be quite interesting. It is almost completely non-applicable to EV plug design, but as a thought exercise, or even as a different game, it would be very fun. For example, it seems to me that flying a gas giant, if it is actually possible, would be far preferable to sending ships around. For one thing, a gravity well has a pretty good cargo capacity. On the other hand, you have a very limited supply of them.

Edwards

As for missile propulsion, we can't tell you, but we will have realistic propulsion worked out before the end of the round. You just have to cover all of your bases

That's fine. Just so long as it's realistic.

About the rules of this round: Just how much are we allowed to change our strategies?
And are the sungates official?

Edwards

We should be able to change our strategies quite a lot so long as we don't go changing ship designs too much.

What I'd meant was "how much adjustment is allowed in all points in the plan- technology, resource distribution, etc."

Edwards

It sounded like The Apple Cřre was saying that the strategies were open for change, but not the technologies. But that was just my interpretation.

NebuchadnezzaR, on Nov 16 2005, 02:59 PM, said:

Course, we could always go in a completely different direction: No ftl transport at all. Each team has to figure out a way for societies to operate on the lightyear scale. Remember, just as the words "weeks or days" in team B's report didn't make it boring, using timescales of thousands of years won't be boring because all of the waiting will be cleanly edited out. I'm really just throwing this idea out there, as it seems to me the most likely game to generate real results. I can imagine attack fleets spending generations getting to their destinations, soldiers that spend their entire lives jousting with one another and training the new recruits, who they themselves will do the same until the final generation finally leads the army into battle thousands of years in design. Generals keep their armies in systems for thousands or tens of thousands of years, stripping everything they can. Since they know the enemy will have a thousand years of flight time to prepare, the attackers will build fleets composed of more than one or two entire systems worth of rescources, ringworlds around suns and entire planets reduced to nothing. No matter how long the enemy has to prepare, he will ultimately only have the rescources of a single system available to him, thus generally guranteeing his defeat.

1000 year outdated technology? This is mitigated by the fact that fleets themselves contain research labs and foundries. Up until the moment of combat, they produce only prototypes to test against themselves. At the very last minute, the entire fleet is rebuilt/refit with the very latest breakthroughs in technology. I think this would be an awesome game to play, it would just be mind bogglingly impossible to wrap our minds around. So while I would prefer the second idea most, I will settle for the simpler ones.
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Cool idea. Not sure how we could realistically simulate it here, but it's an interesting thought. Maybe not as a single army, but an entire race, like those tropical ants that are always on the move and always looking for food and resources. No permanent home. They just strip an area and then find the next target.

Reminds me of Tyranids in Warhammer 40K...

The way I interpreted the 'adjustment' thing was that you need the same basic technologies and strategies, but they can be expanded upon. Like I said, adding on patrol corvettes to A's fleet wouldn't be out of the question, while adding on PD ships to B's attack fleet could be a logical extension. These are just examples, of course.

NebuchadnezzaR, on Nov 15 2005, 05:21 PM, said:

Ok, as for next round: Our team was grand, perhaps if we get one new member and you guys get everyone else (to see if you can get a discussion going)? Sound good?

I'll take Sylvanus if he is still interested. And wants to help the underdogs.
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I'm still in, and I have no problem with being on the underdogs and sorry I haven't been around , its a long long story :blink: . I'll join this round.

Welcome to the team, Sylvanus.

This looks fun, and I'm interested. I just don't understand at all the rules or how it's played.

Mind if I jump in? A PM with details would be friggin' sweet.