@darthkev, on 01 September 2011 - 07:47 PM, said in EV Nova: United Galactic Federation:

Since Luminous has a population of 18 billion, I'm going to assume it's either much larger than Earth, large amounts of the population live underground and/or in the sky, or most of the planet's surface has been taken over by sentient beings leaving little of the planet's original terrain visible.

All three, actually. Luminous is 14,650 kilometers in diameter, about Earth's diameter times 1.15. Slightly higher gravity, and about 160 million square kilometers' additional surface area. About 30% of the planet's land surface (Luminous is about 50/50 land and water) is cities several kilometers tall (the tallest buildings in the Milky Way, short of the Kane Band), and about three kilometers deep.

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Speaking of Earth, what's become of Humanity's homeworld by the time the player enters the game? Is it even remotely important to anyone non-human?

Politically, Earth's importance is somewhat symbolic at this point. The vast majority of humans have no real connection to Earth and may never set foot on its surface. On the other hand, it does feature a great deal of heavy industry, particularly stellar engineering. The Terran Engineering Corporation took over Sigma Shipyards' facilities in the Kane Band during the Depression, and now manufactures everything from shuttles to space stations to hypergate parts. Also, the Galactic military is headquartered there, with its central base in Connecticut.

EDIT: Got rid of a thought that trailed off in mid-sentence.

This post has been edited by StarSword : 02 September 2011 - 12:48 AM

I ended up in writer's block for a few days while working on the first Balcrusian SPOBs. After watching several episodes of Stargate: SG-1 to take my mind off things, I went back to work and came up with these planet descriptions for Balcruz and the Balcrusian spaceport bar:

Landing dësc, Balcruz said:

Balcruz, homeworld of the Balcrusians, is a heavily guarded world in the center of the People's Republic. From here the Republic High Council commands the fleets that seek to place the entire Milky Way under their blood-red banner. Some areas are uninhabitable due to carpet-bombing during the civil war in 969 GSD, while others are cordoned off for secrecy. People's movements are tracked and restricted, and only about forty percent of the planet is open to civilians.

Balcruz is also the spiritual heart of the Balcrusian people. Though the Council has long outlawed the animistic Chien Zor religion, "for there must be no loyalty but to the State," many Balcrusians still practice it in secret.

Bar dësc said:

Like most Balcrusian bars, the one at Republic City Starport is dark and smoky from use of the psychoactive ketesh plant. It would have been shut down long ago, but the Public Security Authority, focused mainly on hunting BPF spies, has turned a blind eye to the sale of smuggled Galactic booze. (It doesn't hurt that many ranking PSA officers are known to frequent the establishment.)

Ketesh is a plant native to Balcruz. Dried and smoked, its effects on Balcrusians are similar to a mix between hashish and LSD. The ever-resourceful Balcrusian paramilitary, the Scimitars, once attempted to use a weaponized form of its active ingredient to immobilize Galactic ground forces in Marathon Sector*, but the vacuum-ready power armor worn by the United Galactic Marine Corps is impervious to all but a handful of chemical agents. (Due to drastic differences in brain chemistry between Balcrusians and the thousands of species that make up the UGF, it's likely the ketesh weapon wouldn't have worked anyway.)

• Marathon Sector is the UGF's easternmost territory in the Milky Way. It is the site of frequent altercations between Galactic and Balcrusian forces due to a long-running territorial dispute. The UGF claim the region because they colonized it first. The Balcrusians claim it mainly for its mineral wealth.

While I was at it, I also came up with dëscs for Corcruz, the second planet in the Cruz System and headquarters base to the Balcrusian People's Navy.

Landing dësc, Corcruz said:

Corcruz is the second planet in the Cruz System, and the only object apart from Balcruz itself even remotely inhabitable. Tightly controlled by the Balcrusian War Council, this world is a block of ice apart from a 1,700 kilometer strip of conifer forest at the equator. Its atmosphere has large quantities of neon and argon, causing Balcrusian residents to develop silvery eyes.

The only permanent settlement here is the city-sized Vektaz Military Installation, a major shipyard and the headquarters base of the People's Navy. Balcruz Military Industries builds the majority of the fleet's Marauder warships here, and much of their officer corps is trained at the planet's academy.

Bar DËSC said:

This is one of several ketesh clubs serving the Vektaz Military Installation. The club's name loosely translates to "Velvet Light", a fair description of a ketesh high. The bar also has a nonsmoking area containing the restaurant and kitchens.

Does anyone else find 'The People's Republic' to be extremely ironic within Balcruz space? Citizens really don't seem to have a lot of control.

I also have another question regarding ships. What annoys me most is when a TC has various ships inherit combat attributes from a gövt and use that gövt for AI combat. This means players are restricted to using ships from factions allied with whomever they're working for. However, I would much like to use a Balcruz Nemesis or a Ganba destroyer while working for, say, the UGF. Will I be able to do this?

@darthkev, on 09 October 2011 - 12:32 PM, said in EV Nova: United Galactic Federation:

Does anyone else find 'The People's Republic' to be extremely ironic within Balcruz space? Citizens really don't seem to have a lot of control.

They don't in the People's Republic of China either. (Or at least they didn't during the Cold War. I'm not really sure how much control the PRC exerts over its citizenry these days.)

The BPR is a fairly typical totalitarian state, with government control over much of the economy (particularly anything economic relating to war), absolute political power, a secret police force that hunts dissidents, and so on.

This is also why ketesh is legal: in a distinctly cynical way, it's a distraction for the common Balcrusian, letting them smoke away their sorrows.

While I'm at it, a lot of totalitarian states have distinctly ironic names. For instance, the official name of Soviet-allied East Germany was the German Democratic Republic. Then there's the Democratic Republic of the Congo. (It's been my experience that any nation that calls itself the Democratic Republic of anything is neither democratic nor a republic.)

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I also have another question regarding ships. What annoys me most is when a TC has various ships inherit combat attributes from a gövt and use that gövt for AI combat. This means players are restricted to using ships from factions allied with whomever they're working for. However, I would much like to use a Balcruz Nemesis or a Ganba destroyer while working for, say, the UGF. Will I be able to do this?

Yes, actually. That bugs me too, as it means that in the EVC port (for instance), I can't fly a Confederate ship if I'm playing Rebel (any Rebel ship will attack you automatically) and vice versa. Same goes for the Federation and the Rebels in EVN: regardless of your legal status, Federation ships will always attack you if you're flying a Rebel ship.

The reason for this is that the SHIP resource contains a field for an inherent gövt resource. Putting the inherent GOVT's ID in straight leads to ships of that government's enemies attacking the player.

Thankfully, there's a fix built right into the Nova engine: set the SHIP's inherent gövt so that it only inherits non-combat attributes like communications voice, INTF resource, etc. In text-only editors like EVNEW, this is accomplished by setting InherentGovt to gövt ID + 2000, but MissionComputer does it with a drop-down menu. (Thanks for that, David. )

This post has been edited by StarSword : 09 October 2011 - 03:41 PM

@starsword, on 09 October 2011 - 03:36 PM, said in EV Nova: United Galactic Federation:

That bugs me too, as it means that in the EVC port (for instance), I can't fly a Confederate ship if I'm playing Rebel (any Rebel ship will attack you automatically) and vice versa.

To be fair, this is an intentional feature — in fact it was the original function of the InherentGovt field. The idea is that pilots who see an obviously enemy ship aren’t going to spend much time doing an extensive background check on its current owner.

@starsword, on 09 October 2011 - 03:36 PM, said in EV Nova: United Galactic Federation:

In text-only editors like EVNEW, this is accomplished by setting InherentGovt to gövt ID + 2000, but MissionComputer does it with a drop-down menu. (Thanks for that, David. )

Any time!

@david-arthur, on 09 October 2011 - 04:12 PM, said in EV Nova: United Galactic Federation:

To be fair, this is an intentional feature — in fact it was the original function of the InherentGovt field. The idea is that pilots who see an obviously enemy ship aren’t going to spend much time doing an extensive background check on its current owner.

I kinda see where they were coming from, but it'd be nice to be able to play a guy who flies a Confed ship to infiltrate the Confederacy unnoticed. Also, from a more practical standpoint, a stock Confed Cruiser is way more powerful than a stock Rebel Cruiser. So I cheated one in by reducing the price to zero and making it available everywhere, only to discover that I came under fire from my buddies every time I popped into the Satori System.

EVC at least has the excuse that in the stock scenario there's only two major factions. In the more politically complex world of EVN:UGF, with multiple rebel groups flying captured government ships, and, more to the point, decent odds that a player may wind up capping a starship of an opposing government and using it as his own, I prefer to use legal status to set whether the other guy attacks when you enter their space.

• It wouldn't do to have a gunrunner for the Balcrusian rebels come under fire from a Galactic warship just because he's flying a Balcrusian vessel.

@starsword, on 09 October 2011 - 03:36 PM, said in EV Nova: United Galactic Federation:

They don't in the People's Republic of China either. (Or at least they didn't during the Cold War. I'm not really sure how much control the PRC exerts over its citizenry these days.)

Good point, I'd momentarily forgotten my history lessons.

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The reason for this is that the SHIP resource contains a field for an inherent gövt resource. Putting the inherent GOVT's ID in straight leads to ships of that government's enemies attacking the player.

Thankfully, there's a fix built right into the Nova engine: set the SHIP's inherent gövt so that it only inherits non-combat attributes like communications voice, INTF resource, etc. In text-only editors like EVNEW, this is accomplished by setting InherentGovt to gövt ID + 2000, but MissionComputer does it with a drop-down menu. (Thanks for that, David. )

I already knew what causes it and how to fix it, I was just wondering whether or not I'd have to manually override EVN:UGF's stock ship stats so I could do that.

Haven't done much lately, but I did come up with a canonical reason for capital ships to have wings despite not being designed for atmospheric flight: they're for cooling.

Yes, they're big fat radiators to get rid of waste heat. Contrary to popular belief, keeping a ship cool in space is not easy. This page explains the physics better than I can, but the upshot is, while on average (averaged across the entire observable universe, mind you) space is only about 3 Kelvin (unbelievably freezing cold, though not quite absolute zero), there's a hell of a lot of variation. Particularly in a star system's habitable zone, where in direct sunlight it can actually be quite hot outside. And heat transfer by radiation is inefficient, so you need big fat radiators to get rid of the heat generated by the ship's operations alone, never mind heat from external sources. Hence, the wings.

@starsword, on 04 December 2011 - 03:27 AM, said in EV Nova: United Galactic Federation:

Haven't done much lately, but I did come up with a canonical reason for capital ships to have wings despite not being designed for atmospheric flight: they're for cooling....

That's an excellent reason; and an excellent reason to mount weapons to them (weapons cause quite a bit of waste heat to radiate). It might be interesting if you could self-ionize a ship and treat ionization as the heat; then make some weapons more 'efficient' and cause less overheating to the main ship. Or use externally-powered weapons that don't cause any heat on the mother ship (rockets).

Have you read the Atomic Rockets page on radiators and cooling as well?

Just did.

I've also decided that the Axe-tails, having a slightly more advanced technological base than the other factions, don't bother with external radiators on capital ships (you'll notice they have no wings) because they've discovered how to dump waste heat into hyperspace.

Mounting weapons to radiators isn't the best idea - you want radiators to be very thin so you can face them edge-on to the nearest star to prevent them from absorbing heat from it. Making them sturdy enough to carry weapons means less efficient cooling considering the heat needs to be dissipated anyways. Also, radiators tend to be not as sturdy as hull plating because of this, and its likely that a stray shot putting a hole through one of them will rip off the attached weaponry.

Unless you claim that the weapons can operate at a higher temperature than the squishy living things inside the ship can withstand, and are thus kept away from the ship so the cooling system doesn't need to drain the heet that bleeds from the weapons into the living quarters. Or something. Or the radiators are made of sci-fi-ish super strong stuff. Either way, it doesn't matter as long as it looks cool.

Regarding self-ionizing weapons: Submunitions - make the first part explode immediately after launch, deal a small radius of ionization, make sure it can affect the parent ship, and then submunition into the actual weapon. Of course, this doesn't work with beams directly.

If you want the ionizing weapon with a beam, the beam outfit needs to add another outfit that is a primary self-ionizing weapon. Doesn't work for secondary weapon beams. Remember to remove the self-ionizing weapon when selling the beam outfit. You can even have different self-ionizing weapons for different ionization rates.

@lnsu, on 05 December 2011 - 06:41 PM, said in EV Nova: United Galactic Federation:

Mounting weapons to radiators isn't the best idea - you want radiators to be very thin so you can face them edge-on to the nearest star to prevent them from absorbing heat from it. Making them sturdy enough to carry weapons means less efficient cooling considering the heat needs to be dissipated anyways. Also, radiators tend to be not as sturdy as hull plating because of this, and its likely that a stray shot putting a hole through one of them will rip off the attached weaponry.

Unless you claim that the weapons can operate at a higher temperature than the squishy living things inside the ship can withstand, and are thus kept away from the ship so the cooling system doesn't need to drain the heet that bleeds from the weapons...

Many of the best radiator designs I've seen are droplet-based; so weapons don't hurt them. Also, you end up with long arms holding the droplet-sprayers, so you could feasibly mount stuff to that. In either case though, supposing that the weapons operate at an extreme temperature isn't at all a stretch, people don't live at an ideal operating temperature for weapons capable of penetrating/vaporizing metals.

@lnsu, on 05 December 2011 - 06:41 PM, said in EV Nova: United Galactic Federation:

Regarding self-ionizing weapons: Submunitions - make the first part explode immediately after launch, deal a small radius of ionization, make sure it can affect the parent ship, and then submunition into the actual weapon.

Would this work well? As in, would the sub not hit the parent ship, fire in the intended direction, and still heat up the parent ship? I was under the impression that subs could be tricky to get to work properly/flawlessly. In any event, if I get my NOVA working again, I'll need to toy with that.

I have to agree with LNSU. Weapons require stable mounting positions which generally means thicker parts, and the thicker the part, the harder it is for heat to escape or move from the center to the surface. Besides, if the wings are heat-sinks for the rest of the ship, having all that heat there wouldn't do well for weapon performance since they'd absorb at least some of that heat themselves.

Explain how a radiator would work in space, again? Are you beaming waste heat off as IR radiation, or something like that? If you just have a radiator in the same way a car does, your ship is going to melt, cause there's no wind (air wind, not solar wind) in space to transfer the heat to.

-K

This post has been edited by Kasofa1 : 14 December 2011 - 03:54 PM

Well, we do it somehow with the space shuttle and the ISS, so it's gotta be possible.

@kasofa1, on 14 December 2011 - 03:51 PM, said in EV Nova: United Galactic Federation:

Explain how a radiator would work in space, again? Are you beaming waste heat off as IR radiation, or something like that? If you just have a radiator in the same way a car does, your ship is going to melt, cause there's no wind (air wind, not solar wind) in space to transfer the heat to.

-K

Radiators in space work by literally radiating heat (as you point out)- they do not use heat transfer.

This post has been edited by Meaker VI : 15 December 2011 - 11:13 AM

@meaker-vi, on 15 December 2011 - 11:13 AM, said in EV Nova: United Galactic Federation:

Radiators in space work by literally radiating heat (as you point out)- they do not use heat transfer.

Meaker's got it, Kasofa. Galactic shipwrights have various tricks for maximizing radiation, one of the most popular being nanoscale texturing of the hull to increase surface area. Meanwhile the hull and bulkheads are honeycombed with microscopic channels for liquid cooling agents that bring heat from the interior to the exterior. The bigger ships also use waste heat for additional power generation, turning it into electricity.

'Course, you can go too far with cooling, like our early space program did. I remember reading that (I think it was) the Apollo capsules were so well-cooled they had to add heaters for the crew's benefit. Most of the factions in EVN:UGF have been at it for so long that maintaining a balance is pretty straightforward to them.

I've gotten back to work on placing the Balcrusian planets. It's slow going, but a system name I threw in randomly gave me an inspiration for a planet DESC (and more worldbuilding). The Creedmore System is located on the southern perimeter of Balcrusian space, and has exactly one rock worth mentioning, Creedmore I.

Creedmore I landing DESC said:

Creedmore I is uninhabited now, but for just under 400 years it was a colony of the Milky Way Union, which settled it in late 503 GSD for its sizable kanium-445 deposits. The next year it was the site of first contact with the Balcrusian Empire, with which the MWU managed to work out a power-sharing agreement on Creedmore. Fast forward four centuries, and the Emperor was deposed by left-wing extremists who proceeded to annex the planet in its entirety. But the nascent UGF had the last laugh, as the best Ka-445 deposits had petered out long ago. The colony's sixteen million inhabitants were evacuated in Operation Red Clover (unofficially "Operation Raspberry"), the first major operation the United Galactic Navy undertook, leaving the now basically worthless Class M to the Balcrusians. It was never settled again.

Operation Red Clover basically consisted of the Fourth and Seventh Battle Groups leading what little was left of the Balcrusian space forces after the civil war on a run-and-gun chase for a month. Meanwhile the entire rest of the mobile UGN and several major shipping companies destroyed any usable equipment and evacuated the population, whether Galactic or Balcrusian in nationality. It was an incredibly successful campaign, and it gave the People's Republic a black eye their upper leadership never really got over.

Hahaha, nice! The Balcrusians may have nice-looking ships, but (in my eyes) they're looking more and more incompetent as a faction.

Well, to be fair, by the time Red Clover got underway a sizable percentage of the former Balcrusian Empire's officer corps was either KIA from the civil war, or had defected or been purged after the BPR took over. And during the op the Ruling Council was too busy consolidating its power to pay much attention to the fact that what was left of the navy was being led on a wild goose chase. The Galactics had no such problems. Once the BPN got their act together a couple years later they managed to largely stalemate the UGN, which is partly why the Galactics were unable to render assistance to the rebellion in 968 GSD.

The other thing is, Creedmore I was basically a MacGuffin in that the BPR didn't really have any practical use for it: the transuranic element that made it valuable had been dug up already, and it didn't offer any strategic advantages at the time. They claimed it because they wanted to show strength to their larger neighbor, who basically gave them the finger. Hence the unofficial name "Operation Raspberry" (given by one of the fighter pilots who took part in the operation). As well as several other unofficial names that can't be printed here.

EDIT: Although I should note that in totalitarian systems of government, the ability to curry favor with the higher-ups has always been more important than actual competence.

This post has been edited by StarSword : 05 January 2012 - 10:51 PM

I know that this is older than a year but I can't download. I went to your site and it said something along the lines of "no files uploaded". So I'm not sure what to do. I would really like to have this plug in just to play EVN with. Thanks. Just for kicks I attached a photo from evn

Attached File(s)

• Abomination.jpg (8.78K)
  Number of downloads: 4