QUOTE (Delphi @ Apr 9 2010, 05:55 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Actually, there exists a form of teleporter within the Delphi universe. The "Riptide" system is designed for the limited instantaneous deployment of troops or supplies between ships. By utilizing a specialized faster-than-light carrier wave passed through the occupants within the riptide chamber, their particles are uniformly accelerated along a lateral vector, with a calculated beam falloff point placed at their destination. However, like any light-based wavelength, it can be scattered by the simplest refractor shielding, and is thus useless in a military engagement. It is useful however in performing rescue and salvage operations on a crippled ship that has lost the ability to open its outer doors. However, the energy requirements are massive, so even when used to this purpose, it's a slow and arduous process.

More painful then the mechanical requirements though is the strain placed on the passengers in the system. During riptide acceleration, every muscle in the body is paralyzed, simply because the neurological pathways are essentially frozen or at least slowed during transit. Despite this, a simple instantaneous jump between two places can feel like a trip as long as five to eight hours, depending on the distance traversed, as the human consciousness is still active during the entire relativistic jump. As a result, passengers often emerge at their destination fatigued and numb, and several hours older than when they first activated the Riptide.

Either way, escape pods exist on NDC cruisers, in the form of armored launch hardpoints similar to missile tubes. There are only a few escape centers on the ships, and most of them are usually demolished under enemy fire, but in cases of internal ship malfunction, such as a life support failure or a core breach, the crew can usually safely evacuate the vessel. In wartime, it's assumed that escape pods would be targeted and picked off anyway, so not much thought is put to ejecting in a combat zone.

Even ships in Star Trek have escape pods. You see them in use twice that I know of, both in the films. In First Contact , Picard orders the crew of the Enterprise -E to abandon ship after the Borg begin to try and take it over; Picard and the command crew initiate the self-destruct sequence. The film shows the crew launching escape pods from recesses on the ship's saucer section. In Star Trek (the one that came out in '09), Spock uses one to maroon Kirk on Delta Vega.

Trek, while one of my favorite sci-fi series, is one of the most scientifically inconsistent and inaccurate sci-fi series out there. Their ships are loaded with windows (justified by made of some future indestructible transparent aluminum magic-glass.) Warp factor speeds are so wildly inconsistent it's incredible. In the new Trek JJverse, the scale on the porthole for the escape pod would make the whole ship about 6 decks tall. If we follow the original Enterprise schematics and adjust simply for pretty graphics, the ship should have more than 30 decks. I don't mean to be a Trek basher. It was Trek that inspired me to become an astronomer (though I switched majors and became an English teacher instead.) It's just not a very realistic model.

krug is right. Star Trek is horribly inaccurate, despite being infinitely entertaining. krug is a firm believer of this philosophy, as expressed in this post.

However, I find it ironic that we're debating the validity of Science Fiction when it comes to the Delphi TC when in fact the very game we are discussing is Science Fiction.

Delphi actually does his research and makes actually plausible theories. At least, they're FAR better than whatever crap I would ever think of.

I need to remember this topic in case I ever get the time to write a TC.

Research? Ha, I wish. Most of it is just simple logic with a little bit of sci-fi fuzzy theory thrown in. Think about it: you are the captain of your ship. Your ship is engaged in combat with another ship. Your ship becomes crippled under fire and as a result you eject. Does the other combatant simply ignore your pod and blast away at your ship? No, he wants YOUR blood, not that of your craft. Your pod is targeted and you are blown into oblivion. While ejector seats are a smart idea for atmospheric warfare, where you may parachute to a lower altitude in which your adversary cannot safely fly, the limitless boundaries of space mean that upon ejecting, you've simply removed the last bits of armor you had around you.

So, let's bring it up to a larger scale. An NDC heavy cruiser and the rest of its supporting fleet is in the process of being destroyed by an enemy battle formation. The enemy knows that at least a certain portion of the crew on the lead vessel will be skilled in their jobs (operating NDC technology), and that large amounts of resources were spent in their training, meaning that they are valuable to the NDC. The crew of the cruiser launch themselves out into space using escape pods, whereupon the attacking force has two options:

1. Let them go and destroy the ship, though without a crew it is now disabled and therefore harmless.
2. Destroy the pods and claim the ship, costing the NDC large numbers of trained personnel and gaining control of valuable technology.

Strategically, it makes more sense to kill the crew if they eject, as the ending of human lives is ultimately the utilitarian goal of warfare: reduce your enemy's numbers until your own are superior and victory is attained. Remember that a warship is just like a giant suit of armor; several hundred people put on the same suit and take control of the "hands" and "legs" to make it move and strike. If they get out of their "armor" and expose their fleshy pink bodies to your weapons, then victory is that much quicker.

In short, escape pods just aren't practical on an interstellar battlefield.

Now then, about those retractable docking gantries. I think there was some confusion when I first mentioned them.

These mechanisms are massive. The Alexander Class only has eight. The two main loading platforms on the Alexander Class can comfortably fit several hundred people, equipment, and even a few tanks and walkers. These aren't the regular 10' wide, 8' tall airlock hallways you see on Star Trek. The way that the ship is built, the hull housing the crew and the ship's true structure is actually distinctly separate from the armor. The armor is layered around the superstructure, supported by massive internal beams and electromagnetic hard points. A completely-sealed vacuum space is maintained between the armor and the structure, with ablative plating lining the innards of the armor shell. The idea is that even if the armor is cracked open, the hull of the ship is still protected within. Its like wearing plate armor over your chain-mail. However, this extreme level of hull hardening means that there are almost no points of entrance or egress. As a result, giant gantries on the inner hull can extend to temporarily match positions with space doors built into the outer armor. Without the docking corridors extended, the outer hatches remain unpowered and therefore sealed. It would require the efforts of an entire ship's thrusters to generate enough force to slide the doors open manually. By this virtue, what would normally be an exterior weak point subject to equipment failure and/or sabotage, instead becomes, by all intensive purposes, just another plate in the armor. This also means that unless the entire outer armor is forcibly stripped away from the superstructure, exposing the retracted gantry, illegal entrance into the ship is impossible. Even this would be a near-impossible task; the empty space between the hull and the armor means that the armor is more likely to buckle inward and compress against the structure, disabling access to the hull doors.

Though the ship must power down most of its systems to deploy the docking assembly, this works in its favor: the corridor cannot be forced to extend without either the powered assistance of a proper space station or the express consent of the residing crew.

I designed these things to be flying fortresses, and don't you ever forget it.

PS: Yes, it's big and inefficient. No, it's not entirely practical. Yes, it stops almost everything shot at it. Yes, it eats power like a black hole. No, it's not fancy and streamlined. It's the NDC. Seriously.

Geez, I talk too much.

Just thought of a far better analogy to describe why the gantries exist and how they work.

QUOTE (Delphi @ Apr 10 2010, 02:15 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Geez, I talk too much.

LIES!! However, the drawbridge image did help explain things. I do have one question, though: if it takes so much power to open one of these docking hatches, why bother putting tanks in them? Why not keep all the tanks in the drop bays with the drop ships specially made to transport them to the surface of hostile/protected worlds? You said these hatches are big enough to fit tanks and walkers, I took that to mean they are used to store such vehicles from time to time.

The gantries can be used either for interim storage, or for general access to the cargo areas of the ship. Only certain ships are outfitted for planetary invasions, and hold facilities for such, including drop pod assemblies, walker maintenance bays, and dropship moorings. However, many other NDC ships boast superior general hauling capacity, simply because of their size (such as the Alexander). Though these larger craft are not outfitted for deployment of troops and vehicles, they are most certainly useful for the delivery of additional reinforcements once a target has been captured by front-line invasion fleets. For instance, manufactured walkers may be loaded onto an artillery-spec'd heavy cruiser from a station and stored in either the cargo space or even in the docking gantry. Upon arrival at the intended site, they will then be offloaded as though they were cargo, not inserted into an active battlefield.

I'm starting to have a lot of fun with Photoshop, so today in a fit of boredom I created a beautiful little ringed planet. It was ridiculously easy, too. Tutorial to follow.

Required for this tutorial:
• Photoshop
• Flaming Pear's Lunarcell Plug-in
• Flaming Pear's Glitterato Plug-in

First-off, we're going to create the ring. You can start with the planet, but color-matching works a little easier this way, because we're going to want a good-looking ring before executing the deformation on it and placing it around the planet.

1. Make a tasty, fibrous, low contrast nebula in Glitterato, on its own layer. Turn off the stars, by dragging density down to zero. The more nebula coverage you have, the better. The lower your contrast, the more total coverage it'll probably have. However, you can cycle through the multiple distributions for the nebula if you want one with a hole in the ring or whatever, just keep regenerating it until you have a black patch where you want it. For this lesson though, we'll be assuming you want a full ring.

2. Add sharpening and such as you want to. Don't make it too pixellated, but a small amount of cleaning up or "crisping" can be helpful in achieving high-definition sprites.

3. Use Filter -> Distort -> Polar Coordinates and warp your entire nebula into a ball with its asymptote at the top (default Polar Coordinates settings).

4. Using the circular selection marquee, cut a 2-dimensional "donut" out of the nebula. Make it about twice as thick along the band as you actually want it to be, because we'll be cutting more out of it soon.

5. Select the ring's whole area, including the hole in the middle, and use "Feather" (under the Select menu) to soften the edge by a few pixels. Don't smooth it too much; the number you enter will define how quickly you want the outer edge of your ring to drop off. A good, naturally accreted planetary ring will probably have a fairly quick falloff toward the outer edge, and a slow fade on the inside.

6. Select inverse and clear the outer black space from the layer. The feather effect should soften the deletion, blending the edge of your nebula out a bit. You can delete multiple times to increase the damping effect, but you might have to go back and select a lower feather value because it's reaching too far in.

7. Perform the same procedure on the inner edge. Select the donut hole, feather, and delete it. A larger feather effect will blend it in a better fashion.

8. Using Lunarcell, create a nice planet that fits within the donut hole, on a separate layer under the ring. It's generally a good idea to use an atmosphere color that matches your nebula, because if your planet has an atmosphere in the first place, it's more than likely that the ring is comprised of at least 50% of the same materials as the atmosphere, which slowly drifted away from the surface as the planet spun.

9. Select your entire ring layer. Activate Free Transform and hold the modifier key to keep it centered while you distort it (Option, on a Mac). Warp it downward until it's at the viewing angle you want. You can now either keep it straight on like a hula-hoop, or rotate it around the sphere a bit for artistic effect, like I did.

10. Get creative with your eraser, and give it a nice soft edge. Clean up the edges of the ring to make it look a little softer. You can also do some more creative blurring or softening, or even selection feathering and deletion to get the ring looking right.

11. Using either the lasso, polygonal selection marquee, or just the good ol' eraser, cut away the back portion of the ring, the part where the Polar Coordinates filter probably left a big clunky ugly line. Just touch it up bit by bit, and eventually the ring will look like it completely surrounds the planet.

12. You're pretty much done! If you did it all well, it should be pretty easy to grab the ring and the planet off the background, make a masking image to match, and put it into your plug!

How much does Photoshop cost these days? Are the plug-ins free, or do I need to pay for them, too? For now I'm stuck with doing minor editing in Graphic Converter. Things like changing colors or making basic (very basic) sidebars.

... I really need to figure out Blender...

Plug-ins are free. Photoshop's probably bundled with Creative Suite, which makes probably as expensive (if not more) as a PS3.

Nice tutorial, Delphi. I will need to keep a tab on this to learn how to make ringed planets. It's amazing what you could do with Photoshop.

QUOTE (darthkev @ Apr 12 2010, 04:39 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

How much does Photoshop cost these days? Are the plug-ins free, or do I need to pay for them, too? For now I'm stuck with doing minor editing in Graphic Converter. Things like changing colors or making basic (very basic) sidebars.

... I really need to figure out Blender...

Did a quick search. Amazon.com has Photoshop Elements 8 priced at $84.99 for Windows and $85.64 for Mac. And for spending that much, you get free shipping.

Of course, there's at least one open-source alternative out there. And Google's Sketchup site has links to a number of tutorials for using said software. I'm considering trying it out myself.

Sketchup and Photoshop are two completely different things.

QUOTE (darthkev @ Apr 12 2010, 10:54 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Sketchup and Photoshop are two completely different things.

So I fouled up. Sue me.

A good open source version of Photoshop is GIMP, but then you're without Lunar Cell and Glitterato.

There are simple and easy ways to get Photoshop, or indeed even CS4, without paying a red cent. However, such things are a bit frowned upon, and will get a torrent of anger directed at you.

QUOTE (king_of_manticores @ Apr 12 2010, 06:43 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Plug-ins are free. Photoshop's probably bundled with Creative Suite, which makes probably as expensive (if not more) as a PS3.

Nice tutorial, Delphi. I will need to keep a tab on this to learn how to make ringed planets. It's amazing what you could do with Photoshop.

You can buy adobe's creative suite software in parts, such as "just photoshop" for less than the total bundle, but its still very expensive, especially when you consider that photoshop elements probably will do almost everything you need to do for most purposes.

QUOTE (StarSword @ Apr 13 2010, 06:09 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

So I fouled up. Sue me.

StarSword, you seem to be overly sensitive. Basically, me not too long ago in the BnB. I did not mean to offend you, nor was I directing any hostility towards you. I was simply stating they were two different types of applications, and that Sketchup wouldn't do what I need a program to do. I apologize if I did offend you.

Now, I recently realized something regarding using additional weapons instead of marines as outfits to help the player capture ships.

Weapons like these rifles will still take up space in your ship. Furthermore, players shouldn't be allowed to buy too many more rifles than they have crew members otherwise the odds for capturing enemy ships would be calculated as if some of the player's purchased weapons were simply roaming the enemy ship by themselves. How do you plan to compensate for this, Delphi? Keep in mind making a weapon's mass adjust depending on the mass of the player's ship isn't really an option since one, weapons would quickly become too heavy to mount, and two, there could be a ship with only a crew of 100 or so, but also be made of really heavy elements. You'd have to link the crew of a ship to the mass of the ship for every ship you have.

Also keep in mind, I'm not criticizing you, I just want to hear what you have to say on the subject.

This post has been edited by darthkev : 13 April 2010 - 02:09 PM

QUOTE (darthkev @ Apr 13 2010, 02:07 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Weapons like these rifles will still take up space in your ship. Furthermore, players shouldn't be allowed to buy too many more rifles than they have crew members otherwise the odds for capturing enemy ships would be calculated as if some of the player's purchased weapons were simply roaming the enemy ship by themselves. How do you plan to compensate for this, Delphi? Keep in mind making a weapon's mass adjust depending on the mass of the player's ship isn't really an option since one, weapons would quickly become too heavy to mount, and two, there could be a ship with only a crew of 100 or so, but also be made of really heavy elements. You'd have to link the crew of a ship to the mass of the ship for every ship you have.

Also keep in mind, I'm not criticizing you, I just want to hear what you have to say on the subject.

I've never made a plug-in but let me take a shot.

The amount of crew could be an unsellable outfit. If your ship has 300 crew you have 300 of that outfit. If your ship has 4000 crew, you have 4000 of that outfit. These outfits do nothing but enable the purchase of the guns (because the crew is already a value in the ship stats). For every 1 crew you can buy 1 gun, like a fighter bay that only holds 1 fighter.

This could conjure some amusing images of 4000 crew members invading another ship without weapons.

This post has been edited by Capt. Radio Willy : 13 April 2010 - 06:58 PM