Omniverse One

Cats are also fairly solitary creatures. People, and presumably A'millians, are herd animals by nature. We can run away to come back with the rest of our pack because we have a pack to begin with. Cats (prides of lions excluded) do not have that option.

Personally I think that if cats had human-level intelligence this might translate into a particularly devious form of backstabbery. Like, they still run away when wronged, but then they'll go out of their way to make sure you trip on the stairs and break your neck. Revenge is had, and there was no need to bash anyone's face in -- gravity took care of that.

A society which operates on a similar principle might look damned civilized and orderly on the surface, until you notice the sheer Machiavellian undercurrents beneath it. These people might not get into your face if you wronged them, but they would cut your brake-lines to make sure you die in traffic. And their insults probably would've evolved along similar lines -- you wouldn't know someone insulted you until ten minutes after you got home and mulled it over a bit.

Maybe. Though, I really like looking at how animals do things - it is a nice guide for different states of mind (especially birds!), and I also think humans are more animal than we often think. I look at intelligence as being a tool to acheive the same things we would do as plain animals rather than a thing to change how we really act.

How many large social structures are basically just scaled up and refined versions of things we see in nature? Think of government: we all basically follow one main leader. Call him a king, a president, a prime minister, whatever. But it is a recurring theme where one guy is on top. Scale down, and it is the same. You have a mother and/or a father at the family level, an alpha in high school, and so on.

This same kind of thing happens in the animal world too. We scaled it up, but it is just a recursive version of the same thing.

Marriage, of course, happens all the time in nature too. Even though humans say things like "till death do us part", but the average marriage is a hell of a lot shorter than that. Indeed, a large percentage break up in just a few years, and a total of ~40% (in the US anyway) eventually end in divorce. Not really all that different from an alpha male picking a social mate for a few seasons.

Aside from all this, how many of our intellectual creations are directly or indirectly driven by our animal instincts? Do we create less work for us because we can, or because we already desire to do less work?

This line of thought leads me to think that we can indeed predict what will happen after a technological singularity too. Even if mankind can change himself, he would be driven in that change by what he already is; he'll move toward being a more 'perfect' human animal, rather than toward something completely different.

People will use the posthumanism as a tool to get more of the same shit they've been getting for millenia: removing pain (includes promoting laziness), increasing pleasure, and the various subgoals associated with this.

Things will be different, yes, but fundamentally so as to not be at all predictable? I don't know about that.


----

What I've been pondering for a few years as a kind of ending to this setting involves some human -> computer uploads taking the quest for pleasure to an extreme.

Say their goal is to maximize their brain's perception of pleasure. Once inside the computer, the logical result of this would be to reprogram it so that it runs in such a state at all times.

From the outside, you'd see a bunch of computers sucking down power at 100% cpu, yet apparently producing nothing at all. Put one of those OCD assholes in there, the kind of walks around his house 10 times at night, every night, before going to bed just to ensure that everything is turned off and all the doors are sealed.

He says "those computers are wasting power, just shut them down".

The problem is that a logical sub-goal to maintaining 100% pleasure, 100% of the time is ensuring that those computers are never shut down. So they put a stop to it.

Then, not wanting to waste future resources dealing with more attempts to shut them down, the decision is made that the best long term decision is to just exterminate those outsiders in some kind of surprise attack.

This logic isn't hard to extrapolate as a real possibility. Now, you have the (normally retarded) paranoia situation mentioned where you want to kill them before they kill you. Things get nasty, all because one asshole wanted to turn out the lights in an "empty" room.




The biggest problem with this scenario is: why wouldn't the pleasure seekers just leave to ensure they are unmolested? Even an OCD asshole wouldn't be likely to bother following someone waaay out of the way just to shut off some "unused" computers. By simply going somewhere else, they avoid the chance of destruction in war, which is surely the best course of action. The odds of being blown up when trying to annihilate someone have got to be higher than the odds of being blown up when trying to leave that someone alone.

-----

I had some other thoughts about the legal system last night too. When I think of courtroom drama, I think LAW & ORDER, which is more than just American, more than just the state of New York, it is New York City.

(A weird thing about New York is the whole state seems split in two: NYC&Yonkers and then the rest of the state. There's differences from trivial things like DMV forms to big things like how criminal court works. For example, in NYC, felonies are handled by the Supreme Court of the State of New York. Everywhere else, it is done by county courts; the Supreme Court there does primarily large civil cases! Which is of course, in itself, different from the rest of the country. What most the country calls a "Supreme Court" we in New York call a "Court of Appeals". But I digress.)

Well, I want to think: is a similar system really to be expected?

At first, I left the system basically to the whim of the nobility; the law is pretty much entirely up to the local Lord. But, this doesn't scale. While a random lord might be able to personally handle maintaining order on a smaller medieval style town, it certainly can't be done in a larger civilization. It has to be delegated.

Giving complete power to the deputies is asking for abuse. A Lord can trust himself to apply his will, but he can't necessarily trust his agents to do that. At one level, he can personally oversee the deputies and keep them in line. But once the scale gets too big for that*, some kind of bureaucracy must arise.

* As a fun fact, if the local Lord happens to be an artificial intelligence, this doesn't apply - he can clone his own program to be his 'deputies'. The lord can personally be everywhere at once! This would definitely change the rules.

Anyway, the way the law works in America really makes a lot of sense, so I expect several similarities, but cloning it is lame. So I want to attack the problem from first principles - see what arises in history, and see hoo that system grows into something they have today.


The idea of laws coming from the Lord not trusting his delegates seems like a weird idea: those laws aren't there to limit what you do, but rather to limit what government agents do!

Think about it - in anarchy, there are no laws, but that doesn't mean you can do whatever you want. You're limited by the whim of the strongmen; the de-facto government. They, by virtue of their control of force, can do whatever they want.

Once you have a system of laws in place, you're still limited by the force of the government agents in what you can do. But, those agents are now also limited by the framework of law.

The government as a whole is still basically unlimited in its power. If the agents were to conspire to throw the law away, there's really nothing stopping them. They have power by virtue of force. But, the individual agents are limited and must conspire to really break the rules. This prevents the whim of an individual from fucking over the populace, unlike in anarchy, where he can just shoot you and be done with it.

An example of two agents conspiring to break a rule, inside the framework of law, is the police getting a warrant from a judge. The government as a whole has all the power here - one state agent is giving power to another state agent - but the law limits the individual.





Yes, indeed. I wonder how dogs react in these situations? They'd probably be a better animal to look at.


Hah, I like that. I'm so tempted to throw in one or two more planets with intelligent life so I can play with ideas like this.

That's really cool.


Man, its been a while since I've infodumped!

Tortoise got back to me with a brief answer. Let me go ahead and quote it:



With this, I figure cats might indeed be a good example for behavior inspiration, to investigate that state of mind, but certainly shouldn't be extrapolated to being some global trend.

The second paragraph there provides the evolutionary justification for the behavior, and also questions the likeliness of a highly social animal not having it. Thinking of it from that direction, it is probably made to fight backstabbing and leeches, and the other effects are just freebies riding along. I might have to rethink some details here.

Hrm... thinking about it, re: revenge, violence, passive-aggressiveness, and fight-or-flight... I think the highly social lions would again prove a counter example to your KITTENS.

Do you know how bachelor lion males get control of a pride and become alpha-males? They aren't born into it. Instead, they fight the current alpha male and defeat him. Then, afterwards, they kill all of that (ex-) alpha male's children. By killing the alpha male's children, the females then become fertile and the usurper gets to make his own babies.

The females can hardly do jack shit, and the best they can do, according to this nature documentary I saw, is to hide their kids. But usually the usurper finds them and kills them, or the kids just die in the wild.

Damn.

Preserving a post from a Testing thread on another board where I go into (too much for a lol thread...) detail about why space fighters are actually more logical in hard sci fi than in soft.


I talk about implicit assumptions in this post. This is something to always keep in mind when reading other people's thoughts about things - they are probably assuming things in their posts, which might or might not apply to you.

In the case of interplanetary warfare, for example, which is a common assumption in hard sf threads (including the almost the entirety of Atomic Rockets! Great site, but remember the assumptions. Especially when reading my own essays on the site.), space fighters are so absurd as to be outright laughable. Travel time is between weeks and months, (and consequently, delta-v is a big deal, acceleration scarcely matters (except for how it affects d-v), battles are long range and/or high speed, and so on)

But, this assumption isn't necessarily true! When reading someone's post, always ask yourself: what is he implicitly assuming here, and do those assumptions apply to me?

Anyway, here's my Testing post:


Long range weaponry doesn't matter if the battle is short range.

There's a variety of factors that (can) go into making them work in hard sf. The tech disparity, like Ford said, makes them plausible, but doesn't make them likely on its own.

However, once you throw in other changes to the setting that (can) come with hard sci fi, fighters might actually become the logical thing to use!

(I keep saying (can) because you don't have to go this route.)

For example, take a Gundam like setting, with habitats Earth orbit. It takes, at most, days to go from one place to another, so the longer range of large ships isn't important. The interesting places are all crowded - colony clusters, tethered together. Importantly, they are likely to have a lot of neutrals around - neutral colonies, neutral comms traffic, probably civilian commerce.

You can't just park your battleship outside and laser everything, since there are no clear lines of sight to the target. The battleship can deny some area to the enemy, but it can't cover everything. (What about multiple battleships? Easy - wait them out. You're all in orbit, so they can't actually hold the ideal firing pattern forever. Just hide inside your colony until gravity breaks the pattern, then go. Moreover, if they have line of sight on you, you probably have line of sight on them. They threaten you with battleship mounted lasers, you pulverize them with colony mounted lasers.)

The battleship is also slow to change vector. In the hard sci-fi setting, acceleration decreases as mass increases, with only a couple potential exceptions (nuclear pulse on a large ship perhaps). So while your battleship is changing its angle to zap you, you just out accelerate it to another cover angle.


There's also the possibility that both sides of the conflict are from the same colony cluster; they might not even have many battleships, since they don't have a need for them. Air Force style fighters, launched on hours long missions from home base, do the job plenty adequately and at much lower cost.



So we've got the use-case, but why not use missiles or drones? Simple - civilian traffic. Assume only very modest AI improvements from what we have today, and it isn't hard to say you might want a human in the loop to make the rules of engagement decision. Is that an enemy or just a strange acting space truck? He'll be pretty dependent on information fed and filtered to him through the computer, of course, but he makes the big picture decisions that you don't trust the machine to do.

So missiles are out. What about remote controlled drones? Comes back to the same thing breaking lasers - no reliable line of sight to the battlefield, so the signal is liable to be interrupted right at important moments. Could you reflect signals off the habitats? Possibly, but this is easier for the enemy to intercept or jam. Or to get confused with civilian comms traffic; it just isn't as reliable as having the meatbag on scene.


There's a number of assumptions in all this, but they are each plausible and none really wipe out the others.


This has the implicit assumption that the cost of propellant is significant. If you are in a short range scenario, it really isn't; a base is just a few hundred m/s away.

Take a fighter with half its mass being LH2/LOX chemical fuel, and its main engine being the one off the space shuttle. It has an Isp of 450 seconds (and a thrust of 2 MN, more than enough for a zippy space fighter!). This gives it a delta-v of 3 km/s - about twice what is needed to fly from home at L5 to the enemy in LEO and back home to L5. You're free to use about 1,500 m/s of delta v in maneuvers against the enemy and still make it back!

That's long enough range to warrant a battleship or frigate (or carrier? depends on the specifics), so you probably won't see fighters actually doing that; their to and from action will be even shorter range, such as inside the colony cluster itself, which requires virtually zero delta-v for getting into position (you can take your time; gravity isn't fucking with you there).

Now, a missile could burn closer to 2,200 m/s of d-v against the enemy in the L5/LEO situation, so it has its advantages anyway. It could also ditch that heavy pilot for a computer and come out even better. But, can you trust it to make the decision all on its own to engage or abort? Can you trust it to be able to tell the difference between the United Parcel Service and the Unhinged People Slaughterers?

Or, can the missile decide to board and inspect the space truck if it isn't sure?


Saying no gives you a reason to put a man there, despite the delta-v cost, and isn't, to me, unplausible at all.




Can these apply to soft sci-fi? Yes, some can (though I've never seen it...), but it nevertheless breaks down when you introduce soft tech. If your battleship can make the insane acceleration anyway, it can just keep a line of sight on the enemy. If it can take infinite damage, why would it even care about a little snub fighter? If fighters make better acceleration than chemical rockets, no human is going to be able to handle it anyway. Throw in inertial dampers, and you still have the reaction speed being too fast for a human to make ROE decisions, so that justification is still out.

Hard sci-fi can have space fighters because it makes sense in universe to have them. Soft sci-fi gets them because World War II hasn't been done to death on the big screen yet.

Yeah, small craft that could vaguely be described as "space fighters" make a fair amount of sense for a hard SF setting where most of the action happens in planetary orbitals and computers are relatively primitive. Although they'd be more sort of like rockets with missiles, guns, or lasers than what most people first envision when they hear the term "space fighter" (unless they include things vaguely along the lines of the X-20 DynaSoar).

Somebody should do a setting with modern tech but a nerd's wet dream space program, with competing nations having all sorts of space infrastructure and space capsules on rockets with missiles and guns to defend/attack each other's space stuff. That'd be cool, and I can't remember it ever really being done before (well, Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series did it a little bit, but it didn't pay very much attention to it). Man, I just wish authors would do more hard SF generally. I see so much untapped potential in it, and not too many science fiction authors touch it, I guess because most of them are scared of it or have a preconception that realism must be terribly limiting because it doesn't let them FTL and 9999 gigaton lasers and whatnot or just don't want to be bothered with the effort of actually trying for a realistic universe.

Well, technically, almost all space warcraft would be rockets with weapons tacked on...

I wonder what the volume would be for that 50/50 mass and fuel deal. One design that comes to mind is what appears to be a sphere, with the pilot in the center, weapons tacked on outside, and the middle being propellant; the tank helps protect the pilot.

Hehe, it'd be like a little planet. Core = cockpit, mantle = propellant, crust = guns.

I'd also really like to salve some old fighter designs I did for this 'verse, back before I hardened it up.

Here's the sprites from my RTS:




They look really good... but I don't think I can make them work without at least adding external tanks.


I've gotta add a general note, I think chemical rockets are really underrated in the hard sci-fi circles. It ties in to the implicit interplanetary assumption to a degree, but even there, people tend to dismiss chemical engines out of hand (especially in favor of the questionable fusion alternative).

Sure, the Isp isn't great, but it is relatively simple and gives good acceleration, which is useful in more places than you might think. The obvious blast off is there (and the Earth orbital space described above), but also less obvious benefits for interplanetary travel, such as using it for Oberth effect maneuvers. The boost this gives from massive worlds (especially gas giants!) can give huge benefits at low cost.

I generally find fusion overrated as well, for virtually everything. This, combined with my feelings on chemical rockets leads to my vision of spacecraft being pretty different than "mainstream" (lol) hard sf designs.


Hell yeah.


Yeah, as we've said on SDN. It sucks.

For those reading this who aren't familiar with the SDN threads, we tend to argue with people saying hard sci-fi is limiting by firing back that the only limited thing is their imagination; they assume everybody will still be baseline humans just like today (thus overlooking the potential of life extension, uploads, etc), everyone will still live on planets (overlooking habitats), wars and travel must be like it was today in 1942.

I really like your ideas, Destro. Man, reading your stuff and other hard SF works makes me want to run out and do an epic hard-ish 'verse in the same style as The Solidarity Wars. Hell, maybe I will! It'll sure as hell be a break from the common pulpy stuff I do.

That sounds a little like the ice-ship idea. You build the outer layers of your ship out of water ice and feed it through a thermal rocket as fuel. It triples as propellant, heat sink, and armor.


Yeah, I've complained before about how I think way too much SF presents the future as being fundamentally like the present or the past, but in space, with lasers. I don't really have a problem with most SF being massively unrealistic (although I personally prefer realistic), but I'm heartily sick of universes where anything that could dramatically improve or change the human condition is systematically banned or ignored by the author so he can write about the USA or the British Empire, but in space, with 9999 gigaton lasers, and with magic used to cop out of all the real challenges of establishing an interstellar civilization, like the lightspeed limit, because they would get in the way of straightforwardly transplanting past or present politics into the setting.

Considering that in my own hard SF uni I have Beserker swarms that attack transhuman civilizations just so I can keep humans (and biological aliens) around* I might be a bit of a hypocrite and general pretentious cockflap there, but honestly my problem isn't so much with the idea itself as with the way it's ridiculously overused. It's like Tolkienesque worlds and vampire and werewolf urban fantasy in fantasy. It's not a bad concept inherently, but it's already been done a bunch of times and meanwhile there's all sorts of other interesting possibilities out there that are getting sadly neglected because they're not as easy and safe.

* Note, they still have superintelligent AGI and all that implies. Not necessarily because there aren't Beserker factions that have a mad-on for that too, but because there are other Beserker factions that want to kill everybody, and a civilization that doesn't have superintelligent AGI at its disposal is horribly crippled compared to one that does; giving it up would be complete suicide.

Thanks!


Do it! It'll be splendid. Though one tip: don't be a technical perfectionist. Just because you are aiming for hardness doesn't mean you have to be flawless (though admitably, the bar is higher than for soft works).

I've known that I want to do a space disaster in my 'verse for many years. I've gotten it down to a fairly specific plot and technical plan, but haven't finalized it yet just because I can't stop worrying about the timing working out perfectly if you actually do the math (and partially because I suck at actually writing, but there's enough bad fiction on the internet that I'd let this slide ).

Don't worry too much about that stuff or you'll get stuck forever. Keep the basic science principles in mind, but use them as a jumping point for fun rather than something to stress over. If in doubt, just leave the numbers off and focus on the people or something. (Probably obvious to say to a real writer, but it isn't so easy for me!)



Yes, indeed. Generally, it seems to me like the propellant should be used for dual or triple purpose if at all possible, since it is just so much mass in the package.


This here is what annoys me most. Instead of running with the setting and taking advantage of its uniqueness, magic is used to take every distinguishing aspect away.

Space is big - nope, magic drives erase it with absurd speed
Zero gravity is fun - nope, artificial gravity decks eliminate it (this is more forgivable for tv due to budgets, but still, ugh)
Orbits move - nope, magic drives and FTL to planets remove it so everything is stationary

Bah.


Meh, you're in good company I rally against FTL at almost every opportunity, but still have it in my 'verse. I even have energy shields solely because a space battle isn't a space battle if Riker can't yell "Shields up!" to inaugurate it!

(Since battles are so rare in my stuff anyway, removing them would be utterly trivial, but I like it!)


Ooo, for the FTL, I often suggest a slowboat habitat that parks in the outer system, so you have aliens and short travel time to them. I didn't do this here since I like my alien history and homeworld...

...but how could I overlook the other possibility? What if it was a cluster of humans that slowboated over to my alien world?! That would neatly beat my objection. It would put it farther future, but this nevertheless works because the colonists could be said to be cut off from tech advancements from home and/or some conservative breakaway faction, so they are still baseline humans for a while.

Hmm, oh mang, I can't discount this possibility. I could totally make it work.


My space disaster story would change, since the thing that kicked it off was an exploding ftl drive, but it could be an exploding something else; the ship just needs to be crippled and put way off course in an unexpected event. The rest takes place near the homeworld anyway (like Apollo 13. so close in sci-fi terms, yet so far in the way of rescuing the astronauts.)

Wow, this has potential. How could I have not thought of it before?!

Must write more, but have to go now. Late for work as it is.

This. When* interstellar colonization happens it won't be a retread of the nineteenth century or the 1500s or the Roman Empire or Polynesia or... anything. Interstellar colonization and holding together an interstellar civilization involves challenges (and hence, logically, solutions) unlike anything any Earth civilization has ever faced. I wish more SF would embrace and run with that instead of using magic to force a round hole to fit a square peg.

* Barring human extinction or permanent collapse of technological civilization I am fairly confident of it being a matter of when, not if.


Maybe you could make it a retractable impact shield out of a huge swarm of microscopic very small robots. Instead of hitting the ship the projectile hits the loose screen of bots and vaporizes, and since the screen is basically an intelligent dust cloud around the ship little energy is transferred to the ship. They could refer to these as "shields" and yell "shields up" when they give the order to deploy the bot swarm. Of course the screen would degrade over time as more and more bots were destroyed, and would probably be much less effective against lasers or particle beams than solid projectiles (though even there a big enough swarm could offer some protection, maybe coat them with something highly reflective to the most popular weaponized laser frequencies).

It's sort of amusing coming up with ways to replicate the function of soft SF devices with hard SF tech. It's surprising to realize what's actually reasonable.


It's nice to see I've apparently helped inspire you.

A much simpler system which is just as efficient would be a series of counter missiles...


Oh, yeah, it's a lot of fun, and often has surprising results. Though, in a lot of cases, a simpler solution arises that works even better. But dems da ropes.

Something I find to be a lot of fun too is what I call hard fantasy (cue Stark laughing at me) - taking magic elements, but giving the same rigourous treatment you'd give real science in hard sf. Work out the rules in a well defined manner, then tell stories about people discovering those rules, learning how to use them to their advantage, and seeing what happens with it.

I say magic is mysterious mechanism, but not results - they can be measured. Science still applies to it (magic vs science is a stupid fight). When I still had honest to fantasy magic in this setting, I worked it that way, with one more step: the results themselves remain grounded. You can magically push something, but it is the same as reaching out and touching it - force and counter force still happens. Measurable results, mysterious mechanism.

I argued shortly after joining this board that such fantasy magic is harder science than FTL drives. I still believe that, though took it out of the setting because I wanted to focus on solutions that might be applicable to the real world. Little things like safety lines and such I wanted to keep, but weren't as dramatic if a wizard could just use telekinesis to do a rescue.


Anywho, my FTL drive got another form of hard treatment: its discovery and engineering makes up the first chapter of my old story. It didn't magically appear; experiments and measurements were done with it the same way as anything else. It had to get funded and built. Things went wrong, the project in jeopardy for being too dangerous with too few benefits. The end results of its operation were measured and well defined. The details of manufacturing had to be worked out, with improving processes for quality assurance and reliability.

Then the space disaster story used one of the failure modes to set up the scenario, with the details of its operation being used to calculate the damage to the ship.

Lots of work, and really lots of fun. It is a pity to put some of it aside, but you've gotta murder your darlings or whatever the hell the editing process is called on tvtropes.


Aye, this is the most excited I've been about a revision for a while.

I've been pondering side stories. One of them involves undercover safety inspectors. They apply for jobs with companies at random, and see first hand how they adhere to the relevant regulations.

But a problem strikes me: what if someone took a picture of the new guy and Googled it? Search results: Police Academy graduation - boom, the cover is blown.


We're getting to the point today with computer facial recognition and data collection and searching can do amazing things. Facial recognition isn't quite to this point yet, but automatic photo tagging gives decent results, and things keep advancing each year. There's no reason in theory why a computer can't do an even better job than humans.

It seems like a sure thing that this kind of thing will be available soon. Take a picture of someone, upload it and search for that person on the 'net. Within seconds, you have every public photo and profile ever posted of him or her. The officer's fake name can be uncovered by any two bit idiot with a computer.

One solution might be to not post things to the net. The problem there is you'd have to do it from the beginning; once something's posted, taking it down is hard. The search might bring up old archives from years before the actual assignment that could blow the officer's cover. Real pain in the ass.

The way to get around it for my current story idea is to not use a cover ID at all; just don't post your picture on the police websites, so no one has any suspicion that you are a cop. But this can't work for everyone. Your best officers might be those who have been on the job for years, and during those years, things are surely to be posted.




I hate technology. It takes all the fun out everything.

Simple (sort of) solution: change the inspector's face. When it comes to undercover work, you've no greater friend than plastic surgery! This way John Travolta can pose as Nicholas Cage and find the, err, dangerous workplace OSHA violations?

Post-surgery all you need is to create a few accounts on Space Myspace and Future Facebook, and insert backdated mentions of the inspector's fake identity in a few websites and voila: one fake identity that should stand up to a cursory glance or two. This might not beat the Space KGB, but it certainly should be good enough to fool random people using Future Google to check up on prospective employees.

I was just listening to the utterly amazing theme from Airwolf while pondering how to fly a space fighter.

From playing my games, ROTATE 12 and 13, I've come to the conclusion that the thrusters all require very light touches. If you just hold in the accelerator, you'll fairly quickly eat through all your propellant and wind up way off course. Naturally, the games aren't super realistic (they are 2d Asteroids clones with some modifications), but this seems to make sense anyway - every move you take requires some extra propellant to get back on course, and rockets eat propellant pretty quickly.

(Fun side fact, if you are randomly jinking around for your mission, the propellant required to correct your course is negligible compared to that used actually jinking. The reason is simple: when making random movements, on average, for every burst you fire to the left, you'll fire another to the right; it just about evens out, so you never venture too far off course in the first place - at least not in terms of delta-v. You might be quite a ways off in absolute coordinates, since a burn to the left, then an equal burn to the right 10 seconds later just put you 10 seconds to the left. But, the delta-v to fix it is small; just burn a wee bit to the right, wait 10 seconds, burn a wee bit to the left. Done.

The problem with manually controlling the space fighter is your movements aren't likely to be random. I know I tend to just slam on the accelerator! Such requires lots of fuel to correct for, and you're lucky if you don't smash into something while out of control.)


So, what I'm thinking you want for controls are push buttons for the thrusters, not toggle switches. That is, they only fire when you are specifically pressing the fire button.

Let me list off the movements you might want:


There are spins in each of the three direction, and thrust in each of the three directions:

1) Forward and backward thrust
2) Side to side thrust
3) Up and down thrust
4) Rotation to turn around - yaw
5) Rotation to spin on your main axis - roll
6) Rotation to turn up and down - pitch


It makes sense to map the controls to these movements, or if possible, the thrusters that allow them.

What controls do we have? I'm leaning toward either one stick (with buttons) and two foot pedals - the Airwolf config - or two sticks (with buttons) and two foot pedals.

In the Airwolf configuration, I'd map the controls thus:

Stick forward fires the thrusters to change your pitch, pointing the nose down.
Stick backward does the opposite of stick forward, pointing the nose up.
Stick left fires the thrusters on the right, translating you in the left direction.
Stick right fires the thrusters on the left.


Similar to helicopter movement, actually. You'll note that there's no way to roll or change your yaw. That's where the foot pedals come in.

Left pedal fires your right and left thrusters together, spinning your ship counter-clockwise in yaw.
Right pedal spins it clockwise.


There's still no roll control... and I don't think I care. Rolling doesn't actually reorient your main engine nor translate your position. All it does is make you dizzy; it is a pretty worthless movement for the space fighter. TV tells me that rolling dodges bullets, but I doubt it is useful in reality for that either. All it seems good for is turning airplanes. (And translating helicopters, but our space fighter has that covered with its lateral thrusters on the stick.)

In the two stick approach, you could get roll by pushing one stick left and the other right, or vice-versa. One stick would control your front thrusters, and one the rear thrusters, allowing you to manipulate the sides independently. While this gives a bit more flexibility, it is pretty useless flexibility in exchange for eating up another hand and making other movements fancier.

There's no up and down thrust either, but adding it would complicate things I fear. In the two stick approach, you could get that by pushing both sticks forward or backward, in the same direction. Not too bad, if you go with two sticks. With one stick, you'd probably just push the stick to move the pitch, then fire your main engine to get the requested change in vector.

Now, what about main thrust? Airwolf to the rescue! Use the super cool turbo button in the thumb position on the stick. This doesn't give reverse thrusters (the two stick approach would naturally use the other hand, so it grants it there), but you can do without; just spin the ship around and fire the main engine. That's what you have to do in ROTATE 13, and it isn't so bad.

Having a third foot pedal, like in the position of the clutch on a car, or a button for the other hand can do it too if it proves to be useful. What I'd probably use the left hand for though is telling the computer what targets to follow: it can be sitting on a trackball or something like that, moving a cursor around on the windshield (which is actually a computer boosted display, tracking shit with info from the radar and whatnot. Like in Gundam, or in video games.) With computer assist, that can guide the auto-aim without taking your attention away from everything else.

Above the auto-aim control would be your toggle switches for TOO CLOSE FOR MISSILE SWITCHING TO GUNS and that kind of thing.


One interesting thing is angular inertia. In the ROTATE games, to change the direction you're pointing, you have to tap the left button, wait a brief moment, then tap the right button to cancel the rotation. Something similar would work here. (ROTATE 13 includes a new spacecraft with a rotation wheel, which only rotates as long as you hold in the button. I find it weird to play, being used to the thruster approach in the classic ship. This kind of thing might be used realistically, but I'm not sure if it would provide combat level performance.)


The controls here are amazingly similar to Airwolf, except that you have to cancel your movement explicitly, and I think I've covered all the important bases. Win.


And the habitat cluster setting provides a place where this kind of thing might actually serve a purpose too......

Luke Campbell, the laser expert over at sfconfim-l, posted some laser gun art:

http://panoptesv.com/Brushstrokes/Pics/ ... eLaser.jpg
http://panoptesv.com/Brushstrokes/Pics/ ... tLaser.jpg
http://panoptesv.com/Brushstrokes/Pics/ ... istol2.jpg
http://panoptesv.com/Brushstrokes/Pics/ ... Pistol.jpg
http://panoptesv.com/Brushstrokes/Pics/ ... Pistol.jpg

Some of them look like phasers, I like it.