67 réponses à ce sujet

[skiaDUDE]

 It occured to me that the Rachni is ME are extremely similar to the Buggers in the Ender's Game series.

To anyone who has not read those books, you will have no idea what I am talking about, but as characters and plot devices they are EXTREMELY similar. Here are my reasons:

1) They are bugs
2) They both proved to be an unreasonable and hostile species in the start
3) They were eradicated and thought extinct for hundreds of years
4) They are a hive mind, meaning they are controlled/guided by a single queen
5) They both communicate telepathically
6)Without proper guidance from the queen they go beserk then die
7)The queen in the end is sympathetic and helpless, with the fate of the species in the hands of one man

Looks like Bioware just kinda copied this, but hey it worked well

[Skyblade012]

It's hardly the only thing they copied. Nor is it exactly a unique idea in science fiction.

[didymos1120]

It's OK. Ender's Game got that whole "Bug War" thing from Starship Troopers anyway.

[ExtremeOne]

well lets be honest the Geth are Mass Effect's version of Star Trek's Borg and the Krogans are basically ME's Klingons.

[TelexFerra]

and the Quarians are like a combination of the rag-tag fleet from BSG and the Travelers from Stargate: Atlantis

[Darthnemesis2]

And the Turians are... AWESOME!

[ExtremeOne]

The mercs in the game are basically PMCs and biotics are ME's Jedi and Sit from Star Wars.

[ExtremeOne]

Darthnemesis2 wrote...

And the Turians are... AWESOME!

 

yeah they are but thats about the only thing that was not lifted from Star Wars or Star trek. TIM is basically Emperor Palpatine and Shepard in ME 2 is his Darth Vader. 

[Darthnemesis2]

ExtremeOne wrote...

Darthnemesis2 wrote...

And the Turians are... AWESOME!

 

yeah they are but thats about the only thing that was not lifted from Star Wars or Star trek. TIM is basically Emperor Palpatine and Shepard in ME 2 is his Darth Vader. 

 its true. But, when you think about it, everything in literature is based (somewhat) on what came before. Certainly you can draw parallels between almost any work of fiction.

[ExtremeOne]

Darthnemesis2 wrote...

ExtremeOne wrote...

Darthnemesis2 wrote...

And the Turians are... AWESOME!

 

yeah they are but thats about the only thing that was not lifted from Star Wars or Star trek. TIM is basically Emperor Palpatine and Shepard in ME 2 is his Darth Vader. 

 its true. But, when you think about it, everything in literature is based (somewhat) on what came before. Certainly you can draw parallels between almost any work of fiction.

 


yeah that is very true but its just striking when something is basically the same thing with different names. 

[Canned Bullets]

Biotics are ' The Force and Mercenary troopers are the equivalent of Stormtroopers.

[ExtremeOne]

Canned Bullets wrote...

Biotics are ' The Force and Mercenary troopers are the equivalent of Stormtroopers.

 

I totally agree with that 

[Skyblade012]

And their entire idea of FTL travel is essentially the Bergenholm from the Chronicles of the Lensmen. A comparison nobody ever draws because they've never read the dang books.

[didymos1120]

ExtremeOne wrote...

well lets be honest the Geth are Mass Effect's version of Star Trek's Borg and the Krogans are basically ME's Klingons.

The geth owe way more to Cylons than the Borg.  The only big parallel is that both races are into the hivemind thing, but that  concept isn't exactly unique to the Borg and has been part of SF practically from the very start.

Well,  OK: I suppose husking people could be compared to assimilation, but that's not geth tech, so you can't really count that. What the  Reapers did to Prothean civlization, as described by Vigil, actually sounds like the original description of the Borg.  Assimilation and nanoprobes and all that jazz came much later, and at first they basically just slaughtered people and almost literally scraped anything even remotely technological off the surface of the planets they attacked.  There were even little hints dropped after their introduction about remote Federation colonies and outposts just vanishing, infrastructure and all.  Then they got here, and Locutus happened, and their major concern became capturing people instead of tech.

[IanPolaris]

Here is my take. In modern Sci-Fi/Science-Fantasy, there is a copious amount of cross fertilization, and there is nothing really wrong with that.



That said, the story of the Rachni Invasion is almost a carbon copy of "Ender's Game" except spoken from the long perspective of over a thousand years after the fact.



The moral decision Shepard must make is *EXACTLY* the same moral decision that Ender faced and founded the religion of the Speakers For the Dead in Xenocide.



The other parallels are less obvious, but yes, I'd agree the sub-plot of the Rachni is almost a direct carbon copy of Ender's Game/Xenocide.



-Polaris

[Skyblade012]

Except told in a much less depressing fashion.

[Ieldra]

Skyblade012 wrote...
And their entire idea of FTL travel is essentially the Bergenholm from the Chronicles of the Lensmen. A comparison nobody ever draws because they've never read the dang books.

Yeah. Except that E. E. Smith could get away with ignoring Einstein because he started writing in in the 1910s. These days, SF should have to account for relativity (though I can forgive them for ignoring the FTL/time travel connection) in some remotely convincing way. If it's all hogwash, at least let it be convincing hogwash.

Anyway, new ideas are almost non-existent in any kind of literature. I'm not surprised many ideas seem copied. I'm convinced some are actually "knowingly inspired", but others are just the result of different people getting the same ideas. It's not surprising.

Modifié par Ieldra2, 19 août 2010 - 07:02 .

[IanPolaris]

Ieldra2 wrote...

Skyblade012 wrote...
And their entire idea of FTL travel is essentially the Bergenholm from the Chronicles of the Lensmen. A comparison nobody ever draws because they've never read the dang books.

Yeah. Except that E. E. Smith could get away with ignoring Einstein because he started writing in in the 1910s. These days, SF should have to account for relativity (though I can forgive them for ignoring the FTL/time travel connection) in some remotely convincing way. If it's all hogwash, at least let it be convincing hogwash.

Anyway, new ideas are almost non-existent in any kind of literature. I'm not surprised many ideas seem copied. I'm convinced some are actually "knowingly inspired", but others are just the result of different people getting the same ideas. It's not surprising.

Disagree.  Most modern sci-fi (even 'hard' sci-fi) ignores relativity, and Lensman's books are post relativity so he gets no pass there.  The problem is the implications of relativity are hard to explain, even more difficult to imagine (if you permit true FTL, then the who notion of causality...the idea that one event precedes another... is completely shot), and there are a host of other complications (such as the possibility of all things happening at once).  This is why most modern physicists really, really hate the idea of FTL.

However, the universe is a funny place.  Local FTL (i.e. going from point a to point b faster than light in an arbitrarily small slice of space-time) is impossible.  Can't happen. Bzzt.  No.

Unforunately, given the existance of Dark Energy with it's negative space-time curvature signature in space (which causes the galaxy to accellerate it's expansion), it's just remotely possible that Global FTL (going from point a to pont b that apparently is faster than light but isn't because of space-time distortions) is just barely possible.

However, explaining all that of that makes for exceedingly dull fiction, and honestly is a fatal impedent to good story telling anyway.  So in the absence of "true" interstellar space travel, the authors make it up and implicitly deal with a Newtonian (and wrong) universe except when it matters to the story, and I'm OK with that.  It's fiction after all.

-Polaris

[Ieldra]

IanPolaris wrote...
However, explaining all that of that makes for exceedingly dull fiction, and honestly is a fatal impedent to good story telling anyway.  So in the absence of "true" interstellar space travel, the authors make it up and implicitly deal with a Newtonian (and wrong) universe except when it matters to the story, and I'm OK with that.  It's fiction after all.
-Polaris

I wouldn't expect things like that to be explained within the story, though I'd like to point you to the gunnery chief's tirade on the Citadel to show that some things can be explained in an entertaining way. But there's another place for it: explanations like this is what the Codex is for.

Don't misunderstand me: it's not a big thing for me (as opposed to interspecies sex), it's just that SF has used more convincing methods for explaining FTL than simply ignoring widely-known stuff. That any physicist would be able to dissect all of them in seconds is beside the point. The point is using a method not any layman with an average education could dissect in seconds.

[IanPolaris]

Ieldra2 wrote...

IanPolaris wrote...
However, explaining all that of that makes for exceedingly dull fiction, and honestly is a fatal impedent to good story telling anyway.  So in the absence of "true" interstellar space travel, the authors make it up and implicitly deal with a Newtonian (and wrong) universe except when it matters to the story, and I'm OK with that.  It's fiction after all.
-Polaris

I wouldn't expect things like that to be explained within the story, though I'd like to point you to the gunnery chief's tirade on the Citadel to show that some things can be explained in an entertaining way. But there's another place for it: explanations like this is what the Codex is for.

Don't misunderstand me: it's not a big thing for me (as opposed to interspecies sex), it's just that SF has used more convincing methods for explaining FTL than simply ignoring widely-known stuff. That any physicist would be able to dissect all of them in seconds is beside the point. The point is using a method not any layman with an average education could dissect in seconds.

I am a physicist and I can assure you on a professional basis no less, that almost all (and all widely read) SF does ignore even the widely known FTL stuff.  It's widely known (but very badly understood by the layman) that FTL travel directly implies Time Travel.  What most don't get and it's almost impossible to explain without going into how Lorenze Transformations work, is that time travel and FTL travel are completely equivalent.  Indeed the entire notion of 'locality' and 'causality' are also completely equivalent.

All widely read Sci-Fi and Sci-Fi games completely ignore these issues.  Some "handwavium FTL tech" is postulated and then the world assumes an almost completely Newtonian character (which is completely wrong if FTL is available) without futher comment, and I am OK with that!

If you wanted to handle things correctly, you'd have to deal with ships arriving before they left.  You'd have to deal with the idea that how you traveled was completely interreated with what you knew and what everyone else knew.  It would be a damned mess and would completely wreck any reasonable story the author wanted to tell (in no small part due to the facts our minds don't and can't completely grasp Einstonian and super-luminal Einstonian implications on an instinctive level).

The first thing you'd have to abandon (as I indicate above) is the idea of "Absolute Time" and "Absolute Causality".  Basically it means that just because A happened after B when you left port does NOT mean that A happened after B when you arrive....and if you take that to it's logical conclusion, most find that mindblowing.

Essentially you can have Relativity, Causality/Locality, or FTL.....pick any two.  Almost all modern Sci-Fi except to highlight certain plot-specific points almost always pick Causality/Locality (and thus absolute time) and FTL.  ME does as well.

-Polaris

Modifié par IanPolaris, 19 août 2010 - 08:00 .

[Mister Mida]

Try to come up with something REALLY original these days.

[Skyblade012]

Other people who know the Lensmen books! Yay!

Modifié par Skyblade012, 19 août 2010 - 08:03 .

[IanPolaris]

Skyblade012 wrote...

Other people who know the Lensmen books! Yay!

Of course, since a field that negates mass is unknown to our physics, the exact result of it isn't exactly subject to all of our laws. What rules control nothingness? It's hard to say, even with relativity and quantum mechanics.

Actually "a field that negates mass" while fancifal isn't completly beyond the bounds of possibility.  After all for most particles, what we idenfiy as "zero point energy" (i.e. mass) is really a side-effect of symmetry breaking of the Higgs-Boson field at the sub-atomic scale.  That an the apparent existance of "Dark Energy" which is still badly understood but does in fact seem to have a negative stress-energy tensor (and thus negative zero point mass) means such things however remotely can't be completely dismissed.

That said, even reducing your mass to zero would not let you break the light-speed barrier.  At best it would shift you into the "light-like" frame of reference where everything literally happens at once.  From your point of view, you'd be "teleported" to the destination, but it would still take you a finate (and long) period of time relative to the rest frame of the destination.  (For example a trip to Alpha-C would still take a bit less than four years relative to the rest frame of Alpha C).

So yes, Lensman ignores relativity too.  His tech is the first of many "handwavium" techs to explain away relativity and as I said, I'm fine with that.  Just understand that this is what he (and almost all other sci-fi writer/film/movie/game since) has done.

-Polaris

[Skyblade012]

True, but remember, a secondary effect of the Mass Effect fields is to "raise the speed of light". Light travels faster in an ME field than it does in a vacuum, as explained in the Codex on what space looks like at FTL speeds.

[IanPolaris]

Skyblade012 wrote...

True, but remember, a secondary effect of the Mass Effect fields is to "raise the speed of light". Light travels faster in an ME field than it does in a vacuum, as explained in the Codex on what space looks like at FTL speeds.

That does not matter. 

*sigh* How do I explain this without boring the board with the math.......

1)  The local speed of light is irrelevant.  It's not the speed of light per se that forms the limitation.  It's the fact that light in a vacuum is completely defined by two global universal constants (the electric and magnetic force constants), and those must the the same in all frames of reference!  This is the very cornerstone of relativity.  There are many materials here on earth that permit a phase velocity of photons to exceed 'c' but that doesn't negative relativity at all.

Edit:  Changing the local electric and magnetic force constants is a no-go at well (on a global scale, that is what going through a non-vacuum does with light anyway).  It's not the speed of light or the local electro-magnetic force constant that matters.  It's the fact that an EM wave (and a Gravitational Wave too it turns out) are completely determined by universal force constants that can not be changed without resorting to an outside influence.  Essentially it means that all experiments with light under the same conditions are the same for all reference frames baring outside influences/forces.  That means the speed-of-light-in-a-vacuum is limit not because of the speed of light but because of the fundamental structure of the universe itself.  That's the best I can explain this in english.

2)  Assuming that the mass-effect field creates what is called a CTC (closed timelike conduit) which is possible (albeit barely) so that while you appear to travel faster than light in a vacuum, you really don't locally, you still are faced with the vexing problem that according to some frames of reference, you have travelled from point A to point B super-luminally.

If you can do that, then A before B (i.e. basical causality and our notion of time and seperation of events) loses all meaning.  This not only permits for time travel, but completely shreds the idea of even living in a world where events happened in an kind of agreed upon order which is devestating for any reasonable story.  This is why virtually all modern physicists loathe even the possibility of even global FTL, but the physics as of right does seem to permit it.....as a very remote possibility.

-Polaris

Modifié par IanPolaris, 19 août 2010 - 08:25 .