67 réponses à ce sujet

[didymos1120]

Renaikan wrote...

Actually Rachi was most likely taken from the same bug in Starship Troopers. I bet Ender did the same thing.

[snip movie bug]

Actually, the Rachni seem to be based more on arthropods in general, and not on any particular film depiciton of bug aliens. I really don't think their anatomy is all that similar to the bugs in the Starship Troopers movie.  They certainly don't have the garish coloration, and they definitely have actual faces and are just all round less angular and armored.  In fact, I'm tempted to say that, visually, they're more like crustaceans than anything else. Especially the soldier forms.

Modifié par didymos1120, 21 août 2010 - 12:55 .

[JohnnyBeGood2]

"Ender's Game" was some pretty horrid fiction

Modifié par JohnnyBeGood2, 21 août 2010 - 01:48 .

[MadInfiltrator]

Turians = Roman Empire, with shades of the Republic



Think about it, yes its true.



Almost every faction/race has a counterpart from either contemporary or CE history.

[Arijharn]

IanPolaris wrote...
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

You are probably going to completely dismiss my statement but I feel it must be said: Once, the world was perceived to be flat. What I'm trying to say (weakly?) is that our present understanding of how the universe presently works is limited by our present understanding.

Have we discovered the answer to the n body problem yet?

I strongly believe that our understanding of the universe will happen (it's rather inevitable in my opinion), but probably wont happen any time soon... even less likely is our ability to cause change.

"Any sufficient advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" -- Arthur C Clarke.

(Sure he's not a physicist, but he's got a point no?) EDIT: Actually, he is a physicist.

Modifié par Arijharn, 21 août 2010 - 06:48 .

[IanPolaris]

Arijharn wrote...
You are probably going to completely dismiss my statement but I feel it must be said: Once, the world was perceived to be flat. What I'm trying to say (weakly?) is that our present understanding of how the universe presently works is limited by our present understanding.

I am not "dismissing" your statement, but I don't think you really understand just how fundamental the speed of light in a vacuum is to the structure of the universe.  We aren't talking about some 'misundersting' or failure of geometry, and honestly your flat earth analogy falls flat.  Even in the Dark Ages, educated people knew the world was round, and have since about 2000 BC.  The Greeks even came within a couple hundred miles of correctly estimating the diameter of the earth!

No, the speed of light and it's fundamental nature as a unversal constant that defines space-time has been repeated tested both in Astrophysics and in earthly laboratories extensively and under the most extreme conditions for almost a century now.  Einstein's Theory of General Relativity has passed the experimental test with flying colors every single time.

It is an observed FACT that you can not exceed the speed of light in a vacuum locally.  It can not be done.  It can not be done not because of some technical reason, but because space itself only connects to itself at the speed of light in a vacuum (best I can explain this without the math).

The reason that you can hypothetically bypass the speed of light using a closed-timelike-conduit is because you bypass the very structure of space itself, but you STILL have the vexing causal problems.

Look guy, take a course in Vector Algebra and then a course on Modern Physics with the math.  If that doesn't convince you of the absolutely fundamental nature of the speed of light, then nothing will.

Trying to go faster than the speed of light in a vacuum is like trying to go north of the north pole.  It's not a limit of understanding but rather a fundamental limit imposed by the very definition of a globe (or in the case of the speed of light by the very DEFINITION of space and time).

-Polaris

[Raxxman]

Nobody ever said space travel was going to be easy.

I was under the assumption that the general accepted theory is that if we're going to travel to other systems within a reasonable time frame, we're going to have to distort space time in some way or another to connect to points that aren't generally connected (ala Wormholes). This is more or less what Polaris is saying, only a bit more dumbed down.

I also would say don't worry about it. The probability that we'd encounter another race which; has two arms, two legs, two eyes, mouth nose and ears in a similar position, is about our height and build, is so low, you'd be more likely to win the lottery every single week of your life.

Like Polaris is saying, 'Just go with it'.

Modifié par Raxxman, 21 août 2010 - 11:10 .

[Nightwriter]

Ender's Game was one of the easiest books to read I've ever seen.

Reading it was effortless. It read itself. In a lot of fiction it requires at least a small effort on the reader's part to make it through, to keep reading, but the pages of Ender's Game seemed to fly by. I think I read it in a day.

[Chrystall]

Nightwriter wrote...

Ender's Game was one of the easiest books to read I've ever seen.

Reading it was effortless. It read itself. In a lot of fiction it requires at least a small effort on the reader's part to make it through, to keep reading, but the pages of Ender's Game seemed to fly by. I think I read it in a day.

Easy to read in the "this book is a no-brainer" or easy to read in the "I can't stop reading this book" fashion?

[Chrystall]

also, the biggest influence on ME:

[Raxxman]

I guess it's just easy to read, not a massively simple book, but no real though required. Kinda like Starship troopers, I bought that book to read on a flight from Oz to the UK, and I finished it about 3 seconds after boarding the plane. Took me 30/40 mins total cover to cover reading time.

[ExtremeOne]

Chrystall wrote...

also, the biggest influence on ME:

  


wow Bioware did more than us that as a influence they basically did that 

[Mallissin]

Chrystall wrote...

also, the biggest influence on ME:

Rips off the Starflight series in a few dozen ways, too. (Starflight being the original Star Control.)

Some of the racial similarities I noticed, like Elcor are much like the Dweedle (in the way they act).

[Raxxman]

For me, Mass Effect is in many ways the spiritual successor to Star Control 2. I don't think any mainstream game will have scope like that again.

[Aedan_Cousland]

Turians = Roman Empire, with shades of the Republic

The word Turian may also have been derived from Centurian, a rank in the Roman Army.

[ExtremeOne]

Aedan_Cousland wrote...

Turians = Roman Empire, with shades of the Republic

The word Turian may also have been derived from Centurian, a rank in the Roman Army.

  


i think thats very true. but if the Turians equal the roman empire then they would have been the ruling party of the original council 

[thetruefreemo]

Husks are just robot zombies or I'd even go so far to say they're synthetic versions of the flood from halo. The Mass relays are like the brodcast network from the clone series.

[JedTed]

You could say the Batarians are like the Romulans because they mostly show up as the bad guys.

ExtremeOne wrote...]
TIM is basically Emperor Palpatine and Shepard in ME 2 is his Darth Vader. 

I never considered this but that's a good one!

[Ieldra]

Raxxman wrote...
I also would say don't worry about it. The probability that we'd encounter another race which; has two arms, two legs, two eyes, mouth nose and ears in a similar position, is about our height and build, is so low, you'd be more likely to win the lottery every single week of your life.

Rather, that we'll encounter another intelligent species at all has about that probability, according to some experts. I don't have a problem with the humanoid species - since we don't know anything about how different (or not) a foreign morphology for an intelligent, civilization-building species could theoretically be, we can always assume that evolution favors the humanoid template. It may even be true. 

Interesting Star Control parallel, btw (some posts abovethread). I never played that. The similarities are astonishing.