103 réponses à ce sujet

[Belgrade_Phantom]

I think they should skip it , but I think some DLC with time travel mission would be nice , for example the crew is going to back on Earth during the 19. , 20. or early 21. century to accompish some task , something by model on one of the episodes of Star Trek ( or The Voyage Home movie).

[Kabooooom]

Scratch "maybe", we know it's possible in theory, that's why Alcubierre's paper received so much attention when it was released - the math held up to scrutiny. The problems pertain to the practical aspects of it, the insurmountable energy requirements (which have since gone from the mass energy of the universe times 10 billion to something like the mass energy of the Voyager 1 probe) and the absence of the required exotic matter in nature, without which space warping remains a theoretical concept.

And while you're right that ME FTL is sort of like Alcubierre FTL, Alcubierre FTL has the ship remaining stationary while the space around it is moving faster than light. The ship doesn't use fuel (beyond the energy and negative energy required for the FTL drive) and doesn't use its mode of propulsion (chemical rockets, fusion engine, ion drives, etc) to achieve FTL speed.

The difference between them is that Mass Effect FTL still uses regular spacecraft fuel and propulsion modes to achieve those speeds, and doesn't warp space. What the Mass Effect FTL drive does it creates a field around the ship inside which matter has considerably lower mass, but not lower energy. Thanks to Einstein's famous equation, a reduction in mass without a proportional reduction in energy means the speed of light has to go up, or the math breaks down.

This has the effect of raising the speed of light by many factors inside the field, allowing the spacecraft to achieve local subluminal speeds that would be considered superluminal speeds outside the field. And because it the local speed is only a fraction of the local speed of light, there's no time dilation and infinite energy isn't needed to go faster than 299,792,458 metres per second.

This is 100% correct. That's exactly how the mass effect is described to work, and honestly, it is probably one of the more clever examples of "FTL" that I've ever seen in science fiction. Actually scratch that, it is the most clever. They took an equation that relates the rest energy of matter to its mass by the speed of light, and asked "well...what if the mass could actually change but the energy remained constant?".

In reality, this wouldn't work. It violates other known laws of physics. But its still a cool idea, and it makes the ME universe a bit more immersive for me.

[GDICanuck]

I think they should skip it , but I think some DLC with time travel mission would be nice , for example the crew is going to back on Earth during the 19. , 20. or early 21. century to accompish some task , something by model on one of the episodes of Star Trek ( or The Voyage Home movie).

"Excuse me, officer. Do you know where I can find a nuclear wessel?"

[Lady Artifice]

One could argue that the more profound alteration was to machine life than organic. For organic life the machine encoding could sum up to be a symbiotic parasite, akin to intestinal bacteria, that allows for and encourages coexistence and empathy with machines. The machines appear to have been altered far more in that they have taken on organic processes and perspectives. The major implication seeming, from what I gathered at least, is that machines may have been burdened with mortality along with organic life.

 

That's an argument I could accept, but I don't see how it refutes mine. Personally I think one is effected as much as the other, but whatever the case, the galaxy is changed just as drastically. A society in which machines and people share empathy is going to have hugely different cultural, social, and technological values from one where all AI has been eradicated. Even the way ships are manned and piloted should arguably be different.