Science fiction vs. science purism

This is continuation of talk started from this post, but it got sidetracked very fast, so I'm separated it into new thread.

Yeah... no, quantum locking doesn't work that way.
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Ou, right! You know about lmgify, so now you may just master everyone with your superior skills and knowledge. Err.. But just one point - you probably need to learn actually read whatever you're replying. Here, I highlighted a part of the quote for you, to make it obvious.

Hm. Could you please define a word "technobabble"? You are using it in mostly negative way, so "good technobabble" is just some weird combination. Do you mean "real sci-fi" (BTW, "real sci-fi" definition is one of the most common flamewars themes in sci-fi fans communities).

Really, see, you probably never tried to imagine/write down something really big and complex, like any good game setting (IP) is? I just want to note here that if you are not explaining everything, at least somehow, maybe by using gods, magic, alien artifacts or whatever, but still producing some formal theory - you may just end up with some mess like Warhammer universe where anything could happen (which doesn't make it bad, but definitely not sci-fi - it's a typical fantasy).

But formal theory I mean that you need to establish a set of axioms, which commonly for sci-fi are axioms of known science plus "fiction assumption" (that's exactly why it's called sci-fi - science fiction). Fiction assumptions are generally are about some well-known (sic!) (there is no sense in writing sci-fi using some facts or paradoxes of some very complex and hardly known theories, cause it would be just the same fantasy for most readers), but not proven (or proven to be wrong) theories, hypotheses or paradoxes.
Formal theory also need a set of rules (called a "logic") how to produce new theories from given theories or axioms.

But you must also note, that having even one fiction assumption, especially in some very low-level science field like quantum mechanics, may lead to completely insane or crazy. Which means that sci-fi doesn't need to be "serious" with sub-light space travel and many other limitations of real world. In most cases you are just focusing on one special effect you want to highlight, adjusting everything else to give a smooth story.

If you don't use formal theory in your composing, you'll end up with "anything-possible" universe (and probably with overpowered main hero/heroes, which would lead to well known problems) or internal logic conflicts.

1. "Out of thin air" is idiom which means "out of nothing".
2. Nukes, surprise-surprise, are using uranium and ordinary explosives (as boosters). Which are not "nothing". It's not even a "thin air", whatever you mean by this.

Sigh. Ok, "exterior" word means "something that leads outside any containment". And I explicitly noted that it means "without a magnetic lock" (that is - without tokamak).

Also, it's also worth noting, that:
1. Tokamak can't contain plasma above certain temperature (dunno exact number, something like 14000 K maybe?), that why we still has no fusion reactors. Why this is happening is still unknown.
2. If you have something that may throw relatively small object capable of prolonged (or even not prolonged) generation of magnetic field of few Tesla power, you just don't need any plasma. Magnetic field would perfectly tear apart anything around without any explosives.

There is better and more simple ways to obtain plasma that nuke. Like, you know, making some fire. Fire is plasma. It's not pure, nor it is superconductor, but "nuke" doesn't produce plasma by itself too. You need some gas to consume energy from explosion (any explosion) and became plasma. Plasma is ionized gas. That's it, so simple.

Also, most commonly in sci-fi plasma weapons are used with two possibilities:
1. You may store the plasma somehow for further use, so you may use impressive firepower without requiring all the energy used to produce this plasma in the field.
2. You may propel plasma at higher speed, with more accuracy and more efficiency than simple bomb or rocket (that could be shot down by defense systems).

In most cases player/reader/spectator would not assume anything. It would just end up confused, especially if your story heavily relying on things you are not explaining. Or, again, you would end up writing fantasy with magic, elves and gods - things that are not commonly explained.

Ok, and how this mass generators works? Or, more precisely, you obtain all that energy you need to produce mass? There was a perfect explanation for this in SupCom (they was using fusion reactors and energy was transported using same technology as their warp-gates).

And here is your actual point. Well, you are right. But only if you are making a platformer, arcade or something similar. And you are completely wrong if you are trying to build up a good setting. Any universe needs a backstory.

That's exactly explanation why you should use it!
1. It's well known, so people would recognise it as something familiar.
2. It's somehow near realistic (as I told you - fireballs - which is weird term for lightning, but anyway - may (as one of hypotheses) be using similar effect to levitate. Or may not. This is exactly what is "fiction assumption" - they are using it).

So, you mean that you are trying to make assumptions only about things that nobody will understand without proper knowledge and good amount of mathematics involved? You see, in world where people are believe in astrology, it's just the same if you would be assuming magic or flying pigs. There is no sense in such science fiction.

It should be educational and you should be happy if someone just find out where exactly you are cheating, cause there just became one more educated man in world! That's why sci-fi exists in first place. It's a science popularization, when you make a little lie to attract people interest to other scientific problems. And if your little lie is so hard to find out, that it's not a "little" one. It just shameless lying. I mean, it seems that you are trying to be honest and write realistic sci-fi to prevent confusion in low-educated mass, but as soon as it still "fiction", you are just getting opposite effect.

Yeah. Problem is - gauss guns would never be real, especially handheld. Just because it's already proven that if you'll obtain technologies required for producing gauss gun - you'll have much better options for making weapon that simple kinetic strike. Gauss gun is just same old pre XX-century canon, but without explosions.

So it's a Realism VS Awesome type thing going on here?

Mike

Loooooks like it

When will people just accept that awesome is where the game is going? =S

I have something important to say in reply, but since my opinion is that much more important, I shall be making a new post instead of replying in the existing thread. Good day sir, and stay tuned for my reply!

Looks more like complaints over how technical terms are being used to define weapons/technologies, etc. Really guys, unless you're writing hard sci-fi, you don't need to go into that much depth for a game, especially not for PA, since nobody will care about all that when they're too busy blowing things up.
Besides, Uber has their own writers, and if they need to, they can bs their way through technological explanations without forum help.

Also, just because it irked me to see in the OP, gauss guns are already real (look up coilgun on wikipedia), and people have made plenty of handheld versions many of which have pretty decent penetrating power. (See countless youtube videos, most notably the multistage coilguns.) As for its feasibility for a practical weapon, while something like a railgun can initially drive projectiles with a LOT more power, it's an imperfect solution due to the requirements of physical contact. (Although some modern implementations vaporize the contact bridge and use the conductive gasses to complete the circuit.) A powerful gauss gun has more options for the types of projectiles it can fire, as long as you can keep them as a cohesive object.

Also, we CAN throw things at near relativistic speed using a gauss gun right now. It's called a particle accelerator. (Not handheld, but we have a couple thousand years to get there.)

They do, i do, aloot of people do. Its part of the immersion and a big deal for aloot of people.

I never saw any complaints for TA. Nor for Deus Ex. Or nearly every Quake game. Or for Starcraft, which had an overabundance of lore to draw from, but very vague technological explanations.

You want details like this, read a book. Adding that amount of detail to a game is a waste of time, especially since it will probably be incorrect anyway. (Game developers and lore writers are not particle physicists.)

as long as some basic rules and logic dependencies are kept, you don't need uber-realism.

On the other hand a game where you would list advanced maths and physics skills as player requirements beside the system requirements would be fun too.

I hope they at least pack a physics refresher course in the documentation.

let's calculated nuke and asteroid trajectories on paper,
let the best nerd win

ok I got a bit carried away with all the realism, but it would be fun, even if it would reduce the game speed a bit.... hmm perhaps that's the reason for the idea of hours of game time in one session. <spins a few theories and wanders off>

I'm sure games like this exist out there. Programmers have Core Wars, so it wouldn't be a stretch to see physicists with something similar.

Certainly appears so. For those who may want to see that thread http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=36658

For me, tech in sci fi games matters to a point. As an RTS the explaination of the tech matters less than the tech in a story driven adventure game, but in all cases the suspension of disbelief should be maintained.

Put more simply, a sci fi story/game/movie/anything, should set down the laws of the universe it is set in and then work within those laws. Exposition and explaination can be minimal so long as it makes sense in context and doesnt come across as arbitrary or 'magic'

Star wars may be a bad example as it is more like a space fantasy but it provides an example of how crap detail can be worse than being vague in context. The addition of microorganisms being the source of the force. Previously it had been defined that the force was as intergral to the way the universe worked as gravity and electromagnetism. Then later they add an unnessesary step in the microorganisms.

I dont think we should spout off "We are going for awesome!" and throw out all rules. I also dont think that we should try have lore and backstory and physics explainations for everything to a minute degree. Things like Deus Ex may have had vague descriptions in aspects (I would note however that some of the detail in having actual academic papers referenced in the in game literature was a nice touch) but it was consistent with the style of universe (and game genre!) that had been set down.

IMO it should be a mix; awesome and realism aren't exclusive.

So, we should have orbiting planets instead of stationary ones, and we should use actual rockets to go into space instead of teleporting, as both of these are better gameplay-wise.

On the other end of the spectrum, satellites could use some science fiction so they don't strictly need to orbit planets and can instead hover over areas allowing for more gameplay freedom, and space/time will be greatly compressed so we don't need to wait literal years to reach another planet.

I agree with the sentiment of the post, just thought I'd mention that you dont need any sci fi for that aspect! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_orbit

So I won't quote/respond every point, but here's it in no particular order :

Sorry for the off-topic in the other thread, I got carried away.
Also sorry for using lmgify, it was a too condescending of me, I also got carried away.
Still, I actually did read the first ones before coming back to tell that no, quantum locking don't work that way. Really. It is (more or less) about trapping magnetic lines in the imperfections of a fine coat of superconductor. Plasma is a conductor, but not a superconductor. It is also a bulk of plasma here, not a fine coat. And I'm pretty sure that you need a stronger field than the Earth's one (or equivalent) for it to work. I'm pretty sure there are others reasons why it wouldn't work, but I already found several with 20min of basic research, and I'm not even a scientist (like you, I'm a programmer). Worse, many people watched this video last year, and many of those did search for explanations about how it works. Those people would then instantly recognize that the explanation is completely flawed. Which would break their suspension of disbelief in half right away. And they're not even scientists themselves. I met scientists, and you don't imagine how much this kind of bs can anger them when they see it. Imagine a show where a guy wants everyone's megaoctets so he can have the computing power to shut down a cyborg (actual example unfortunately).
Plasma isn't just fire or ionized gaz, it's more like fire++. And the giant fireball produced by a nuke is actually a plasmaball. Don't believe me? Just look it up, you'll see.
I do worldbuilding and writing SF short stories as a hobby, so I do know of creating complex things for the sake of a story/setting, thank you.
Storing plasma makes no sense.
Throwing plasma at someone would be far more effective, all things being equal, with a plasma cutter (used in the industry today) or a particle beam (some researchers study the possibility of using nukes this way - if we can use an antimatter-triggered nuke, the problems with conventional explosives disappear, and you can sort of concentrate the nuke detonation in a fine beam. You can also use it to fuel a X-ray laser. But antimatter-triggered nuclear weapons won't exist in at least one decade (and probably more), so it's not for today)
I know the general meaning of 'out of thin air', but the irony was just too much to be let silent - nukes actually turn thin air into plasma, it's precisely what most of their fireball is...
Any good writer will tell you that no explanation is always better than a bad explanation. The only exception being if the explanation is voluntarily bad, of course (the person is wrong in-universe, it is played for laughs...)

What is technobabble? I could link to TvTropes, but that wouldn't be nice
Technobabble is something meant to sound scientific/technological and believable, but that isn't based on actual science/technology.
When well-done, it doesn't contradict anything we know today. When it's very well-done, it doesn't even contradict future discoveries as well.
For example, you need a FTL drive so people can spend holidays on Sirius and be back next Monday.
A bad technobabble would be to say that antimatter engines are powerful enough to accelerate the ship faster than light.
A far better technobabble would be to tell that wormholes were discovered between the Sun's neighbourhood and Sirius', and that ships were developed that can cross them near-instantly.
The first one directly contradicts a century of actual experimentations. Nearly everyone heard about relativity, and most will recognize that it would simply not work.
The second one uses one of the loopholes in relativity, and nothing has yet unproven the possibility of wormholes. No one knows how one could be created, or even if the Universe has anything that could actually create one, but if one is created, it can remain stable and not contradict anything we know. Note that nothing is said about what actually created the wormhole there, the important part is that it exists and can be used. Again, no explanation is better than a bad one, and the story is about people spending holidays on Sirius, not what created the wormholes aeons ago.
A good technobabble will be believable, and give you the impression that there is an actual explanation that doesn't contradict anything you know.
Note that in some cases, technobabble can directly contradict what we know of our Universe. It is when the rule of the story's Universe are openly stated to be different from ours. For example, a Universe where light is a thousand times faster. But unless specifically said (or shown) otherwise, a story uses the same rules than our Universe.

Now, let me use a few examples to try to explain my point better :
You know what's awesome (IMHO)? Star Wars. It's a great trilogy of movies and I won't have to explain why so many people liked them so much. And yet, it has WW2 dogfighting in space, lazors blowing planets up, lightsabres...
But you will note that in the movies, it is never explained how stuff actually works. It is just shown, and people go with it, they accept that this Universe is fundamentally different from ours on those points.

On the other hand, you have hard-SF. I recently read a book called Fallen Dragon (that I recommend to everyone interested by SF) in which they discovered FTL, they colonized worlds, then discovered that colonization is actually not profitable for the companies on Earth : it takes a lot of money to create a new colony, but with the cost of transport, the cost of creating new industries and the immense population of Earth, there is nothing that a colony can profitably export to the Earth. So the companies are closing or giving stars up, and interstellar travel is slowly dying...
The funny part is that this is a problem hard-SF writers are actually confronted. For what we know, interstellar trade from colonies to the Earth is simply not viable, if possible at all. But he took this problem and built a story from it.
Hard-SF isn't (only) about having stuff and trying to find a way to explain it believably, it's (also) about working from constraints and creating new stories from them. Constraints like that can actually be quite beneficial for creation.

Then, there's Digital Fortress. If you didn't read it, good for you. Continue like that. I'll pass on the stupid story, boring cliché characters, Spain described as a third-world hellhole, the entire staff of an US secret agency unable to answer to 238-235...
To summary, they have a supercomputer that can break any encryption and use it to save the world from terrorists/drug lords/other bad guys. Said computer is described to be so powerful because 1) it has two million (or billion?) cores, and 2) it's a quantum computer. And it's meant to take place today or tomorrow at most.
Anyone knowing computing can instantly tell that every single thing said about the computer, or anything computing-related, is complete bulldust, and as there are quite a few explanations, and even a few plot points about it, it breaks the reader's suspension of disbelief (not that it will survive long for the others anyway).
Here, unnecessary explanations about how the supercomputer works are worsening the work, while simply saying that they have a supercomputer (none of the characters is actually a hardware technician or engineer, so they don't have to know or think about it themselves).

Now that this wall of text is out of the way, about the thread subject itself :

The important isn't realism, it's believability. It means that things have to be consistent.
By default, people consider a story to be 'like reality unless noted'. This is why, unless specified otherwise, people tend to cringe when something is visibly unrealistic.
Here, however, many things are specified 'not like reality'. Tiny planets, giant space robots blowing each-other... This is the basis of the setting, and as such no need to try to come up with explanations for that.
But once this is set, things have to stay coherent.

For example, one problem is that if a Commander can build an entire army in a few hours, why are they never greeted by a nuclear hail when arriving in an occupied system, even if the other Commander only arrived a few years back - or even a few days or a few hours.
This is the kind of problems that can break suspension of disbelief (and you don't want to break it, if you want to keep people interested by the setting), but fortunately most of them can be solved quite easily.

Commanders can't arrive in an occupied system? They always fight for yet unoccupied ones. After all, there are hundreds of billions of stars in the galaxy, and there are many more galaxies than that in the universe. There will always be new systems to fight for - bonus points for the procedural system generator, meaning that those new systems actually are different from the previous ones.
For example, I'd suggest Galactic wars to be fought for the control of sectors instead of individual systems. Gameplay will be more or less the same, but the fiction can be that the more systems you can capture and turn into factories, the more starships you can throw at the face of the other factory systems, and as thus better controlling the sector.

Commanders always have to arrive at the same time in the system for gameplay reasons? Sure, for some reason teleportation (or any other way they use to go to the system) can only be done at very precise moments, meaning that Commanders will always arrive at the same time, and not with, say, a few minutes late.

Commanders need to have a bit of metal income for gameplay reasons? Sure, they have a small mass generator included in the chassis. How does it work? The hell if I know! I'm the general throwing war robots at the face of other war robots, not the scientist designing said war robots! That's the role of the boring subroutines that I let running in the background - I think humans called it something like 'unconscious part of the mind'...

You Sir are underestimating the awesomness factor of realism.

Now that's quite awesome.

So particle accelerators use the principle of coilguns? I stand corrected then, I was only thinking about solid-projectile coilguns.

Oh, and seeing the title, I actually thought for a second that you had made a poll. Thank you for not having done so!

I wont cover everything you have said (maybe later when I have more time) I just thought I would mention that OrangeKnight was referencing his thread (I linked it earlier in the thread, but for the lazy among us http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=36658) - which was actually talking about how awesomeness and realism can be the one and the same, so you may have the wrong end of the stick there.

Well, yes, but geo-synch orbits are only possible when at the equator but also you can't easily move where you are relative to the surface without a tonne of delta-v.

You are confusing Synchronous orbits with Geo-sync. From the link: "However, a synchronous orbit need not be equatorial; nor circular" - given there is a small amount of movement depending on the nature of the sync (tracing out an analemma shape) but as far as relationship to the ground (communications, what it can observe), the satellite is effectively stationary.

I didnt realise you were talking about satellites moving from location to location around the planet so you are correct there from a realism standpoint, altering orbits does take a lot of delta-v for a conventional satellite.

Call me a big div who doesn't know the first thing about science, but one of my favourite things about TA/SupCom is it is entirely believable within its own context.

Unlike some other RTS games you collect and use resources directly. Compare to Red Alert where you collect gems, sell them wirelessly to an unnamed party and then use that money to buy tanks from factories that you own.

It's “plausible” that the mass and energy you collect is capable of being transmitted wirelessly or by teleportation to units that are relatively nearby. It's even more plausible that this would have a certain cost associated with it, hence why putting storage next to a resource-gathering building would increase its apparent efficiency.

Even the top-down view makes sense within the context of the game - your commander has all sorts of future sensors that mean that even though you're physically sat in the commander, you use the sensor display to coordinate your units through a virtual reality display.

TLR; as long as there is consistency, I can't see how any massive reality holes could appear.

There is still the question of why aren't every single planet of the galaxy covered with military installations, if war rages for millennia and Commanders can build an army in a matter of hours. And why are they using plasmoids.
But those points aside, TA does make a better job than most RTS to try and be believable. The funny part is that from those efforts come things like the flow-based economy, which actually makes the gameplay better.

Oops, how did I forget that? OrangeKnight, please disregard this comment.

It's cool.....just don't let it happen again! ;p

My personal favorite explanation is that Nanolathing is extremely expensive in power(energy) beyond the cost of materials(Mass/Metal), like it's never explained exactly how much power a power gen generates, for all we know a T1 Pgen would power current day earth for all we know.

So yeah, building a military base in hours can be done, but it's not practical to do so unless you are actively fighting, and because you can build up a base and an army in immediate response there is not as much focus on per-fortifying unless its a very strategic location for you.

Also to be considered(at least in SupCom's case, maybe less so for PA) is that traveling between planets is itself hard, slow and expensive so it could be that landing with an army is more expensive than building it on location.

It's not a perfect explanation, but it works very well to me.

Mike