Author Topic: Questions and Answers Thread  (Read 7651 times)

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Offline Droid803

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Questions and Answers Thread
Okay, let's have a combined thread for all the things you want to know more about DE.

If you have any burning questions to ask me (or AndrewofDoom), here is where you do it.
Note that answers may be subject to being partially REDACTED. :P



Alternatively, you may ask a character in DE anything.
Note that not all characters may be able to respond to your questions at all times... I must respect their schedules. :P
(´・ω・`)
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Offline Spoon

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Re: Questions and Answers Thread
Erika, please give us your best Nyan~ (Or Nyaa~)
Urutorahappī!!

[02:42] <@Axem> spoon somethings wrong
[02:42] <@Axem> critically wrong
[02:42] <@Axem> im happy with these missions now
[02:44] <@Axem> well
[02:44] <@Axem> with 2 of them

 

Offline Commander Zane

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Re: Questions and Answers Thread
Is Meimu's Megan's obsession with money purely coincidental from anyone else with a similar outfit / name? ;)

 

Offline Legate Damar

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Re: Questions and Answers Thread
Are the AIs sapient, and do they have legal rights?

 

Offline qwadtep

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Re: Questions and Answers Thread
Is the Amaterasu actually a cute girl called Amy-chan?

 

Offline Droid803

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Re: Questions and Answers Thread
Here goes nothing...
Don't expect anything amazing :P


Erika, please give us your best Nyan~ (Or Nyaa~)


Erika

Ny...nyaaa?




Is Meimu's Megan's obsession with money purely coincidental from anyone else with a similar outfit / name? ;)


Droid803

I would say it was coincidental, but given the fact that it's probably been subconciously drilled into my head...I can't say that with confidence :P



Are the AIs sapient, and do they have legal rights?


Shizuku

The AIs our current level of technologically capable of making are not really self-aware, and only have enough intelligence to perform their necessary functions and communicate with humans in a 'natural'-feeling manner. Mmm I don't know exactly how they're written, but I guess they're built with an adaptive code base so they can have a naturally-flowing conversation with humans regarding their areas of work. That's the best way I could describe it. You can see how they don't necessarily need rights until they can think for themselves, don't you?

The Exarchy don't actually use AIs at all for whatever reason, so we don't have a more advanced versions to learn or copy from. I would believe things would be different in another case if we could have self-aware AI. Though I've read a few articles stating that some AI developers may have come close...




Is the Amaterasu actually a cute girl called Amy-chan?


Droid803

Of course. Wait what.
(´・ω・`)
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Offline Legate Damar

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Re: Questions and Answers Thread
Regarding the use of time travel, is it not simply possible to take a fleet of warships and make continuous jumps several seconds into the past, in order to multiply the fleet exponentially with temporal duplicates? Or is there some kind of paradox that prevents this?

Also, I find it a highly questionable practice to give an enemy combatant unrestricted access to your facilities, let alone allowing them to fly for you with what could only have been a cursory inspection. Defectors should be thoroughly interrogated and kept under observation for any signs of hostile intent, or sleeper style brainwashing. And they most certainly should not be given access to military assets. I can relay knowledge of several effective Cardassian interrogation techniques, if it is requested.

 

Offline Jellyfish

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Re: Questions and Answers Thread
To Mike:
Have you tried setting MIKI to different -deres? How did that work out?

To the other girls:
Would you have AIs in your ships?
"A weapon is only as powerful as its wielder. With this weapon, you'll be but an annoyance, which would greatly dishonor it. With this weapon, I can change history. With me, this weapon can shape the universe."

 

Offline z64555

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Re: Questions and Answers Thread
To Mike:
Were there any references to Bosch Beer or Carl the Shivan in FireSpace 2?
Secure the Source, Contain the Code, Protect the Project
chief1983

------------
funtapaz: Hunchon University biologists prove mankind is evolving to new, higher form of life, known as Homopithecus Juche.
z64555: s/J/Do
BotenAlfred: <funtapaz> Hunchon University biologists prove mankind is evolving to new, higher form of life, known as Homopithecus Douche.

 

Offline Droid803

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Re: Questions and Answers Thread
Regarding the use of time travel, is it not simply possible to take a fleet of warships and make continuous jumps several seconds into the past, in order to multiply the fleet exponentially with temporal duplicates? Or is there some kind of paradox that prevents this?

Also, I find it a highly questionable practice to give an enemy combatant unrestricted access to your facilities, let alone allowing them to fly for you with what could only have been a cursory inspection. Defectors should be thoroughly interrogated and kept under observation for any signs of hostile intent, or sleeper style brainwashing. And they most certainly should not be given access to military assets. I can relay knowledge of several effective Cardassian interrogation techniques, if it is requested.


Shizuku

It wouldn't be a paradox that prevents it, but it could not possibly occur because it would be a paradox...if that makes sense. I'm no temporal physicist, but that's what we were taught in the academy.

As for the second point... I find it rather questionable as well, but I'm not in a position to judge my superiors on their descriptions. We can only hope that they actually do know what they're doing.. They do seem to be hiding quite a bit - perhaps they know more than it seems...




To Mike:
Have you tried setting MIKI to different -deres? How did that work out?


Mike

Apologies for the image quality, I think they gave me a broken camera. Oh well. Anyhow, my first thought was that I didn't want anything to do with that stuff. Well, I can't say I didn't try it out later after reading the manual. They sure put a lot of work into that program, but I figured it would be best to not be...distracted...during missions, so I settled on something more "professional".




To the other girls:
Would you have AIs in your ships?


Shizuku

While I'd love one to help manage some of the auxiliary systems, they don't exactly come cheap. I do think that they'll start becoming standard at least on higher-end craft in a few years, and when that happens I can't see why anyone wouldn't have one. Though I can't exactly answer for everyone else, maybe they have a reason...



Erika

...eh? Why would we have any need for one? Wellm they're...cute...mmhm.



Shizuku

Well, you wouldn't need one. That, and being distracting is a valid concern, I guess.




To Mike:
Were there any references to Bosch Beer or Carl the Shivan in FireSpace 2?


Mike

I had just about forgotten that dang thing too... They tried to crack a few in-jokes in cargo, but with how the whole thing just looked like an attempt to milk some extra money and how the whole system was dumbed down with achievements, auto healing, auto aim and whatnot, it just left a sour taste for many longstanding fans of the franchise. I guess that's just what had to happen to be marketable these days...gotta be playable using a gamepad with 10 buttons so the console jocks would buy it.
(´・ω・`)
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Offline Legate Damar

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Re: Questions and Answers Thread
Would it be possible to go back in time again and try to defend your homeworld from the attack?

 

Offline z64555

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Re: Questions and Answers Thread
Would it be possible to go back in time again and try to defend your homeworld from the attack?

In the scene where Mike is recruited in HAF, it is explained that past events cannot be changed. But, it also implies that persons from the past may be brought into the future to do stuff, and then put back into their original time after the moment they left.

So, if Mike left at 3:00PM on <obscure date> then he could be put back in the same area at 3:00:01PM on the same date or a little after that. Any time more than a few hours would raise suspicious and/or calls to the missing persons hotline by Mike's parents, friends, etc.
Secure the Source, Contain the Code, Protect the Project
chief1983

------------
funtapaz: Hunchon University biologists prove mankind is evolving to new, higher form of life, known as Homopithecus Juche.
z64555: s/J/Do
BotenAlfred: <funtapaz> Hunchon University biologists prove mankind is evolving to new, higher form of life, known as Homopithecus Douche.

 

Offline Legate Damar

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Re: Questions and Answers Thread
But sending him back with knowledge of the future is changing the past. And the attack on Earth (which, as I understand it, involved spending a lot of time traveling there under FTL, but shortening the perceived passage of time via time travel) also involved changing the past as the Earth was attacked earlier than it would have been otherwise.

 

Offline Droid803

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Re: Questions and Answers Thread

Droid803

Time travel in the DE universe must obey the Novikov self consistency principle, regarding bringing people from the past.

Quote from: Wikipedia
Stated simply, the Novikov consistency principle asserts that if an event exists that would give rise to a paradox, or to any "change" to the past whatsoever, then the probability of that event is zero. In short, it says that it's impossible to create time paradoxes.

...

A common example of the principle in action is the idea of preventing disasters from happening in the past and the potential paradoxes this may cause (notably the idea that preventing the disaster would remove the motive for the traveller to go back and prevent it and so on). The Novikov self-consistency principle states that a time traveller would not be able to do so. An example is the Titanic sinking; even if there were time travellers on the Titanic, they obviously failed to stop the ship from sinking. The Novikov Principle does not allow a time traveller to change the past in any way at all, but it does allow them to affect past events in a way that produces no inconsistencies—for example, a time traveller could rescue people from a disaster, and replace them with realistic corpses if history recorded that bodies of victims had been found. Provided that the rescuees were not known to have survived prior to the date that the time traveler stepped into the time machine (perhaps because they were taken forward in time to a later date, or because their identities were hidden), the time traveler's motivation to travel back in time and save them will be preserved. In this example, it must always have been true that the people were rescued by a time traveller and replaced with realistic corpses, and there would be no "original" history where they were actually killed, since the notion of changing the past is deemed impossible by the self-consistency principle.

Basically, shortly after Mike was taken to the future, the First Event (read it in the techroom) happens, which results in a nuclear war on the scale that people basically stopped counting the dead. That resulted in many people being missing and never found. Mike was taken to the future, and since that happened, he was not seen prior to being brought into the future, thus there's no problem at all - everything is consistent.



Conversely, the jump to Sol has a much more out-of-universe explanation. It's basically standard sci-fi FTL with a bit of plot device usage as to why the whole damn allied fleet didn't jump there. It could have easily been "oh they have much better jump drives than we do...and we have a few fighter sized prototypes - take these!". I just picked something. I wanted to avoid BoE syndrome missions so I put a hard limit on the number of friendly capital ships present. Yeah, this is a very meta-explanation of things.

I needed to get rid of the friendly fleet. I just picked a random explanation. :P

Yeah, the consistency principle might just conflict with the entire idea of having FTL travel in the first place (not exactly certain about it), but I hope you're willing to overlook that like for every other sci-fi universe that has FTL travel and no going-back-in-time-and-causing-paradoxes. The long story short is no, they *shouldn't* be able to change events already recorded in history - they can't go back and prevent the attack on Earth because if someone did go back in time to try and prevent it, they obviously failed. Of course, they could still go back and rescue people like how they brought Mike to the future, but there's no real deadline for that....haha

If I've made any really dumb plothole...well...sorry XD

But sending him back with knowledge of the future is changing the past.

As a though experiment: If he simply thinks of it as an hallucination or dream, and never acts on that knowledge nothing really changed...did it?
(´・ω・`)
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Offline Legate Damar

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Re: Questions and Answers Thread
Yes, because new knowledge would still exist in his brain, and even if he didn't do anything to act on it, his body would be slightly older and the electrochemical patterns in his brain would be different (not to mention things like substances from future food and microbes in his body) and according to chaos theory, even a single atom out of place could give rise to unpredictable, large-scale changes.

 

Offline z64555

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Re: Questions and Answers Thread
Yes, because new knowledge would still exist in his brain, and even if he didn't do anything to act on it, his body would be slightly older and the electrochemical patterns in his brain would be different (not to mention things like substances from future food and microbes in his body) and according to chaos theory, even a single atom out of place could give rise to unpredictable, large-scale changes.

There's another theory out there somewhere that basically says the time abhors paradoxes, so it'll try everything it can to absolve them. Even if Mike DID believe it wasn't it a dream, his status as a "typical kid" would mean that nobody would really believe him, therefore, any actions of Mike trying to prove that it happened would end up with him going insane or the entire world thinking he is.

Also, Chaos theory doesn't specify when things will go to pot. :P
Secure the Source, Contain the Code, Protect the Project
chief1983

------------
funtapaz: Hunchon University biologists prove mankind is evolving to new, higher form of life, known as Homopithecus Juche.
z64555: s/J/Do
BotenAlfred: <funtapaz> Hunchon University biologists prove mankind is evolving to new, higher form of life, known as Homopithecus Douche.

 

Offline Destiny

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Re: Questions and Answers Thread
If I've made any really dumb plothole...well...sorry XD

Don't worry Droid. Nothing the Commonwealth can muster, even with Mike's information of the future, is actually going to be able to do anything, other than evacuate Sol in time. I mean...

Every Commonwealth capship from every Commonwealth system, stuffed inside Sol, wouldn't be able to stop the full Amaterasu Warfleet :P


Unless it's Shizu-...

Well, uh, unless Mike forms this huge fighter wing and bumrush the Amaterasu and stuff. I'm sure even one little Astrogator that manages to get in would help a little, right?

 

Offline qwadtep

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Re: Questions and Answers Thread
There's another theory out there somewhere that basically says the time abhors paradoxes, so it'll try everything it can to absolve them. Even if Mike DID believe it wasn't it a dream, his status as a "typical kid" would mean that nobody would really believe him, therefore, any actions of Mike trying to prove that it happened would end up with him going insane or the entire world thinking he is.
And of course, the worst-case scenario is that the universe starts shoving people headfirst into meat grinders because Mike forced causality to feed into itself and his brilliant science teacher has to send him back to the future again to fix it. Wait, what were we talking about?