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Astronomy

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General Battuta:
Humans have significantly lower odds against BP's Shivans than ants do versus humans. By like...a mind-boggling order of magnitude. Ants might have a good run at wiping out humans, I expect; at the very least the odds are non-zero.


--- Quote ---3) Blue Planet (Wounded Prey): if I remember right, this was the mission in which you chase the Duke while your wingmen warp in to who-knows-where. One of them says he showed up 10 light years away. As with the analysis above, that's not believable. 10 light years is more than the distance from Earth to Alpha Centauri. It also means that the wingman would not be able to communicate, since any signals he sends takes 10 years to arrive. A more plausible distance is 1 astronomical unit, i.e. the distance between the Earth and the Sun, but even at this distance light takes 8 minutes to travel. Even more plausible is the distance between the Earth and the Moon - about 360,000 km. Light only takes one second to travel this distance, but for all intents and purposes, the wingman still won't be able to get to the Duke.

--- End quote ---

The point is not that Corey is 10 light years away but that his navigational systems are ****ed.

The Shivans destroy Capella with a subspace weapon. In much the same way that an atomic weapon can get a preposterous amount of energy from a small amount of matter, their mastery of subspace lets them disrupt the star until it goes supernova without needing to actuate the ordinary dynamics of a core collapse. The mass of the Sathanas fleet is as irrelevant, since presumably whatever they are doing relies on the dynamics of subspace.

The E:

--- Quote from: Banedon on December 14, 2017, 01:56:03 am ---There is no conceivable way the Shivans can cause a supernova either. It is just not believable. Just count how many Sathanas juggernauts will be needed to come to 1% of the mass of the Sun, or how much energy they must emit to come to 1% of the energy the Sun produces every second. To actually cause the Sun to go nova requires way way way more resources than the Shivans could conceivably field. To put in some numbers, assuming each Sathanas were a billion kilograms, it would still take ten billion billion billion Sathanas juggernauts to come to 1% of the Sun's mass. A fleet that size would have literally no trouble annihilating the GTVA (how many systems does the GTVA control anyway - less than 50?). At one Sathanas per second, it would also take billions upon billions of years to get all those Sathanases into the Capella system.
--- End quote ---

Do you have a degree in advanced shivan science?

The problem here is that you're looking at FS and FS2 through a hard SF lens, when neither game was written to be hard SF. It's like trying to argue that Star Wars is bad because there's no way that the Death Star can generate enough energy to overcome the gravitational binding energy of a planet, or no way to make light sabers that interact with each other like metal sabers would. The Shivans are able to turn Capella into a supernova. That's a fact of the FS universe. How they manage to do that is unknown, and in storytelling terms, doesn't matter; It's not an inconsistency or flaw that needs correction.


--- Quote ---As for FTL communication - I'm under the impression that in the FS world, aside from intersystem jumps, communication occurs at light speed. Communication within a system at light speed is plausible. It takes several hours for light to reach Neptune, the outermost Solar System planet, which is short enough to make coordinating a fleet plausible.
--- End quote ---

This is wrong. During FS2, Command is always able to communicate with us, even if the ship he is presumably on is in an entirely different system.

AdmiralRalwood:

--- Quote from: Aesaar on December 14, 2017, 01:35:15 am ---Like Ralwood said, the Shivans did it, and the Shivans technologically outclass humanity by a considerable degree.

--- End quote ---
That was Asteroth (not that I disagree).

karajorma:
To be honest, I don't consider sending a 100km iron asteroid into the core of the sun to be beyond anything we could expect from 80 Sathanases. Nor would removing a similar volume from the core seem to be beyond them. I'm not familiar with astrophysics enough to know if either would actually cause a supernova but I can't imagine either of them being good for the star.

And that's without them having some kind of subspace weapon we haven't seen before.

Banedon:
Ants can't even damage humans. Humans in Blue Planet can kill Shivans.

If Corey were 10 light years away he would not be able to communicate since signals take 10 years to travel. He wouldn't even know which way to send the signals in.

The atomic weapons idea doesn't work either (for reference stars by definition undergo atomic processes at their core, which is why they output so much energy). I'm nonetheless talking in terms of mass because the plausible power output of a weapon is capped by its mass. Seriously, run some numbers: the Sun produces 10^26 joules per second. By E = mc^2, the total amount of mass needed is 1.1 billion kg, assuming you are able to convert ALL of that into energy (real nuclear weapons reach yields significantly less than this). An iron cube of that mass would be ~138 km long, which is way longer than the Colossus. Simply sending an asteroid into the Sun will not work; asteroids already fall into the Sun with regularity and our Sun hasn't gone nova. You could send the entire Earth into the Sun and nothing would happen. Further note that a supernova can outshine an entire galaxy for a brief instant.

The "easiest" way to get the Sun to go nova is to dump mass on it. The more massive the Sun gets, the higher pressure its core comes under, and the more luminous it needs to be to balance gravity. Eventually it reaches a tipping point and goes nova. You need to dump a lot of mass however, on the order of magnitude of the Sun's mass itself. That's why I mentioned that the most realistic way to do it is to collide another star with it. This can conceivably be done over thousands upon millions of years: in our case for example, we put a big mass in between us and Alpha Centauri, and gradually (g-r-a-d-u-a-l-l-y, since Alpha Centauri is more massive than the biggest mass we can conceivably use, which is the mass of Earth) pull Alpha Centauri into the Sun.

FS2 is set up in a world that's already not realistic since it has subspace portals. But like I wrote in the OP - one can pick more realistic values. Corey could've been 300k km away instead of 10 light years. It's up to the designer. If you're designing and don't care, that's fine. If you care, then feel free to ask whatever you want.

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