Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => FreeSpace Discussion => Topic started by: Liberator on January 12, 2004, 12:23:37 am
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I know you've wondered how fast the various ships travel while they fly around blow each other up.
Well, using the Hercules as an example, we see that the Herc has a maximum sustained forward velocity of 50 meters/sec.
This translates to 180 kilmeters per hour.
1000/50=20 second to travel 1 kilometer
60/20=3 kilometers per minute
3*60 = 180 kilometers per hour or 111.84 miles per hour.
This is not really that fast, especially considering how fast aerial engagements take place in modern warfare.
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Here's something for you...
The most distant man made objects, the Voyager probes, are probably one of the fastest too...
Voyager 1 has a speed of about 3.6 AU per year while Voyager 2 has one of about 3.3 AU per year. That's about 17.1 kilometers per second (!) and 16.8 kilometers per second!! But, the highest are the helios probes, which have once reached a speed of 70.2 kilometers per second!!
The fastest combat jet has a very tiny percentage of that (of course), it moves at about 0.94 kilometers per second.
Just some random facts to annoy you :D :sigh:
Think of the Herc as a tank (an extremelly slow one) rather than a space or aircraft. :doubt:
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something that keeps within reasonable acceleration and deceleration i guess -- you don't want to kill that pilot inside the herc :)
Plus, any faster speeds would a) screw up the size problems even more or b) make it impossible for you to hit even a cruiser :p
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Originally posted by Ghostavo
Think of the Herc as a tank (an extremelly slow one) rather than a space or aircraft. :doubt:
I have no problems with that. The Herc sure looks like a tank. ;)
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Well, I don't think that if humanity was ever to create space-fighter craft, they would be controlled by computers, rather than pilots. I think it's safe to assume that by the long time it would take to build an interstellar fleet, we would also have created the technology to relieve humans from piloting the spacecraft.
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I think the only problem problem would be programming a computer to act imaginatively.... I think to have a fighter that could 'think outside the box' and improvise, you'd need to develop an AI to the point of near-sentience... the point being that, aside form the technological difficulties, would that type of AI even be co-operative?
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*views this from a shivan viewpoint* :p
why waste expensive robots when there's insane humans who want to waste their lives?
Humans are much cheaper, and they're more effective.
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I don't belive we will ever come close to near-sentience.
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Originally posted by Falcon
I don't belive we will ever come close to near-sentience.
So true... :rolleyes:
Computers already control most of the airplanes functions... it's only a matter of time until they control all the ships functions and start "thinking".
e.g. look at the A.I. of any game. Not the scripted things... the A.I. itself... now imagine what a military A.I. would look with our current technology.
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Phear CNN in the future...
'And today, American tanks repeatedly rammed the enemy positions whilst firing point blank.'
Sources said losses would have been lower had the tanks not continuously driven into each other.
:)
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Originally posted by Ghostavo
So true... :rolleyes:
Computers already control most of the airplanes functions... it's only a matter of time until they control all the ships functions and start "thinking".
e.g. look at the A.I. of any game. Not the scripted things... the A.I. itself... now imagine what a military A.I. would look with our current technology.
Coputers don't really have any true control, though...it's basically a straight translation of the pilots input to respective output functions, or simple actions like correcting flight instability. It's not something that requires 'intelligence' per-se - it basically boils down to mathematical formulas.
Remember that the AI in games is still very basic.... it works well withing a very limited context and often boils down to a simple finite state machine.
Even given that, the level designer often has to provide 'hints' to the AI on what context to use - i.e. Call of Duty uses nodes which indicate suitable cover, etc, which the AI uses in deciding upon actions. The data given to the AI on it's location, what's happening, etc is all in a purpose built format.... in real life, this would be done trhough stuff like visual recognition- and there is no current way for a computer to look at an image and actually understand what it is.... the only forms of visual recognition are based on colour, etc properties or (in the case of web search engines) captions/text nearby , rather than content.
Unfortunately(or not), we are still massively far from automated military hardware, etc. the current level is basically trying to get robots that think and act like insects - i.e. can pathfind, etc.
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Speed?
HERE (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,14164.0.html)