Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => FreeSpace Discussion => Topic started by: DarthWang on April 20, 2008, 02:58:08 pm
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I don't know if this has ever been brought up before, but why didn't the GTVA ever try sending a ship, or even an unmanned probe, to Earth at sublight speeds from Alpha Centauri? With constant acceleration (which could easily be accomplished with a simple technology like a solar sail, which I'm sure is within the GTVA's capability to construct), it could reach a significant fraction of lightspeed, which would cause the time percieved by the crew to be less due to relativity. Deceleration could be accomplished by using the gravity wells of the outer planets once they reached the Solar system. It would only take a little over a decade at most to send a ship there and hear back - but by FS2 which is over 3 decades since the node collapsed noone has ever tried. Why not?
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Well FS doesn't have newtonian physics, does it? :p
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Yeah. You could send a ship towards Sol. But what if the engines break down totally? They'd be stranded, floating with zero momentum for the rest of eternity.
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I think they may have had other things to worry about, like building a new government and dealing with various rebellions etc.
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Yeah. You could send a ship towards Sol. But what if the engines break down totally? They'd be stranded, floating with zero momentum for the rest of eternity.
That's why the GTVA will build a giant slingshot in the future.
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With constant acceleration (which could easily be accomplished with a simple technology like a solar sail, which I'm sure is within the GTVA's capability to construct), it could reach a significant fraction of lightspeed, which would cause the time percieved by the crew to be less due to relativity.
Well it takes a while for solar sail to accelerate.. a loooong while... especially given that solar sails efficiency degrades rapidly as the distance to the star increases.
Deceleration could be accomplished by using the gravity wells of the outer planets once they reached the Solar system. It would only take a little over a decade at most to send a ship there and hear back - but by FS2 which is over 3 decades since the node collapsed noone has ever tried. Why not?
You do know that the very same gravity well also accelerates the ship? Of course the slingshot maneuver can be used for deceleration but to slow down a ship traveling at relativistic velocities... fat chance. That is it basically just changes the direction of the ships velocity vector (from the perspective of planet slingshot around).
But as to the actual point.. There are couple of potential snags.. First we do not know if the systems with jump nodes are in neighboring systems or do they have tens or hundreds of lys distance between them. Second even if they did... wouldnt it be a lot simpler just to radio them (on any EM band, radio, light, etc)? Sure it would take years for the message to pass through the void (and the same amount for it to return) but it would still be a lot faster than anything except jump drive.
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I don't know if this has ever been brought up before, but why didn't the GTVA ever try sending a ship, or even an unmanned probe, to Earth at sublight speeds from Alpha Centauri? With constant acceleration (which could easily be accomplished with a simple technology like a solar sail, which I'm sure is within the GTVA's capability to construct), it could reach a significant fraction of lightspeed, which would cause the time percieved by the crew to be less due to relativity. Deceleration could be accomplished by using the gravity wells of the outer planets once they reached the Solar system. It would only take a little over a decade at most to send a ship there and hear back - but by FS2 which is over 3 decades since the node collapsed noone has ever tried. Why not?
What's the point? Sol would've had the most established facilities and as the capital, certainly would have had access to the best communications equipment. Sending a probe would just be a needless expenditure that wouldn't do anything other than say "Hey, we're alive."
Either that or someone has tried but it wasn't relevant to the military situation at the time of Freespace 2.
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I would say it'll make things too easy. It's more convenient for the plot writer to just ignore it, just like how the other two jump nodes to Sol disappeared from FS1.
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I don't think it's the same thing. You almost have to come up with some kind of deus ex machina to explain away the other jump points collapsing, some anomalous thing about the sol system that explains why blowing up the Lucifer took out the other two nodes, but the same thing didn't happen in Capella. Or just accept it as an inconsistency.
With contacting earth, there's a lot of good reasons why they might not have. Cost, for one. No viable designs, is yet another. Greed could be another good one; with the earth's central authority gone, that would leave a lot of regional/sector governments in charge. (Most likely this is why the Vasudans did better than the Terrans - their planet got wiped out, but they had time and ability to evacuate). The people who are left in power will be the ones who were aspiring to get more power. Why would they want to contact the earth government so they can get a response back that questions their legitimacy?
The collapse of the government may have also led to the feeling that the future does not lie with the earth, and that it'd be nice to go back, but it's not worth spending a lot of effort on.
Existing businesses could have opposed it for much the same reason.
Given the time, I wouldn't be surprised if the earth was importing a lot of stuff from the other planets. Losing it may have eliminated an economic drain on those planets.
Regardless, I think there's a lot of reasons why the other planets wouldn't try or wouldn't try very hard to contact the earth. I can't think of a historical situation that's close to the same thing to put things in context, either.
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Who's to say the Gamma Drac node didn't bite the dust after the Vega node blew?
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We've got nothing to suggest either way; but we do know that the Vega node was still around after the Bastion was detonated. The Bastion was detonated from normalspace while the Nereid was detonated from within subspace. However, if the GTVA knew they could detonate all of the nodes to a system from within subspace, it seems doubtful that they would have spent so much energy detonating the Bastion from normalspace.
Especially since a significant number of GTVA forces and refugees were in-system at the time. If the Sol nodes' destruction was the only thing they'd observed, it would not be a smart move to detonate the Bastion so early in the game. Then again, their hand may have been forced by the Shivans, and the Bastion was detonated in the Capella system so that it didn't collapse the nodes in the destination system. However, the mission briefing states that the Bastion was going to be detonated from the Capella system, so it seems that that was the plan all along.
I suppose the Bastion may have been detonated to close off that one specific node, because the GTVA did not have the resources to blockade it and needed to get the refugees past. That's not how the plan is stated in the mission briefing.
Finally, if the GTVA expected all the other nodes in the system to go with the Nereid, they should have stated it that way. The destruction of the sol nodes would be common knowledge; it wouldn't buy them anything to fail to point out that all the nodes would have been collapsed to the Capella system, rather than just the ones to Vega and the one collapsed by the Bastion.
So all the indicators point to the GTVA expecting that detonating a ship inside a node only collapses that node. Since the GTVA node network is still relatively intact by Freespace 2, we can assume that they haven't done virtually any testing of node collapsing since Freespace 1. That being the case, they should've expected the same thing to happen. If there were three nodes in Sol and they all disappeared, that contradicts what the GTVA expected to happen in Capella.
Now you can come up with good reasons why that might not be the case, involving the power released by the Lucifer's reactors, the relative stability of the Sol nodes, and so on, but going by the evidence in Freespace 2 there was only ever one sol node. Other nodes are not mentioned nor accounted for.
Basically all the evidence ends up pointing to the sol nodes being retconned. You can explain them away, but to me there's enough evidence that all the explanations would feel like explaining around the evidence than actually explaining the evidence.
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What's the point? Sol would've had the most established facilities and as the capital, certainly would have had access to the best communications equipment. Sending a probe would just be a needless expenditure that wouldn't do anything other than say "Hey, we're alive."
Either that or someone has tried but it wasn't relevant to the military situation at the time of Freespace 2.
Or the GTVA attempted it and they either got no message, or they didn't like the one they got.
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We've done this discussion a lot already...
- Political reasons (Sol might not approve of the GTVA, we were too busy with the NTF)
- We did contact them, but it's classified for some reason
- It didn't fit the storyline
Probably a combination of the three ;)
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Fusion pile generators can provide a pretty good power output.
When a cruiser or larger jumps, theres a pretty fast burst of speed, (remember "dive dive dive! HIT YOUR FRAKKIN BURNERS PILOT" Which if left to it's own devices could potentially yield ludicrous speed..
I'm not sure if the acceleration is from the engines though or if the subspace vortex has a gravity well which has massive sucky power......
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Which if left to it's own devices could potentially yield ludicrous speed..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB7tc9pVvYg&feature=related
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There's some good stuff on hard SF slowships here (http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3aj.html).
Not sending a radio message to Earth after the first Shivan armada has been finished off would be rude. Earth would want to know whether they should try to reopen the node.
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didn't seti do a study on the subject of inter system communication? where it was determined that most signals would degrade beyond readability within a couple light years.
as for a probe, we know its possible to launch a vehicle and send it beyond the sun's escape velocity, didn't the voyager probes do this? of course this wouldn't work cause you have to have a perfect planetary alignment for gravity assist, and still it would take you forever to cross space. not to say that fs2 tech doesnt have the ability for long duration sustained burns.