Sensor range restricted by Nebula, then not restricted.

I fully agree with this comment. I've also mentioned it, as well as some others. I would like to know if the game engine will support this idea?

id like to take it up a step

a ship that ends its turn in a nebula has a chance of getting lost (10%)

a lost ship will choose a random direction and travel in a straight line for that turn

if it is still lost at the end of the turn it will choose another random direction and travel until the end of its turn etc

when it gets out it rejoins your ships as usual

for small nebula's this would mean pretty much nothing but for larger nebula's this could make you wonder if its really worth trying to cut through it.

there could be some ways to affect this as well a space station with a specific module N.P.S. (nebula positioning system) could eliminate this chance in its area of effect or a ship outside of the nebula with a similar module its also possible that an enemy or ship could confuse your own sensors increasing the chance to get lost

I like this idea. Also, in many Star Trek scenarios ships would actually take random damage if they resided inside certain nebulae for too long. Nebulae have ALOT of potential for some fun and strategic game play. Especially if a key planet or starbase resided inside one.

They are talking about putting a resource inside these nebulae.

I am curious about the dust clouds. It should be next to asteroids or the outskirts of the solar system for one. Two they are similar to nebula. They need to be different somehow either a negative or positive.

I also think sensors should be cut in half in either one.

DARCA  

I'd think inertial guidance systems of the 23rd century would be much better and reliable than todays, so I would guess it would take some kind of electrical discharge from the nebula to damage the inertial guidance system (which, of course, should be well protected from such an event), so perhaps the chance of failure resulting in getting lost should be a bit lower, say 1%. Also, since such a system is so critical, I would think there would be a good deal of redundancy and protection built into it.

If the inertial guidance system gets damaged, it may be appropriate to have a ship miss some turns while trying to repair it (maybe 1-5 turns), with a high probability of being able to repair it (say 99%, since such a critical part would prompt any ship's master to insist in sufficient spare parts to ensure being able to repair it.

After being successful in repairing the IGS (my own made up acronym), it would be reasonable to assume that the ship may have lost its sense of direction, but would be better able to maintain directional control once the repair was completed, allowing the continuation of their exit from a nebula less random somehow.

After being unsuccessful in repairing the IGS the ship would attempt to exit the nebula as described by androshalforc.

Once the ship suffering the IGS failure exits the nebula, I think the ship should stop immediately to get its bearings, taking maybe one turn.

For this to work would it require auto-pilot to avoid nebulae by default? Otherwise you're taking a gamble that you didn't sign up for.

True.

Nebulae slowing ship traffic and sensors I'm mostly okay with, even though it's fairly ridiculous. Normal nebulae causing my ships to get lost or damaged, though? No thanks; any navigational design so incompetent as to rely so heavily on dead reckoning that it could result in the ship becoming lost due to a failure of an IMU should never appear on a starship, particularly not one found in a setting supposedly more advanced than the present. Even a basic setup for navigating by the stars would be superior, and no remotely realistic nebula is so dense or so large that you cannot detect stars from inside of it.

If you want something that can damage ships or cause them to become 'lost', it should probably be an effect from a star (e.g. an 'ion storm' when a star emits an unusually high level of radiation and charged particles), black hole, pulsar, or anomaly, rather than something specific to nebulae. Possibly such events could be more likely in nebulae, particularly in close proximity to stars, but I personally see no good reason to include such a thing specifically as a feature of normal nebulae. Perhaps as a rather rare 'Badlands' or 'Ion Storm' nebula tile, but not as a general 'nebula' tile. Beyond that, this is exactly the type of thing that radiation shielding and proper electrical protection should prevent; shields, armors, or circuit protection and backup navigational aids should be far more than adequate to prevent anything remotely dangerous from occurring, should a vessel encounter such an event.

Actually it's an interesting question as to what sort of sensors ships use to navigate while at warp speeds? Electromagnetic sensors such as visual sensors would be useless. In fact you'd probably have to caculate and lay in a destination before hand and hope you didn't hit anything.

I read an article once by a physics student who had worked out the math for a warp drive and concluded it would be possible if you had enough energy and some negative mass matter.

He had looked at the issue of bumping into things because you literally couldn't see where you where going and suggested pinching of an area of space by warping it, that would contain the ship. The opening of the area of pinched of space would be the size of a proton then that area of space is moved along by the warp minimising the chancee of fatal collision with gas particles and micrometors.

Of course sci-fi generally ignores this issue.

SHIELDS...ya need shields I tell you SHIELDS..which wouldn't work during that kind of travel anyways. Though I think the collision thing wouldn't be as much of an issue when you would have to consider the type of material that the ship would inherently need to be made out of. Also generating and emitting some kind of field on the very fringe of the ships hull could divert or deflect most trouble that could impact but there is also a million and one variables involved.

Any Shield or hull that could withstand particle collisions at those relative velocities would be impervious to most combat weapons from the start.

Not to mention that while our current understanding of physics does not rule out warp drives and wormholes, it does suggest energy shields of the type seen in sci-fi are impossible with the exception of plasma curtains which we already have, still I'm happy to overlook that since force fields are fun, (basicly fields don't work in the way sci-fi force fields would need them too).

As far as I understand it, we're not actually moving at warp speeds. Hyperdrive folds space, yes, but that's all it does. The remaining distance still needs to be travelled using conventional means. In other words, while we reach our destination faster, we are still only travelling at sub-light speed.

Shields that created a bubble of sorts around the ship I agree is highly unlikely. Our current understanding is that it could never happen but knowledge does change and grow over time...remember...earth was flat at one point. Any who one thing that is possible is my reference to creating something right on the fringe of the metal to buffer or deflect. Maybe that is why the little green men fly saucers....oh the mystery...

I don't see a metal strong enough to deflect would be strong enough to withstand direct beams of energy, large concussion weapons, or doom rays. If the metal that the ship was created out of wasn't resistant enough to at least buffer against such weapons or space debris then it would only take one shot from any weapon to just sear through the entire ship and blow it up. Which I guess in reality a spaceship would be like a paper airplane flying through a hail storm of epic doom.

It was an interesting point about how a warp drive could actually work here is one solution http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw81.html

This solution means that indeed the ship is not moving within it's own frame of reference but that the localised spacial warp it's travelling in is moving faster than light.

Note that any matter impacting on the front of the warp would be destroyed in a burst of hard radiation that would impact the ship in the warp, even for a small mass this would be a lot of radiation to shield yourself against much more than a high powered laser for any even slightly signifigant mass.

The other paper I've seen but can't find came up with the bubble of folded space propelled by the warp for this reason making the front of the warp the size of a proton means it is very unlikley to hit anything and anything it does hit will be very small.

A Nebula would have a high enough partical density to create a real radiation storm for a ship traveling FTL in this way, (even though it really doesn't have a high particle density by our standards), unless it used the space bubble trick too. So maybe nebula should not be blocking site but block movement without spacial pocket technology.

Why.The nebula stops sensors so why would signatures outside stop it.This is not detection with a looking glass or on a flat plane.

I think the origional point was that if Nebula block line of sight when you are within them then they should certainly stop you seeing across them to the other side when you aren't inside them.

Nebula are not normally very dense clouds of matter by the way not when you in them the particle density is normally orders of magnitude less dense than the earth atmosphere. However because they can be hundreds of light years across it all adds up to prevent seeing through them.

If your ship sensor range is bigger than the nebula why would it stop seeing past it? Like I said this is not eye vision but more like Radar.In my opinion a nebula being like some sort of big land mountain is stupid.

Depends how your sensors work, electromagnetic sensors both visual and radar are useless across the sort of distances you are talking infact radar is worse as an active electromagnetic sensor it has to get there and back, so to see an object 1 light year away with powerful enough radar would take 2 years.

You'd need some sort of superliminal sensor technology to see in real time what was going on light years away anyway, it's a game so we ignore this practical problem.

Depends on how big the particles are. Mass may not have as much of an effect as velocity on the collision energy, but there's a big difference between hitting a 0.1 kg object at 0.9c and hitting a 1 kg object at 0.9c. Regardless, if the vessels truly are moving at relativistic velocities in real space, they must have hulls, shields, or both which are capable of withstanding such impacts, or which can deflect particles away from the vessel's path before the particle becomes a threat to the vessel. Otherwise, relativistic travel velocities are incredibly risky, especially considering just how expensive the ships are to build.

Regardless, it isn't necessarily true that the ships are capable of moving at relativistic velocities; they certainly didn't appear to be moving at relativistic speeds in combat in GCII, though there are certainly reasons why vessels might not move at high fractions of c during combat.

It depends on how your sensors work. A sensor which operates on a line-of-sight principle could easily be unable to see past an obstruction, or at least have a blindspot even if it can diffract around a region. Regardless, a region that interferes with the sensors of vessels within the region should at the very least interfere with sensors looking into the region, unless the interference is along the lines of 'we have dirt on the lens again'.

It also depends on how the nebulae and ships represented on the game map translate to 3D space. Nebulae are incredibly huge compared to anything you can build in GCII and presumably in GCIII; if your vessel and the sensor target are on opposite sides of a nebula in 3D space, then you're looking at an incredibly long trip for the sensors to look 'around' the nebula rather than through it in most cases, even if whatever the sensors detect is capable of bending around obstructions, which would tend to suggest that there would be a blindspot behind the nebula if you're looking 'around' it rather than 'through' it.

Of course, there's also the likely possibility that the sensors work on the same principle as the drives, and somehow bend the space between the detector and the observed region, which would cover why sensors and drives are similarly affected by nebulae, but not why a ship which enters a nebula takes 2 moves per tile while sensors present on a ship outside the nebula detecting tiles on rays which enter or pass through a nebula appear to be unimpeded by the nebula. Basically, if the sensors operate on the same principle as the drives and are affected by being in nebulae in a manner identical to the manner in which a nebula affects a ship's drive, it is reasonable to assume that whatever form of radiation or whatever particle the sensors detect will see nebula tiles as 2 tiles rather than 1 tile for the purpose of sensor range.

We very clearly are not using any real-world sensors in the game, anyways, so I don't really why the time requirements on the radar is important. It's possible that real-world sensors might be used in combat, since that appears to take place at ranges where EM radiation detection methods could be practical, but it's rather unlikely that such is the case for general navigation given that our vessels' sensors can detect other vessels as soon as those vessels move into sensor range (or nearly so, since each turn is nominally 1 week long).

It depends on how you assume warp travel works. You appear to be assuming that travel in GCII/III has the vessels moving constantly, which is possible and reasonable. It is nevertheless possible that warp travel works by fixing the current position in space through some means or other, taking a short jump in a specified direction, and recalculating the current location, and then taking another jump, and so on. Given the information shown within the game, either of these methods of travel are supportable, and in the second case sensors which detect EM radiation are a potential navigational sensor, as you really only need to be able to identify a sufficient number of important stars and their apparent location relative to you, and an adequately powerful computer could then work out from that information where you currently are in the galaxy.

Regardless, the game clearly includes sensors whose operation depends on a detectable particle or form of radiation which propagates at a rate greater than the speed of light, or which propagates through something akin to Star Trek's subspace in a way that makes something light-years away detectable less than a week after the body enters sensor range. These sensors would additionally appear to be usable for warp travel, as there is no difference in the sensor range of a ship which has used up all of its moves this turn and an identical ship which hasn't moved at all this turn. Whether or not the resolution is fine enough for avoidance of high-velocity collisions with particles or debris is not really answerable with the information presented by either game, but indications are that either the ships have a sensor with the requisite range and resolution, or the hulls or navigational shields of the ships are sufficiently strong (either alone or in combination) to take no significant damage from any collisions which do occur, since there are no random events in GCII (and currently in GCIII) which cause damage to ships due to navigational mishaps.

Having refreshed myself on theories of how a warp drive would work the problem is that a mas of 0.1kg hitting you warp front is likley to be completely converted into radiation by the hudge tidal forces literally ripping the matter apart that means total conversion to energy e=mc^2 and given he speed of light that would be a very great deal of energy to shield yourself against indeed even 1g of mass converted to energy is a very large amount of energy.

Check out this article for how I'm assuming a warp drive would work  http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw81.html , the ship does not move at all but the warp in space itself moves faster than light and due to the degree of curveture of space at it's leading edge would anhilate any normal matter it hit releasing it's total energy as radiation much of which would strike the ship which is in an area of flatspace within the warp and from it's own frame of reference not moving.

"Possible that warp travel works by fixing the current position in space through some means or other, taking a short jump in a specified direction, and recalculating the current location, and then taking another jump, and so on".

That would be more accuratley described as a jump drive or wormhole generator than a warp drive athough you do of course have to warp space to create a wormhole.

Personally I'd prefer that the used improbability drives in GC3 .

The problem is I like them to acknowlegde the issue by giving me a plausable sci-fi explaination of how the sensors work.

The good thing for them is that if they spend some time on looking at how these things could work and really think it through that can actually help them to come up with new and interesting techs for the tech try that address various issues.

Then again the UP seems to require  Galaxy wide real time communication from the start of the game and I wouldn't want them to loose the UP.

Why would they loose the UP? The Yor have subspace communications for about 225,000 years, while the Arceans (and through them all the other races) have it for about 1000 years. In other words, instant interstellar communication already exists at the start of the game.