Ah, and I’m not too good with thinking at that scale and how much goes on in such a time frame.
Hm… well you can be off by a lot more than 1 microsecond when you have packets to compare clocks to a few times a second or every few seconds. A milisecond is 300 meters!
Comparing by a microsecond just seemed like a good example of “even in the best case scenario, things could be really messed up”.
Anyway, to add to that idea I had, even if you did get the celestial body sim and sim for other things that are on “rails” and procedurally positioned to a timer out of sync, if positions were given relative to the closest major thing, it seems like it’d solve those issues.
Wish I had time to throw together an example, but yeah, conceptually it’s pretty simple.
Instead of saying a ship is moving at 15,000 km/s it a vector that puts it near a moon, you say that moon has no actual speed and position but is on rails that allows the client to extrapolate its movement based on the clients clock but effectively it’s moving through space at 10km/s, you say the ship is moving 5km/s relative to that body at such and such vector.
edit: and what would happen when there are catchups and slow downs is that the closest planet/moon and all the ships whose positions/vectors that are set relative to it, including yours, would all move together in such a way that would be completely unnoticeable since it’s a small distance compared to what’s much further away.
Then with no centrifugal force the thing collapses into a ring. Thus Ring World books.
A pop to Wikipedia… “Most fictional depictions describe a solid shell of matter enclosing a star, which is considered the least plausible variant of the idea”
not looking much like a sphere.
“2013, at the Starship Century Symposium in San Diego, Dyson repeated his comments that he wished the concept had not been named after him.”
The spheres look like more trouble then they are worth. Get a sphere maker to convince me or I don’t think it’s practical.
Now your telling me that guy on the radio lied to me!!! first time ever I’m sure!
They’re not if you want to capture all the energy a star radiates. Then there is no other option. Now don’t ask me what we’d need that much energy for, but I’m sure we could think of something.
Space is probably big enough that (technologically) by the time you can build and orbit that many objects around a star, you have the means to coordinate them to not collide even in a full sphere instead of just such a ring/toroid. Any of these swarm shapes can probably get crowded enough to capture really substantial amounts of energy.
If you read down a bit farther in the thread you guys are referencing, you’ll see that I describe how I solved the problem in the warp prototype, and Flavien comes back and states that he solved it in a similar way back in the ICP.
He knows how to solve the problem, but he has existing code that was built assuming stationary planets. Stationary planets were used because it makes everything vastly simpler to implement, and they have been - and still are - pressed for time. To solve the problem for orbiting planets, that existing code must be retrofitted, and it’s a bunch of work. It’s a bit like a 32-bit to 64-bit precision conversion. It gets into a lot of stuff and can be a touchy change to make. It’s definitely not something that he can tackle during the Kickstarter.
Does anyone have any new latest screen shots please so I can post them on the SC and ED forums. Some with 2/4 way dog fights going in and out of the atmosphere would be great. In fact videos of 3 dog fighting all around and below one another whilst transitioning the atmosphere would be very good. Thanks in advance.
Yes, @Crayfish has a very good eye for postcard pieces. The middle one is outstanding as it demonstrates a huge swath of the engine’s lighting capabilities in a beautiful composition. I particularly like the subtlety of the maneuvering rockets (sigh) lighting the ship hull. It’s one that I’d have up as a background in an instant - if I did such things.
