I’ve been reading a bit into the egosoft forum and well … its not a nice place at the moment.
They just released a new title (X:Rebirth) earlier then it should have been (full of bugs, probably financial decision) without putting an “early access - warning sign” on the steam page.
Oh and it is totally different from its predecessors.
The forums are going bezerg. Accusations of fraud, lying and outright being bad at their jobs has been directed at egosoft. A lot of anger relief threads. People being insulted and bashed on for having another opinion. Constructive comments flooded by hundreds of angry voices.
Just happy to be here. Thanks for being awesome. DFTBA!
Not to say that something like that couldn’t also happen here when reality meets overbloatet expectations.
I have been disappointed in Egosoft ever since they dropped the idea of X-Online, the game they said was their dream game. With that they could have even surpassed the RTS-esque EVE online. Instead their team is filled with artists, other than the GUI and missile focused gameplay, little has changed in the X-Series. It became painfully obvious when they released Albion Prelude, where a war between Terrans and Argon is initiated by a single person destroying a planet encircling station. Even if it was meant to be a small team it is still a shallow backstory.
P.S. Surely most of their fanbase is located in Germany, therefore that Hitler meme video doesn’t represent that fan base, since obviously their native language is German.
I would be far, far more terrified of it if it didn’t look like a Discovery Channel glossy animation frame of what an animation director whose only source of reference is a digital painting done by some guy whose never had more than a loose description to work from would come up with.
Stellar mass black holes have inner accretion disk temperatures of approximately 10 million kelvin. That black hole should be flooding the entire system with enough thermal x-rays to sterilize everything for light-years. The luminosity in the visible band should outshine the system’s star by an order of magnitude, if not more.
Wow, never realized that stellar black holes were that violent. Let’s say that such a black hole replaced the Sun and I would somehow survive the new conditions. What would I see? How would it look like from there, and what would the Earth look like?
For all those who want environmental conditions in Infinity (the MMO), your description sounds like a good candidate. Particularly as black holes were supposed to be necessary for some high-end facilities.
If the Sun were replaced with a 1 solar mass black hole, you wouldn’t notice much, except for the darkness. In the direction of the black hole, the constellations would be severely distorted, and you’d likely see the stars stretched into arcs or rings. That back hole would be in quiescence, as there wouldn’t be much material around to fall into it. The image above is unrealistic in that it has an accretion disk without a source (among other problems, of course). That material has to come from somewhere!
Mining black holes with accretion disks would be a terrible idea. There are much easier ways to get whatever materials may be found or generated in the disk. I think quiescent black holes will be needed for anti-matter mining, as the anti-matter coming from the event horizon of an active black hole is likely to be very quickly annihilated by the infalling matter.
I know the jets of active supermassive black hole contain a non-negligible amount of antimatter, but I’ll have to check and see how much is associated with stellar mass jets.
Sorry I worded it poorly, I meant “if you replaced the Sun with an active black hole and its accretion disc”. Are there even such things in the Milky Way, btw, or even nearby galaxies? ‘Extensive research’ (read : a quick Internet search) failed to bring data.
While farming active black hole do seem to be lunacy when inactive ones are around, it could be justified by technobabbling the need for such conditions for those exotic facilities, if gameplay is needed. I simply wonder if it would make for a good corp end-game, or even major strategic points for the cores.
Oh, and before reading the next posts, I thought that the image showed a wormhole for starships, actually…
Oh! Well, things are a little complicated for the case of an accreting black hole. First of all, there needs to be a source of the accreting material! This is usually a companion star, so right away we have to replace our solo Sun with a close binary system.
But let’s pretend there’s a magic fairy sprinkling astronomical quantities fairy space dust in the neighbourhood of the black hole, just so that we can ignore that whole second Sun business. This gas and dust would attempt to orbit the black hole until the orbit path was full, at which point interaction between the infalling dust and the orbiting dust would generate friction. This friction would slowly heat up this outer ring of material, causing it to lose energy and gradually spiral inward. This is where the disk comes from. As the dust spirals closer and closer to the black hole, it picks up speed (Kepler’s laws!); more speed means more friction, and more friction means more heat.
The closer the dust can get to the event horizon, the faster it can go, and the hotter it can get. This is why smaller black holes actually have (significantly) hotter accretion disks than supermassive black holes. We think it can actually get so hot that the radiation pressure risks dispersing the accretion disk (though the amount of light necessary to do that depends on what the infalling material is made out of). At that point, we can calculate the maximum luminosity a black hole of a given mass can achieve for a given disk material.
Let’s assume our fairy dust is chemically and physically identical to hydrogen. In that case, a solar mass black hole with an accretion disk could be as bright as (but no brighter than) 32,000 Suns.
For a real life example, let’s look at Cygnus X1, the most famous stellar mass black hole located in the Milky Way. It’s located about 6000 light-years away from us, and orbits a blue supergiant star from which it steals material. Cygnus X1 is believed to have a luminosity of approximately 2% is theoretical maximum, which, for a black hole of its mass (~15 solar masses) is approximately 10,000 times the brightness of the Sun.
In other words, it would look like the world was burning.
More seriously, thanks for the great info. In the case of Cygnus X1, I guess that the accretion disk luminosity would be kind of drown by its parent star. How small the feeding star can be? And stellar active black holes would there be in the Milky Way?
One way or another, I would love to see one of those in the MMO, in all its ship-wrecking, shield-burning, armour-blasting, component-frying glory. Or at least, smaller versions with neutron stars, or even pre-nova white dwarfs.
