Ummm wave particle duality? Seriously. You can mathematically derive that everything has to be particle based at the quantum level. Its been done and done often. However this is not the case experimentally. So the particle nature of the electron is "relaxed" (i.e. fudged) using wave particle duality so that the experiments work right.
I remember back in 99 someone said this couldn't work because this violates schrodingers equation which holds true for all electron behavior in hydrogen except for and he gave a short list of a couple things. Sorry friend but exceptions disprove the rule.
Note also that for hunreds of years all the respectable scientists believed in the four aristotlean elements, impetus theory, and phlogiston theory, too.
Firstly, shooting at 60 fps requires more of two things, storage capacity and bandwidth. Neither should really be a problem but since most people won't need to shoot 60 fps, the faster cameras will cost more.
Secondly, interpolating frames does not create a truely higher frame rate. It simply fakes it well. It will add smoothness but if you read Eberts article, the great thing about shooting at 48 fps is that it adds truer clarity. Ebert mentions things like reading the signs on moving trucks, panning across picket fences clearly, and I believe something about water coming from a sprinkler showing up really well. 48 fps can do things that 24 fps can't. It is doubtful that adding frames via interpolation will clear up the artifacting that shooting at 24 fps causes. You need true frame rate.
As we all know, the real reason people are going digital is to make movie distribution easier not to add additional clarity (although it will simplify FX work clarity somewhat). Attack of the Clones was shot using HD digital cams that actually had HALF the resolution of a standard modern film camera. But besides a few critics (like Ebert) nobody is complaining because nobody is really noticing. If you think the industry is going to shoot at faster speeds consider that TV has been shown at a higher frame rate than movies for decades and the film industry has not changed.
Yes and no. Most of what you have said is true. Business didn't go with Apple because Jobs was a hippy. Business went with IBM because Apple didn't market to industry. IBM knew business as much as business knew IBM. By the time the Mac came out business software was firmly PC entrenched and PCs were cheaper.
Schools bought Apples. My entire school experience until high school was on Apples. All my computers are PCs. Why? All the useful software I learned was on PC. My parents had a PC as did my brother. Why? Because all the useful software and the fun games were for PC for them too.
The Mac vs. PC separation has always been nearly a religious one. Mac has a niche market compared to PC but it is a relatively stable niche. Mac kids grow up to be mac adults and raise their own mac kids. They give their mothers iMacs when they ask for computers. Apple is appealing to low tech new users because of ease of use and style. They are also losing users to PC because of cost, universality of PC, and because Apple tend to milk its customer base for profits through the upgrade path.
Actually Clerks was cancelled before it ever aired. Thats why there were only 6 eps, they were contractually obligated to make at least 6 so they made the minimum and then aired it during the summer in obscurity. Crusade faced a similar fate on TNT. JMS refused to make it the bikini sci-fi adventure and so it got cancelled before a single episode aired. Its network politics.
One big piece is bad, a bijillion smaller peices is better. The reason is that while the kinetic energy of the asteroid does not change, the surface area available for the atmosphere to work on does. A million smaller pieces have much more surface area so the characteristic size of the asteroid shrinks at least a hundredfold (cube root of a million). This is important because you want the atmosphere to vaporize the meteor before it actually hits something because even a small mass making it to the surface can do a lot of damage.
Breaking the asteroid up into smaller piece means that you get a lot heat generated in the atmosphere, but little real damage because you lack a ballistic impact. Its just a little warmer over the atmospheric entry site until diffusion spreads that heat over enough of the planet that it becomes background noise. You get a local temperature spike not serious damage. This is good.
The main problem with realistic physics in video games is that it really isn't possible to do it.
What's that you say? But this whole post is about how you can do it? Nope sorry, but I don't know of any games today that really model what is going on in terms of 3D solid mechanics. Once one body interacts with another the calculations get staggering complex. Likewise do you really think that the flight sim calculates the flow around the aircraft to get it to behave right? Of course not.
What most games actually do is model everything as a point mass and then add a handful of other parameters to take into account solid body rotations. Collisions and other more complex events are handled with simple rules of thumb. Or in other words they are fudged. Provided they are fudged well it doesn't really matter. This is what many simulation games do (like Terminus). If you are very lucky they may actually calculate the stall of an aircraft using bernoulli's principle at a few key points. However it far easier to supply a stall angle and stick with that.
So when we talk about "game physics" keep in mind that some of the best game physics of all is completely fictitious. It just has to look and feel right, it doesn't have to be right especially when being right would take way to much processor power.
Hmmm, you need to watch the movie again but you obviously didn't get it the first time. Aki is the first "spirit". The eight spirit was the one created by Gaia and the alien ghosts interacting. It wasn't until they found and incorporated this eight spirit that they could win.
This is the whole problem with the movie. FF has always had weird incomprehensible but involving plots. They unfold and surround you so you, in general, don't realize how stupid they are by the time its all over. The movie didn't do that. It didn't have time like a 40 hour game does.
Are they calling it the Alan Parsons Project?
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Lunar Lasers
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· Score: 2
No its not. The majority of NT boxes where I work are run as administrator 24/7/365. Given a lax security environment this is exactly what will happen. Unfortunately saying "viruses don't exist for linux" creates just such an environment.
Actually the idea that game companies lose money on the system but get it back on the games is mostly myth. Read Acts of Gord for more on this.
Basically while Sega and to some extent Nintendo have used this technique in the past, it doesn't really work well. Its the reason both the Saturn and Dreamcast were discontinued. Unless you plan on making the vast majority of your games yourself (like Nintendo), this is not a wise thing to do. Despite popular myth Sony has never really taken a loss on its game console.
If you read the article again you would notice that these lasers are designed to shoot down theatre range ballistic missiles. So you are shooting down a $100,000 missile with a $3000 laser. Not too bad.
Re:are artillery shells that delicate?
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Battlefield Lasers
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· Score: 1
Depends if we're talking a shaped charge or not. A shaped charge would require some sort of rigid blast plate to direct the blast energy to the right point. Otherwise, yes HE rounds only really need to be a box stuffed with C4 to make a big bang.
There is an optimal place for a shell to explode to do the most damage and be the most lethal, destroy that and the weapon is less effective. This is why the proximity fuse was such a breakthrough. Shotguns suck at long range. A shell detonated too early will likewise suck.
Now what if the shell is an armor-piercing shaped charge? If it goes off early it is useless in an AP capacity because it lacks penetration. Sure some fragments might hit someone, but it won't damage anything sufficiently armored to take anti-personnel rounds. Best yet it doesn't have to go off that early. A few meters or so should do it.
You are making fundamentally invalid assumptions. For there to be interstellar combat starships must be capable of achieving speeds close to light speed if not surpassing it. It is therefore illogical to assume (a) Newtonian physics models or (b) Relativistic physics models. Frankly in this sort of purely fictional environment anything could happen. Who is to say that sensor systems are limited to light speed? If ships can surpass it why shouldn't their comm and sensor systems? This is a meaningless debate unless you establish physical relationships for the quantities involved.
The main variables here are anti-ship and anti-drone ranges; the relative speeds of the drones, ships, and weapons; and weapons sizes. None of which we know or have the physics to predict. At this point anyones theories could be true with the right values for these variables.
In star trek the weapons required for anti-ship combat are so large that using drones is pointless. They'd have to be on the order of the size of a starship anyway. Sensors are basically instantaneous at combat distances. Also Star Trek lacks real AI so combat occurs at the speeds of human reaction. Oh well, but it is basically internally consistant. If you want to gripe, gripe about how ships don't move that way in space. Its just a TV show.
As for the rest. In practical air combat you do not shoot something you cannot positively identify. That is how friends and civilians get killed. While aircraft are technically capable of killing something the pilot cannot see they do not because FOF is not that reliable in practice. Again, this is how air liners are shot down by accident.
In short, the two of you are simply bullshitting each other. You will get nowhere.
Right Sato said "rigel" was one of the words the Klingon said and that it was probably a proper noun given its usage. T'Pol then said that "rigel" is the name of a system. Assuming that the terran rigel system and the Klingon "rigel" system are one and the same is an incorrect assumption.
As for weird technologies, do we actually know how the impulse drive works? Basic trek piece of equipment in use in basically every show and we don't know the physics canonically. Maybe everybody manuevers that way because its how impulse works. Its a stretch of course but then again why do Centauri fighters make banked turns in space if they use reaction thrusters?
1. Star Trek is not real life. They know no real physics. Do not treat it like they do and say that Star Trek should be X. Especially when being X breaks continuity which is far more important for storytelling.
2. Air combat is not "shoot missile from 5km out". Why? Because that is the way air liners are shot down. Dead civilians bad.
3. Guns exist on current missile cruisers and aircraft for one simple reason. Economics. You should not pay a million dollars to kill someone if you can do it for a hundred. That is why fighters and naval ships have guns. Therefore it is reasonable to assume any military starship will have a gun equivalent for the same purpose of killing weak or unskilled things cheaply.
4. Any discussion of combat techniques requires at least the establishment of ratios like combat range/projectile speed and more importantly vehicle speed/projectile speed. In star trek these ratios are roughly equivalent to WWII military combat so their combat tech follows.
5. Missiles of the conventional phallic shape maneuver like bricks. Even worse in space because they are built entirely wrong. A good fighter pilot can easily outmaneuver a SAM provided he sees it coming. Just bring it over your wing and it will stall and crash into the ground. If the speed, etc. are as you describe getting the missile to hit the opposing ship would be just as difficult as shooting it accurately.
6. Don't assume big "guns" must be swung about on heavy carriages to target them. It is equally possible that they may be directed highly accurately using electro-magnetic fields, etc. which can be altered to incredible precision instantaneously. Beam weapons could be used to sweep a designated area which may contain the ship, rather than simply targeting a ship. If their contact is sufficiently powerful in relation to the ships defenses this is just as good as shooting at them. Note that current shipboard anti-aircraft guns use this technique. They fill an area with lots of lead and the missile will simply run into it.
Lastly, the future of combat is autonomous and unmanned. Very shortly people will not have the response times required even on earth let alone space so computers will have to do it. Whether this is in the form of unmanned turrets or unmanned combat vehicles is the issue. However it is unlikely combat will be big ship to big ship because big ships would be slower to maneuver and lack physical response time.
What you will most likely see in space is something similar to fighter vs. intercepter vs. fighter bomber combat but thousands of times faster. Various defensive and offensive drones fighting each other at incredible speed with mothership based anti-drone weapons thrown in. The specifics will undoubtably be decided by the effective killing range of the various weapons weapons. Anything that gets to close will be killed by the motherships automated anti-drone turrets, anything too far away will not be able to damage the mothership with its attacks, anything in the kill region but outside of the turrets effective range will have to contend with the defensive drones first. So the real question is what is the anti-ship and anti-drone effective attack ranges.
Of course we can't know that because they don't exist. Furthermore we can't know specific battle tactics of should you attack first etc. because these are determined by the previous ranges. If the antiship range is huge vs. the anti-drone range then attack first because your defensive drones won't be able to keep up. If not then its let your opponent attack you and then crush him after he has nothing left to throw.
9. Yes and of course it would be the same star we call Rigel. After all its not like this guys from another planet and speaks a completely different language... oh wait.
10. There are any number of reasons why "use space-leeches" doesn't show up later. Foremost being that Dr. Phlox is not a starfleet doctor, he's essentially an outside contractor. Second being that a machine that can do the exact same thing as a leech doesn't get old and die or eat the wrong kind of kiddle and die or whatever. Just because its more advanced than what came before it does not mean it will not be superceded by something else later.
11. Yup, not enough logic from the vulcans. Pretty underwhelmed by Jolene Blalock as an actress. Soft core decon camera work was stupid too. Liked the fact that they actually had a decon chamber though. Maybe we'll see some dialog in an actual starship bathroom too.
12. Right again. Great sets and supposedly we haven't seen all of them yet. There is evidentally a torpedo room that "works" among other things. The CGI was more artistic than functional. I guess they are going for weird and alien not "look realistic starship designs" like B5 tried to do in places. If that was the case I doubt the Enterprise would look the way it does. It should be noted that B5 had lots of silly stylistic ships too, but they get praised for the few ships flown mostly by earth that weren't utter crap.
13. Dunno. It was hit or miss and there were a fair share of misses but overall there was a lot of promise. Quite frankly that is all I expect from a first episode of any series.
Come on, I need the orchestra with the powerful brass about ready to blow my ear drums away. Something new. Not some recycled theme song written by a recycled band.
Yeah something original in big brass just like the big brass opening credits of DS9 or Voyager. I hate to tell you but putting rock, even if it is Rod *shudder* Stewart, in Star Trek is a new and original thing for the series. Big brass openings and "voyages of the starship *insert name here*" monologues are not.
I also understand why they picked that particular song. Listen to the lyrics and remember what the show's main themes are. Notice that this crappy Rod Stewart song captures all the major introductory themes of the show i.e. exploration, being "held back" by the vulcans, and feeling your way forward into the unknown.
The song is already somewhat dated now so don't worry about it dating the show. This isn't the eighties rock of Transformers or nineties rock of Titan AE. I hesitate to call any Rod Stewart song a classic, but this one is a least going to be around for a while on easy listening CDs.
Someone else said that this opening will alienate the hardcore trekkies. Tough. They need to be alienated some. Trek needs to grow and change and evolve or it will collapse and die. Its time to stop trying to please everybody and make something worth while.
What I want to know is whether they will repeat the mistakes of Voyager and destroy the internal conflict that fuels the series. Are they going to maintain the internal tension of Vulcans vs. Humans or not. If they choose not then the show will suck for several seasons. If so then they can use it provided it does not become cliche.
Efficiency is not what you really want to talk about here. The flapping wing style of flight may be more efficient than rotorcraft or jets. The problem is in the absolutes like speed, jets and rotorcraft have the potential to be much better than ornithopters at this.
Actually doing everything by hand may result in a stronger final product. For instance, I doubt medieval catapults where made of pine. They were probably made of a stronger hard wood, although it certainly varied because they were usually constructed of metal parts and whatever wood was closest to the seige site. Also cutting everything yourself means you can actually tailor the construction to make a stronger final product.
As for nails, well they wouldn't have had modern nails, but them might have used them in some form. Raw iron nails aren't that expensive. In general however they didn't take apart catapults and move them in their entirity from seige to seige. Certainly not for the large ones at least. The seige engineers just stripped off the expensive metal bits and cut new wooden parts at the new seige location. It was logistically easier than transporting all that wood from place to place over crappy medieval roads.
If I understand it correctly, this is essentially an issue of licensing. Any syndicated content they recieve is licensed to them to play in their geographical market. However if they stream it over the internet, they aren't just playing it in their market anymore. This opens them up to a possible lawsuit from the content providers should they want to make it.
This wasn't a problem for a long time, but now a lot of these syndicators want to stream their content live over the internet themselves and cut out the radio station middle men. So they are now using their previously neglected rights to a monopoly on Rush Limbaugh or Dr. Laura, or whomever else. They are also backing it up with lawsuits for people who don't comply.
It sucks for me because the only decent traffic station in northern Delaware is WDEL and they have now stopped real audio streaming over these legal issues. Hence I am getting caught in huge traffic jams on I95 I would have previously driven around on alternate routes.
Umm, hydrogens performance is only about 10% better than helium. I would not call that "far better" especially in light of the fact that hydrogen is major fire hazard under the right conditions.
Last time I checked, you do not have a "right" to copy from CD to cassette. You simply have the ability to and the music companies realized they couldn't really stop people from doing it. Of course that was after they tried to stop people for a real long time.
Do not construe the ability to do something as the legal right to do something. They are different and that difference is important.
Slashdot Mirror
Ummm wave particle duality? Seriously. You can mathematically derive that everything has to be particle based at the quantum level. Its been done and done often. However this is not the case experimentally. So the particle nature of the electron is "relaxed" (i.e. fudged) using wave particle duality so that the experiments work right.
I remember back in 99 someone said this couldn't work because this violates schrodingers equation which holds true for all electron behavior in hydrogen except for and he gave a short list of a couple things. Sorry friend but exceptions disprove the rule.
Note also that for hunreds of years all the respectable scientists believed in the four aristotlean elements, impetus theory, and phlogiston theory, too.
Firstly, shooting at 60 fps requires more of two things, storage capacity and bandwidth. Neither should really be a problem but since most people won't need to shoot 60 fps, the faster cameras will cost more.
Secondly, interpolating frames does not create a truely higher frame rate. It simply fakes it well. It will add smoothness but if you read Eberts article, the great thing about shooting at 48 fps is that it adds truer clarity. Ebert mentions things like reading the signs on moving trucks, panning across picket fences clearly, and I believe something about water coming from a sprinkler showing up really well. 48 fps can do things that 24 fps can't. It is doubtful that adding frames via interpolation will clear up the artifacting that shooting at 24 fps causes. You need true frame rate.
As we all know, the real reason people are going digital is to make movie distribution easier not to add additional clarity (although it will simplify FX work clarity somewhat). Attack of the Clones was shot using HD digital cams that actually had HALF the resolution of a standard modern film camera. But besides a few critics (like Ebert) nobody is complaining because nobody is really noticing. If you think the industry is going to shoot at faster speeds consider that TV has been shown at a higher frame rate than movies for decades and the film industry has not changed.
Yes and no. Most of what you have said is true. Business didn't go with Apple because Jobs was a hippy. Business went with IBM because Apple didn't market to industry. IBM knew business as much as business knew IBM. By the time the Mac came out business software was firmly PC entrenched and PCs were cheaper.
Schools bought Apples. My entire school experience until high school was on Apples. All my computers are PCs. Why? All the useful software I learned was on PC. My parents had a PC as did my brother. Why? Because all the useful software and the fun games were for PC for them too.
The Mac vs. PC separation has always been nearly a religious one. Mac has a niche market compared to PC but it is a relatively stable niche. Mac kids grow up to be mac adults and raise their own mac kids. They give their mothers iMacs when they ask for computers. Apple is appealing to low tech new users because of ease of use and style. They are also losing users to PC because of cost, universality of PC, and because Apple tend to milk its customer base for profits through the upgrade path.
Actually Clerks was cancelled before it ever aired. Thats why there were only 6 eps, they were contractually obligated to make at least 6 so they made the minimum and then aired it during the summer in obscurity. Crusade faced a similar fate on TNT. JMS refused to make it the bikini sci-fi adventure and so it got cancelled before a single episode aired. Its network politics.
Ummm no.
One big piece is bad, a bijillion smaller peices is better. The reason is that while the kinetic energy of the asteroid does not change, the surface area available for the atmosphere to work on does. A million smaller pieces have much more surface area so the characteristic size of the asteroid shrinks at least a hundredfold (cube root of a million). This is important because you want the atmosphere to vaporize the meteor before it actually hits something because even a small mass making it to the surface can do a lot of damage.
Breaking the asteroid up into smaller piece means that you get a lot heat generated in the atmosphere, but little real damage because you lack a ballistic impact. Its just a little warmer over the atmospheric entry site until diffusion spreads that heat over enough of the planet that it becomes background noise. You get a local temperature spike not serious damage. This is good.
The main problem with realistic physics in video games is that it really isn't possible to do it.
What's that you say? But this whole post is about how you can do it? Nope sorry, but I don't know of any games today that really model what is going on in terms of 3D solid mechanics. Once one body interacts with another the calculations get staggering complex. Likewise do you really think that the flight sim calculates the flow around the aircraft to get it to behave right? Of course not.
What most games actually do is model everything as a point mass and then add a handful of other parameters to take into account solid body rotations. Collisions and other more complex events are handled with simple rules of thumb. Or in other words they are fudged. Provided they are fudged well it doesn't really matter. This is what many simulation games do (like Terminus). If you are very lucky they may actually calculate the stall of an aircraft using bernoulli's principle at a few key points. However it far easier to supply a stall angle and stick with that.
So when we talk about "game physics" keep in mind that some of the best game physics of all is completely fictitious. It just has to look and feel right, it doesn't have to be right especially when being right would take way to much processor power.
Hmmm, you need to watch the movie again but you obviously didn't get it the first time. Aki is the first "spirit". The eight spirit was the one created by Gaia and the alien ghosts interacting. It wasn't until they found and incorporated this eight spirit that they could win.
This is the whole problem with the movie. FF has always had weird incomprehensible but involving plots. They unfold and surround you so you, in general, don't realize how stupid they are by the time its all over. The movie didn't do that. It didn't have time like a 40 hour game does.
Ass.
No its not. The majority of NT boxes where I work are run as administrator 24/7/365. Given a lax security environment this is exactly what will happen. Unfortunately saying "viruses don't exist for linux" creates just such an environment.
Actually the idea that game companies lose money on the system but get it back on the games is mostly myth. Read Acts of Gord for more on this.
Basically while Sega and to some extent Nintendo have used this technique in the past, it doesn't really work well. Its the reason both the Saturn and Dreamcast were discontinued. Unless you plan on making the vast majority of your games yourself (like Nintendo), this is not a wise thing to do. Despite popular myth Sony has never really taken a loss on its game console.
Umm, no
If you read the article again you would notice that these lasers are designed to shoot down theatre range ballistic missiles. So you are shooting down a $100,000 missile with a $3000 laser. Not too bad.
Depends if we're talking a shaped charge or not. A shaped charge would require some sort of rigid blast plate to direct the blast energy to the right point. Otherwise, yes HE rounds only really need to be a box stuffed with C4 to make a big bang.
Ummm, no.
There is an optimal place for a shell to explode to do the most damage and be the most lethal, destroy that and the weapon is less effective. This is why the proximity fuse was such a breakthrough. Shotguns suck at long range. A shell detonated too early will likewise suck.
Now what if the shell is an armor-piercing shaped charge? If it goes off early it is useless in an AP capacity because it lacks penetration. Sure some fragments might hit someone, but it won't damage anything sufficiently armored to take anti-personnel rounds. Best yet it doesn't have to go off that early. A few meters or so should do it.
See the point now?
You are making fundamentally invalid assumptions. For there to be interstellar combat starships must be capable of achieving speeds close to light speed if not surpassing it. It is therefore illogical to assume (a) Newtonian physics models or (b) Relativistic physics models. Frankly in this sort of purely fictional environment anything could happen. Who is to say that sensor systems are limited to light speed? If ships can surpass it why shouldn't their comm and sensor systems? This is a meaningless debate unless you establish physical relationships for the quantities involved.
The main variables here are anti-ship and anti-drone ranges; the relative speeds of the drones, ships, and weapons; and weapons sizes. None of which we know or have the physics to predict. At this point anyones theories could be true with the right values for these variables.
In star trek the weapons required for anti-ship combat are so large that using drones is pointless. They'd have to be on the order of the size of a starship anyway. Sensors are basically instantaneous at combat distances. Also Star Trek lacks real AI so combat occurs at the speeds of human reaction. Oh well, but it is basically internally consistant. If you want to gripe, gripe about how ships don't move that way in space. Its just a TV show.
As for the rest. In practical air combat you do not shoot something you cannot positively identify. That is how friends and civilians get killed. While aircraft are technically capable of killing something the pilot cannot see they do not because FOF is not that reliable in practice. Again, this is how air liners are shot down by accident.
In short, the two of you are simply bullshitting each other. You will get nowhere.
Right Sato said "rigel" was one of the words the Klingon said and that it was probably a proper noun given its usage. T'Pol then said that "rigel" is the name of a system. Assuming that the terran rigel system and the Klingon "rigel" system are one and the same is an incorrect assumption.
As for weird technologies, do we actually know how the impulse drive works? Basic trek piece of equipment in use in basically every show and we don't know the physics canonically. Maybe everybody manuevers that way because its how impulse works. Its a stretch of course but then again why do Centauri fighters make banked turns in space if they use reaction thrusters?
You are both wrong.
1. Star Trek is not real life. They know no real physics. Do not treat it like they do and say that Star Trek should be X. Especially when being X breaks continuity which is far more important for storytelling.
2. Air combat is not "shoot missile from 5km out". Why? Because that is the way air liners are shot down. Dead civilians bad.
3. Guns exist on current missile cruisers and aircraft for one simple reason. Economics. You should not pay a million dollars to kill someone if you can do it for a hundred. That is why fighters and naval ships have guns. Therefore it is reasonable to assume any military starship will have a gun equivalent for the same purpose of killing weak or unskilled things cheaply.
4. Any discussion of combat techniques requires at least the establishment of ratios like combat range/projectile speed and more importantly vehicle speed/projectile speed. In star trek these ratios are roughly equivalent to WWII military combat so their combat tech follows.
5. Missiles of the conventional phallic shape maneuver like bricks. Even worse in space because they are built entirely wrong. A good fighter pilot can easily outmaneuver a SAM provided he sees it coming. Just bring it over your wing and it will stall and crash into the ground. If the speed, etc. are as you describe getting the missile to hit the opposing ship would be just as difficult as shooting it accurately.
6. Don't assume big "guns" must be swung about on heavy carriages to target them. It is equally possible that they may be directed highly accurately using electro-magnetic fields, etc. which can be altered to incredible precision instantaneously. Beam weapons could be used to sweep a designated area which may contain the ship, rather than simply targeting a ship. If their contact is sufficiently powerful in relation to the ships defenses this is just as good as shooting at them. Note that current shipboard anti-aircraft guns use this technique. They fill an area with lots of lead and the missile will simply run into it.
Lastly, the future of combat is autonomous and unmanned. Very shortly people will not have the response times required even on earth let alone space so computers will have to do it. Whether this is in the form of unmanned turrets or unmanned combat vehicles is the issue. However it is unlikely combat will be big ship to big ship because big ships would be slower to maneuver and lack physical response time.
What you will most likely see in space is something similar to fighter vs. intercepter vs. fighter bomber combat but thousands of times faster. Various defensive and offensive drones fighting each other at incredible speed with mothership based anti-drone weapons thrown in. The specifics will undoubtably be decided by the effective killing range of the various weapons weapons. Anything that gets to close will be killed by the motherships automated anti-drone turrets, anything too far away will not be able to damage the mothership with its attacks, anything in the kill region but outside of the turrets effective range will have to contend with the defensive drones first. So the real question is what is the anti-ship and anti-drone effective attack ranges.
Of course we can't know that because they don't exist. Furthermore we can't know specific battle tactics of should you attack first etc. because these are determined by the previous ranges. If the antiship range is huge vs. the anti-drone range then attack first because your defensive drones won't be able to keep up. If not then its let your opponent attack you and then crush him after he has nothing left to throw.
9. Yes and of course it would be the same star we call Rigel. After all its not like this guys from another planet and speaks a completely different language... oh wait.
10. There are any number of reasons why "use space-leeches" doesn't show up later. Foremost being that Dr. Phlox is not a starfleet doctor, he's essentially an outside contractor. Second being that a machine that can do the exact same thing as a leech doesn't get old and die or eat the wrong kind of kiddle and die or whatever. Just because its more advanced than what came before it does not mean it will not be superceded by something else later.
11. Yup, not enough logic from the vulcans. Pretty underwhelmed by Jolene Blalock as an actress. Soft core decon camera work was stupid too. Liked the fact that they actually had a decon chamber though. Maybe we'll see some dialog in an actual starship bathroom too.
12. Right again. Great sets and supposedly we haven't seen all of them yet. There is evidentally a torpedo room that "works" among other things. The CGI was more artistic than functional. I guess they are going for weird and alien not "look realistic starship designs" like B5 tried to do in places. If that was the case I doubt the Enterprise would look the way it does. It should be noted that B5 had lots of silly stylistic ships too, but they get praised for the few ships flown mostly by earth that weren't utter crap.
13. Dunno. It was hit or miss and there were a fair share of misses but overall there was a lot of promise. Quite frankly that is all I expect from a first episode of any series.
Come on, I need the orchestra with the powerful brass about ready to blow my ear drums away. Something new. Not some recycled theme song written by a recycled band.
Yeah something original in big brass just like the big brass opening credits of DS9 or Voyager. I hate to tell you but putting rock, even if it is Rod *shudder* Stewart, in Star Trek is a new and original thing for the series. Big brass openings and "voyages of the starship *insert name here*" monologues are not.
I also understand why they picked that particular song. Listen to the lyrics and remember what the show's main themes are. Notice that this crappy Rod Stewart song captures all the major introductory themes of the show i.e. exploration, being "held back" by the vulcans, and feeling your way forward into the unknown.
The song is already somewhat dated now so don't worry about it dating the show. This isn't the eighties rock of Transformers or nineties rock of Titan AE. I hesitate to call any Rod Stewart song a classic, but this one is a least going to be around for a while on easy listening CDs.
Someone else said that this opening will alienate the hardcore trekkies. Tough. They need to be alienated some. Trek needs to grow and change and evolve or it will collapse and die. Its time to stop trying to please everybody and make something worth while.
What I want to know is whether they will repeat the mistakes of Voyager and destroy the internal conflict that fuels the series. Are they going to maintain the internal tension of Vulcans vs. Humans or not. If they choose not then the show will suck for several seasons. If so then they can use it provided it does not become cliche.
Efficiency is not what you really want to talk about here. The flapping wing style of flight may be more efficient than rotorcraft or jets. The problem is in the absolutes like speed, jets and rotorcraft have the potential to be much better than ornithopters at this.
Turbulence is highly chaotic and it is only fluid dynamics.
Actually doing everything by hand may result in a stronger final product. For instance, I doubt medieval catapults where made of pine. They were probably made of a stronger hard wood, although it certainly varied because they were usually constructed of metal parts and whatever wood was closest to the seige site. Also cutting everything yourself means you can actually tailor the construction to make a stronger final product.
As for nails, well they wouldn't have had modern nails, but them might have used them in some form. Raw iron nails aren't that expensive. In general however they didn't take apart catapults and move them in their entirity from seige to seige. Certainly not for the large ones at least. The seige engineers just stripped off the expensive metal bits and cut new wooden parts at the new seige location. It was logistically easier than transporting all that wood from place to place over crappy medieval roads.
If I understand it correctly, this is essentially an issue of licensing. Any syndicated content they recieve is licensed to them to play in their geographical market. However if they stream it over the internet, they aren't just playing it in their market anymore. This opens them up to a possible lawsuit from the content providers should they want to make it.
This wasn't a problem for a long time, but now a lot of these syndicators want to stream their content live over the internet themselves and cut out the radio station middle men. So they are now using their previously neglected rights to a monopoly on Rush Limbaugh or Dr. Laura, or whomever else. They are also backing it up with lawsuits for people who don't comply.
It sucks for me because the only decent traffic station in northern Delaware is WDEL and they have now stopped real audio streaming over these legal issues. Hence I am getting caught in huge traffic jams on I95 I would have previously driven around on alternate routes.
Is this going to result in some kind of corrollary to Sturgeons Law? Something like 90% of programs are written in Java and are all crap?
Umm, hydrogens performance is only about 10% better than helium. I would not call that "far better" especially in light of the fact that hydrogen is major fire hazard under the right conditions.
Last time I checked, you do not have a "right" to copy from CD to cassette. You simply have the ability to and the music companies realized they couldn't really stop people from doing it. Of course that was after they tried to stop people for a real long time.
Do not construe the ability to do something as the legal right to do something. They are different and that difference is important.