You do need to compress antimatter to get a good explosion. You can get a messy explosion without compressing it. I agree, that might be messier. It depends.
All known current nuclear bombs are implosion type, which use a subcritical mass of fissionable material and compress it to criticality using conventional explosives. The Hiroshima bomb, a handful of follow-on US bombs, some artillery shells and some early designs by other countries were gun type, where two sub-critical masses are brought together, but the vast majority of bombs made or exploded have been sub-critical implosion types. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G....
Hitting a missile with a laser isn't very hard. The Chinese can hit satellites. Even Boeing can hit missiles. In atmosphere it's hard to hit one very far away because the air scatters the beam, but in vacuum it's not hard at all. Since lasers travel at the speed of light you can't outmaneuver one unless you're VERY far away. And missiles have to get close. In the hypothetical future where you have enough cheap antimatter to make lots of bombs with, big lasers guided by sensors that don't burn out isn't a particularly big leap. We've got lots of ways of shielding sensors from overloads right now. Realistically, you wouldn't let anyone's missiles get anywhere near 1000 km of you.
A "tune" of antimatter? Low energy antimatter annihilation doesn't generate neutrinos, and you wouldn't want it to. Neutrinos are a crappy way to kill things because they interact so poorly: they're very inefficient. Gamma rays, which are what antimatter annihilation does produce, are much better at it. Of course, a more efficient weapon would be a nuclear (or antimatter) explosion that pumps a gamma ray laser. Then you deliver more of the explosion's energy to the target.
Explosions really work much better in air. In vacuum, you're always wasting most of the bomb's power, unless you happen to get it inside an enemy ship, or get a bunch of them to sit still in formation and stick one in the middle. Lasers are much more efficient. EVE actually models this - missile damage is lessened if the target is smaller (less of the explosion hits it) or faster (the target is farther away when the explosion hits it, absorbing less).
There are two ways to go about starting EVE. Sign up and join some corporation that's newbie friendly or attached to some out of game group you happen to belong to. Newbie friendly corps are Red vs. Blue (RvB), Eve University, etc. They'll teach you.
The other way is to go it alone. My suggestion would be to concentrate on PvE to get some income. When you've figured out how to make money you can use the proceeds to buy some cheap frigates and go do some PvP. Doing PvP you're going to die a lot. If you do it with a group like Red vs. Blue you'll learn something doing it.
EVE is big and complicated. You will never master everything, and it takes quite a bit of planning and time to get good at even individual specialties. The key at the beginning is to try a bunch of things and see what you enjoy. PvP is the headline item, but the majority of EVE players actually concentrate on other things like manufacturing, research, exploration, trading, etc.
The 14 days is enough time to do the introductory tutorials, which try to give you a taste of most of the different career paths, and, if you play a decent amount, to do the Sisters of EVE epic arc missions (which are PvE).
It really is helpful in EVE to have someone to mentor you, but you have to be careful about randoms who are out to scam you. Scamming is a major part of the game. So joining a recognized newbie friendly group that does something you think you're interested in is probably a good move.
I enjoy how complicated EVE is. I've become an okay trader, specializing in smuggling, starting to get into manufacturing. And I really enjoy flying a stealth bomber. There's a rush that moment when you've maneuvered into position and you're about to click uncloak and introduce some unwary ship to your torpedo launchers. Particularly when 50 of your friends are about to do the same. But it takes a while (a few months) to get there. And losing those bombers hurts a lot less when you've got a solid in-game income doing something else that you enjoy.
"Nuclear missiles can't use the nuclear reaction as a motive force"
They can just as well as an antimatter missile. Your description of an antimatter missile would be ridiculously inefficient. An antimatter drive would use reaction mass that is vaporized by energy from the antimatter reaction just like nuclear drives. The actual bomb part would need to be very similar to a nuclear weapon, with something (like a well designed shaped conventional explosive) to compress the matter and antimatter together. Otherwise the reaction pressure just blows everything apart before you get very good conversion. No, you can't just crash a large amount of antimatter into some matter and expect it to go boom. You'll get a little boom and lots of annihilated antimatter flying away. Which admittedly is pretty nasty, but not in the "earth-shattering kaboom" kind of way. If you slam some nuclear bomb fuel into something hard enough it will go kaboom too, by the way.
Yes, blowing up an antimatter missile means a cloud of antimatter flying around. But assuming you did it in space, with a laser, it's a long way away from you (missiles are pretty trivial to track), you're probably moving pretty fast compared to the missile, and there may be annoying things like gravity to consider. Thus the need to have missiles guided. By the way, in the situation you've described, guess what you've got? Lots of (poorly aimed) little antimatter bullets.
Exotic radiation? Gamma rays aren't exotic. You've probably got a couple of matter-antimatter annihilation gamma rays passing through your body right now.
Missiles are pretty useless, particularly in space where they can't hide in terrain and the travel distances are much longer, as soon as you have decent lasers. Since we've got lasers that can shoot down missiles now, they're not likely to be good for much in space battles. Supposing you have a way to make cheap antimatter, you're going to want to use it to power the lasers. Possibly (but still not likely) you might want to shoot inert, undetectable little bits of it at your enemy in the hope that some of them will hit him.
Right, just google pictures of people at EVE conventions.
Except he didnt' google anything...
I see reading comprehension on Slashdot is still the same as it's always been. Wait, are you a football fan?
I'm sure CCP hires booth babes too (first hit for Google image search for "eve online chicks", BTW). The conversation is about how cool the people who pay to be involved are (yeah, it's stupid topic, but it's a slow news day). When I think of EVE players I think of geeks sitting in their basements in front of a computer with Mountain Dew. When I think of people involved in football, with the exception of the small number of actual players and cheerleaders, I think of shirtless fat guys with painted faces and beer. They're different, but I'd be hard pressed to say one group is cooler than the other.
Things like that have happened. You don't even necessarily have to go after healers. Most ships have specific ranges where they're most effective. You could jump in a squad to attack long-ranged ships at close range.
Generally ships that are engaged can't just jump around freely because their drives are disrupted by specialized enemy ships. But unengaged fleets or squads can be used for surprise attacks.
Stealth bomber wings routinely jump in, decloak, drop bombs and jump out again (hopefully) before anyone can catch them.
Sort of. The big ships just shoot at each other. The smaller ships get up to other things. Stealth bombers on coordinated squad bomb runs can do a lot of damage to things like drones, which provide a lot of the damage from some types of ships. Specialized ships disable the drives of other ships, use various kinds of electronic warfare, suck energy out of enemy ships, provide repairs or energy to friendly ships, etc.
There's quite a bit of strategy, both in designing the fleet and in the battle itself. This particular engagement is notable because everybody didn't just pile into the same system. The winning side was apparently quite successful at harassing the enemy's reinforcements trying to get to the battle.
That's why people who are looking for fun don't play in the giant null sec battles. You go fight people in small to medium size gangs where seconds (actual seconds) matter. The big null battles get all the press but to me that's the most boring part of the game, and completely avoidable. Worse than mining.
Which is a little silly. Moties are efficient. They wouldn't build spaceships bigger than necessary. You'd tend to orient yourself so your faces were close together. Since our (and their) heads are at one end and there probably isn't space to be face to face with your feet sticking out in opposite directions, you'd orient yourself in the same direction, which itself could be arbitrary.
If you look at pictures of the space station where there are multiple people they tend to use that orientation. Arbitrary, but everybody mostly pointing in the same direction.
So I googled "football fans" for comparison to your EVE picture and I got mostly pictures of hot girls, mostly European or Brazilian. Then I googled "nfl fans" and got this: http://www.synergy-sponsorship....
So I guess it depends on what the GP meant by "football."
"this only makes sense for people with more time than money, like you apparently. it makes a lot more sense for most people to work longer at their real jobs and buy in-game items than to sit around earning them in-game."
That only makes sense for people who don't like playing the game. There are a lot of ways to earn money in EVE. Some of them more fun than working a few more hours at your regular job.
People spend time doing things to build those ships. They will now spend more time doing things to build those ships. If you count time as valuable, which most people do, real wealth was destroyed, not transferred.
Lots of people will have a net benefit. The people and organizations who lost ships will be poorer. The people who sell them minerals and ship and components will be richer. Over all the amount of wealth will be less, but the ones who make things will become wealthier while the ones who get their things destroyed will become poorer.
CCP (the company that owns EVE) doesn't benefit as much as you might think. Some people will undoubtedly buy some PLEX with real cash to fund rebuilding, but that PLEX is only saleable to other players, who will use it to NOT use real money to purchase game time. CCP sells PLEX for more than they sell a non-PLEX month of game time, but not that much more.
Far more than $300,000 was lost if you count that way. The average income in EVE is well short of minimum wage on an hourly basis. Of course, most people play in their free time. On the other hand, the battle lasted pretty much all day yesterday.
Sure, for officiating, why not? Like using cameras for refereeing.
But if you've got all those sensors, some actuators to go along with them, and no rules to prevent it, you could just let that central computer run the whole boat. No need for a crew. Best code wins.
Or go the other way. No GPS available to the crew, no weather reports or satellite imagery (except for emergency messages everyone gets), etc. Winner is the one who read the weather, navigated, and sailed the best.
Navigation aids would make things interesting. Dead reckoning and celestial navigation both give results that improve a lot with skill. Everybody could have a GPS on board in a tamper proof container that they can crack open if they get in trouble, but it forfeits the race.
We keep hearing about all the advantages of open development but people like Stallman seem to think it needs an awful lot of help to succeed. They just don't seem to have much confidence in their own arguments. But when you look around, I can't think of many successful closed forks of open source projects.
Not really. Good modern machine learning algorithms, like the ones Google already uses, take a vast amount of unlabelled data and extract features from it. Then a small set of labelled data is used at the end. Somebody has to go through a few videos and label the cats, but the program goes through hundreds of thousands learning to recognize things, including cats. That's the same way we learn - a baby doesn't only benefit from experiences where adults point at something and say "cat."
In other cases, the metric can be completely automatic. The program has chosen correctly when you click on that ad, for example.
Google doesn't care about building an artificial human. Google wants algorithms that can better predict what ads will work on you. And that CAN be done at this time. The field of machine learning has come a long way in the last five years.
Slashdot Mirror
You do need to compress antimatter to get a good explosion. You can get a messy explosion without compressing it. I agree, that might be messier. It depends.
All known current nuclear bombs are implosion type, which use a subcritical mass of fissionable material and compress it to criticality using conventional explosives. The Hiroshima bomb, a handful of follow-on US bombs, some artillery shells and some early designs by other countries were gun type, where two sub-critical masses are brought together, but the vast majority of bombs made or exploded have been sub-critical implosion types. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G....
Hitting a missile with a laser isn't very hard. The Chinese can hit satellites. Even Boeing can hit missiles. In atmosphere it's hard to hit one very far away because the air scatters the beam, but in vacuum it's not hard at all. Since lasers travel at the speed of light you can't outmaneuver one unless you're VERY far away. And missiles have to get close. In the hypothetical future where you have enough cheap antimatter to make lots of bombs with, big lasers guided by sensors that don't burn out isn't a particularly big leap. We've got lots of ways of shielding sensors from overloads right now. Realistically, you wouldn't let anyone's missiles get anywhere near 1000 km of you.
A "tune" of antimatter? Low energy antimatter annihilation doesn't generate neutrinos, and you wouldn't want it to. Neutrinos are a crappy way to kill things because they interact so poorly: they're very inefficient. Gamma rays, which are what antimatter annihilation does produce, are much better at it. Of course, a more efficient weapon would be a nuclear (or antimatter) explosion that pumps a gamma ray laser. Then you deliver more of the explosion's energy to the target.
Explosions really work much better in air. In vacuum, you're always wasting most of the bomb's power, unless you happen to get it inside an enemy ship, or get a bunch of them to sit still in formation and stick one in the middle. Lasers are much more efficient. EVE actually models this - missile damage is lessened if the target is smaller (less of the explosion hits it) or faster (the target is farther away when the explosion hits it, absorbing less).
EVE is famous for it's vertical learning curve.
There are two ways to go about starting EVE. Sign up and join some corporation that's newbie friendly or attached to some out of game group you happen to belong to. Newbie friendly corps are Red vs. Blue (RvB), Eve University, etc. They'll teach you.
The other way is to go it alone. My suggestion would be to concentrate on PvE to get some income. When you've figured out how to make money you can use the proceeds to buy some cheap frigates and go do some PvP. Doing PvP you're going to die a lot. If you do it with a group like Red vs. Blue you'll learn something doing it.
EVE is big and complicated. You will never master everything, and it takes quite a bit of planning and time to get good at even individual specialties. The key at the beginning is to try a bunch of things and see what you enjoy. PvP is the headline item, but the majority of EVE players actually concentrate on other things like manufacturing, research, exploration, trading, etc.
The 14 days is enough time to do the introductory tutorials, which try to give you a taste of most of the different career paths, and, if you play a decent amount, to do the Sisters of EVE epic arc missions (which are PvE).
It really is helpful in EVE to have someone to mentor you, but you have to be careful about randoms who are out to scam you. Scamming is a major part of the game. So joining a recognized newbie friendly group that does something you think you're interested in is probably a good move.
I enjoy how complicated EVE is. I've become an okay trader, specializing in smuggling, starting to get into manufacturing. And I really enjoy flying a stealth bomber. There's a rush that moment when you've maneuvered into position and you're about to click uncloak and introduce some unwary ship to your torpedo launchers. Particularly when 50 of your friends are about to do the same. But it takes a while (a few months) to get there. And losing those bombers hurts a lot less when you've got a solid in-game income doing something else that you enjoy.
"Nuclear missiles can't use the nuclear reaction as a motive force"
They can just as well as an antimatter missile. Your description of an antimatter missile would be ridiculously inefficient. An antimatter drive would use reaction mass that is vaporized by energy from the antimatter reaction just like nuclear drives. The actual bomb part would need to be very similar to a nuclear weapon, with something (like a well designed shaped conventional explosive) to compress the matter and antimatter together. Otherwise the reaction pressure just blows everything apart before you get very good conversion. No, you can't just crash a large amount of antimatter into some matter and expect it to go boom. You'll get a little boom and lots of annihilated antimatter flying away. Which admittedly is pretty nasty, but not in the "earth-shattering kaboom" kind of way. If you slam some nuclear bomb fuel into something hard enough it will go kaboom too, by the way.
Yes, blowing up an antimatter missile means a cloud of antimatter flying around. But assuming you did it in space, with a laser, it's a long way away from you (missiles are pretty trivial to track), you're probably moving pretty fast compared to the missile, and there may be annoying things like gravity to consider. Thus the need to have missiles guided. By the way, in the situation you've described, guess what you've got? Lots of (poorly aimed) little antimatter bullets.
Exotic radiation? Gamma rays aren't exotic. You've probably got a couple of matter-antimatter annihilation gamma rays passing through your body right now.
Missiles are pretty useless, particularly in space where they can't hide in terrain and the travel distances are much longer, as soon as you have decent lasers. Since we've got lasers that can shoot down missiles now, they're not likely to be good for much in space battles. Supposing you have a way to make cheap antimatter, you're going to want to use it to power the lasers. Possibly (but still not likely) you might want to shoot inert, undetectable little bits of it at your enemy in the hope that some of them will hit him.
There are a lot of gear heads. There are also a lot of independent mechanics. More than dealer mechanics, actually.
I see reading comprehension on Slashdot is still the same as it's always been. Wait, are you a football fan?
I'm sure CCP hires booth babes too (first hit for Google image search for "eve online chicks", BTW). The conversation is about how cool the people who pay to be involved are (yeah, it's stupid topic, but it's a slow news day). When I think of EVE players I think of geeks sitting in their basements in front of a computer with Mountain Dew. When I think of people involved in football, with the exception of the small number of actual players and cheerleaders, I think of shirtless fat guys with painted faces and beer. They're different, but I'd be hard pressed to say one group is cooler than the other.
What's interesting is that'd you'd be able to print replacement parts. Autoparts are a big deal. And autobody is a big racket I mean, industry.
Things like that have happened. You don't even necessarily have to go after healers. Most ships have specific ranges where they're most effective. You could jump in a squad to attack long-ranged ships at close range.
Generally ships that are engaged can't just jump around freely because their drives are disrupted by specialized enemy ships. But unengaged fleets or squads can be used for surprise attacks.
Stealth bomber wings routinely jump in, decloak, drop bombs and jump out again (hopefully) before anyone can catch them.
Sort of. The big ships just shoot at each other. The smaller ships get up to other things. Stealth bombers on coordinated squad bomb runs can do a lot of damage to things like drones, which provide a lot of the damage from some types of ships. Specialized ships disable the drives of other ships, use various kinds of electronic warfare, suck energy out of enemy ships, provide repairs or energy to friendly ships, etc.
There's quite a bit of strategy, both in designing the fleet and in the battle itself. This particular engagement is notable because everybody didn't just pile into the same system. The winning side was apparently quite successful at harassing the enemy's reinforcements trying to get to the battle.
That's why people who are looking for fun don't play in the giant null sec battles. You go fight people in small to medium size gangs where seconds (actual seconds) matter. The big null battles get all the press but to me that's the most boring part of the game, and completely avoidable. Worse than mining.
Antimatter missiles have all the same problems nukes do.
Now, antimatter bullets there's a nightmare.
Which is a little silly. Moties are efficient. They wouldn't build spaceships bigger than necessary. You'd tend to orient yourself so your faces were close together. Since our (and their) heads are at one end and there probably isn't space to be face to face with your feet sticking out in opposite directions, you'd orient yourself in the same direction, which itself could be arbitrary.
If you look at pictures of the space station where there are multiple people they tend to use that orientation. Arbitrary, but everybody mostly pointing in the same direction.
Considerably more than 90 days. EVE is a long-term game.
So I googled "football fans" for comparison to your EVE picture and I got mostly pictures of hot girls, mostly European or Brazilian. Then I googled "nfl fans" and got this: http://www.synergy-sponsorship....
So I guess it depends on what the GP meant by "football."
"this only makes sense for people with more time than money, like you apparently. it makes a lot more sense for most people to work longer at their real jobs and buy in-game items than to sit around earning them in-game."
That only makes sense for people who don't like playing the game. There are a lot of ways to earn money in EVE. Some of them more fun than working a few more hours at your regular job.
Except that CCP charges more for PLEX than they do for non-tradeable game time.
People spend time doing things to build those ships. They will now spend more time doing things to build those ships. If you count time as valuable, which most people do, real wealth was destroyed, not transferred.
Lots of people will have a net benefit. The people and organizations who lost ships will be poorer. The people who sell them minerals and ship and components will be richer. Over all the amount of wealth will be less, but the ones who make things will become wealthier while the ones who get their things destroyed will become poorer.
CCP (the company that owns EVE) doesn't benefit as much as you might think. Some people will undoubtedly buy some PLEX with real cash to fund rebuilding, but that PLEX is only saleable to other players, who will use it to NOT use real money to purchase game time. CCP sells PLEX for more than they sell a non-PLEX month of game time, but not that much more.
Far more than $300,000 was lost if you count that way. The average income in EVE is well short of minimum wage on an hourly basis. Of course, most people play in their free time. On the other hand, the battle lasted pretty much all day yesterday.
Sure, for officiating, why not? Like using cameras for refereeing.
But if you've got all those sensors, some actuators to go along with them, and no rules to prevent it, you could just let that central computer run the whole boat. No need for a crew. Best code wins.
Or go the other way. No GPS available to the crew, no weather reports or satellite imagery (except for emergency messages everyone gets), etc. Winner is the one who read the weather, navigated, and sailed the best.
Navigation aids would make things interesting. Dead reckoning and celestial navigation both give results that improve a lot with skill. Everybody could have a GPS on board in a tamper proof container that they can crack open if they get in trouble, but it forfeits the race.
We keep hearing about all the advantages of open development but people like Stallman seem to think it needs an awful lot of help to succeed. They just don't seem to have much confidence in their own arguments. But when you look around, I can't think of many successful closed forks of open source projects.
The "energy conversion" is an internal combustion engine. ;)
I had to learn about significant digits in high school. Why do people do things like that when changing units?
88 pounds = 40 kg.
Not really. Good modern machine learning algorithms, like the ones Google already uses, take a vast amount of unlabelled data and extract features from it. Then a small set of labelled data is used at the end. Somebody has to go through a few videos and label the cats, but the program goes through hundreds of thousands learning to recognize things, including cats. That's the same way we learn - a baby doesn't only benefit from experiences where adults point at something and say "cat."
In other cases, the metric can be completely automatic. The program has chosen correctly when you click on that ad, for example.
Google doesn't care about building an artificial human. Google wants algorithms that can better predict what ads will work on you. And that CAN be done at this time. The field of machine learning has come a long way in the last five years.