Vanamonde

Oh my. Seems we've overlooked this thread for a while. Guys? This thread is for discussions of and questions about this part of the forum. If you want to post your ships, please make threads for them.

The purpose and meaning of this thread are not clear to me. Please remember that we would like to keep religious discussions off of our forum, if that is what this is about.

Questions about 25? Why not ask them in the handy 25 thread? (Merged.)

No downloading required for Imgur. Upload your pictures to it, then paste their BBCode link into your posts here. And no, you're past the probationary period now and are a full member, and don't require permissions for anything.

Looks like this thread ran its course some time ago.

To post pictures on this forum, you will need to upload them to a filesharing service and copy/paste the link they provide into your posts. Imgur is pretty easy to use, and basic membership is free.

Please discuss the subject of the thread rather than each other.

There's no rule against spam because, if everything goes right, you should never see it in the first place. Every accounts' first few posts must be approved by a moderator before they actually go through, and we catch the 'bots then and lock their origins out permanently. But occasionally, we goof and send one through, which seems to be what happened in this case. And yes, we have a forum rule against roleplaying because some people become overly invested in their fictitious factions, and then the pretend conflicts turn into real feuds between forum members, spilling over into other threads and subforums.

Funny how this looks like it could either me a star, or an electron microscope picture of a pollen grain.

Didn't say anything like that. I didn't say physics changes would break the game, or that there never can be good reasons for revising the game. I am saying that I have yet to see a reason for rescaling distances and planet sizes which a) is not in response to hypothetical problems which haven't arisen yet, and/or would have any meaningful affect on the experience of playing the game. I'm not saying it's dangerous or harmful to rescale. I'm saying it's a lot of work for something which is unnecessary, except that it would please certain people if the game's made-up numbers were arbitrarily closer to the real solar system's numbers. I really haven't given a lot of thought to most of the other proposals for greater realism in the game, and have no strong opinion one way or the other. But the scaling one is a pet peeve of mine. The solar system is already almost entirely empty space and surface area that no one will ever see. No one is ever going to even take the time to explore the entire surface of the home planet of Kerbin, and yet there are some people who are insisting the planets must be scaled up, even though that would just create more empty land area that no one will ever see. And since we all zip through empty interplanetary space at high warp anyway, what is the benefit of stuffing even more empty, featureless void between the planets? How much empty, useless space/area is enough, simply to make the game's numbers closer to the real solar system's numbers?

Merged into the existing Unity 5 thread.

Sorry guys, but the decision was made to merge the threads. Keeps all the discussion in one spot.

What is it?

It has been suggested here that increased warp factors should be introduced so that the longer distances are covered in the same real-time interval. But higher warps introduce inaccuracies in the simulation of trajectories affected by gravity, as the ships move through the gravity well in fewer ricks. That certainly would not be realistic, and would require the developers to devote time to ironing out this problem, which need not be introduced into the game in the first place. I am dubious that the art of planet surfaces could be arbitrarily blown up by a simple numerical factor without ruining their appearances, either. It's not as simple as you make it out to be. You keep insisting this is a necessary change while also arguing that it would make no substantive difference even if it was implemented. If it doesn't change the gameplay experience, then it is arbitrary, and a waste of effort to go full circle and end up where the game started off. I agree. Let's abstract the planet sizes and distances between them so as to keep the scale of the game convenient and fun to play. Which is the situation we have now.

Correct you about what? You haven't given any reasons for your concern.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but this makes it sound as if you consider the changes you yourself want to be arbitrary and unrelated to gameplay. In which case, why bother with them at all? It seems to me that many of the arguments in favor of rescaling the game are simply aesthetic objections. Some people want the game's numbers to be closer to the real solar system's numbers, just for the sake of the idea of "realism," proposing parallel changes to keep the experience of playing the game much the same. In which case, again I must ask, isn't that an awful lot of work to ask of the devs for an abstract final result that is merely more aesthetically pleasing to your own personal tastes?

Climber is a professional animator. His work is sometimes shown on tv in Brazil.

There would have been many unusable planets in the ST universe, but they just didn't have much reason to go anything but the "class M" ones. And as for the aliens all looking like people with stuff glued to their foreheads, Roddenberry wanted all the aliens to be recognizable characters, and decreed that the actors' eyes and mouths should be visible. You are free to dislike it, but it wasn't due to laziness or lack of imagination. I agree that it got old, though.

I'm not following your argument here. Why do you say the engines and tanks are "balanced" to deliver certain dVs? One can combine several sizes of engines with varying numbers and sizes of tanks to achieve larger or smaller total dVs, which means there is no single balance to any engine or tank by itself. Why wouldn't players simply choose different models and numbers of parts while constructing their ships, requiring no rescaling of the celestial bodies? A major change might require the tweaking of engine statistics, but that's already been done a few times, without resorting to an alteration to the entire game universe. Also, you're assuming that there's going to be a reason for rescaling, and then using it as a justitication for rescaling. If they change the aerodynamics and if this change should it turn out that it actually does call for a rescaling of the planets, I would no longer consider this a pointless exercise. But that's only one hypothetical response to a situation that doesn't exist yet and might not ever, and until such time as this hypothetical situation should come to pass, rescaling the planets is a solution looking for a problem.

I am convinced that it actually was Slenderman.

I wouldn't have a problem with rescaling the educational version. I don't feel it's necessary, but I can see the value of increased realism there. But why shoehorn that change into the normal game, where it serves no purpose? Smaller with lower warp values? I would have no problem with that. Except that, like the scaling-up, both would require the developers to spend time re-working something that already works just fine, instead of adding new features to the game. That is the major basis of my objection. Make the game universe bigger/smaller and introduce larger/smaller warp values, and the devs have wasted umpteen staff hours just to arrive back where they started, with the game we're already playing except for the number of zeroes in the distance measurements.

You want higher warp factors, so that you can cross larger empty spaces, in the same amount of real time? Why not just not bother to scale up either in the first place if it's going to end up with the same experience from the player's end? This seems to me like an awful lot of effort just to end up back where you started out. To paraphrase, "If you spend 2 minutes of real time time warping, it makes zero difference at all if you travel 10,000,000km in that time or 100,000km."

Merged into the existing thread for this video.

The whales weren't aliens. It's just that whales were the only earth creatures the aliens were interested in talking to.

As Alexw says, it is an optimistic future (at least in the early shows, not so much when other producers took over), and the original series often (not always) told intelligent stories about grownup subjects such as integrity and ethics. But most of all, I think, the original series had a superlative cast. Yes, including Shatner, though I agree his acting abilities declined as the series wore on. Shatner, Kelley, and Nimoy had the ability to lend gravitas to stories that might otherwise have not been so affecting. Additionally, the original series had good effects for its time, and was smarter about the science than a lot of the junk it was competing with. Last but not least, the episodes were written by old-pro, high-quality writers, and even some science fiction authors. Next Generation perhaps concentrated even more on the ethical stories, though I do not think it was written anywhere as well, and the cast was much more uneven in their skills as actors. Still, it was about people trying to behave ethically. After that, I can't really comment because I never warmed to the later shows. In my opinion, they range from bland (DS9) to awful (Enterprise).