More than 1000 years in the future - why do we have a canopy?
- Thread starter kingchub
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Better yet, why aren't they self-driving? It seems like we are going to have self driving cars by 2020.
Is there a reason why we don't have self-driving spaceships in 3301?
Is there a reason why we don't have self-driving spaceships in 3301?
apparently 4 of the 48 or so self driving cars have been involved in accidents already.
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you are being terribly small minded. In a 1000 years i woudnt be surprised if the material the screen was made of gave you perferct 3d vision as if u were looking through a plain glass window. Indeed i wouldnt be surpised if this material encased the whole command centre so when u increased the viewing screen size it would look as if u were standing in the vacuum of space.
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you are being terribly small minded. In a 1000 years i woudnt be surprised if the material the screen was made of gave you perferct 3d vision as if u were looking through a plain glass window. Indeed i wouldnt be surpised if this material encased the whole command centre so when u increased the viewing screen size it would look as if u were standing in the vacuum of space.
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The same reason we don't allow planes to fly themselves.
um planes have autopilot
I struggled with the same idea. For a while actually.
Why put the pilot right at the head of the ship with only a thin*, brittle material between them and the void + bullets/lasers? There has to be a better way.
It bugged me for weeks, which is probably why I started noticing that the 'glass canopy trope' is EVERYWHERE in science fiction. Especially the space stuff. There are exceptions, of course. I usually notice that big-huge ships have a protected bridge with view screens and the like, while smaller ships are almost always doomed with Model-T era screen doors with a bulls-eyes reflecting off of them.
Solo and small ship pilots have been boned by the entire sci-fi genre, Elite: Dangerous is just a small tentacle on a many tentacled conspiracy octopus.
We need to be asking the BIGGER questions...
Nonsense...
The problem with seeing in space is that with the naked eye you will be able to pick out targets reliably up to 5 km. We do see things up to 50 km for instance a candle in total darkness. A detection system will be able to detect a hot object - such as an engine - at least up to 300 million km that's 300 000 000 km at our PRESENT tech level... So assuming I am on planet Mars and at planet Earth we are launching a chemical rocket, IF the vision of my sensors is not obscured we would detect it even now...
The problem is of another nature. We can detect things to such a distance that the electromagnetic waves travel around - let's round it up to - 15 minutes (it is less about 13 min 48 sec on average depending naturally on the distance of planet Earth to planet Mars). So the detected launch happened 15 min ago... The realistic ranges of our present easily conceivable military tech - rail guns (being tested even now) - for instance permit me to open fire on targets at this distance in space... The bullets would travel around 30 min to the target... But the problem is where to aim... An interesting cat and mouse game of prediction. The precision of the probability predictions would drastically rise as the time delay would decrease... I estimate that we would be able to reliably hit at a distance of 1 light sec so 300 000 km (rounded up number). So 60000 times further as we would see the target with our naked eye...
Finally there are those who would say that we do see thing much much further away - we do see galaxies that are much further away then a miserly light sec, but I am talking about it in practical terms, let's leave poetry out of it...
Yeah, I'm sure there's room for a 'realistic' space combat sim, which I imagine would feel a bit like a submarine simulation where you spend your time studying sensor readouts and plotting courses and calculating firing trajectories, and death comes quickly and often from a place you didn't expect.
And all with no windows and no visual contact with your targets, a very sterile and stoic experience.
So I'm glad Elite is not that game, not even close. Luke had a canopy, so did Bluehair Alex Rogan and Lonestar and it worked out alright for them!
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Once we can walk around our ships we might find they also harbor much open space and walkways...
i think u can somehow use the debug camera to move around inside the ship. dont hold me to that tho.
also it deosnt have to be reading sensors and stuff all the time. in my vision you would be ensconced centrally in the ship with a perfect view of the space outside. in 3d as if u were looking at it through a canopy.
Interesting if you are shooting from Earth to Mars... One little problem in the context of ED tho, I have never once been asked to shoot anything further away than 5km...
really? u have never been asked to go to another system and kill the pirate lord there?
yup, sure have. Never had to snipe him from the distance of earth to mars tho.
And I suppose the metal plates of your hull magically hold themselves together with no support beams?
Well, y'know...more than 1,000 years ago we had the wheel. Why do we still have those today? ;-)
At the same habits. The environment in which we live is not futuristic. Therefore, it is not possible to get the idea that describe the reality of what will be in the distant future.
When developing the concept of the idea. He takes all the insight in the current environment. Here is the archive for an organization that contains videos and pictures, movies and other games. From these sources you get inspiration, then develop the idea. And You have a project.
On top of that add creativity.
the wheels of today are very different from those of 1000 years ago.