What kind of syfy are you?

[knowles2]

Is it wrong of me to instantly want to strangle the original post for using Syfy, it sci-fi mate. Syfy is the name of a tv channel that does sci fi shows and cancel every single good show they have going without competing the story.

I really don't know.

But if they can bring over the technologies they have built for planet zoo, it could be something special, with the idea of genes influencing the looks of the animals, add in environment affecting those genes, such a system is how I would approach building ELW. Making it all unique is a huge challenge, making the above system produce hundreds or thousands of animals in the few seconds from orbit to landing on the planet, I hate to be the programmer that has to figure that out.

 

[War Eagle]

Star Trek(all) and Star Gate(All)
Alien/Predator(all).

 

[rhiz]

It gets a rough time, but aesthetically I like a lot of the things that Lynch did in Dune. We could definitely use more variety and exoticism in Elite - even in human space, you expect very significant cultural divergence.

 

[Gully Foyle]

Harlan Ellison
PKD
Phil Farmer
AE Van Vogt
Issac Asimov
Frank Herbert
William Gibson
Spider Robinson
Larry Niven
Keith Laumer
Rudy Rucker
Dan Simmons
Neal Stephenson

 

[m0rl0ck]

Thinking about it, i would like to see more H.P. Lovecraft content influences and more H.R. Giger artwork influences.

 

[Werewolf13]

IF we're talkin' the ED universe then it's fine as it is.

If we're talking about what it should be based on reality then lots and lots of HELL planets that are unfit for human habitation.

I'd be surprised if mankind ever finds an exoplanet that can support human life without some heroic level and very, very expensive terraforming.

 

[Das Boot]

Harlan Ellison
PKD
Phil Farmer
AE Van Vogt
Issac Asimov
Frank Herbert
William Gibson
Spider Robinson
Larry Niven
Keith Laumer
Rudy Rucker
Dan Simmons
Neal Stephenson

Interesting list. But I can't help but think that YOU at least would have included Alfred Bester, CMDR Foyle.

 

[Gully Foyle]

Interesting list. But I can't help but think that YOU at least would have included Alfred Bester, CMDR Foyle.

True enough.

 

[[VR] scipio_77]

Seeing as we are all playing the most realistic syfy game out there. What is a Elite earth like world going to look like? whats going to look to fake. Thats the hard part for me when it comes to syfy are any of these worlds going to look passable I mean I have no frame of thought as to what another planet in another solar system we have never seen before is going to look like. should it look like Star Wars, Star Trek, No Mans sky. what will pass the it looks real test with this group. o7

It depends on whether we view them as integrated or separated.

Consider that the prior to the exploration of our own planet, we saw extremely few (none really) good predictions about how other continents would be like in terms of ecology, culture or architecture. We can use two examples... 1400s Tenochtitlan and 1400s Venice, two city states at the height of their power in the 1400s. Barring that both have to conform to similar physical laws of construction, they certainly look completely alien to each-other. The ecology, food, dress, culture and so fort is also very different.

But if we look at cities in the world today, we see much more conformity. Cultures borrow good (and some bad) ideas from each-other, imports / exports, exchange of information and reliance on identical technology also remove a lot of differences.

I think the Elite universe can fit both ideas. The universe is certainly integrated in the sense that transport and travel does not take much time. At the same time, it is also acceptable that a different planet in a different solar system could see itself as completely culturally different or that travel is so prohibitively expensive (for individuals) that cultures are more isolated.

 

[CMDR Pugwash]

I'm loving this thread, loads of authors for me to look up.

 

[Gully Foyle]

I'm loving this thread, loads of authors for me to look up.

I totally recommend Frank Herbert's The Jesus Incident

Its about clones traveling aboard a ship they have made sentient .....

o7

 

[4gui4]

i am a old one..

 

[GJ51]

I expect it to be Expanse - ive

 

[Urbanski101]

What? No mention of Iain M Banks...my favorite Science fiction author.

I also love the work of Ray Bradbury though his work is often not science fiction at all...more twilight zone but brilliant none the less. Fahrenheit 451 is up there with 1984 as prophetic works, but unlike Orwell, Bradbury is not trying to make a political point.

As for FDEVs representation of an earth like, I don't think that will ever exist so I'm not sure it's worth contemplating how they'd do it or what it would look like though I will say they would probably do their research and try to make it fairly realistic. Without the pressures of over-population and scarcity it should look fairly utopian.

 

[Riverside]

Without the pressures of over-population and scarcity it should look fairly utopian.

Indeed I would expect most of it to be farmland or wild terrain tbh. But the towns & cities will be the equivalent of the ground ports we have now, smaller bases will be the equivalent of villages & homesteads.

 

[Old Duck]

Seeing as we are all playing the most realistic syfy game out there. What is a Elite earth like world going to look like?

I think earth-like worlds will look like earth. Earth is so much 'bigger' and more diverse than many people know. There are places right here on real Earth that look downright alien, so other ELWs need not be 'extreme' to be alien. I don't think other earths are going to have purple grass and orange trees unless there is some scientific reason (different wavelengths of sunlight or atmospheric composition) to justify it.

That said, we do have brain trees and glowing disco pumpkins in ED already, so I'm sure there will be an alien feel to alien worlds if Frontier ever finishes ED to have landable ELWs with life. I, however, do not want NMS. I prefer more science, less fiction.

 

[Darkfyre99]

Science fiction, even hard science fiction in its main stream, got pretty uniform over the decades.

If we're talking authors and founding fathers angle, Elite has obviously a very rational, hard sci-fi tone to it, meaning its centred around technology, economy and loosely-agreed 'realism', echoing by it notes of such voices as Arthur Clarke or Stanislaw Lem, with just a touch of Frank Herbert/Issac Asimov's background space-opera politics added to the mix as a flavour (very rightly so on FD's part). The wild-west ruthlessness of the world also brings to mind William Gibson's dystopian cyber-punk tones.

Still, overall it seems to me that although the general tone is closest to Clarke's and Asimov's visions of the future, rationality prevailing over all else.

The Earth-like would be closer to a utopia than a dystopia, given how much space mankind was suddenly granted to combat overpopulation. With cheap fuel and widespread FSD technology, we are generally doing very well as a race and the Blade Runnery type of vibe would not make a lot of sense. Not that I wouldn't want to see it in Elite.

Perhaps a nice, procedural variation could be in place - on one hand a sprawling, overpopulated and overcrowded blade runner-like city in certain places (Federation?), and more utopian, clean and garden-like in others (Empire?).

Judging by Frontier's art direction, there's not much to worry about in that department, it's the gameplay mechanics and loops that are mostly troublesome.

I agree with 90% of what you wrote.

That being said, given that this is the Elite Universe, human inhabited Earthlike worlds should range from utopian democratic governments to dystopian Corporate States, depending upon who is in charge. With three Superpowers, all the truly independent factions, eleven “Powers”, and fifteen government types, there should be plenty of variation of planets side urban experiences, even before security and economic ratings, economy types, and miscilleaneous faction states are thrown into the mix.

Sadly, I doubt we’ll ever see such variety in the game anymore, but I certainly won’t mind being pleasantly surprised.

 

[Darkfyre99]

Babylon Five, or maybe The Expanse.

However Elite with its cross the galaxy in about 30 hours real time flat out jumping has probably pushed beyond even the most absurd postulations of any sci-fi movie, TV show or book. If the technology levels in the game were reflected planetside, things would look and work far different to what we might think or expect.

One of my primary assumptions about this game is that it is played in “real time” only in the loosest sense, and that a large amount of time compression is involved. In the five or so hours a week I typically play, one hour may represent three days spent in Witchspace flying between systems, one hour may have covered six hours primarily spent waiting for cargo to load, one hour may have covered a three hours of combat, and so on.

One of these days, I really should get around to codifying this kind of things, just for the fish.

 

[CMDR Big Mike]

I think the codex entries give some idea for the architecture style for the various superpowers. As for stations/outposts I think something that looks like the Expanse would be great. The designs in the books and in the show really capture what practical/ good looking architecture in space could look like

 

[Helvellyn]

I think earth-like worlds will look like earth. Earth is so much 'bigger' and more diverse than many people know. There are places right here on real Earth that look downright alien, so other ELWs need not be 'extreme' to be alien. I don't think other earths are going to have purple grass and orange trees unless there is some scientific reason (different wavelengths of sunlight or atmospheric composition) to justify it.

That said, we do have brain trees and glowing disco pumpkins in ED already, so I'm sure there will be an alien feel to alien worlds if Frontier ever finishes ED to have landable ELWs with life. I, however, do not want NMS. I prefer more science, less fiction.

Always a tricky one, making things convincingly alien. Weird for the sake of it doesn't always work, too Earthlike, just a few blobs and changed colours doesn't either (although there are plants on Earth with different-coloured leaves, e.g. copper beech).