Community Event / Creation Implications of zero-G

[drew]

I was musing about this one today. We've been told that there is no anti-gravity tech and it seems unlikely that the ships would be able to incorporate a carousel for simulated gravity.

Low speed manoeuvres would be fine, but any constant interplanetary thrust or violent moves during combat will mandate the use of protection; the previously mentioned 'siloplaston'.

With that in mind' the usual ability for passengers and crew to have a 'chat' during flight may be rather limited. How do you think this might work? Multi person silo-p compartments? Lots of engine-off cruising and a mad dash for the flight chairs if attacked?

Cheers,

Drew.

 

[Rattatay]

Inertial dampeners around cockpit and passenger cabins. Maybe in hallways, alternately magnetic boots

 

[Cmdr Andy B]

Inertial dampeners around cockpit and passenger cabins. Maybe in hallways, alternately magnetic boots

problem is with that ID's are so tired to Star Trek lore where they came wrapped in a nice little bundle with artificial gravity that you cant do one without the other.

I'm with the leg it for the pilots chair group myself as from what I understand we will be able to do small in-system jumps as an online replacement for time acceleration.

I've already given my engine output 'magnetic flux' so this will be used to explain dropout due to mass lock and the mini jump explains the ability to travel vast distances in system without all the issues associated with fast acceleration.

During combat I'm writing into ships systems g warnings and thrust limiters to prevent blackouts that can be over ridden for added dramatic effect and danger (near blackouts, tighter turns than your enemy etc.)

That's how I'm handling it, would still be nice to use AG as it solves a lot of problems, even if it was new tech and limited in use by power requirements as this would give wiggle room enough to use it on a small pilots cabin but still need to spin the station to create pseudo gravity in the outer hub.

would also give us gravity plating in central control areas like in Bab5's dock control deck - no spin but no floating.


That's my plan for dealing with it, can be a bit more gung-ho about it than the official writers i suppose but still don't want to step away too far from the official line

 

[drew]

If you've got 'inertia dampeners' you've effectively got rid of the effects of mass, which is pretty much 'anti-gravity' anyway. That's already ruled out by David and Michael from comments in the kickstarter. Elite tech isn't 'that' advanced.

Magnetic boots will do diddly squat for you at an acceleration of 25g (as in the Eagle Fighter) other than ensure your feet stay stuck to the floor as the rest of you is ripped off to splatter on the back wall...

We know the pilot is protected by 'silasoplaston' which is (and I quote from the Frontier manual here) "a material that stays dry at all times. It really gives the message that you are in control! It feels as though you are immersed in water while it protects you from dangerously high acceleration forces."

Which sounds like a 'poor mans' inertia dampener to me. I imagine it rather like the 'gloop' they used for interstellar travel on the spoof 'Galaxy Quest'.

This sounds like something you strap yourself into, or perhaps cocoon yourself in so you can cope with the rigour of spaceflight. There might be a number of them for the crew. What about passenger compartments? Perhaps an array of 'spare' cocoons.

I think the 'buckle into your seats folks, we've got company' idea will make for a nice stressful pre-battle situation.

There could be a lot of tension around getting the ship secured for combat and, if some unlucky chap/chapess falls to get their seat secure (or it malfunctions in the battle), there will be a rather unpleasant mess to clean up afterwards...

During combat I'm writing into ships systems g warnings and thrust limiters to prevent blackouts that can be over ridden for added dramatic effect and danger (near blackouts, tighter turns than your enemy etc.)

This is good too. I've used something similar in the past, when the onboard 'inertia management' system has failed. The problem is the frail human condition. The ship will be able to survive and operate at much higher G-rates than the human body can cope with unaided.

Cheers,

Drew.

 

[AnnuverScotinExile]

... Lots of engine-off cruising and a mad dash for the flight chairs if attacked?

The lack of speed of this process would turn off the instant gratification players, and thus not reflect how the game is played. I sense an even bigger than usual suspension of reality coming on.

 

[drew]

And that's ok for the game, but if you're trying to write something that doesn't have all the physics-buffs going "Seriously... meh" almost immediately, it needs at least a little rigour.

Cheers,

Drew.

 

[Cmdr Andy B]

How recent is the development of 'silasoplaston' anyway? I when from dark wheel to kickstarter so missed out on the back story and fiction of FE & FFE.

if it's a new development in the last 100 years it gives me the option of setting the book in the 'past' as it were and even if i set it 25 years after invention the back story of the ship my guy has is as a family heirloom so i can always justify it with saying they never bothered to retro fit.

I could go the other direction and set it in the future a few hundred years once they have invented artificial gravity treating the current period of the game as past history (remember the days when they used silasoplaston? how did they ever manage? etc.) but that would be cheating in my view.

 

[kaserei]

This might be an interesting wikipedia article for you to have a look at, though there is a lack of citation in the text. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_gravity

I've done some maths based on that information on the rotation approach to artificial gravity, feel free to check my thinking, I am currently re-learning Mathematica after a ten year break!.

It seems in a Coriolis type station, to get the minimum effective gravity of 0.5g and a low enough spin rate to allow docking and prevent vertigo (I will assume 1/2 rpm) the habitable decks would need to be placed at a distance of approx. 1800m or greater up to just under 3600m, which provides the slightly more than ideal 1g.

Thumbs up for 7-8km diameter stations! though there is a massive amount of "unused" low gravity space inside that first 1800m. Might be useful to use it as a robotic loading area. but as it is not 0-g, it's not much use for manufacturing and your staff sick days would be very high.

This also indicates the size or speed of rotation of a ship "carousel" needed for useful gravity. That is a lot of kinetic energy just waiting to tear a ship apart, or make it spin out of control when you are dogfighting.

At this point it is worth noting that the outermost corridor you would be walking down is travelling at an instantaneous velocity of around 1350Kmph (approx. 840mph). With the weight of the station there is little chance you'd need airbag lined walls (unless you were to hit something BIG!), but even slow ship collisions on the outer hull would make a nice mess.

 

[Ian Phillips]

On the more mundane parts of travelling in zero-G:

Sleeping:
Beds at the extremes of the ship (wing tips) and put the ship into a rapid spin to get the simulated gravity effect. The idea being that by doing this you have fewer/smaller problems with combating the health issues associated with life in zero-G.

Everything sealed: (especially the WC!)
No liquids open to the air, or you are going to get water in your circuits - of course at the wrong time!

Frequent bursts of high acceleration to force any junk to the back of the ship where it can be easily collected.

Storage :
via webbing - pop something into a handy web. Would need to be strong to hold up to high G's, or automatically sucked away during high acceleration.

 

[Cmdr Andy B]

still, it gives us a chance for a nice 'sqwish' scene of someone being splattered again a bulk head, hard work to write for this universe though.

saying that i plan to cast the ship a few thousand years into the future at some point in the story so i could cheat by having gravity plates installed then before i throw them back to present day - then I'd have the only Cobra 3 in the universe with AG & ID's without breaking the history that's been established as i'm not giving it to everyone

 

[Darren Grey]

Humanity has likely gotten a little better at handling Gs over time, and pilots will be especially well trained to handle it. And already we can handle pretty significant g-force for short times at least. The biggest health problem is blood vessels in the eyes bursting. Perhaps space pilots would wear special goggles to keep them okay? Or better yet you can get some sort of injection that hardens the capillaries. There could be other medical treatment people get to harden them up significantly.

There could also be materials people wear that help buffer them from the onslaught of movement in space. I've pencilled in one of my characters wearing an expensive "terraprene" flight suit - a soft, tight material that many bounty hunters wear to keep insulated, radiation-proof and to maintain muscle exercise over time. Not run this past Michael yet, but something like this could be appropriate.

For general interactions in spacecraft I think a certain amount of glossing over is needed. Describing things in too much detail will be boring to read. Characters in the book will take weightless movement as normal, so it doesn't need to be commented on too much. But at the same time we don't want patently unrealistic statements in there...

I'd say outside of combat those 27g would not be regularly put to full use, and mag boots will do just fine. Walking around is normal, but so is jumping from floor to ceiling. Inside combat is the scramble to get harnessed up, and potential drama of items flying around the cockpit during turns, etc.

 

[drew]

How recent is the development of 'silasoplaston' anyway? I when from dark wheel to kickstarter so missed out on the back story and fiction of FE & FFE.

It's described as 'revolutionary' in the frontier manual, so that's about 3200 AD. Elite is roughly 75 years before this, so what they did before silastoplaston, who's to say!

'Silastoplaston' might only be a brand name though, an application of a proven technology; rather like 'revolutionary new Elvive Nutri-gloss', which is, of course, just another shampoo.

@Kaserei. I've seen that entry - it's good. Basically a small ship couldn't have an effective carousel, and that's before you get to the complexities of changing your attitude or vector with it spinning. That would be a nightmare. I think we can safely say that Elite ships don't have any really large moving parts...

Cheers,

Drew.

 

[Nvmb3rth30ry]

Excellent question. Ultimately I guess we are waiting for the 'official' word on what happens in the cabin when people are not strapped into seats. Zero G? Oxygen and life support? These are fundamental to the kinds of stories we will be writing around Elite ships and pilots, so I am kind of hoping this aspect of our imaginary realm has been considered by the FD think tank, with details eventually to be revealed -- hopefully before we have written half our fiction. Or it could be perhaps that they are waiting to see what 'solutions' we can jointly come up with before committing to anything...?

Don't know anything about this Siloplastron stuff. Does sound like a poor man's inertial dampener!

For the smaller ships with which I will be dealing most often, I kind of favour lots of traditional buckling-up and strapping-in of both pilots and passengers. How this might work on board your Anacondas or huge Navy vessels, I'm not sure. Might be a lot of significant magnetic-boot action going on there, because I presume in that environment straps would probably be too restrictive. (Leading to occasional Zero-G fun when anyone loses their footing)

As mentioned, I am also curious about the life support mechanisms on board. Fully pressurised shirtsleeve comfort in all cases, or will certain smaller ship types require masks and breathing gear?

 

[Darren Grey]

Thumbs up for 7-8km diameter stations! though there is a massive amount of "unused" low gravity space inside that first 1800m. Might be useful to use it as a robotic loading area. but as it is not 0-g, it's not much use for manufacturing and your staff sick days would be very high.

The perfect space for ship docking. Pilots can then travel dock to the habitation areas, getting used to the gradually increasing g's as they go further along the arms.

There will also be different habitation zones to meet everyone's preferences - some people living on low g worlds are going to prefer something more central. The 1.5-2 g areas will likely be slums, where people live because the rent is cheap. One could also have nutrient farms and such out on the rim too.

 

[drew]

Frontier manual here > http://www.lemonamiga.com/games/docs.php?id=679

Scan and search for Silastoplaston.

There is also the 'Remlok' a device which can keep you alive in space, even without a suit - a sort of emergency life saver.

It's described in the 'Dark Wheel' Novella. http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/dkwheel.htm

I'd always imagined it as a sort of hi-tech gas mask.

Cheers,

Drew.

 

[krisavery]

And that's ok for the game, but if you're trying to write something that doesn't have all the physics-buffs going "Seriously... meh" almost immediately, it needs at least a little rigour.

Cheers,

Drew.

That to me seems a weird sentiment. Surely the game itself is the ultimate canon to draw from, and you have to write to make the story fit what we'll all be experiencing next year? Tricky!
I'm not sure I'd worry too much about Physics buffs myself. If science fiction writers do that too much, they'd go insane with restrictions very quickly!

(edit: I re-read your comment, and see that I misunderstood it slightly... in that you are looking to find the right line between what is fun, and not going to make physics buffs roll their eyes immediately)

To be honest, I didn't think that Elite had that much to draw upon. In my imagination, I'd always run about my ship with artificial gravity. I had no idea that DB has deemed it not to be the case in the Elite universe. This also makes me wonder how he'll approach the walking around the ship aspect of the game that is to come later. Will it be floating around the ship?

The concept art for the ship interior seems to point very much towards an up-down gravity orientated environment.

I'm writing a script for my Elite films, and small details like this become a big nightmare if live action is brought into the equation. Floating people and all that. I suppose there is always the velcro boots option as seen in 2001.

I have to say though, that seeing pictures like the one here...

...well quite frankly, the whole floating in the cockpit thing really turns me off and is not what I imagine the Elite universe to be at all. I hope to God that isn't the direction they are taking the game. I almost find it depressing, and not what I imagined at all whenever I played previous incarnations of the game. I'm sure that a massive percentage (despite the laws of physics and reality) imagined themselves in their own version of the Millenium Falcon to some degree or the other.

If anything, I was more taken by the cockpit picture in the original manual...

or something like this...

but definately not this...

Sorry if this is slightly off topic, but it all relates to how the Elite universe is conceptualised.

The type of universe that Elite exists in needs to be nailed down hard. It seems all over the place at the moment. I really feel for all Elite writers out there, as unifying all this is going to be very tricky (I include myself in this also).

Kris

 

[Darren Grey]

The up-down element is an important consideration. A particularly wary pilot might have their bed on the ceiling of their cockpit. If an alarm goes off whilst they're asleep they can just kick off the bed and land in the pilot's chair within seconds.

I'm personally trying to keep my expectations of Elite: Dangerous as blank as possible. There's no way the game will match the variant imaginations of tens of thousands of players. As for the writing, well the story is about the characters ultimately. A few little interactions will change based on the physics, but the core story remains the same.

 

[drew]

All good points, Kris. I agree with you completely that the detail does need to be locked down if possible. Personally, I'm not too bothered by the actual answer; my problem is that I don't want to write a scene around the ship's dinner table (a la Firefly) if it's decided that that there's no way that the ship could have a practical dinner table (a la 2001). There'll be enough editing without that extra hassle.

Also. Acclimatising to an artificial gravity equipped starship for a person who's never stepped foot on one before is peanuts (a la Star Trek - just stow your bags and enjoy the view) whereas for the same person on a ship with no artificial gravity will be a stomach churning and very disorientating exercise in adjustment (imagine being dumped into an F15 fighter jet with no preamble).

This detail matters to my story as I'll have a bunch of passengers along for the ride.

What we do know is as follows:

Space stations rotate because there is no artificial gravity technology in the Elite universe (at least, not yet). This was stated by DB in the Kickstarter.

There is also no 'anti-gravity' plating as in Star Trek, Firefly etc. Magnetic boots have been mentioned.

In Frontier and FFE, pilots were protected from high-G by use of 'Silastoplaston' which seems to be some kind of 'liquid' you're immersed in. (This is taken from the Frontier Elite 2 manual, so reasonably 'canon')

How strictly you want to adhere to this is up to you. My concern is that for an official 'Elite: Dangerous' novel, there has to be some 'canon' we take as 'gospel'. While we wait for the "Writers' Bible", we're just speculating in the dark for a time unfortunately.

I built this into my plan for Elite:Reclamation, I don't intend to start writing until March, giving time for some of this to be worked out. The novels do have to be 'approved' by Frontier, whether this extends to rationalised depiction of the technology involved I'm not sure, but I'd certainly prefer my book to be consistent with the game and the other novels.

Cheers,

Drew.

 

[krisavery]

I think from my point of view (creating a film of Elite) where you actually have to see the reality, these points become much larger.
In writing, you can emit details of the 'how' and let the reader fill in the rest, such as...

Jameson gets out of the command chair and makes his way to the sleeping quarters.

rather than...

Jameson unbuckles his belt, pushes himself out of the seat and gives a little kick against the console to float towards the sleeping quarters.

I think I'll have to approach my writing for the visual medium with only cockpit chair shots while in space (so strapped in), and any other interactions done while landed on a planet. Otherwise it is a whole can of worms waiting to be opened!

 

[drew]

Agreed. I don't intend to labour the description, in fact my writing style is pretty sparse on description at the best of times.

It boils down, for me, to one of my characters who has never in their life been on board an Elite starship, suddenly finding herself aboard one, in something of a rush - little time to adjust, no time for a tour. For her, this is going to be a completely novel experience... but what is that experience going to be like?

Cheers,

Drew.