So this has been out there for millenia, using the same assets as everything else in the modern galaxy; the wacky world of elite.
Buy more ARX, enjoy your rebadged community goal
Buy more ARX, enjoy your rebadged community goal
The Reverand's Daily RANT
- Thread starter RevCaoticFox
- Start date
avoiding detection from WHAT!!!? They're ALONE, remember? RAXXLA
They must have realized at some point, likely while approaching their destination, that other humans were in the vicinity...else they never would have bothered sending a distress signal, as the odds of it reaching anyone in time to be relevant would be slim.
So this has been out there for millenia, using the same assets as everything else in the modern galaxy; the wacky world of elite.
Buy more ARX, enjoy your rebadged community goal
Indeed!
Calm down mate, it's only a game!
I recall, long ago (before the age of mobile phones), driving a company pick-up truck that'd just been fitted with a newfangled immobiliser.
It just died completely on a country lane, where I coasted to a halt and used the last of my momentum to park it on a grass verge.
I then spent about 90 minutes walking back along the dark, rainy, country lane to the main road where, luckily, I was spotted by a colleague who picked me up.
My colleague, wanting to rub salt in the wound, decided it'd be funny to drive me back to the disabled pick-up truck, just to see where it was.
It took us about 5 minutes to drive the distance it'd taken me 90 minutes to walk.
Oh how I laughed.
That's kind of the big problem with Generation Ships, though.
They are still "in the parking lot" so finding them should never really be a big deal.
The stuff about them succumbng to various historic problems is kind of interesting in a pathetic sort of way - thousands of people dying alone out in deep space while modern ships have developed the ability to blink past them in a matter of seconds - but the idea of finding an operational Generation Ship in an inhabited system and neither the Gen' Ship or the system's inhabitants noticed each other for, presumably, hundreds of years seems a bit bizarre.
For me, the interest in Gen' Ships should come from the separate, parallel, evolution that's taken place aboard them.
Every time we find a Gen' Ship there should be something new and interesting that we discover from them.
I don't think it's that far-fetched. With sublight drives, how far could it get? If it was going the fastest speed of the Apollo missions for the full 1200 or so years, you 're talking about the distance light would cover in about two weeks. If it was going about the fastest some kind of nuclear-powered engines could get it, it would get 111 ly in that time. How far Upaniklis from Sol?
Also, we don't know how long the ship has been in Upaniklis. Unlike all the other ships with FSDs now, this ship doesn't anchor to stars. It just travels through space. I imagine a lot of time it's between star systems where nothing is. It could have moved into Upaniklis from deep space. It might have moved there precisely because Upaniklis had a listening post which was an active and broadcasting piece of communications technology designed to be interfaced with. It might have been the first thing it found that it could use. Most other communications are probably either beyond its ability to interface with, too focused and/or brief for it to find/respond to, or non-existant because of the 3305's penchant for ship-carried messages in bottles to get around security issues caused by computational capability and a galaxy full of snakes at war with each other.
I also don't think it's that far-fetched that it would be missed. It would be very difficult for the station in Upaniklis to detect something like the ship without specifically looking for it in a direction very close to its general vicinity and using some pretty powerful radio telescopes. That's if the ship is broadcasting some signal at all. Otherwise it gets even harder.
On top of all of that, we don't know where the ship has been or what it's been doing, or why the hell its crew has been trying to avoid being detected. Honestly, I've got a bad feeling about this star wars sytle and I really think there's more to this story.
edit: you know what? I guess the FSS' magical ability to detect al lthe things makes it bit harder to believe it wouldn't have been found, but perhaps the FSS detects things by some emissions caused by more modern technology.
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Do you know what Golconda means?
It was an Indian city famous for selling diamonds
Yeah, but in the nineteenth century it was the name of a ship that was lost at sea! but why anyone would name a ship after an assumed disaster is beyond me, and why FDev thought it a good idea to have history repeat stretches further.It was an Indian city famous for selling diamonds
Yes, I'm heading out there now to sow as much chaos as possible.
I call this "Militant Darwinism." Extinction of the Unfittest.
Most of there time has been spent in deep space, light-years away from any star system. Our scanners can't seem to detect a generation ship if they're more than a few thousand Ls away. Cruising without power, they'd look like any other piece of interstellar space debris flying about at 0.17c. We 21st century Earthlings might get all excited and think spotting an interstellar space rock is newsworthy, but folks in Upaniklis probably see such things all the time; they'd only become newsworthy if they're aiming directly at an inhabited planet.
The ship would have become blindingly obvious (a giant fusion torch pointed right at you would have been literally blinding) in Upaniklis once the main engines lit up for deceleration, which probably took several months. You'll have to ask the Upaniklis government why they didn't announce to the galaxy that a generation ship appeared to be Arriving in their star system. But prior to that, the ship would have been effectively invisible.
Not physically possible. It's a generation ship travelling at sublight speeds - doing the maths, they've been travelling at 0.17c for the past thousand years - a speed which is more or less in line with the speeds that the other generation ships seem to have travelled at (between 0.17c and 0.20c). It's not possible for a generation ship launched a thousand years ago to have travelled very much beyond the bubble. Certainly not faster than light, probably not above 0.5c.
Their ancestors reached their originally intended Arrival point, but decided not to stop - they decided they liked the Known (living on board the ship) rather than the Unknown (colonizing an alien planet), so they cancelled their Arrival. The generation ship Odysseus had the exact same thing happen to them - they decided to remain on board and not attempt colonization. Generation ships should have had some cultural engineering of the crew to try to prevent this from happening, but this doesn't seem to have worked for at least a smal fraction of the ships that were launched.
A generation ship can't just stop and start whenever it wants to. The limiting factor is hydrogen fuel for the normal-space fusion engines (effectively giant thrusters). It would use half of its fuel at Departure, accelerating up to cruising speed of 0.2c, then use the rest of its fuel upon Arrival to slow down again. They'd need some capacity to refuel and an assurance of a readily available fuel supply at the waypoint if they were to choose to stop at an intermediate destination.
So deciding to stop was a big deal for them: having stopped in Upaniklis, the Golconda will now be out of fuel. Upaniklis has plenty of ice moons; they could mine the ice to create hydrogen fuel but, being an early model, they probably aren't equipped for large-scale fuel extraction, so restarting their ship would need external help too. And kudos must go to those ancient engineers, for designing and building main engines that lit up without exploding or failing after being dormant for a thousand years, to bring the Golconda safely to a halt.
Finally, they may well have been noticed, at their original Arrival point and subsequently, but they were left alone due to the old pan-galactic laws regarding non-interference with generation ships. We're only interfering now because they've chosen to break the Prime Directive themselves and ask for help.
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Yeah. Since Upkanis was previously discovered and has no doubt been scanned several times in the past it is nearly inconceivable that nobody noticed "Generation Ship" in their contacts panel. Quite the bummer about this game. Hundreds or thousands of CMDRs pass through a system and suddenly "Looky that!" as if teleportation exists.
The least FDev could have done is found an undiscovered system to place the Golconda into. That would at least have offered some excuse for it having never been seen before.
I couldn't agree more!
No need to caps lock and shout. Never been called a sham before, but there is a first for anything. Have fun, it's a game! I am off bug hunting in the real world!
CONSIDER THEM MY ITALICS
Then use italics.
Writing in capital letters is considered online equivalent of shouting. Therefore usually considered rude.
Italics exist on the forums.
Just like other threads on the exact same topic as this thread! Maybe spend less time using all caps and more time reading.