What kind of syfy are you?
- Thread starter CMDR-ss47ply
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I would hope that the appearance of ELWs in a future edition of Elite would be determined by player agency (base building). Frontier would determine the land masses, climates, geographical characteristics,and maybe some interesting anomalies such as Cappadocia in Turkey. The players would build cities according to their taste. Hopefully we would see Cyberpunk to Shangri la. And maybe a lot of dinos and roller coasters.
o7
o7
Good thoughts: "rationality prevailing over everything else."
So what I would call "enigma sci-fi" is probably not what we'll see. I classify "enigma sci-fi" as protagonists encountering things that are inexplicable based on current understandings of the known universe. Like "Event Horizon," "Sphere," etc.
I read a really great novel once about a dimensional tunnel which generated exact copies of anything entering one end at the other and which resisted any attempts at entry.
Eventually the protagonists were encountering versions of themselves at the far end. Creepy.
A shrubbery would be nice.
I would fancy a Strugatzki like world (see Roadside Picnic. Add a bit of Warhammer 40k and Cuthullhu and I am a happy man.
If I had to draw an artistic comparison to another sci-fi franchise, I'd instantly say "dark-matter", the long suffering Duchess-le-Chardon and I watched that as a sort of "box set binge" and even she could see the visual similarities, echoed by some of the technological anachronisms, such as FTL travel, but explosive-->projectile guns (rather than energy weaponry like star wars or star trek).
I remember in 1997 when the remastered versions were on the big screen, being very excited at seeing the movies on the big screen, the fanfare was really stirring, then on the return of the jedi, when the ewoks made their initial appearance, what seemed like every female in the movie theatre, in unison, went "aaaawwwwwww", made me chuckle. As did the fact I went bonnet surfing in my efforts to get to the last train out of the city to get back to my village.
Pretty much echoes my thoughts, I was going to comment on this thread with something along the lines of "it would depend where you are, federation high pouplation systems = blade runner, alliance systems = star trek, frontier independents = firefly, etc
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I'm guessing you are a Kim Stanley Robinson Mars Trilogy fan? Those books changed my life, the Arkadi username, presumably a mars trilogy reference, got you the like.
whats wrong with ewoks? they're delicious BBQ'd....
I have not heared from the Mars Trilogy yet, but it sounds interesting. My username indeed stems from Boris and Arkadi Strugaktzi whose humor and writing I really enjoy. I started with the Maxim Kammerer trilogy and got addicted to theire writing.
However your earlyer post makes a lot of sense, since the Elite Universe seems to ground on a very pragmatical and materialistical focus, where politics have not changed much from our century and humanity has only evolved technologically and not in it's society or on individual base.
My favorite science fiction author is Larry Niven his books for Ringworld is what got me into playing any space game. diffareant races all intune with there day night cycle and gravity and such. so I do hope what ever comes I dont reconise to much. But I do want to know thats human and thats not.
Somewhere out there, there has to be a Ringworld.
The Culture.
Anything from the Culture.
Please.
Anything from the Culture.
Please.
Star wars started it, tie figher made it, but these days its more about putting into practice all the waffle from the relatively recent series of documentaries with the british dude. Will just leave it at that. And also for the record i worked out all that stuff while "staying up late" during adolescence, didn't need a physics degree, same conclusions. One of the best parts about cosmology is that in large your guess is as good as mine. Anyway.
I hoping it'll be a badly done, small town uk version of late 20th century brutilism.
Badly designed bus stations, early 80's post punks spitting on the floor, dark brown engineering bricks laid on edge, disillusioned new romantics weeing in doorways after the club, brown tiles, rotating adverts with smiling housewives, asbestos ceilings, timber slatted seating areas smelling of pee, wimpy's, everything shut on Sunday.
As someone mentioned last time I posted this pic, they could smell it!
Jut round the corner - what could be more inviting that pats flowers, conveniently located beneath the underpass that's never seen the dystopian, rain filled, sunless skies :
Grab your tartan, zero-g shopping trolley, mushroom coloured rain mac and plastic rain bonnet - it's market day and bargains to be had.
Badly designed bus stations, early 80's post punks spitting on the floor, dark brown engineering bricks laid on edge, disillusioned new romantics weeing in doorways after the club, brown tiles, rotating adverts with smiling housewives, asbestos ceilings, timber slatted seating areas smelling of pee, wimpy's, everything shut on Sunday.
As someone mentioned last time I posted this pic, they could smell it!
Jut round the corner - what could be more inviting that pats flowers, conveniently located beneath the underpass that's never seen the dystopian, rain filled, sunless skies :
Grab your tartan, zero-g shopping trolley, mushroom coloured rain mac and plastic rain bonnet - it's market day and bargains to be had.
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Definitely Philip K. influenced for me, so Blade Runner, Total Recall.
Bladerunner/Cyberpunk is happening now. Gibson was a prophet.
Seems to me what's happening now is Heinlein's "crazy years". As far as OP's question goes, David Weber's Honor Harrington series depiction of Earth is about right, if sci-fi. If SyFy, then Star Trek parody mixed with Teletubbies.
Yep, Wiliam Gibson and also Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash) were ahead of theire time. Great stuff. Also those guys from FASA Shadowrun knew stuff. Eerie.
It's speculative fiction what are these weird abbreviations
I assume you mean "What is an Elite Earth-like world going to look like up close, when we can land on them?". Because we already know what Earth-like worlds look like in Elite.
ED has an unusual approach to "alien-ness", primarily because the ED galaxy is so big. Hand-crafted weirdness, like some of the planets featured in various sci-fi franchises and authors, is out of the question (for the record, I'd vote Cordwainer Smith as best "creator of fantastic yet believable alien planets"). So, what do we see in Earth-likes in ED? Here's a montage I prepared earlier...
So, to generate the planets, we've basically got a fractal map-maker drawing the coastline, governed by basic stats for land-water ratio and icecap size. Weather patterns are largely determined by atmosphere thickness. It's the kind of thing you need for procedurally-generated planets - a procedure to generate their appearance. Coloration is fairly consistent; blue oceans, with green-and-tan-coloured landmasses. Any colour differences in the planets in the picture above are entirely caused by the different coloured light of the system's star. So ED is fairly conservative in it s estimation of what an "Earth-like planet" would look like from space - it sticks to "known science". So there won't be any cyan-colured grass, or red oceans, or green skies, because there's no known scientific explanation of how such things could come about. Not on a planet with human-breathable air, at any rate; if you want that kind of thing, go land on an Ammonia World.
This means that many of the ELW planets will indeed look "samey" up close, just as they all tend to look "samey" from space, as the procedures that generate them cannot allow for too much variation, lest the edge-cases of the procedure look completely cartoonish or otherwise ridiculous; they will want to make the algorithms such that an "average" planet looks realistic, from a currently-known-science point of view.
Does this mean that there won't be any weird, inexplicable surface features on Earth-like planets? Absolutely not. As we've seen with other aspects of the Stellar Forge, truly weird and improbable things will almost certainly happen, given enough dice-rolls. Glowing Green GIants were almost certainly not in the original intent of the Stellar Forge's creators, for example. But their improbability means that very, very few of the planets we will find will show them.