Just my two pence from the peanut gallery, latching on to some snippets that caught my attention...
Redspear wrote: ↑Mon Nov 30, 2020 10:18 am
stranger wrote: ↑Mon Nov 30, 2020 1:02 am
I have no idea how to work with unknown scientific laws.
Quite
But there's a serious point here in terms of how one reacts to the unknown.
stranger wrote: ↑Mon Nov 30, 2020 1:02 am
I can't understand something on some level I'll find it unsatisfactory.
So you're trying to understand the technology of an imagined future by using the science of today?
Perhaps the main problem for you there is not just that of the fiction but that it is a fiction (or fictions) based around a game.
For me, personally, I would still like to try to consolidate all those fictions - plural - within a singular, logically-consistent (if imaginative, in-universe) framework. From what I've seen so far of other attempts, is that they seem to be less than satisfactory at tesseracting the hypersphere consistently.
For instance, none of the following seem the return positive search result when CTRL+F'ing for "generation ship":
https://daftworks.co.uk/elite/index.php ... c_Timeline and associated appendices + the Oolite Timeline, which seems to have formed the foundation for the following:
http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Pilot% ... l#Timeline - 11:13, 17 February 2006 Selezen
http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Timeline - 21:45, 2 August 2009 Diederick
http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Chroni ... _Milky_Way - 14:16, 3 February 2013 LutherBurgsvik
http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Oolite_timeline - 18:35, 19 December 2013 Zireael
...But: please refer to the original 'Space Trader's Flight Training Manual' (SBG38/B1), p. 30, top of the page, 'INTERPLANETARY TRAVEL', 'Generation ships'...
A generation ship is a big thing, literally and figuratively, in more than one sense. ...And there were
still, around the time of 3100, when the original manual was published along with the release of the first Faulcon deLacy Spaceways/Cowell & MgRath Cobra Mk IIIs, according to our best information, 'seventy thousand [!!!} of these immense vessels ploughing their way through the galaxy'... Why would *ALL* the other historical records be silent about such a phenomenally-ginormous and significant event as the launch of merely even only the first generation ship, never mind the 69,999 others - and presumably more - that were to follow supposedly relatively shortly afterwards?
IMHO, redaction and retconning should not be necessary if homework had only been done properly beforehand. However, now that preparatory homework has been proven to have been lacking, I am of the opinion that is has become our task to find a single, exhaustive explanation for this - and other paradoxes and seeming contradictions - an explanation that makes logically-consistent sense, at least within an in-universe framework.
Commander Wagar, in his 'Wagar on Writing' Twitch stream a while back, mentioned something to the effect that disbelief can be suspended fairly satisfactorily if the repeated question of 'Why?' can be answered at least five levels deep. So, I would eventually like to see at least a 'five-level' framework within which most disbelief can consistently be suspended for the entire (and all) Xlite universe(s).
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Redspear wrote: ↑Mon Nov 30, 2020 10:18 am
Some sci-fi novels are written by expanding a scientific idea and so the science leads to the fiction.
Science --> Fiction
Sometimes however, more artistic licence is employed and so it becomes more about the fiction dictating the science.
What we may have with Oolite however is the game dictating the fiction and then the science. If you consider that it's predecessor had (for its day) the unusually detailed instructions that came with some lore attached and even a novella. So as a product at least, the pathway was more:
Game --> Fiction --> Science
That pathway is heading in the wrong direction for your tastes it would seem.
I think that it might be helpful to distinguish between RL (Real-Life) Science and IU (In-Universe) Science. My interpretation, Commander Redspear, is that, perhaps, you seem to have in mind in your first flow diagram:
*RL* Science --> Fiction
...and in your second flow diagram:
Game --> Fiction --> *IU* Science
Please correct me if my interpretation is off-target.
RL and IU Science might require some handwavium to associate the two with each other. (TBH, my thoughts are still rather unclear about this topic at the moment. I just thought I'd mention something that popped up in my head when I read the thread, in a further attempt to clarify communications.)
[/two pence]
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Redspear wrote: ↑Mon Nov 30, 2020 10:18 am
However, this is a solo game, so whatever makes you happy
It keeps me happy to try make sense of all the confusion.