Sci-fi Weapons, Vehicles and Equipment

Isn't a Space Opera a form of Science Fiction? Sci-Fi is a pretty wide net, with differing levels of phlebotinum interference.

"Artificial gravity clothing" wont protect the internal organs, though. That's why you need every cubic centimeter of flesh supported somehow, at the very least.

But Fighteer is right in the sense that here we have this literally history-shattering new technology, intertial damping (or artificial gravity, same argument), a device that cleverly used could give humanity nearly god-like power, and the story depicts them using it... to orient floors in a spacecraft? That's blatant Reed Richards Is Useless applied to technology.

I think Corvidae's scenario can be made plausible with sufficient battle damage to the automatic systems.

I'm trying to be concise: the difference is more of gradations along the Mohs Scale Of Sci Fi Hardness, with hard sci-fi at one end and Space Opera at the other.

I assume that the artificial gravity field would extend far enough that you wouldn't need a generator for literally every cell and/or molecule. The inverse square law really kills the concept here unless you handwave that away as well. A gravity field created by a device on a belt that could provide 1 G of downward force on someone's feet would spaghettify their guts.

The key takeaway from this conversation is that, once you arrive at this point, you're talking about space magic, which can have any rules you want. Any semblance of adherence to physics is out the window, looking in wistfully from the rain (or suffocating in the vacuum of space, as may be).

Edited by Fighteer on Jul 22nd 2019 at 12:13:57 PM

I like how Mass Effect did it, with the titular technology being used pretty much everywhere. Propulsion, artificial gravity, weapons, industry and manufacture, flashy superpowers etc. ...And toothbrushes, apparently.

The catch with synthetic gravity is how small we can make the devices. Pretty much every setting of mine with artificial gravity makes it clear that a device that can literally generate gravitational pull can't be smaller than a household fridge.

Edited by EchoingSilence on Jul 22nd 2019 at 2:45:34 PM

I'm trying to imagine what an anti-gravity toothbrush would do. Float in midair whilst cleaning your teeth? Like some sort of mechanized Oxpecker bird?

You'd better hope it doesn't break down and yank your teeth out.

Edited by Fighteer on Jul 22nd 2019 at 4:21:55 AM

Rapid mass fluctuations or something? Like one of those vibrating ones?

It shakes plaque off of your teeth with gravitational waves. Because if you're going to warp science, you should go for maximum overkill.

Edited by Fighteer on Jul 22nd 2019 at 4:26:08 AM

Exactly.

and Pretty much.

"My toothbrush is a Cision Pro Mark IV. It uses tiny Mass Effect fields to break up plaque and massage the gums."

Edited by Corvidae on Jul 22nd 2019 at 10:58:34 AM

Would there be any need for a dedicated team of software engineers on a starship?

Toying with an idea of mundane” jobs and making a story out of that instead off the usual fighting and killing

Depends on how it is controled, on an automated ship I could definatly see those kinds of technician roles.

I mean some one has to fix something if it goes wrong, and can you always contact the manufacture?

@Fox Hell yes. A modern ship needs it's own teams of electricians, plumbers, and cooks already and I'm pretty sure they now need sysadmins. Just keeping the crew from compromising the firewall would be a full time job.

Humans would be largely irrelevant as far as operating and controlling a starship goes, but they would be vital as troubleshooters and mechanics.

Pray gravity manipulation technology like that never reaches the adult entertainment industry.

Oh, I pray it does. Porn is always an early adopter.

A lot of my settings even with more sci-fi hardness always keep human crews to troubleshoot, repair stuff and make the call on certain actions. Ships may be automated but they keep a crew so there is at least someone to blame, compared to automated ships which may get hacked or suffer a programming glitch and proceed to cause trouble.

"Porn is always an early adopter."

More true than you think. Advances are being made in autonomous robots who appear human, and guess which industry is leading the way?

Given that we’ve mastered automated long-endurance aircraft and are coming close to having practical automated long-endurance sea vessels, I’d imagine any future far enough away to have casual space travel would also have fairly robust automation capabilities.

As I said it's less for the need for human crews and more to keep someone on board they can more easily blame than a programming glitch if something goes wrong. It's easier to blame someone enlisted with a nametag than it is to state that the 20,000 casualties from that poor shot upon a space station was a programming error that just got missed in the hundreds of ships that are out there.

Are you kidding? A technical failure is way easier to blame than a person.

It’s not like you’d really be able to blame the people to any significant degree anyways, since a ship like that would necessarily be automated to a high degree even with people on board. To use your example of a space station being destroyed, it’s not like humans would ever be manually directing fire control anyways.

Edited by archonspeaks on Jul 23rd 2019 at 10:52:22 AM

A technical failure tends to point blame back at the manufacturer, and can cause harm to their reputation and/or market value. A human failure can point to bad hiring or training practices, but is much easier in general to pass off as not a systematic issue.

Think about self-driving cars. People get into crashes all the time: millions per year with tens of thousands of deaths, yet we just accept it because people will be people. But if a self-driving car gets into a crash or kills someone, it's big news, even if that software is ten times safer than a human overall. There'll be investigations, financial consequences for the car maker, loss of sales, etc.

If a Hyundai car is involved in a fatal crash because someone drove across the median while on their phone, Hyundai's stock doesn't fall and people don't suddenly switch to Fords. Everyone understands that individual humans can be fallible but equally thinks that they themselves are better at driving (a falsehood but basic to human nature). If a Tesla on Autopilot drives across the median and crashes, people will panic about it because they think it represents a systematic flaw with the software, potentially getting them killed through no fault of their own. ^note This isn't completely fair, since Tesla requires that all cars on Autopilot be supervised and is constantly updating their self-driving software, but it is at least understandable.

Or, let's say a car crashes and kills someone because of a faulty wheel. If people believe (and investigations confirm) that this represents a design flaw in that vehicle, it can cause huge financial and reputational penalties for the manufacturer.

Look at Boeing's current catastrophic troubles over the 737-Max. They screwed up their software design leading to several fatal crashes and several near-crashes, but kept trying to pass it off as pilot error until planes were literally grounded and their orders dried up.

No, corporations would much rather blame individual people for failures than the designs of their products.

Edited by Fighteer on Jul 23rd 2019 at 3:38:17 PM

Plus it is a bit of a Necessary Weasel to allow human crews on ships or else we're not telling a story or focusing on microchips in space which is a pretty tough thing to do.

The moment hackers find access to self driving cars it’s going to die in the pits of hell.