I always liked this excerpt from the old Cyberpunk 2013 supplement, "Near orbit" (2020 expanded on this book with "deep space".) - from 1989. REAL space combat will be days and weeks of tedium followed by a few seconds of frantic action and hoping (so not unlike REAL combat) that you survive. You can have realism, or you can have something that allows the PCs some kind of agency. Too much one way and you get Phoenix command, too much the other and you get AoS.
This is what I am talking about. What we have here is a bullshit explanation that preserves the known laws of thermodynamics. All we need is a little more advanced tech and it just so happens we have a ton of handwavium all over the place. A Hacker on a system computer spoofing the reported dopler/IR reading and yelling at the pilot to watch out for windows because she can't hack the MKI eyeball are all in the realm of possibilities with whne you have some wormhole magic and handwavium. … now talking about the laws of thermodynamics, werewolves push it to far. That shit is just magic.
Fair point, but how long would a stationary (stable orbit) system remain unknown and what sort of energy requirements would this directional cloak require? How feasible is it to hide the array from all potential spies and is 30 to 60 minutes of detection time really manageable? What sort of mission are we talking about here, blockade running? Is it possible to make a stealth dogfighting ship? Probably not, but on the other hand if all it needs is to get close enough, then maybe? Also keeping in mind it is now something like 100 years since we discovered we could make a metal array that silently screams into the night and by listening to the echoes determine the position of a heavier than air metal and cloth flying machine. Infinity is twice that time into the future, there is leeway for some Trek science to turn out to be true and actual hard scifi (but with terms and conditions that Star Trek couldn't possibly imagine)
I have to narrow down a little, because at the moment My interest for the "+Realistic / -Realistic" approach of Infinity Background versus arguments grounded in "True Hard Science" is JUST for how could have the impact of making the Roleplaying Game based on the Universe of Infinity more or less AMUSING. . . If a Gaming Group is made of 3-4 Persons ALL quite grounded in various "High Science Theory" (let's say all College Students / Professionals in Scientific Job applications such as Engineers) this could be entertaining even if coded in "Real Physics". . . For an Hypothethical "Infinity Battle Science" one Player could calculare "Vector Thrusts Vs. Inertia" in moving the Ship inside an Asteroid Cloud / Comet Tail / Wrecked Spacestation Debris; another could execute complex "Sensor Sweeps Vs. E.M.P. Pulse Scrambles" for the VERY Hypothethical "Spaceship Stealth Conundrum" while another check the inertial drive to predict where enemy vessels will be on a probable trajectory to be intercepted by small "Railgun Mass Driver Artillery" too small to be properly intercepted by Point Defence Systems (that could be more effective against Smart Missile volleys). . . But if NOT ANY PLAYER is interested in this then the risk is to have "Realistic Spaceship Combat" as mind-boggingly BORING !!! Someone pointed rightly Cyberpunk2020 by Talsorian as an excellet example (after all Infinity was born of a Game Campaign of the same System, played many years ago by Gutièr and the other "C.B. Staff Core"). . . That Game had the same problem with the Netrunning Hacking System that narrated the Computer Cowboys diving into the Net as ascting THREE times more quickly than "Realspace" Player Characters; not only this made them doing x3 More Roleplaying but also acting in an environment where the other Player Characters could not DO ANYTHING. . . A Rule System often abused by Players that were "Tech Nerd Enthusiasts" (that tried to accrue the Game around themselves with incomprehensible Jargon) and that ruined many otherwise entertaining, amusing Campaigns. . . The same is if in the previous example there is a Player that wants to play a "Heavy Infantry Specialist" optimized for Close Combat (let's say a Pan-O Magister Knight); while the other Players do their "NASA Stuff" that one is bored to death, sitting in the Troop Cargo Bay and hoping for a Boarding Action by Enemies that would probably NEVER happen. . . . . . . . . How many SUCCESFUL "Space Combat Wargames" are hard physics simulations and how many are totally unrealistic. . .?? . . . . . . The proposed idea beforehand to "Abstract" the Wargame Rules with "Single Ships" in lieu of Infantry Miniatures is a good starting point; I think that UPON a Basic, Amusing comprehensible Ruleset could be THEN constrained "Real Physics" LATER and not the other way around. . . . . . . . Infinity as a Gameworld has a lot of suspension of disbelief (Teseum and Nessium as "Space Magic Handwavium"; illogical physics of Ariadnan Dogwarriors; Stealth Camo directly ripped from "Invisible Ghosts" Animes rather than R.W. Prototypes; the idea that "Voodootech" is a as good as "A Wizard Did It!"; and so on) even if is far, Far, FAr Away from the absurdities of Warhammer40.000, but I do not think that this detract from a succesful and amusing Game. . . The same could apply to a Spaceship Combat system. . .
The FTL travel uses wormholes, which are allowed by General Relativity (even if the math does require them to have negative mass!) If you think launching 80x Hubble Space Telescope equivalents requires anywhere near unlimited resources, you need to re-examine your definition of unlimited. I suspect that the US has launched something close to that between the various missile launch detection IR cameras (23 known launched in the Defense Support Program, and another 10 in the successor Space-Based Infrared System) and various spy satellites (16 in the KH11 series alone). Not cheap, yes. A cost you'd be willing to pay? I'd say yes. But I'm also going to note that you can often get cheaper units when you buy a series of 32 or more since the R&D costs are spread across more units. Though the delta-vee budget for getting the 'space traffic control' satellites into a solar-polar orbit is probably obscene, it wouldn't be hard to do with even a solar sail, though it'd be hard to stealth a solar sail. The 'Misty' satellites are radar and visible-light stealthy, and are believed to be comparable to the earlier KH11 satellites (or Hubble) in capabilities, so it can be done if you only need a couple KW of power. It's megawatts of power that are nearly impossible to hide. But they keep trying to make it harder scifi, by mentioning real-world tech (or extrapolations of it). Like those rocket types. You tell me what kind of rocket it is, I can tell you what kind of performance it can have (rocket engines are a solved engineering problem, and are a very mature technology). And that's what is throwing me for a loop. You can't do scifi as hard as they are trying to make it with stealth in space.
Most space combat wargames are spun from someone's visual scifi settings. Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, even Battlestar Galactica. Babylon 5 Wars came the closest of the 'popular' visual scifi to getting physics right. Everyone else is stuck in the "dogfights in space" mentality. Even Trek. The only hard-physics space game I know of is Attack Vector: Tactical. Full 3d, full newtonian physics. Designing a ship requires calculus (so isn't supported by the publisher. You only get the ships he's designed for his Ten Worlds setting, no rolling your own ships)! The publishers of AVT also make a less-complex game called Squadron Strike, which is the core engine for the Saganami Island Tactical Simulator (Honor Harrington universe). There's even a smartphone app to help track where the enemy ship is in relation to your ship's firing arcs, and it's highly recommended. AVT would work OK for gaming The Expanse, but you'd need to convince Ken Burnside (the designer) to share his ship-design calculus. Squadron Strike does let you build your own ships, but the spreadsheet makes Excel cry like a little girl. AVT is for single-ship duels. Squadron Strike can handle up to about a dozen ships a side, once you know the game and take all the speed-increasing shortcuts. Full 3d is definitely an acquired taste, I struggle to wrap my brain around it. (Submarine warfare is effectively 2d)
That's the thing, you can't get full solar system detection with 80-ish sensors. 3d. But never mind that. I think you just need to let go of the little snippets they are using to tie things back to the real world. Take them for what they are, window dressing. Nothing more or nothing less than the technobabble from Star Trek.
Yes, with a ... 4deg field of view (pretty wide-angle for a telescope), you'd need 32,400 sensors for total 360x360 spherical coverage (maybe more, if I didn't do the math right). You mount that as the 'fire alarm' sensor on every single telescope, so when a new source lights up your 'fire alarm' you point the telescopes at it to see what the hell is moving. The timing of when your 'fire alarm' goes off gives you baseline for determining range, though that will take some additional Trigonometry to determine how far apart any two sensors are at any given time. The point is that 80 narrow-field-of-view telescopes orbiting at ~3AU make it very difficult to know where to radiate even if you know where all the sensors are, since that puts a single telescope every 60 degrees horizontal and 30 degrees vertical centered on the Sun. It'd take additional shells of telescopes to cover the outer solar system, but as soon as you got within the orbit of Mars you'd be hard pressed to have a safe direction to radiate with this setup. I think the farthest Wormhole is roughly the orbit of Saturn, so you'd want a ring a little beyond that. Drek technobabble had the 'advantage' of being obvious window dressing.
I hear you, and I even sympathise. I, too, enjoy hard scifi. But that's not Infinity. Seriously... Werewolves. And Plasma Rifles. And whatever the fuck is going on with hacking (seriously, none of it makes any sense).
Infinity is pseudo-realistic. By that I mean, it's not realistic at all in places, but it both has an aesthetic of sci-fi realism, it tries to explore the ramifications of things in a sensible and believeable fashion, it tries to create a somewhat acceptable justification for things being how they are and it avoids saying "this work because it's the genre." How does the Empire function in Star Wars? How does Coruscant work? Billions, trillions of people? How does the Empire remotely begin to control and organise on that scale? How does space combat work? Why are 1000 Jedi considered a genuine force for anything in the setting? Answer; because it's a Space Fantasy setting, it works because it does. No explanation needed. Infinity says that hey, these interstellar nations exist because they have a population of X and ALEPH organises it all etc. Why is hacking like it is, very cyberpunk and movie/comic style? Because quantronic processing means that encryption breaking is just a matter of time and power but on a scale of seconds, minutes, hours depending on processing capabilities. Why? Because neomaterials, and it means that wireless systems are made up of very short range but powerful receiver/transmitters so you need to get close and do computer magic to make it work. Okay yeah that's probably bullshit, but it's plausible, pseudo-realistic, it's not just "because." Space combat is the same. They have stealth, because Neomaterials mean they can dump heat signatures in quantum sub-space. Probably bullshit, but vaguely plausible, and it means naval strategy looks like X as a result. That's fine. Pseudo-realistic space combat; not actually realistic at all, but feels like it, has a veneer of it, isn't just dogfights in spehs because.
Also it's easy to point out how something can't work. It is so much harder but more interesting to point out how something maybe can with just a bit of new tech.
Never thought I'd have to explain the difference between Unobtanium and Handwavium here. Unobtanium is something that we can't get (at least not in anything resembling useful quantities at anything resembling a sane cost), but we know how the laws of physics say it'd have to work. Antimatter is unobtanium. We've made small quantities of it in the lab, and we know that it behaves like the theories say it should. But trying to make usable quantities of the stuff is beyond us at present. Handwavium is pure fucking magic. It works this way because we say it does, even if the laws of physics prohibit things from working that way. Scientific Laws are mathematical representations of how things behave. Example, Newton's Laws of Motion, or Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion. Or the Laws of Thermodynamics. You can ignore a human law like a speed limit with relative impunity (or, at worst, a fine). Attempting to ignore a scientific law usually results in deaths (often with a side order of large explosions). Hacking in Infinity is largely handwavium, but it's based on the early internet days where the assumption of the people building things was that anyone talking to the computer was an authorized user. Sadly, M$ still hasn't un-learned that idea. Teseum and Nesium are somewhere between the two, more handwavium than anything else (mostly because we haven't gotten any concrete examples of what they do). But neomaterials in general are not prohibited by the laws of physics (neomaterials tend to be applications of quantum-mechanical effects at scales we don't currently expect them to happen, and QM is fucking weird). You run into big problems storytelling when you try to use Unobtanium in place of Handwavium. And that's what has happened with Infinity recently.
To be fair, I don't think that all of us were ever under the impression that anything to do with Teseum, Nesium and the other Infinity "neomaterials" was in any related to the potential of real materials with that title in the real world. And, furthermore, that isn't the only way the phrase "unobtanium" is used. It's also used widely in engineering to stand in for a material with perfect properties to suit a specific purpose but which does not exist. In which context it's more what you are calling "handwavium" in the first place.
I have to correct you there, Sec. 9 et. all. Some interesting and time wasting links. Applied Phebotinum - Process Unobtanium - Materials Handwavium - Bullshit Though there does seem to be some crossover between each of course. However, if you compare what someone from 200-300 years ago would have thought about 'modern technology' we'd all be witches and warlocks using magic. Technology also has an exponential growth rate: So, infinity's technology wouldn't necessarily be unrealistic even relating to laws of thermal dynamics. A law is only a law till it's broken and in the past 100-150 years we bent, broke and made up entirely new laws and Maths. Warfare in space would probably be run by computers, unless the singularity tries to destroy us, then it could feasibly be like 40k or Battlestar galactica huge massive armored ships and battery's firing weapons with trajectorys being caculated on manual devices or similar to WWI. Or, it could be by teeny ships unless particles or energy are accelerated till a computer can't calculate it and then there'd be huge armored ships like Star wars. Or, space combat could be so rare due to deadliness and lack of Applied Pheblotinum and Unobtanium it'd turn out like the expanse. War technology is driven by the problems of the era and the technology that's available. So 'realistic' space combat to us may--> probably has no relation to how it'll actually turn out. So it's all handwavium.
Cypher, you evil bastard. Linking to TVTropes without the should-be-mandatory Evil Website Warning (aka TVTropes will destroy your life). You're looking at it from the wrong direction. Engineering use: The laws of physics say I need something with the following properties [ list ] to do this job. I can't make that stuff, but if I could, this device would work in the following manner [ explanation ]. Again, we know that properties it has (or needs to have), which are not prohibited by the laws of physics. Like that example for heat-sinking Thermal Goo. Handwavium doesn't get into the properties required for something to work, it just does because the author says it works. It's like OrkTek from 40k, it works because they believe it does. My complaint is that CB isn't using the proper narrative tool for the job. Don't use Unobtanium when you should be using Handwavium (or Applied Phlebotinum), or vice versa. If you say that an antiship torpedo accelerates at 12 gee for 40 hours, don't go on to say that it reaches 0.6cee at terminal velocity. Basic math says speed at burnout will be 17,280,000 m/s, which is 0.0576cee, 5.76% of lightspeed, not 60.00% of lightspeed. All that matters is that the torpedo has plenty of capability to chase down an opposing ship, because ships can't accelerate at more than 3 gee for any length of time. Don't tell me what kind of rocket motors you're using, because there's an entire damn website full of rocket performance data and I can tell you just how bright that drive plume will be during a burn. Not to mention how far away the drive plume will be dangerous. It's all basic math that doesn't even need calculus! It barely counts as freaking algebra. You want hacking to be able to mess with someone's power armor remotely? No problem. It's Handwavium that it works that way. You should probably have some rules for how your Handwavium works (hey, Hacking rules!) to keep things consistent, but that's still Handwavium. It works that way because the author says so. You want FTL travel? OK, that's Handwavium, since Einstein was a jerk. What effects do you want your FTL to have? Well, drop-in-anywhere FTL Trek style is honestly pretty nasty from a storytelling POV. If there's no way to detect someone coming, they can destroy your planet with no warning or recourse. You get more interesting stories when your FTL requires some "geography", like a wormhole. This wormhole acts like a mountain pass, and gives you nice blockade stories among other things. So once you drop out of FTL you need to travel into the system. I'm going to have to rebuild my old spreadsheet, which had a lot of the formulas for travel time and things. It doesn't really take a whole lot of acceleration to get places in a reasonable time. Earth to Mars the slow way (Hohmann transfer orbit) is 333 days. If you can do a continuous burn at 1gee, you can get from Earth to Mars in about 4 days. Slow that down to a more sane 1cm/sec and you can get there ~40 days (IIRC, I can't even find the damn formulas right now to rebuild the spreadsheet). Note that when you're talking acceleration, it's a square function, so half the travel time requires twice the acceleration. But please, for your own sanity, use Metric (yes, even us dumbass 'Murricans). You don't want to do rocket equations in feet/miles and pounds/tons, the conversions just get hideously ugly.
I have worked with a lot of Engineers. That is not what they ever meant when they used the term "unobtanium". But I'm willing to accept that's just another cultural and language difference. America really is just another world (also, lol @ anyone who even CONSIDERS doing serious math in Imperial... also lol @ Americans using IMPERIAL). I don't think the problem is in anything CB have done here, but I guess if you really want to argue that it is then you can. The real science just doesn't fit the setting.
Infinity space combat is never going to be based on the actual mathematics of rocket science and if you want it to be then you are going to be perpetually disappointed. Infinity space combat is going to be pseudo-realistic, that is, not realistic, but kind of feels like it is, in the same way that cyberpunk and lower-tech Space Opera often does. Also we are spending wayyyyy too much time arguing about the definition of terminology which is tangetial to the discussion at best for it to really be productive. Let's actually talk about what we know about Infinity space combat. And JCJF is right, what we know is that it's not remotely "realistic" and wanting it to be is kind of like wishing Hacking isn't a thing. Ships have stealth, sufficient armour to withstand secondary weapons without harm etc.
Funny thing is how that came from England, which got it from the Romans originally, despite not really wanting to join the Empire XD There is a difference between "things work like this" and "thinks work like thise because I say so, tomorrow work like that, and I keep merging stuff no one is sure of anything, but I use nice technobabble as filler to justify anything". That is lazy. And I am against making an effort to read something that was written with no other purpose than just enable the conclusions. It's like the author goes and writes at the end of the page "thus the Japanese gained Independence from Yu Jing" or "Thus Merovingia got taken out of the front lines due to massive casualties", and then proceeds to fill the rest of the page with whatever he wants, without giving it any thought at all. Of course, never let some hours of planning save weeks of programming! Seriously, if we can't agree in a base of concepts, communication will be slower and ardous. I will be sincere here: what we know about Infinity has been, until the RPG came out, mostly implied and undefined by purpose, since that tends to let anyone fill the gaps the way he feels more comfortable with and saves effort on the Game Master. Once we get to defining things... consistency is key, and Infinity lacks consistency. Heck, a tester told me once "the system can't sustain that kind of questions without breaking down"... :/
None of the examples raised here have anything to do with consistency. So I guess I'm curious what you think is so inconsistent. But I feel like it's a massive swerve off-topic, so maybe if it is just say so and we can move on.
Some people using "unobtanium" as "material hard to obtain but critical for the working of stuff" and "theoretically possible material we don't have access at this moment" for example. Clearing the point the same term was being used for different (if not totally) things means better understanding and easier communication.
