The Quick Questions About World Building Thread

Likewise fair!

Looking at the page, I think that this simply means that "Intellectual Animal" is the broader parent-trope, of which Nearly Normal Animal, Civilised Animal, and Funny Animal are specific types.

True! But without knowing the specifics, it doesn't seem unreasonable to have suggested something that falls within that broad space.

Okay, that sounds like it could work, then. ^_^

Fair!

(There's debate about a few animals—but those tend to not be as hugely social as humans, I gather.)

I think that the most likely candidate would be the chimpanzee—and that only reaches "small child" levels, if I recall correctly.

Hah! Also fair!

Aaaaah! I recall you talking about this species before!

Knowing the above could have helped earlier. :P

Ah, okay—that does clarify things! Thank you for explaining! ^_^

Hmm... In that case, I could also simply see these beings congregating out of a desire for complex social interaction.

(Especially if there are additional drives to congregate, as we've already discussed.)

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Mar 30th 2024 at 4:55:44 PM

Yeah, I did bring it up elsewhere. To be fair, it's been a while since I had done so, and I didn't memorize the names of those who had given me feedback on the questions I had asked.

PS: Just realized that I had botched one of the quoteblocks' markup in my previous post. Fixed it.

Edited by MarqFJA on Mar 30th 2024 at 11:03:44 AM

Oh, I'm not expecting you to remember whether I specifically had responded to such an earlier post! (My apologies: I didn't mean to get that impression.)

Rather, I think that I was just suggesting that it might have helped at the start to have briefly stated that:

• These are the same as in that previous post
  • (This would aid any who might have seen and remembered that earlier post)

• They're not merely NearlyNormalAnimals, but essentially humans, with human intellect, but rendered more ape-like (if I recall correctly) and with their ability to pursue technology locked off.
  • (This would aid anyone else)

It's not a big thing, to be clear. I just feel that it would have made the discussion easier to have had that information at the outset.

Yeah, well, another part of the problem is that I don't exactly remember where I had posted about this species last time. ^^;

Hahah, that is very fair! ^^;

What if you used heat to improve the lifting ability of helium blimps? Not like a hot air balloon with an open burner but an electrical heater at the bottom of the gas envelope, possibly powered by induction. Having the heater at the bottom of the envelope would cause the helium to circulate, with hot helium rising away from the heater and cold helium replacing it. This could give you not only more lift but also greater control since you can turn the heater off when you want to descend.

Just airship things.

That's a thing, (kind of) it's called a Roziere Balloon. They're pretty fuel efficient, but expensive and mostly see use in endurance ballooning things.

If you stuck an engine on it to make it a hybrid thermal airship, my guess is you'd get something with all the disadvantages of a thermal airship (slow, difficult to steer, slower and harder to steer when there's wind, pitches every time you change the throttle setting, low weight capacity relative to size) with none of the advantages (cheap, easy storage).

The Roziere balloon doesn't heat the Helium. It might do so accidentally but it's really a hot air balloon with a helium reserve buoyancy. It's definitely not what I'm talking about and doesn't take advantage of helium's thermal expansion. The fact is that Helium expands faster than normal air when heated and I'm wondering if that lift can be compared with room temperature hydrogen.

Heating helium directly sounds like an excellent way to have it all leak out of the envelope. It's hard enough to contain when it's at a low energy, the thermal expansion of the envelope combined with the higher energy of the helium and the helium undergoing convection sounds like a recipe for very quickly running out of helium, and you obviously can't do this with cheaper hydrogen because it's a fire hazard.

Also I'm skeptical that turning off the heaters to give buoyancy control would actually work. Hot air works as a lifting gas because it's less dense than the air around it, but helium needs to be kept in an enclosed container so I don't think heating it would really reduce its density that much, except in the sense of "forcing it out through the walls of the container"

All you'd need is some extra slack in the envelope. Fill the blimp with less helium then normal and then use the heater to make it reach full expansion. This should reduce the helium needed providing more net lift.

Helium is a scarce enough resource on Earth that we don't need to be wasting it on airships.

Basically the whole point of helium blimps is that you don't need to heat it for buoyancy. Heating takes a lot of energy, which cuts into your weight limit. At some point, more fuel to stay buoyant will reduce overall buoyancy.

The economics of slow flight only really work if it's also very efficient flight. A blimp needs no power to stay afloat, only move, unlike an aicraft.

I'm re-thinking the FTL method for my sci fi setting. For now, I'm using jump/teleportation FTL like in Dune or BSG, but I've always liked hyperspace.

My issue is that I don't know how to make hyperspace work without just ripping off of Star Wars.

What are the different kinds of hyperspace out there?

[edit: I misread the OP; my apologies! Feel free to ignore this section...]
I suppose that my question is that of how your version of hyperspace bears similarity to that of Star Wars.
[/edit]

But otherwise, I've long been partial to the depiction of hyperspace as an actual sub-/super-universe through which we see the characters travel, which corresponds spatially to the "main" universe", but which happens to be "smaller" than the "main" universe.

This can be seen in works like Babylon 5, Star Control II, and (arguably) The Jaunt from Skeleton Crew.

(The version in Star Control I find particularly interesting for the way in which hyperspace interacts with gravity.)

That said... hyperspace is so widely used in sci-fi that I'm not sure that another work using it would be likely to be seen as ripping off Star Wars unless it really looks and feels the same.

In general, Wikipedia seems to have a rather nice article on the subject, including description of the two general "forms" of hyperspace.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on May 3rd 2024 at 11:23:58 AM

Well, to be more specific, I'm trying to evoke the Feudal Future trope where space is big and mysterious and ripe for adventures.

I don't like Star Wars' FTL methods. From what I understand, it seems like any guy with a spaceship can hop from one end of the galaxy to the other in the same day.

I still want it to take time to get places, but not as slow as Traveller.

In Stargate, hyperspace is effective a tunnel through subspace, which in turn is a parallel dimension with different properties. Speeds vary wildly, ranging from weeks to reach a different star to going to another galaxy in mere hours.

But if you are looking for exciting, it's hard to beat Warhammer 40K where hyperspace is almost literally hell.

Ah! Then I heartily recommend the "sub-/super- universe" approach.

Characters still have to actually fly to their destinations, so by adjusting the relative size of hyperspace you can determine how quickly people can travel in your setting.

And as characters have to pass through a space of some sort, you can potentially include in that space convolutions that might send people off course, or allow for the discovery of new places; or hazards that make passage exciting; or even mysteries to be discovered within hyperspace itself...

(This is—in one form or another—the approach taken by Warhammer 40k, as mentioned by , and the three works that I mentioned in my post.)

In my setting, they use conventional multi-mouth wormholes for FTL travel. Because of the strongly curved spacetime, their insides look like a kaleidoscope - or more like a Calabi-Yau manifold. And since fluctuations in curvature can "scoop up" particles and accelerate them to relativistic speeds, they are often bathed in blue Cherenkov radiation.

I'm going to be That Guy again and note that any depiction of FTL Travel in fiction serves a necessary function of transporting people across interstellar distances without the immense time and effort it would take to do it the "normal" way. Once you've got that premise in mind, the rest is mainly Narrative Filigree, giving you excuses to develop lots of subplots around whatever Applied Phlebotinum you come up with.

ETA: The Humanx Commonwealth setting features a fairly novel form of FTL involving using an artificial gravity well to "pull" a spacecraft faster and faster until it breaks through the speed of light. (This is deeply unscientific but we're already overlooking that.)

Travel times using the "posigravity drive" range from days to months depending on distance. It's not exactly a Feudal Future but there are definitely a ton of planets at the ass end of the Commonwealth that aren't frequently visited or explored.

Edited by Fighteer on May 4th 2024 at 10:37:10 AM

eh when someone starts their question with "i want FTL but not sure what kind", i think its obvious the realism/hard sci fi train has already departed.

It's why I lean towards hyperspace as my preferred style of FTL. I'm not a scientist, so hyperspace allows me to make whatever rules I need for the setting to work, because it's a separate dimension from our own.

My current project, though, has a system very similar to BSG, which uses jump-teleportation instead of hyperspace. I think it's perfect for tension and drama

I don't have to worry about some reader calling me out about bad science because I made a mistake about tachyons.

I'm going for a semi-hard Space Opera. Aside from the FTL, everything else in the setting is at least theoretically possible. With the few things that are outright right fantastical, I at least try to extrapolate the implications of them.

Edited by Count_Spatula on May 7th 2024 at 6:06:47 AM

that WIP setting I had shelved for now also used Hyperspace, for similar reasons.

That said I have to wodner if anyone had considered "folding" space for FTR as I think the aformentioned also had elements of that.

Folding space has indeed appeared in previous works, I do believe.

(Offhand, I recall it being the explanation for how FTL worked in the horror sci-fi Event Horizon.)

In fact, Wikipedia lists "folding space" as one of the two primary forms of hyperspace.

(There, I gather, the "hyperspace" being the spatial or temporal dimension in which the "standard" space is folded. That is, if "standard" space is a two-dimensional sheet, then "hyperspace" is the third dimension used for its folding.

So our (at baseline) three-dimensional space (here I omit time) would presumably be folded in a fourth dimension.)

Wikipedia also lists at least one other work that used it.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on May 7th 2024 at 12:44:00 PM

eh when someone starts their question with "i want FTL but not sure what kind", i think its obvious the realism/hard sci fi train has already departed.

I tend to treat Artificial Gravity the same way, because while the only condition that GR imposes on FTL is the need for negative mass-energy, most AG concepts I've seen tend to be not even theoretical physics.

TBH even more so than FTL, artificial gravity is a practicality handwave. For shows, pretend-zero-G is expensive and complicated. For games, 3d motion is complicated. The only place it truly doesn't matter is books, but books still commonly follow the conventions of other media.

Shields are a similar standard scifi handwave because it means your vfx department isnt so expensive.