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Okay, so I'm reading the excellent BZ2 Strategy Guide when I come across this in Resource Model Section...and I quote "What doesn't make sense is that only ONE Extractor is ever ative at time. Even in a fantasy realm as Battlezone 2, this does not make sense and is counter-intuitive."

Its totally intuitive. The recycler has only one teleporter to teleport the scrap from the extractor to the recycler. Obviously there has to be some teleporter technology. And the fact that we don't have teleporter bombs or tanks teleported into enemy bases means the technology is still at some early limited stage.

But I can hear it now, "Okay mr smarty pants. How come is it that if your one teleporter per recycler theory is true you can still have a dozen scavengers teleporting scrap to the recycler all day long."

Well..okay...hmm...oh yeah I got it. The biometal in the pools is unrefined and thus constantly changing at the molecular level. The scrap on the ground has already been refined and is unchanging at the molecular level. Its just broken into pieces. Therefore you need a special quantum computer the size of an assault tank constantly helping the teleporter get a lock on the extractor's unrefined liquid biometal. And it can only work on one teleportation beam at a time. But the scavengers themselves teleport their stuff back to the recyclers with smaller, simplier teleporters which already have the molecular structure of refined biometal already programmed in. '

So we learned two things today. First the resource model totally makes sense. And second, I desperately need a girlfriend.

Just you wait until you see the rest of the science we've come up with. Wormhole generators are awesome, and the implications of the Thinspace concept Nielk and I developed for CP2 still fascinates me.

AHadley wrote:Just you wait until you see the rest of the science we've come up with. Wormhole generators are awesome, and the implications of the Thinspace concept Nielk and I developed for CP2 still fascinates me.

I'm having a hard time with the concept of thinspace. What does it do,let us move faster?

Not faster; instantly. Think of space as a flat plane, with depressions where the thinspace is (at the cores). You can punch a hole straight out of one of these and back in at another.

Light takes less time to travel through less matter.
Matter takes less time to travel through less space. Or more accurately, distance is a measure of space, so if there is less space along one path to a location vs another, that area is less space is faster.

So, if the very fabric of space is thinner, as in there is less actual space there, would it not be easier to escape from the confines of space? Just like if you have a wall that is made of less material, being less dense than another wall, it is easier to break through?

Probably considerably more complex than that, in the 5+ dimensions the difference between forces such as light, matter, magnetism, momentum, gravity etc are not so distinct as they appear to us, they are all just subtly different expressions of the flow of energies from one state to another within the infinite dimension 0 void we perceive as spacetime. To put it simply it is really just a question of manipulating the energies to form a area of null flow that equates to your location and your destination, then there is literally nothing between you and it and that includes the distance! The tricky bit is actually putting something through it, while maintaining the null flow. Its a damn fine party trick if you can pull it off without converting yourself into a brief burst of radiation, accidentally causing your planet to suddenly fall into its sun or indeed arriving minus one dimension critical to the continuation of existence.
It is rumored that it is quite possible to produce a personal transportation device that can be entirely powered by a potato or other suitable vegetable. However it is not clear how useful these devices are as while there are many rumored departures, there does seem to be a mysterious lack of arrivals...

See, that sounds awesome. Honestly it didn't come through in the article that this is what you meant. Mass travels faster through less space. Heh heh. That sounds like one of the things you'd read in a physics book that makes you think. But all things being equal mass does move through 1 km of space faster than 2 km of space. My question is, how would you notice the difference? The only way I could thing you'd notice, if you're in thinspace is by measuring the energy required to get you to a certain speed. That would mean that force = mass times accelleration would have to be changed to F=XMA with X being a variable defining the 'thickness of space'. That's not an argument against but rather an interesting result. An arguement against would be this: Wouldn't things get bigger as space got thinner? A space half as thin would have energy twice as powerful and the effect of energy transfer twice as great. Everything would require half the amount of energy to be the same size. So yeah, you'd go twice as fast but it would be meaningless because as space got thinner, you got bigger and things got farther away. Just a little something something to think about. I do like the idea though. And I think I can see how to argue against my own point of things becoming bigger.

You can't notice the difference, since your speed technically doesn't change. There is simply less distance between two points, but by being in this area of lower spatial density you experience it yourself and thus cannot tell it is there. It's something you would only notice with a sharp contrast in the change in density of space. Yes things get bigger, but only if your viewpoint is outside of space. Size is a measure of how much space you take. If space is 'thinner' you still need to take up the same amount. So items in thin-space would be bigger in the context of outside of space. To the person in thin-space, they would think they are normal sized. And furthermore, to anyone outside thin-space looking in, due to the curvature of light as it travels through the varying 'densities' of space-time everything looks normal size. Because it is.

Really the parallels to light through a medium help a lot to understand the idea. Another analog might be to take an elastic sheet, stretch out the middle section, and then count the threads when traveling across it. Then count the threads in the same distance without stretching the fabric. But now realize that in this analogy distance is threads and speed is threads/time, so what you measured, inches, meters, whatever, was outside of the system and that as an observer on the inside, you only know about threads per second.

It is difficult to explain well because it's hard to graph. If you took a picture of a grid and then pinched it, this is wrong. Doing so have the same amount of space, it is just compressed in the center and decompressed on the edges before returning to normal density. What this fictional phenomenon would graph as would be an area of LESS SQUARES somehow properly connected to an area of more. Like having a 5 by 5 area of grid somehow bordered by 10 on each side and then trying to measure the distance traveled on a line that goes through this anomalous section and a line which does not.



Something I am really bad at is using the right words. What I should be doing is putting scare quotes around anything that is being used in a reference frame outside of space. Two objects that are the same 'distance' may not be the same distance, as distance is a measure of space and 'distance' is a theoretical method to explain what a distance would be if all of space was of equal density.

Basically most sentient beings only perceive in the 4th dimension, most distortions in the 5+ dimensions go unobserved by them. Also the Void 0 dimension has no size or other properties to be measured in any meaningful anyway. It's (non) existence however does need to be taken into account when calculating anything else in the others as its "absence" is a critical pre-condition for the existence of all the others. Its easier to think of thick/thin space as if it were soup, some parts are thick and chunky while others are thin and greasy and all of it is swirling about in a pot of infinity that has no dimensions at all. Theoretically an area of pure void would permit not only instant travel but time travel too, however you cannot actually do this unless you don't actually exist as well (as far as we know). This neatly explains why fictional characters can time travel.
Some things, such as information, can be very very thin and can travel virtually instantly, quantum entanglement is an example of this actually happening.

2Sheds, I am basically talking about the fabric of space-time in however many dimensions exist, not exclusive to 3 or 4.

Yes. Problem is it all looks so very different depending on which dimension it is viewed from. I am assured, that from the 6th a substance known as Narrativium actually behaves much like chemicals from the 4th do and an entire periodic table of lives and events can be easily manipulated and transformed in whatever their equivalent of our kitchen sink is....Its probably best not to try and think about this too much, just because we can't.

Sorry about butting in on your fiction with my own nonsense. Just making it up as I go along.

MrTwosheds wrote:Sorry about butting in on your fiction with my own nonsense. Just making it up as I go along.

Yea and it's not going well considering mine was adapted and altered over several years including as much real physics as possible and creating the best possibility space when implemented in fiction while also creating strong restrictions to serve as a sort of sub-conflict in itself..

Credit to you for that. Although I would point out that the history of Sci Fi is littered with the bodies of authors who tried to do the same thing and have mostly failed. A good fictional concept should avoid being too specific when it comes to physics, next year another theory comes into fashion and the stories begin to look dated. Either make it plausible enough to get the plot to work without getting too deeply involved with the real physics, or make it so far out even the physicists cant figure out how it works.
Just a tip from a lifelong reader of Sci Fi.

At this point understanding anything beyond three dimensions is next to impossible to anyone without a theoretical physics doctorate, much less proving them.

So what if your scifi physics are proven wrong. Unicorns don't exist and stories still have those.