"Silly Bubble"

from StarControl Forums

I thought of a lore explanation for a tournament barrier....

It's an arcade game, sometimes you just have to shrug and say “It's just a game...” and accept something that you can easily poke holes in. You try to be a consistent and “realistic” as possible, but sometimes the game or the laws of reality make that impossible. There are things that even “you are in the wrong Place to understand” doesn't adequately explain. Or, if you prefer Babylon 5 too the PDU... “You have to surrender to toc.”

The good part of this explanation is that modern gamers already know the concept from Star Wars lore. Like most universes, you would say that combat only happens at sublight speed. Ships can force a fight with an “Interdiction Field”. The “Energy Barrier” map edge is the inner wall of the “interdiction field” used to pull another ship out of warp to fight it. At least it is assumed too fight... it would be considered “rude” to do this to someone just as a joke or something.

Then, in your story, try to gloss-over the “Interdiction Field” and avoid talking about it as much as possible. Or, if you want to go PDU style... turn it into a running joke of self-deprecating humor about all of the different ways that it isn't actually realistic;-)

So as just a first thought, maybe each race uses a different word for the “Bubble Environment” of a fight in the SCO universe. Like *Dance*/Orz in SC2. There are a LOT of words for a... circle, sphere, bubble, orb, circumference, radius, round thing, balloon, planet, ball. One race might express a sphere mathematically... anything that works. And they all share the same opinion, you guys blew it on consistency with this one! It's really easy for the sci-fi buffs to pop Stardock's silly bubble!

Haha!

 

 

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Reply #1 from StarControl Forums Top

One of the species, whoever it fits best with, might be excited to have finally encountered humans!

“Who do I contact to lodge a complaint with... let me see here... Oh, yeah, S-t-a-r-d-o-c-k Entertainment about this bubble thing I have to fight in? Our ships are very fast, and it just isn't fair to our kind. We believe that this is in violation of the Organic Rights Act of 2639, which gives us a right to lodge an official complaint with the offender.”

;-)

 

 

Reply #2 from StarControl Forums Top

So... an SCO “Interdiction Field” pulls a nearby ship out of hyperspace by creating an artificial bubble of normal space within hyperspace. The outer shell of the bubble is far too strong for ships to penetrate. The fight is taking place within this artificially created island of normal space within hyperspace. What you would see in Super Melee is a normal space star field area that is the playable map, and the cool looking hyperspace extending out into infinity outside of the “bubble”. The edge is like a pool table side bumper you bounce off of, and you can make it look whatever you imagine the “shell” of the bubble too be. I imagine it as an energy barrier like band of hyperspace color, but like twice as bright as the normal hyperspace. Then it would also be “blurry” like the Drak in B5 or looking through hot air can do like on a hot day or around planes running jet engines on a runway.

This could actually just be done as a “serious” thing, it makes as much sense as half of the other pseudo-science explanations of things out there in sci-fi that everyone just accepts. But if you do want to do the comedy thing of making fun of yourselves over its flaws, work out the pseudo-science of it in as great as detail as possible... so that the aliens have all that much more about it to play off of and pick apart, haha!

 

EDIT: BTW... If you are wondering about fights within a solar system, you can't get around the solar system on "maneuvering thrusters".  You need to use the "impulse engines" or "warp drive" for that.  So, to travel between planets in a solar system in the SCO universe, you would still be using "hyperspace" (or at least your "hyper drive") to do that.  And if your "hyper drive" is active, then you can be intercepted by an Interdiction Field.

One last Edit: ...and the animation you already have of the ship decelerating into orbit is the ship transitioning from "hyper drive/impulse engines" to "maneuvering thrusters".

 

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Reply #3 from StarControl Forums Top

Problems...  this is how lore is born! ;-)  All ships of all species have to be able to create an Interdiction Field.  Why would they all have the same technology?

Obviously, all ships can generate an Interdiction Field because it is a "law of physics aspect" of the drive system that it interdicts.  One "hyper drive" can interdict another "hyper drive".  All ships in hyperspace must have a hyperspace drive to be there... Tada!

What about species with other types of FTL travel?  I don't know... might be one of those holes you can poke in almost any psuedo-science tech from any universe.  Ignore it/gloss it over like everyone else does, or point it out and make fun of yourselves over it in the spirit of Star Control.

The more I think about it the more I thin this works for the modern game audience, and the old people too for that matter.

 

EDIT: Actually, if it doesn't conflict with lore you already have... You could say that hyperspace and quasispace are the only possible forms of FTL travel known in the SCO universe.  Quasispace is either "partially hyperspace" or "an extension of hyperspace" in some way so that the same drive system is used in both cases.  This means that "as a law of physics", any FTL ship in the SCO universe can use its drive system to interdict any other FTL ship in the SCO universe... and it can still all be done "serious" this way.

 

Reply #4 from StarControl Forums Top

Oops... I realized that “hyperspace” has been used by many sci-fi stories and is often defined differently. When I say that I am always thinking of the definition I use, which is similar to B5/SC2's vision of it. The B5/SC2 version of “hyperspace” is that it is a different dimension (or “place”) where the distances between points are much shorter. Ships that need to travel through hyperspace do so because they aren't capable of traveling faster than light. They travel at near-light speeds through the much shorter distances in the different dimension of hyperspace. This is B5/SC2 “hyperspace”, which were the same except for JMS adding the fact that his hyperspace was a very dangerous place where ships are essentially “deaf, dumb, & blind”.

My hyperspace adds one more dimension too this, that the hyperspace drive (high-speed sublight, like impulse engines) produce part of their thrust in hyperspace even when traveling in normal space. I was assuming my own little addition too the lore when I explained why you would still be able to pull a ship into the Interdiction Field even in a solar system. It's because they are using their “hyper drive” even when traveling in normal space, and when the drive is active the ship is partially in hyperspace even when traveling in normal space.

 

I realized the solar system part of the lore explination probably wasn't making much sense without understanding this definition of it that I use.

Reply #5 from StarControl Forums Top

This is probably obvious, but part of what made me think of an Interdiction Field was Stardock saying that they wanted the barrier to collapse during the fight. The Interdiction Field allows you to do this in a way that makes perfect sense no matter how you want it to work. If you want it to slowly collapse from the moment it is formed that is easy to explain in the engineering lore, or if you want it to hold for most of the fight and then fairly rapidly collapse to try and find a balance where the mere threat of the arena shrinking forces the fast ship to engage and want to “beat the clock” so that it almost never actually happens, that works too.

Also, if you want different size bubbles in different situations, you can make that make sense in the lore, too.

None of that makes any sense for an asteroid belt, but it makes perfect sense for the artificially created “Interdiction Bubble”. Energy is always finite, by all that is right with science... the Interdiction Bubble MUST collapse!


EDIT: I have also been thinking that if you have a "hyperspace look" to the barrier like I described earlier, it would probably look really cool if a ship bouncing into the barrier caused "ripples" (like throwing a rock into a pond) to emanate into hyperspace from the point on the barrier that the ship bounced off of.  

Reply #6 from StarControl Forums Top

The thought occurred too me that there could be another type of fight in the solar system, that takes place on the solar system map.  It might be that only the mother ship can be in a fight like this.  These would never be PvP, so the retrograde problems don't exist.  You design the AI to engage the player, so the retrograde isn't an issue with the AI unless you make it one.

This might be the ONLY way the mother ship ever fights, it makes fights in the mothership unique.  Those fights take place on the "infinite open space" map of the solar system.

 

EDIT: Oops, again... If I remember right the human mothership is very primitive in SCO and they are “just starting out” in space. For the mothership to fight on the solar system map, the explanation for that is that it can't be interdicted because it doesn't have a hyperspace drive. It has a warp drive. So that doesn't really fit at all with SCO.

In Star Trek combat takes place at warp speed, even though a lot of sources say that it doesn't. Just think of Enterprise running from Q at warp 9 and firing torpedoes back at him as just one example of that. This, of course, makes no sense at all. At FTL speeds by the time the captain says the “F” of “Fire” the enemy ship is already millions of miles behind them. But since Star Trek says so... you can do it if you want!

Reply #7 from StarControl Forums Top

One problem with the "interdiction field" is if you want to hit the escape key and emergency hyperspace escape like in SC2 the interdiction field seems to make that impossible.

Reply #8 from StarControl Forums Top

There are very few things that can't be explained with pseudo-scientific techno-babble!  ;-)

You could say that either ship within the bubble can use their hyper drive to collapse the bubble, even if you decide to just have static bubbles and not have them collapse to shrink the arena.  Once the bubble has become weak/small enough, either ship can escape it/leave the fight at will.