Today's Chief Chat inspired me to take a deeper look into the Vision Book. Since my Sci-Fi interests have led me to gain a cursory understanding of Real Life Space Science, and how it relates to Sci-Fi, I've compiled some feedback on the following excerpts from the August Update version of the Vision Book:
"The ship was vast, miles long, and its construction hidden among the rings of Saturn."
Something that big would definitely be visible via telescope. Perhaps not necessarily an Earth-based Telescope, but telescopes would be vital equipment for any spacecraft (navigation, threat detection and avoidance, etc.) In addition to how difficult stealth is in space, a ship that huge would likely exert a gravitational influence on the rings. It would create visible ripples in the rings, which would be another clue to its presence (similar phenomena can be observed IRL, caused by Saturn's innermost "Shepherd Moons")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphnis_(moon)
If I were trying to construct a secret Starship, I would hollow out one of Saturn's outer Asteroid Moons (like Pheobe, if you want to make a subtle reference to The Expanse), and Build it there. You would definitely need to ship in Metals from the Inner Planets and the Asteroid Belt, Saturn's Moons are likely to be mostly water ice. This comes with the added benefit of setting up a spectacular setpiece when the Enshigi depart. After a quick burn of maneuvering thrusters to get just outside of the hangar bay, the starship would light its enormous main drives, incinerating the entire facility, breaking up the asteroid moon in the process. A Drive powerful (and efficient) enough for Interstellar Travel would create a light source visible from almost any distance within the Solar System. It would be like a new star appearing in the night sky right next to Saturn. Also, this would make it easy to calculate the general direction they were traveling in...
"The probes were microscopic vehicles, built atom by atom, and accelerated to near light speed by giant particle accelerators near the edge of the solar system."
Small nanotech probes would be ill-suited for long duration spaceflight. Cosmic rays would decimate their delicate internals (IRL Satellites generally use enormous transistors that are more resistant to radiation, because a modern ~10nm architecture CPU would be fried by space radiation). And even if they survive the trip, I doubt they would be powerful enough to send a viable signal back to Saturn. It would be more plausible for the Enshigi to decide on their destination via telescope observation (we've recently been locating exoplanets by observing their host stars dimming periodically as the planet passes in front of the star)
Additionally, even if you accelerate the probes to ~0.9c, it'll still take centuries for them to reach a good candidate location for the Enshigi (they'd need to settle anywhere from 150 LY to 500 LY away, in order to steer clear of the inevitable wave of colonization that would follow them.
"As for the Enshigi, their ultimate destination remained undiscovered until a sudden and surprising astronomical event was observed. A star had dimmed unexpectedly. The process had taken only a few short years, a blink of an eye in terms of the timescale of the Universe. The sudden stellar dimming went unnoticed until an amateur astronomer came across the anomaly and reported it."
Depending on how far away each colony is from one another, the light delay would make this event take decades at least, more like centuries or Millenia. Because of FTL Communication, the first colony to see the dimming will alert the others, and then the next closest colony will see the dimming a few years later (assuming they're a few LY further from the Dyson Sphere). In other words, the limiting factors are the relative distances between the Colonies, and how much further away the Enshigi Dyson Sphere is. And the limiting factor to those distances would be how fast the initial colony ships were. If they were on the order of 5-10% of the Speed of Light (already an insanely fast speed), then it would be plausible for the furthest pre-gate colony to be approximately 50LY away (a trip that would take centuries, perhaps almost a Milennium.)
"Humanity caught a brief glimpse of a giant structure completely encircling a blue dwarf star. The structure was big enough to cast a shadow that dimmed the star, explaining one event but revealing an even greater, terrifying mystery. Was this the doing of the Enshigi? Could they have possibly mastered the technology to completely encircle and harness the power of their star in a massive dyson ring?"
A "Blue Dwarf Star" is most likely not a Main Sequence star. B and O types (Blue Stars) tend to be absolutely massive (anywhere from 6 to 100 times the mass of our sun), and as a consequence they burn much hotter and faster (Lifetimes measured in Millions of years rather than Billions). Not a particularly wise choice for construction of a Dyson Sphere as a post human colony. A-class stars could be described as Blue-White, or simply White. Not as massive as B or O type Blue Stars, more massive than F-type White Stars. Again, more massive stars burn hotter and faster. Also, a bright star wouldn't exactly go un-noticed. To be stealthy, I think the Enshigi would choose something different:
What may have been meant by "Blue Dwarf Star", could either have been a B or A type star, or one of two varieties of Stellar Corpse (left over shrunken core after a star explodes): A White Dwarf (very dense, formed from a star similar to our sun), or a Neutron Star (more massive, absurdly compact and dense, basically the intermediate step between a White Dwarf and a Black Hole). The problems with these objects would be their intense radiation. However, if the Enshigi harness that energy, it would last them for Billions of years.
A more reasonable choice would be a Red Dwarf Star. They're the most common type of star in the Universe, and they burn their fuel at a leisurely pace that allows them to last for trillions of years. It is practically consensus in the Sci-Fi community that these stars are ideal colonization candidates for advanced civilizations.
"It was a time of great peace, for the lack of faster than light travel made conflict between the colonies non-existent. Who could wage interstellar war when the fastest military ships would take decades to reach their targets?"
Honestly I would say travel time would be closer to Centuries instead of Decades, unless we're talking about colonies in a relatively small star cluster. Even if two colonies are 5LY apart (a generous estimate, given how few stars are located within 100LY of Sol), If ships can only get to 10% of c (or less), then the travel time will be anywhere from a several decades to a Century.
"No one had heard from the Enshigi in nearly two hundred years. No one had ever been close to one of the forbidden zones, let alone manage, through sheer chance, to end up inside one. The odds of appearing in one of the zones, out of the vast infinite of space with its billions of galaxies, was astronomical. This might be the only chance to discover what the Enshigi seemed so desperate to hide."
Is Em-8ER's Forbidden Zone in another Galaxy? If so, how can the Enshigi sense what's happening there? You'd think their FTL Observational powers would be somewhat limited by the incomprehensibly vast distances between galaxies. Even if it's on the other side of our Galaxy, that's still far enough away that even the Enshigi should have trouble seeing what's going on, but barely even peanuts compared to Inter-Galactic distances.
Any thoughts? I would love to see some sort of Space-Related content after Em-8ER has launched and has a few expansions, but until then there will be plenty of lore to nitpick.
"The ship was vast, miles long, and its construction hidden among the rings of Saturn."
Something that big would definitely be visible via telescope. Perhaps not necessarily an Earth-based Telescope, but telescopes would be vital equipment for any spacecraft (navigation, threat detection and avoidance, etc.) In addition to how difficult stealth is in space, a ship that huge would likely exert a gravitational influence on the rings. It would create visible ripples in the rings, which would be another clue to its presence (similar phenomena can be observed IRL, caused by Saturn's innermost "Shepherd Moons")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphnis_(moon)
If I were trying to construct a secret Starship, I would hollow out one of Saturn's outer Asteroid Moons (like Pheobe, if you want to make a subtle reference to The Expanse), and Build it there. You would definitely need to ship in Metals from the Inner Planets and the Asteroid Belt, Saturn's Moons are likely to be mostly water ice. This comes with the added benefit of setting up a spectacular setpiece when the Enshigi depart. After a quick burn of maneuvering thrusters to get just outside of the hangar bay, the starship would light its enormous main drives, incinerating the entire facility, breaking up the asteroid moon in the process. A Drive powerful (and efficient) enough for Interstellar Travel would create a light source visible from almost any distance within the Solar System. It would be like a new star appearing in the night sky right next to Saturn. Also, this would make it easy to calculate the general direction they were traveling in...
"The probes were microscopic vehicles, built atom by atom, and accelerated to near light speed by giant particle accelerators near the edge of the solar system."
Small nanotech probes would be ill-suited for long duration spaceflight. Cosmic rays would decimate their delicate internals (IRL Satellites generally use enormous transistors that are more resistant to radiation, because a modern ~10nm architecture CPU would be fried by space radiation). And even if they survive the trip, I doubt they would be powerful enough to send a viable signal back to Saturn. It would be more plausible for the Enshigi to decide on their destination via telescope observation (we've recently been locating exoplanets by observing their host stars dimming periodically as the planet passes in front of the star)
Additionally, even if you accelerate the probes to ~0.9c, it'll still take centuries for them to reach a good candidate location for the Enshigi (they'd need to settle anywhere from 150 LY to 500 LY away, in order to steer clear of the inevitable wave of colonization that would follow them.
"As for the Enshigi, their ultimate destination remained undiscovered until a sudden and surprising astronomical event was observed. A star had dimmed unexpectedly. The process had taken only a few short years, a blink of an eye in terms of the timescale of the Universe. The sudden stellar dimming went unnoticed until an amateur astronomer came across the anomaly and reported it."
Depending on how far away each colony is from one another, the light delay would make this event take decades at least, more like centuries or Millenia. Because of FTL Communication, the first colony to see the dimming will alert the others, and then the next closest colony will see the dimming a few years later (assuming they're a few LY further from the Dyson Sphere). In other words, the limiting factors are the relative distances between the Colonies, and how much further away the Enshigi Dyson Sphere is. And the limiting factor to those distances would be how fast the initial colony ships were. If they were on the order of 5-10% of the Speed of Light (already an insanely fast speed), then it would be plausible for the furthest pre-gate colony to be approximately 50LY away (a trip that would take centuries, perhaps almost a Milennium.)
"Humanity caught a brief glimpse of a giant structure completely encircling a blue dwarf star. The structure was big enough to cast a shadow that dimmed the star, explaining one event but revealing an even greater, terrifying mystery. Was this the doing of the Enshigi? Could they have possibly mastered the technology to completely encircle and harness the power of their star in a massive dyson ring?"
A "Blue Dwarf Star" is most likely not a Main Sequence star. B and O types (Blue Stars) tend to be absolutely massive (anywhere from 6 to 100 times the mass of our sun), and as a consequence they burn much hotter and faster (Lifetimes measured in Millions of years rather than Billions). Not a particularly wise choice for construction of a Dyson Sphere as a post human colony. A-class stars could be described as Blue-White, or simply White. Not as massive as B or O type Blue Stars, more massive than F-type White Stars. Again, more massive stars burn hotter and faster. Also, a bright star wouldn't exactly go un-noticed. To be stealthy, I think the Enshigi would choose something different:
What may have been meant by "Blue Dwarf Star", could either have been a B or A type star, or one of two varieties of Stellar Corpse (left over shrunken core after a star explodes): A White Dwarf (very dense, formed from a star similar to our sun), or a Neutron Star (more massive, absurdly compact and dense, basically the intermediate step between a White Dwarf and a Black Hole). The problems with these objects would be their intense radiation. However, if the Enshigi harness that energy, it would last them for Billions of years.
A more reasonable choice would be a Red Dwarf Star. They're the most common type of star in the Universe, and they burn their fuel at a leisurely pace that allows them to last for trillions of years. It is practically consensus in the Sci-Fi community that these stars are ideal colonization candidates for advanced civilizations.
"It was a time of great peace, for the lack of faster than light travel made conflict between the colonies non-existent. Who could wage interstellar war when the fastest military ships would take decades to reach their targets?"
Honestly I would say travel time would be closer to Centuries instead of Decades, unless we're talking about colonies in a relatively small star cluster. Even if two colonies are 5LY apart (a generous estimate, given how few stars are located within 100LY of Sol), If ships can only get to 10% of c (or less), then the travel time will be anywhere from a several decades to a Century.
"No one had heard from the Enshigi in nearly two hundred years. No one had ever been close to one of the forbidden zones, let alone manage, through sheer chance, to end up inside one. The odds of appearing in one of the zones, out of the vast infinite of space with its billions of galaxies, was astronomical. This might be the only chance to discover what the Enshigi seemed so desperate to hide."
Is Em-8ER's Forbidden Zone in another Galaxy? If so, how can the Enshigi sense what's happening there? You'd think their FTL Observational powers would be somewhat limited by the incomprehensibly vast distances between galaxies. Even if it's on the other side of our Galaxy, that's still far enough away that even the Enshigi should have trouble seeing what's going on, but barely even peanuts compared to Inter-Galactic distances.
Any thoughts? I would love to see some sort of Space-Related content after Em-8ER has launched and has a few expansions, but until then there will be plenty of lore to nitpick.
Likes:
Pandagnome and liandri
