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Favorite scifi concept? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/sciencefiction@lemmy.world
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I'd love to hear about your favorite concept or idea you've read about or seen in scifi media.

My personal favorite is the Conjoiner Drive out of the Revelation Space series. These ship drives are dual drives on either side of a lighthugger and have a living being inside the drives to act as a supercomputer, which holds a wormhole open inside the drives. The wormhole links far in the past to the big-bang and uses the energy from the big-bang for propulsion.

In most scifi I've come across wormholes are used for FTL travel, and I thought this was such a unique and creative use of a wormhole it has stuck with me for years after reading about it.

So what are your favorite devices or ideas that have come out of scifi media?

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[–] 2 points 3 months ago (6 children)

I don't play Elite anymore, but I've always really appreciated how elegant the FSD is and wanted more games to copy it. The physics of it just feels sensible. It explains away the lack of FTL ramming while simultaneously being a safety mechanic for the player. Looking at it as a pure game mechanic, it self-balances travel times so that distances many orders of magnitude apart are compressed together into a much more practical range.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (5 children)

    My friend always complained that that jumping between systems is unnecessary. That you should just be able to to fire up your FSD and go between systems that way. I don't know if this would be better, I think we all understand that the wormhole is just a loading screen that makes you wait longer than loading the actual system. I don't play Elite anymore either, I did all 5 of the activities it offers lol.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    I just did the math, and using the FSD presented in-game to travel from Sol to Alpha Centauri would take 20 real life hours, so I think it's fine to say that, yes, FSD can technically be used for interstellar travel in lore, but it's so impractical versus jumping that it might as well not exist.

    Also, yeah, the game doesn't offer a lot of variety. I only still want to pop in occasionally, because the immersiveness in VR is something special. It makes combat really fun and space trucking really cozy. Unfortunately, there's not much else going for it. I just don't get how all the faction war stuff is supposed to be appealing.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (3 children)

    Well I think he meant that the ship should speed up a lot when you get clear of the system so it's a lot quicker ;)

    And yeah man same, the VR experience is incredible. The VR, the sound design, planets, docking, all so great. But almost everything else is just so garbage it's embarrassing. I just wish they'd open up the game to modders to create some actual fun gameplay.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    The thing is, I'd at least want the mathematical rule governing speed versus mass proximity to stay internally consistent, so bringing up the interstellar speed massively would mean bringing up the interplanetary speed massively too, and right now, I think the latter is already tuned pretty well.

    Did you play with a HOTAS? I lined mine up to match the virtual positions, so the feeling of presence was insanely good. This is making me want to set that up again, which I should probably do anyway for an Index/Frame comparison.

    And yeah, the lack of mod support is a shame.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Yeah they'd have to make up some lore, maybe make it so you have to fly away perpendicular to the other massive bodies in the system, or just plain increase the speed, maybe as it gets faster.

    Dude not only did I play with a HOTAS, I bought a HOTAS and drilled it into a dinner tray along with a keyboard, trackball mouse, and USB hub so I could even type blindly. I got very good at flying inebriated :)

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