if you're only accelerating at 1g, you're in for a looong ride. :P 

really? by my calculation it would take 350 days to reach the speed of light, which means you'd roughly have travelled 0.5 light-years after one year. The next year you'd travel 1.5 light-years, for a total of 2 light-years in two years, with your speed at the end being 2x the speed of light. Then you turn around, decelerate for 2 years, and it takes a total of 4 years to reach alpha centauri which is about 4 light-years away.

How long should it take? :) 

You don't need centrifuge if you're ship has a constant acceleration of 1g, just gotta turn the ship around at the midway point, or walk on the ceiling for the second half of the trip!

That only works if your journey is one way. For a ship that can dock, orbit, and manoeuvre you'd need something other than constant acceleration. 

i don't have 4y to sit around in a tin can. :( 

Years are but seconds when talking about interstellar travel. =)
Kell for a ship that can dock, orbit, and manoeuvre, you just don't bother with gravity I'd imagine. 

also, we don't know anythng about these aliens.. they might be highly intelligent bacteria, or something, so maybe they don't really NEED gravity as much as we do. 

then you might be able to drop from orbit without a parachute or anything, just a pressure suit. You'd be so small you would decelerate at high altitude already and gently float to earth... or be carried around by winds.
:P 

we don't know anything about these aliens

So the spaceships are for invading aliens? If we don't know much about them, how are we supposed to know what would then be realistic?

Also: they might be highly intelligent bacteria

is itself unrealistic. Bacteria could not be intelligent in any meaningful use of the word. Intelligence isn't some vague, abstract property with which one can endow any speculative entity. Intelligence requires, by definition, the capacity to store and process vast amounts of information. Bacteria can't do that, at least not on a level challenging to us.

Very small organisms might theoretically be intelligent, but I suggest they would have to be something more than bacteria.

Anyway, how realistic do you want? Why do you need it to be that realistic? 

... can of course display intelligent behaviour if three conditions are met:

1. there is a very large number of them
2. they can exchange information in a meaningful way
3. they can process that information

A single bacterium can not be intelligent however. I'm not a biologist, so I don't know whether it's possible at all for bacteria to meet all of the above criteria. 

Once you are travelling at a significant fraction of c you won't experience the years it'll take you to travel anywhere (relative to a "stationary" observer back on Earth, that is). That makes really long term travel more attractive.

Slightly. 

Relatively, you wouldn't age as fast. And you could probably get some great mapping done in four years in a can with nothing better to do. Unless it has a pool, of course. Or a Wii. 

I think what you're implying is that enough bacteria working together constitute a sort of brain. Maybe. It's an idea I've given some imagining, except what I had in mind was more like an invertebrate species - starfish or jellyfish or the like - rather than single-celled organisms.
Anyway. It's what megaman has in mind I was wondering. 

Nasty bacteria which cause dislikeable effects in humans such as killing them, causing their dead bodies to re-animate and develop a taste for blood? 

the kernel of the alien consciousness could be packed in the bacteria: the brain would rearrange during the short period it was dead to form a functional tool for it. Then the aliens could have fun by being zombies and attacking humans. 

i wasn't having much in mind, it was just a hint at how the aliens might not have the same requirements like we do.

Anyway, how realistic do you want? Why do you need it to be that realistic?

ATM, im just throwing thoughts around how to design the ships. of course i need to stick to the map layout, so it might change lots.

i just want to get a base of knowledge/ insight into stuff like this before i try to modify it to my needs. Know the rules!


My motivation is that plausibility is what i miss from modern games the most. 

Parasites are the new virus'. 

viruses are parasites you twat 

Well, that doesn't mean realism needs to be the deciding factor. I'll use that Valve quote again, because it's so pertinent, and because I like it so much:

Realism is a tool, not a goal.

A distinction I started making back with Aliens and Star Wars is between realism and believability.

For example: the starfighters in Star Wars pitch, swoop, and bank as they travel through space. They produce fireballs when they explode. None of which is at all realistic because it breaks the laws of physics. It would never happen, yet that was an entirely appropriate way for them to behave in the movies because what Lucas was aiming for was a fantasised version of WWII dogfighting, as would have been familiar to moviegoers of the late 70s. Not just the physics of it, but the drama. But those starfighters also looked more believable than the art deco chrome pinnacles of the Flash Gordon era rocket ships. They were grubby. They needed refuelling, and repairs. So are x-wings realistic or not?

Something else all the SW ships have, and share with the even more 'realistic' Nostromo and Sulaco of the Alien movies, is linear gravity. It's a practical concession of course, because you just can't film that much without it. But it also works to keep the events in a realm easily engaged with by the viewer, in a way that the Odyssey from 2001 ( with its shot dedicated specifically to this reality ) does not because it uses centrifuge to create gravity. Linear gravity is far more believable, but it isn't remotely realistic.

And both the Nostromo and Sulaco use some sort of nuclear reaction premise to travel faster than light speed. Again, not at all realistic, yet other aspects of their designs make them closer to home than those in the SW universe. They don't embark on exciting adventures with the whoooosh BOOM of the Millenium Falcon or Enterprise. Instead, the Nostromo and Sulaco are presented as moving more like objects of industry than magic - they plough, heave, or grind their way across the interstellar distances. And even at FTL speeds, they take long and intentionally tedious passages of time to get there, necessitating cryogenics for the crew. This makes the experience far from swashbuckling, and much more like the mundane rigmarole of blue-collar work. That's something that anyone who has ever worked in a cubicle, a warehouse, a factory floor, finds incredibly believable as a human experience. But as far as the laws of physics are concerned, it's not really any more realistic than hyperspace.

How much realism do you want? And where do you want it? It may be best for your map to have relatively realistic girders and similar supporting structures, but still raise a middle finger to the laws of physics and depict linear gravity ( especially since anything else isn't going to work in the Quake engine ).

And just what is the plausibility missing from current games? Do you mean concrete and sniper rifles? I hope you're not suggesting that making a game's style more realistic automatically makes it better, cause if you are I think I shall have to call you mean things. Sarcasm may be employed.
Would you rather play D3 DM instead of TF2 CTF? If not, why not? And if so, do you think you can actually find enough people who agree with you to fill a server?

You're considering invading aliens, and even suggested the idea that they be hyper intelligent bacteria. Is that really plausible? Does it matter? It depends on what you find plausible and, more importantly, what your audience will find plausible.


On the issue of realistic spaceships, some things you might want to look at are:

Ron Cobb, the man most consciously responsible for introducing technical realism into scifi. He designed a lot of stuff for SW, Alien/s and subsequent movies. Working on Alien he described himself as "a frustrated engineer."
http://www.roncobbdesigns.com/Welcome.161.0.html

The Colonial Marines Technical Manual by Lee Brimmicombe-Wood
http://www.amazon.com/Aliens-Colonial-Marines-Technical-Manual/dp/0061053430

My Aliens page about the Sulaco
http://kell.leveldesign.org/aliens/

This is Kell, last survivor of the discussion, signing off. 

Get a copy of this novel. It is highly entertaining and written by a NASA engineer.

http://www.amazon.com/Back-Moon-Novel-Homer-Hickam/dp/0385334222

Listen to Bambuz, he obviously knows a lot about this field. A collaboration between the two of you would likely be interesting and different.

For example: the starfighters in Star Wars pitch, swoop, and bank as they travel through space. They produce fireballs when they explode.

What? Current satellites have to be capable of performing pitch/roll/yaw adjustments to travel through interstellar space. 

Current satellites have to be capable of performing pitch/roll/yaw adjustments to travel through interstellar space.

You know what I mean - aeroplane manoeuvres that you get when moving against air. Satellites don't move like that. Neither do they travel through "interstellar" space, since by definition they remain orbiting earth and don't travel between stars. 

I was talking about the Resident Evil series. 

but he means that x-wings move like spitfires, they swoop and turn like they're using differences in airpressure on the wing like a plane in air rather than a spacecraft which would have to use other means such as thrusters. He doesn't mean that nothing we've put into space can ever be pointed in a direction we want.

Very well thought out post there Kell by the way, nicely articulated the argument for believability being the goal in scifi technology. It's all about keeping the world coherent and plausible while allowing yourself to create the story you want. If you want absolute realism, you probably have to rule out humans meeting any alien races, especially humanoids that speak english as so often happens. 

guess i was replying on a page that had been open for a while.. 

I was talking about the Resident Evil series.

Actually I thought you were referring to Parasite Eve hence the capital P, but same difference.
Maybe I should have used a different smiley.

starbuck: thanks. with a name like yours you ought to know a bit about swooping spaceships yourself :P 

is exactly what im aiming for. (that's a very relative concept, btw) As i explained earlier, im not really trying to nail down my spaceship design for the maps directly. It's like building a ww2 themed level - you try to gather as much information and background on architecture, landscape, army, etc. as possible, to get a picture of how it worked. Maybe that's a pretty good phrase for what im doing: getting a picture of how something like that could happen.

re: believability in games: Look at hl2. those giant three-legged thingies that shot at you. throw one grenade on the ground before them, and they should be gone (but they aren't in the game(?)) - nobody would design a weapon like that. I can't even think of a scenery where they would be of advantage. That kind of stuff annoys me (slightly).

Now, q3 is obviously not a realistic environment to build in, but i tend to build my maps in a way that doesn't base off the q3 scenarios. And thinking stuff through is kind of fun for me, makes the process more interesting.

Also, i thought guys like bambuz would like the discussion =)

on topic again: Im sketching around a bit after chatting with bamb and others yesterday. What about the loading bay having 'arm'-like structures, kinda like those flexible hallways they have at airports to make the planes easily boardable? Those would make getting out of the ship fast on rough ground easier.