archimage_a

Right then...The ArchiTech Miner: [hide] [/hide] The design for this miner is, overwhelmingly, simple. It takes the common, every day, Plasma Drill, bolts several hundred of them together, attaches them to a vast Tubes, attaches that tube to a central station, and that station is attached to 15 other vast tubes and thus several dozen thousand Plasma Drills, and, meanwhile attaches that station to a number of supporting girders, which are attached to an immense worm(In engineering terms, basically a screw) which is progressing down a giant supporting column, in a thread that is hollowed out by Plasma Drills mounted on the central station. What could be simpler? So: White are Hollow Tubes, which are connected to the Station (Red) where a Vaccum sucks the mined rock into the central area and it then transported to the surface (in a hitherto unexplained manner...I assume more tubes, but yeah). The Red is the station, which is suspended by the Girders (Green) from the Worm (blue). The station slowly rotates as the worm progresses down the thread, driven by a number of rollers, which, in turn, rotates the Hollow tubes (White). This slow turning, along with the downward motion of gravity and a semi-sophisticated computer system, causes a thread to but cut down the central pillar. In addition to the thread being cut, the central pillar will be reinforced by whatever means are possible and neccessary. In addition this, several dozen Coandă Effect generators will be positioned on the Station for activation in an emergency. Primarily to take the strain off the central pillar and/or to 'land' the Miner should the Central Pillar collapse. The Green is Girders...They are pretty self explaintory. The Blue is the word and thread. Representing the major supporting mechanism for the whole operation, in conjection with the Coandă Effect generators and several suspention beams supporting the Worm, from the surface. Aside from that the tail end of the worm contains a number of Plasma Drills, with the primary aim of which is to remove the now useless parts of the pillar to remove the unneccessary weight from the central pillar and thus help prevent a collapse. Brown evidently represents rock. Construction of the Miner/s should first consist of building a Central Pillar, then the Miner. The speed of the miner can be varied slowly, but it should be noted that the immense weight of the miner should not be left to weigh on any one part of the Pillar for too long. The Gravity of the planet may only be 0.376g, but this is a collossal undertaking. The end of operation presents three possibilites. The first is abandonment. The second is the use of external sources of thrust to lift the Miner clear. The last is the use of internal thrust, mainly supplied by the Coandă Effect generators. All three options have their benefits and their limitations. If you want a more technically minded (Aka weights and other considerations) analysis then I will require the density of the martian rock, the weight/method of operation of the Plasma Drills...thats probably it really...It just requires alot of effort on my part, which I don't really want to do if you are gonna end the game/let me have this. The device is scalable in the extreme...With the upper limit being the tolerance of rock. It can be constructed as a half meter long, half meter/meter wide miner on a peice of rope...Or constructed at a Kilometer long, by Kilometer wide and freestanding.

Nex, why you offline when I come back? :thumbdown: :thumbdown: :thumbdown:

Simpler in some aspects, more complex in others, Ross. Also it is realtime rather than turnbased which makes a huge difference.

Le Gasp! And with Last Post to Win shut down you can't make use of your double post skillage! And at the moment... Star Ruler There is a demo here: http://starruler.blind-mind.com/files/StarRuler_Demo_1100[Caution: Executable File] It is a pretty impressive game, with a VERY customisable start which allows you to tailor your game. For instance, you can start at tech level 0, or tech level 50. You can define that you have 8 rivial empire and only 1 star in the whole universe, or 1 rivial empire and 10,000 stars. You can have pirates (who constantly raid your systems) and remnants (of previous empires, who guard some solar systems) or neither. You can even set the tech advance rate. Diplomacy is a weak point against the computer (You can have a fleet of 7,000 ships ready to level their final planet and they will refuse to accept a peace where you give them all of your resources...) but in multiplayer it is pretty dynamic. Ship Building/Design is pretty immense. You can design a fighter and then scale the design up so you have a super battleship, with exact the same design....Put another way, if you build a pretty awesome destroyer...say scale 10...You can build a super dreadnought(or whatever you want to name it) of scale 1,400. However, while bigger ships do more damage(a hellevalot more damage), they take longer to reload and can be overwhelmed BUT if you build a ship with powerful enough shields you can ignore vast fleets of smaller ships. At the same time, if you decide to turtle your way through the game you can build artillery satellites which can obliterate enemy planets' population from ANOTHER STAR SYSTEM...Which I had tremendous fun with. Also, you can build planetary thrusters and use your own planets, complete with their satellites, to attack enemy systems. So the turtle isn't limited in any way (Against big ships planets stand no chance though =P, even with shields). One of the other rather entertaining things is that, if a system is stupidly well defended, you can blow up the star (in the late game) and obliterate most of the planets and their defences. The game is, admittedly, geared towards massive games...which is a pain...so much of a pain that I uninstalled it after the first time I played it. But I reinstalled it, tinkered with the settings (Now 9 systems in the universe :thumbsup: divided into 3 clusters of 3) and actually managed to win a game! (There is a VERY steep learning curve...I was impressed that I had colonised 3 systems in my first game, when the other empires had dozens of systems...And even in my later games I am often lost as to how the enemy can do better than me) Final point: The Balance is very good. Taking power systems as the example, there are 3 types: Power Generators, Fusion Generators and Anti-Matter Generators. Power Generators produce a fairly minor amount of power(Enough to power the ship, yes, but they take up much more room doing it), but will still operate if the ship is on 1,000 HP out of 3,000,000,000. Fusion Generators produce more power, but will explode when the ship is damaged to about one third of its HP. Anti-Matter Generators produce FAR more power, but will explode pretty much the moment the shields go down in some cases, taking the whole ship with it. Similarly you can build a ship with 50 sheets of armour plate, but it costs more. You can't, however, build a ship with 50 massive railguns on. The max is something like 10-13, or 52-58 of the smallest varity. So the actual value of 1 super ship is diminished, without being utterly pointless. (I have build 3 super ships and proceeded to wipe out two empires that are larger, and more powerful, than me...But on another occassion, my 3 super ships were defeated by one planet because they took SO long to build they were obsolete.) But yeah...Play it.

Of course we needed to know that. We might have been convinced that Mather wasn't an adolescent male...

Comparing the two...The Anime one is better. The snail one lasts forever, is physically questionable and, at the end of the day, isn't actually that funny/amusing. The Anime is concise, makes a limited amount of sense (People jump out of windows) and isn't trying to be funny, and is reasonably amusing. Considerably better: Lolz. FOOLISH HETROSEXUALS! But yeah. We men tend to be wandering along quite happily, see a penny (or other thing that causes us to stop wandering along quite happily) and then, suddenly the ground has given way and we are stuck down the bottom of a shaft with no hope of escape...Also we can't find the penny we saw.

Aw :cry: Gotta agree. Cryptograms are considerably easier than Anagrams about 90% of the time, for 90% of the people. When you are solving a cryptogram you are, essentially, always making progress because you are eliminating letters and progressing down the phrase so as to be reasonably sure that you will, eventually, solve the thing. (This is provided you have a key of useful letters as a starting point.) When you are solving an anagram you are constantly going down blind alleys because you are just randomly reassembling words, getting excited because you made the word 'Cat' after 20 minutes of :wall: and then the realisation that 'Cat' probably isn't relevant...though you can't actually discount it because the clues are so tremendously vague. For comparison: Z G Q - I B S X U - W T U - I S E Q - W D - R B W C C B W S U C Clue: E = M B = R Verses: Easter From Sraddha Codon Slog G Clue: Pomp and Tavern Same phrase, but where as the general structure of the first one is known, and unscrambled, the structure of the second is entirely unknown. As such, even without clues, the Crypotogram represents the easier of the two because you can make an educated guess, as opposed to a blind guess. The main difference between Cryptograms and Anagrams is that CG gets easier the longer it is and harder the shorter it is. Anagrams start easy when they are short, and become more impossible the longer they get. But yeah, cryptograms plox. Electronics, I am ok with...Just that our history precludes me from being enthused about them. Also the capacity for 'Archi is intelligent, he can solve this Riesenburg Equation'/'Archi needs to suffer' is much increased with Electronics.

Tommorow, somewhere between 5 and 8 or 4 and 7 or 6 and 9...GMT So if you just schedual 16:00 to 02:00 as free then you have a good chance of making the session :rolleyes: That said, I would imagine that arriving around 7pm GMT wouldn't see you far wrong. http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/time/scripts/clock-8/runner.php?tz=europe_london

=) 200 XP for everyone. Stork and Ico, can you arrange some other time for your sessions. I don't mind you missing the odd one, and I understand that you have other demands on your time, but can you please organise. Thanks.

Oh, for last session everyone got 80xp. Tonights session is starting in about two hours, however I will be available for questions for the next two hours. General Chat: /join Inn People in Pendle: /join Path_of_Wizards tavern NB: At the end of the last round there was a whooshing sound and the Witches disappeared. People in Lightgate: /join Path_of_Monks tavern NB: You have come to a round table. It appears someone was in the middle of eating a meal of mushroom bread...it looks as unappetising as possible. A pewter goblet appears to have been knocked over, and red wine is seaping into the table. There are a number of silver coins lying about the ground. There are a number of papers burning in the fire.

I don't think we use the same textbook, tbh. Mather: [hide] [/hide] Archi: [hide] [/hide]

Well, this is the trouble with massively hard science. However we are adopting a less hard science approach, so there shouldn't be so much need for arguments of a scientific nature :grin:

Thanks Earth, it was partly my fault you dropped out so I will try not to argue with Mather too much =P Nef...Are you sure your not Hex...pretty sure he said the same thing about Ross...

Really...the main problem so far is that people are not really giving Mather a fair trial...and there are not enough people. I was thinking about my responce to what has been written comparing the SI to the CIU and I would have said this "The SI would have only acted under two circumstances...The direct request of a person or at the end of a very long series of arguments that went nowhere." But it isn't really fair to compare the SI of session 20 with the CIU of session 1. I can even see similarities between the way I ran the SI in the first session (the session barely anyone turned up to) and the CIU...Including the 'Ok...Democracy isn't working...time to elect a captain'. I would ask that Nex, Ico...not Nef/Hex since they have so far ruined games....And anyone else please give Mather a chance to learn from his mistakes and become a better GM over time...rather than expect him to be me. As a note, though...Being helpful elicites a counterproductive force if you are a GM because people go 'Hmmm, railroading'. As such try to limit your input to responces, or delivering story.

Well...the class system is otherwise useless...Only the Scientist gets free reign of the ship by going 'Hey, CIU, I am a scientist, so therefore I can access the armoury.' Understandable... Innevitable with roleplaying I think that was more Mask trying to disable you before you killed him. What? How can you make changes to a movie? Trolololol.

Air Traffic Control Towers have a thankless task... 1) 'Its his fault that he didn't notice the impending collision, despite his radar screen being partially inoperative, his technical support being disabled, his Co-Controller being absent and another air traffic control tower going down and dumping all their plans on him.' 2) 'Its the pilots fault FOR LISTENING TO HIM(When he did notice it), and not their automated guidance system.'

Right then. I think we should colonise Europa instead of Mars.

I do have to say that it lacks any firm direction... I mean I could basically play the entire game by constructing a highly detailed plan for colonising Mars...Or, if we remember the Zombie Survival Guide/Thread, ripping off a guide to colonising Mars with a firm scoop of self-aggrandisement and perhaps some local flavouring. The entire planet has a rich Iron Oxide and Silicate base, with slight variations in the common metal content. So unless Mather is trolling the probes 'But you didn't say they didn't sample their own casing', its basically 'Land absolutely anywhere'. The 'Science' basically involved Retech and, I assume (I was called away) Lei, doing puzzles and needlessly upgrading their weapons tech. Seriously...The plan developed in my absence revolves around using our level 15 weapon tech, and Retech's soon to be developed Clone Army, to invade North Korea, end the threat of colonising Mars, and then, presumably, invade China, establish an American Style Dictatorship under Retech...Then open it up for other people to take control of countries and starting playing Hegemony. So, in my role as Engineer...I suggest we build a Self-Deploying, Von Neumann Fabricator, complete with mining apperatus on the surface of the planet. Obviously it does more than just replicate itself, so once the area surrounding the Fabricator is filled with other Fabricators, it begins producing clones and their weapons. We then develop a large Mass Accelerator, put the clones in Orbital Drop Pods, activate the Mass Accelerator at not Lethal Acceleration, towards Earth, adjusted so that the projectile enter a stable orbit following the 39th Parallel, then using the Clone Drop Pods as out projectiles, we launch them as regularly as we can. If there is strong AA or AS presence (And targetting has improved by an order of magnitudes) in the area, we build Orbital Kinetic Projectiles and simply rain death on North Korea and China. We can further modify the plan so that instead of OKPs or DPs it fires single shot, overcharged laser/EMP modules to destroy anything they place in orbit, or inbetween Mars and Earth to prevent us from destroying their AA/S guns, which prevents us from landing our troops. That way we can basically automate the entire process. Then, once we have decimated NK and China we can take over those two areas and begin harvesting the vast amount of Martian resources we have deployed and selling it very cheaply to the rest of the world. Then we can retire on a tropical island, meet up with the CIU and play a roleplaying game that retells our automated victory over China. At present I am ignoring the glaring scientific inaccuracies, the lack of the basic information concerned the ship, the lack of a map, the railroading and what not...mostly because I don't often get to actually play a game.

What part of DAY LIGHT SAVINGS, and the fact that Tip It MAY OR MAY NOT have updated the time readout, do you exactly have a problem with? Moreover, why don't you answer the question?

Mather is already running a session of Prototype today, maybe you could run the session of Spaaaace tommorow? Can someone reschedual their game because someone else wanted to run their game at a time vaguely on the day the other person wanted to...

Yes...Yes it is. After Stalker I had pretty high hopes...But Metro was, to my recollection, a railshooter, with intervening periods where you tried to complete badly designed levels with bad camera control.

The approximate time the session usually starts is, therefore between 6 and 9 or 5 and 8? I wonder what goes through your mind when you post: 'Archi is asking about daylight savings...It must be some sort of a ploy to outsmart me! Lets see, he said 'to' so clearly his real question was 'Is that the starting time?'...WAIT...What if his ploy is to outsmart me by asking two questions instead of one, and thus getting two answers! 'So, knowing this, what I need to do is answer the question he isn't asking, and ignore the question he is!' It is not outsmarting...it is tedious and counterproductive because it makes you look like an imbecile.

So 5pm to 8pm? GMT...I think that is 6-9 in Norwegian...Unless daylight savings are interfering again. http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/time/scripts/clock-8/runner.php?tz=europe_london Please indicate the time based on this.

Yeah, I think that would be pretty awesome and pretty much what I was aiming for in terms of the game. The year is 1971 and the atomic rocket America has just touched down on the Moon. The atomic robots have gone out to collect samples and our intrepid explorers are inimitably sitting in the atomic lounge, drinking their atomic milkshakes for a job well done. But then something happens. The atomic alerter begins flashing and the Captain checks the atomic view screen and egads! A meteor the size of China is heading directly for America! The atomic communicator beings bleeping, its Houston calling "Meteor approaching, launched by the USSR! We are launching all our nuclear weapons to make sure they don't spread Communism!" Then the atomic communicator just displays atomic static. You look around the atomic cabin for a moment, all agast at those damned Soviets and worried for your families back on Earth. Then curiosity overtakes you and you put on your atomic spacesuits, open the atomic blast doors and get outside just in time to see the Earth impacted by a giant, non-atomic, meteor. And then the game begins. Especially if you have a guide and are following a system. :shame: Gonna keep pointing out your hypocricy until you apologise. Hehe. I entirely disagree...Its fun for a while, then you get that one player who wants to report you for one reason or another. "Gonna report you for scamming. No way I am buying a Dragon Dagger for 80k, they are only worth 60k." then they follow you around (ironically I was in the middle of a quest and not merchanting) shouting 'Archimage_a is a scammer'. Other times me simply running out of Rune Halberds (Yeah, it was THAT long ago) caused a flurry of people to report me as a scammer because I said 'If you give me the money now I can buy it cheaper'...despite me having been selling there for the past two hours, and two hours before then. Probably would have been different if I had been merchanting properly, but you know.