To the Stars!

[SlowwHand]

There's a different sense of urgency between "It might be nice..." and "I want to..." and "Holy Crap! We have to get moving!".

[Elok]

Spartans with that government makes them rich (+2 economy), advanced (+2 research), with a large and elite military (+2 morale, +2 support). You have -1 efficiency and -1 industry but I think those costs are more than made up for by the additional wealth from economy and what you save with the support.

Lots of ecological destruction, though, and you're prone to probes but ehh whatever.

Support is the red-headed stepchild of SE factors. Unless it's very high or very low, all each level does is give or take away a fraction of a mine-crawler per base. So the only thing police state is doing there is helping counterbalance FM's giant police penalty, and it's hurting your efficiency to do it. Doesn't seem optimal. I barely ever play Santiago because I'd rather build, but plain old DemoPlan sounds like it has as much to offer. Big big growth, your industry penalty is neutralized and all you lose is that POS Support. Oh noes, not one-sixth of a single borehole's output! If you wanna do FM, do it in peacetime, match it with Democracy so you're getting top dollar in all cities and you can tinker with the sliders, and switch out to something more vicious when vendetta rolls around.

[Donegeal]

Nice calulator.

However, I pluged in the distance to AC and it spit back a max velocity of 645,213 KM/S which is more than twice the speed of light rendering it almost useless.

[Lorizael]

An asteroid headed for Earth, big enough to destroy all life and too big to destroy, seen coming with plenty of time. That's the most feasible scenario to overcome the political difficulties under our current understanding of physics, IIUC. Ask Lori or somebody about the scientific difficulties, but I think they're beside the point.

[/killjoy]

As far as I'm aware, there aren't really asteroids that would be too big for us to deal with. Astronomers think they've found something like 90% of potentially dangerous NEOs (although I'm not entirely sure how they know what we haven't found), and none of them are too big to get rid of. But destroying the asteroids Armageddon-style is not the current thinking within the astronomical community. It's much cheaper to ram a bunch of rockets into the side of the asteroid and push it out of the way, or to simply place a massive spaceship nearby and use the mutual gravitational attraction to drag it away. We might not necessarily be hit by an NEO, though. Some long duration comet/asteroid from the Kuiper Belt/Oort Cloud could come sweeping into the solar system and hit us, but anything with that long an orbit would give us a lot of time to push it out of the way.

[The Mad Monk]

Nice calulator.

However, I pluged in the distance to AC and it spit back a max velocity of 645,213 KM/S which is more than twice the speed of light rendering it almost useless.

That's still useful, it tells you that you need to coast at some point, or settle on some lower acceleration.

[The Mad Monk]

0.232 G will get you to AC in a little over eight years with a max speed of around .99c.

The Unity's 40 year voyage suggests 0.001 G acceleration, with a max speed of about .2c.

Assuming I remembered AC's distance correctly. I don't feel like looking it up.

[OneFootInTheGrave]

The article of the '10 year long Civ II game' and recent personal Civ games where I make it my goal to win via Spacerace, has got me thinking: What would it take/How would we get a colony on a habital exoplanet?

For the sake of this particular argument, we'll go with the assumption that suspended animation is not feasable.

To start with, one would have to make an automated spaceship without people to test getting close to the speed of light with some bacteria on board, see how that goes, learn something new and back to the drawing board.

[Dinner]

To the stars? It's supposed to be "to the moon, Alice!"

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

When it happens, I'm joining the Gaians, because I want those creepy ****ing worms on my side.

Screw that, I'm with Lal--"the sane, emotionally balanced person's choice."

I only ever played with the Spartan Federation. Free Market, Police State, Knowledge is the way to roll.

Knowledge? There only one true path of knowledge, and that path is owned by the University of Planet!

SCIENCE!!!

Bunch of Racists CEO Nwabudike Morgan

For the record was it just me or was Lal always the one that dropped planet busters first (even before Yang). So much for sane and emotionally balanced.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Another aspect of the Revelation Space spaceships is that they had carbon nanotube nosecones, since the interstellar medium gets very soupy if you're traveling at .99c

Magical hardness.

I can only imagine the collisions at those velocities would destroy the structural integrity of space craft, hence the usual nonsense about deflector shields etc.

[Elok]

For the record was it just me or was Lal always the one that dropped planet busters first (even before Yang). So much for sane and emotionally balanced.

Yes, but he destroyed those bases and the very ground/water they stood on for purely humanitarian reasons. Look, you've got a tyrant, a fanatic, an unhinged plutocrat, a John Bircher gun nut, a scientist who's excessively fond of human trials and an ecoterrorist who starts wars over energy-inefficient light bulbs (and uses psychoactive biological weapons to do it--for some reason those were left out of the UN charter on atrocities). Lal's the good guy. Look how happy and high-condition his people are.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Yes, but he destroyed those bases and the very ground/water they stood on for purely humanitarian reasons. Look, you've got a tyrant, a fanatic, an unhinged plutocrat, a John Bircher gun nut, a scientist who's excessively fond of human trials and an ecoterrorist who starts wars over energy-inefficient light bulbs (and uses psychoactive biological weapons to do it--for some reason those were left out of the UN charter on atrocities). Lal's the good guy. Look how happy and high-condition his people are.

Bah! Bush loving neocon. The Lal Doctrine. Bah!

[Donegeal]

To start with, one would have to make an automated spaceship without people to test getting close to the speed of light with some bacteria on board, see how that goes, learn something new and back to the drawing board.

Despite the good numbers involved with NPP, I believe that anything over 10% of C is starting to get into the realm Sci-Magic (the whole increased mass the faster you go problem and all...).

[Al B. Sure!]

Bah! Bush loving neocon. The Lal Doctrine. Bah!

I think the only Americans in the game are Santiago and Miriam. Funny how the developers decided the militant and the religious nut should be the Americans.

[C0ckney]

I think the only Americans in the game are Santiago and Miriam. Funny how the developers decided the militant and the religious nut should be the Americans.

pretty accurate, no?

although as i recall santiago sounds spanish/mexican.