cks you designed to be ~exotic~ or whatever, and those rabid jerks at Disney can only grit their teeth now!
Minor but important retcon to Sufficiently Advanced... · 4:08pm Dec 14th, 2014
Short version? The mind-bogging large size of space keeps blind-siding me.
As such, Rainbow Dash is no longer in the Kuiper belt, but rather the asteroid field.
The longer version is far longer and contains a lot of large scary numbers, so feel free to skip it...
But even with pushing the tech and things as far as I was comfortable with, about half a year of travel time was a bit... non-constructive for drama. 
So rather than losing some more scientific hardness, I'm going with a retcon.
More details for those curious under the cut.
One of the 'design' things I wanted, was for the teleportation in this setting to be highly useful, but without the 'afternoon tea on the moon' thing Star Trek has.
Don't get me wrong, that is also awesome... but I find it a bit anticlimactic for the characters to just step onto a teleporter and end up at whatever destination they want.
As such, these were the numbers I've been working with in my head:
(All these numbers uses RD as the example. IE, the upper limits on a transhuman, but there are still ‘faster’ ships out there, including the Pheidippides.)
Range.
Short = 0-1000 meters. +/- 0,010 m.
Medium = 1-50 km +/-20 m.
Long = 50-100 km +/- 5000 m.
Beyond that, risk for equipment failure.
‘Re-fire’ rate.
Short ≈ 0.4 seconds.
Medium ≈ 1 second.
Long ≈ 2 seconds.
‘Speed.’
100 km in 2 s = 50 000 m/s
Times three HORNs, firing in sequence every 0,66 s = 83 000 m/s (RD’s optimal speed without auxiliary gear.)
Auxiliary HORN arrays. (Five times two, one under each wing.) Firing once every 0,2 s = 250 000 m/s
(Lightspeed = 299 792 458 m/s)
50 000 / 299 792 458 = 1,6678204759907602478778835723746e-4
≈ 1,67 % of lightspeed.
250 000 / 299 792 458 = 8,339102379953801239389417861873e-4
≈ 8,3 % of lightspeed.
And do keep in mind, that RD is the speed-freak of the group. This is, more or less, this settings version of the sonic rainboom, to use 'pony' words for it.
And yeah, I know even another equivalent to 8.3 % of the speed of LIGHT is quite a bit for sci-fi that's trying to be on the harder side...
But I think it makes sense for the setting and the tech level, and it allows semi-reliable inter solar travel, while still keeping the potential of the Farcaster a big deal.
Anyway, the problem was...
Travel time.
Important units:
AU, Astronomical unit = 149 597 870 700 m
Earth to the sun = 1 AU.
149 597 870 700 / 250 000 = 598391,4828 (seconds)
598391,4828 / 60 = 9973,19138 (minutes.)
9973,19138 / 60 = 166,21985633333333333333333333333 (hours)
166,21985633333333333333333333333 / 24 = 6,9258273472222222222222222222222
≈ One week of travel time for one AU.
Neptune —and therefore the inner edge of the Kuiper belt, is thus roughly thirty weeks away from the sun with this ‘speed.’
Jupiter, five.
For comparison Mars is about a year away with our current cutting edge, and taking advantage of stuff like gravitational slingshot-ing and waiting for optimal orbit patterns.
For RD, it would as worst be about two weeks, but depending on the orbits it could be as little as a couple of days.
Oh, and one light-year, the distance to Alpha Centauri our nearest star, is 63 239.7263 AU.
To save you the math, that is roughly 1216 years of non-stop travel.
So... yeah.
Think this is a good compromise between realism and sci-fi hardness for this setting, without turning any of the characters into demi-gods that can just wish themselves to Mars at the first sign of trouble.
Hope that wall of text interested at least some of you!
Edit* Correction by Pixel Pony:
Corrections:
It takes about 6 months at optimal distance to reach Mars.
Alpha Centauri isn't the closest star to us. Proxima Centauri is, and it's over 4 light years away.
My bad! Thanks for the clarification!
Yeah, space is big. When you see starships landing on small points on a planet in Star Wars, they'd better be using good navigation systems to pull that off.
You misspelled Alpha Centauri.
2652993
That was actually one of the things that impressed me with the first Mass Effect.
That first little scene were Joker get's introduced, and he's rightfully impressed with nailing that mass-relay jump by only a couple of hundred kilometers margin?
Just really wish more creators actually knew what a darn error margin is, so we could get more subtle scenes like that.
2653006 Mass Effect is what I picture when I think about what a good sci-fi story should be.
2653005
Oops.
Thanks for pointing it out!
2653009
Yeah.
For how badly Bioware fumbled the ending of the trilogy story-wise, the two first games were really darn solid all the way through.
I must admit the freaking dues ex machina star-child from nowhere burned me quite a bit on the franchise, but I'm still hoping #4 can salvage things.
2653014 The ending to ME3 wasn't bad, it just didn't stack up to the rest of the storytelling by a wide margin.
2653016
Actually, I was one of those kinda loved the ending and story...
Quite literally up to the point were that darn elevator, and you-know-who.
I almost never do that type of head canon stuff, but I honestly consider everything that happened past Shepard pushing the fire button the hallucinations of a dying man.
2653085 Yeah, ME3 had a great story up to the star-child.
That was interesting
Speaking of mass effect, have you guys read the fanfic "Transcendent Humanity"? It's a bit of a HFY, and a bit short, but it is ongoing and I love it.
But along the lines of distance in space, it is kinda hard to grasp the distances involved. It isn't helped by the classic portrayal of the solar system as having all the orbits right next to each other. I mean, Jupiter is more than 4 times the distance from the sun as Earth, and Saturn is almost 2 times further than that, with the distances of the next few planets doubling the previous planet's distance. It is truly wonderful to think of.
2653135
Glad you liked it!
2653155
Yeah, that's a good story.
Personally I think it's a bit short on descriptions of things, but when it's good, it's GOOD.
Yeah... More or less exactly the trap I fell in.
There's just this whole different ballpark between knowing abstractly that space is big, and actually even as much as scratching the surface on grokking how mindbogglingly titanic it truly is.
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9d/From_earth_to_the_largest_star.gif
Corrections:
It takes about 6 months at optimal distance to reach Mars.
Alpha Centauri isn't the closest star to us. Proxima Centauri is, and it's over 4 light years away.
2653210 I love that gif. It gives you a bit of a sense of how huge this universe is. So does this
So, I'm not entirely certain what you mean by teleportation, up above. Do these ships go faster by "blinking," rapid repeating teleports that get them going faster and stopping faster than acceleration would, or do you mean personal teleportation?
2653325 Also, with that link, you still only go 32 times the speed of light, while scrolling as fast as my computer will allow. That's still 1.59 months to the next closest solar system.
It's the Pheidippides, not the Philippides...
Also, what's more impressive than the size of objects in space is the exponentially more vast space itself.
2653325
Technically, it's both. At least in RD's case.
You ever heard of the Sword of the Stars series?
In that 4X game, there's a race of psychic space dolphins called the 'Liir,' who have as their favored drive system something called the flicker drive.
And it's basically a ship sized teleporter, that fires again and again many times a second, 'flickering' the ship forward through space without actually moving as such.
I came to think about it, and with combination with how reliable teleportation is in the SA world, it occurred to me that it actually made more sense as a long range propulsion system, than the gravity stuff.
2653331
That's a really cool map! Really get's the sense of distance accros, without bogging down in details.
And space really is b~ig.
2653351
2653246
Miss-remembered a lot of stuff this time it seems...
Still, thank you so much for correcting me! I've edited the blog a bit.
2653014 Honestly, the reason the mass effect 3 ending was so bad, was because it was so close to being good. People complain about the star child, but that wasn't the problem with the ending in the same way that jar jar was not the problem with the phantom menace. They were both annoying, out of place characters, but the real problem was with the main story, and they just make convenient scapegoats.
I mean first of all they switched what should have been the blue and red ending, with the destroy ending being some stupid luddite death beam, and the control ending being 'good' despite the fact that it was Cerberus' plan all along.
The green ending was the worst thing they could have ever put in the game. It took things from semi-hard sci-fi with a bit of elder technology, all the way over to space magic that had no place in the setting. Especially considering the paraphrased quotes:
Star child: Using you as a template, we will combine organic and synthetic dna into a new form of life.
Professor Farnsworth: I've found a way to read bender's robot DNA, or RNA, and through reverse fossilization turn him into a human.
Just wat?
2653386
I mentioned this above, but I honestly thought the ending was quite decent if a bit phoned in all the way to...
Well, the star-child.
You know what this is?
financialsense.com/sites/default/files/users/u716/images/2013/apparat-fmt.jpg
In Greek plays, a common ending was to lower a 'God' onto the scene, to wrap up all the remaining plot-points, and quite literally explain the ending to the play...
Seem familiar? Aside from having Shepard, AKA the player, being risen up onto the stage instead of the star-child lowered, it's exactly that.
A dues ex machina.
A robotic dues ex machina, that tells your bad-ass cyborg space hero that have saved millions if not billions, that 'artificial things are bad.'
In other words Bioware went for what might be the lamest type of ending —one that the ancient Greeks grew tired off!— and they still screwed it up!
Yeah, and I'm not going to lie. The synthetics versus organics bullshit? That bit of the endings theme pissed me off almost as the crappy writing. An anti-tech message, in a freaking sci-fi series?! Where you've spent ninety percent of the time, using future guns to shoot aliens in the face, so you can talk with the actually nice future people in their future clothes, on their future space stations?!
So, yeah, I honestly think that 60% of what is wrong with the Mass Effect trilogy ending can be linked directly back to that glow-in-the-dark enema tube known as the star-child... but he's still tied into the rest of where Mass Effect stumbled so heavily you can just lay it at his feet anyway.
I will wholeheartedly agree with this, though.
It really, really felt as if how EDI and the Geth being hit by the same anti-tech beam was a blatant 'Fuck you!' from the writers, because otherwise EVERY player would have considered Destroy the golden ending.
And we simply can't have people enjoy themselves, because that isn't artsy enough...
This. I mean, I fully expected Shepard to die in a bittersweet paragon ending, and possibly go evil overlord in a renegade ending. Is it cliche? Sure, but I would have enjoyed it. Instead we got a minute or two of dialogue telling the player that all the previous things they did with making peace between organics and synthetics, helping the galaxy be a place of tolerance and love, etc, etc, etc, was bad, and now they have to kill all robots (and themselves) to make things back to the way they were.
I still hit the power button when i get to that part of the game.
2653496
Yeah...
I think the most telling when it comes to how Bioware actually thought about the player reaction to their 'master piece,' was the only thing totally new added to the extended cut, the forth and worst ending:
The damn war readiness doesn't even do anything.
You piss of the god-brat, and he just kills EVERYBODY.
AGAIN! And you are somehow meant to listen to the omni-cidal bastard, and think that he's just dribbling wisdom into your ears!
I just... Argh!
I'm honestly wondering how many reviews, once #4 comes out, that are going to go either: 'Well, the ending sucks again. You now know all you need to.' Or 'Calm everybody, the ending doesn't suck this time!'
Either way, I'm not paying as much as cent for #4 until I've heard about the ending from people I trust.
Does this mean you're finally going to update your story?
2656843
Hopefully before Christmas, but it depends a bit on my inspiration and if my editors have time.
Huh, how'd I miss this blog? But yes, very good reasoning. In fact I use kuiper belt as a location for any human civilization I want developing separate from Earth in settings where FTL is rare/non-existent. any civilization in the kuiper belt would be it's own. There's no way to get any real help from earth on any crisis' and once they're self sustaining they would likely become independent and likely become their own independent nation. give 50-100 years after that and they'd probably develop on a different track than the rest of humanity.
I just woke up so have some stuff that barely makes sense.
Interesting. I also liked the ending of Mass Effect.