Bay 12 Games Forum

Mmm, the problem with a fleet-wide withdrawal is that the entire stated purpose of this feature is to preserve individual ships as well.  Repairs take less time than construction, so a key part of the present situation of decisive battle is the annihilation of the enemy fleet which forces them to rebuild losses from the keel up.  If you simply pool fleet-wide HP and retreat when it drops below half, that damage tends to be focused on a few ships.  The retreat thus means that half the fleet escapes unscathed and half the fleet is annihilated, which doesn't fulfill the design goal; moreover, it can already be done manually in any battle that takes around a month as in the late game.  By forcing individual ships to flee, you leave more individual ships intact and spread that 50% damage across more of the fleet.  This preserves individual ships as well as the fleet as a whole and maintains the fleet as a force in being, making snowballing off of an early victory a bit more difficult unless you can catch the enemy fleet again in the repair docks. 

Plus, I'm not so sure that the ships still appear when they've disengaged.  That single lone screenshot we have shows two ships which I assume (without any proof, but I think it's reasonable) are the two ships listed in the status screen, but one of them seems to be flaring up.  Depending on *when* they took that screenshot, it might be that disengagement is communicating visually at on the map by ships jumping out using the same method as Emergency FTL, and they simply took the screenshot at the moment this was happening because it was visually distinctive rather than simply taking a shot of one lone ship.  Plus, both of the ships are still taking fire when we know from the DD that disengaged ships aren't targeted for fire in the first place, which suggests someone either screwed up big writing the DD (known to occur before) or they intentionally timed that screenshot pretty much right when the ship flipped to "engaged" to "disengaged".

Quote from: Trekkin on November 30, 2017, 01:47:35 pm

Conceptually, perhaps, but this execution is going to look very silly when ships just stop doing anything and hang around being invincible. Why not have the fleet as a whole disengage after a certain percentage of losses, if they don't want individual ships to disengage? That way there could still be some decisive, fleet-ending battles, too.

I don't see why it'd look silly. Disengaged ships are pretty much hitting emergency FTL early, right? The only reason they don't separate and move off on their own is because of how tedious and micromanage-y that'd be. _{Also they obviously want individual ships to disengage if they're implementing this.}

Quote from: Trekkin on November 29, 2017, 07:40:02 pm

Okay. Assuming the ship travels ~4x the speed of light, the stars are 10 years apart from each other in a line ABCD, and it lingers motionless for five years at each star in a trip going A->B->C->A, (and omitting the actual destruction events to simplify) each of them sees this:

Ship: Depart A, Arrive B, Depart B, Arrive C, Depart C, Arrive A. All good so far.
A: Depart A, Arrive B, Depart B, Arrive A, Arrive C, Depart C. Oh hey, two ships at once.
B: Arrive B, Depart B, Depart A, Arrive C, Depart C, Arrive A. It arrives before it leaves! It leaves before it leaves!
C/D: Arrive C, Arrive B, Depart C, Depart B, Depart A, Arrive A Good grief! The ship's in two places at once and it's arriving before it leaves besides!

See the problem? Mass-energy equivalence isn't conserved, effects precede causes... I can post the diagram if you want.

I'm assuming FTL by Alcubierre drive. I tried working it out by creating a table, but I ended up just confusing myself, and my brain has started shutting down for sleep.

I'm thinking of making some kind of simulation where the ship releases labeled photons as projectiles at each time interval. Then we can know what each point sees by the available photons. Unity engine would be ideal.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

While it certainly is no secret that I greatly dislike paywalls, that does not make my interest in science any less, Trekkin. They published in Nature, so that is where I linked.

While they have not fully integrated the synthetic components, (as you point out, it requires artificially added transcription factors), the demonstration that the base pairs are theoretically functional should additional features be incorporated into their sample's genome (said tRNA frameworks) is still a big thing. The devil lives in the details, yes-- but that is what they are showing here-- one of the details claimed to be a devil has been shown to not be. (Specifically, the different bond structure of this base pair, since it is not based on hydrogen bonds. It was argued that it would cause problems with transcription. This is now shown to not be the case.)

You dont win a marathon by jumping to the finish line, you do actually have to run the race. This is exciting, because the runner is still running, and has made a significant distance down the racetrack.  The goal of synthetically assigned amino acids being added to a cell's vocabulary is just a little bit closer today. That is still pretty damn exciting.

<morbo>Causality doesn't work that way!</morbo>