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Having seen some episodes of Land of the Lost that he wrote the scripts for, I can say his works are quite... Distinctive. Yes, Distinctive is the best word for them....
Distance Learning for fun and profit...
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Well, I wouldn't recommend that motive force at least.
We had some really strange ideas for a while when trying to come up with uses for nuclear weapons other than blowing ourselves up. Some of them were pretty damn goofy.
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Not quite. Beyond the Horizon radars (and radio communication, BTW) are a thing.
Over-the-horizon radar - Wikipedia
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No, I am in fact recommending the book (specifically the last few chapters) as an example of space battle done right.
I wasn't recommending the whole book as a sterling example of fiction, mind. Niven does tend to get wordy, and that particular book spent more time following the antics of a variety of people in the middle of a war of planetary invasion.
Niven does short stories extremely well. His novels tend to get a bit rambly. Then again, I tend to judge Hard SF by his example, along with Asimov and Heinlein (though less of that last). That's what I grew up reading back in the 80s, so.....
FaerieKnight79
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Heinlein is good, as is Asimov. That said, did you know that Heinlein also wrote fantasy? And that his primary 'hard Science fiction' world setting (the one most of his novels and short stories are set in) included magic in various ways?
on the manned fighters vs unmanned drones/missiles topic...
one factor that i havent seen mentioned (tho i havent read every post, apologies if anyone already has) is that training a fighter pilot costs a lot of time and money. with some quick google-fu, it takes 2 years and $5-10 million to train one. sure during times of war that could be cut down in both time and cost, but then the quality of the pilot is sure to be less too. unless in the future there is some sort of way to digitally quickly transfer knowledge and skill into someone, i dont see that changing.
one factor that i havent seen mentioned (tho i havent read every post, apologies if anyone already has) is that training a fighter pilot costs a lot of time and money. with some quick google-fu, it takes 2 years and $5-10 million to train one. sure during times of war that could be cut down in both time and cost, but then the quality of the pilot is sure to be less too. unless in the future there is some sort of way to digitally quickly transfer knowledge and skill into someone, i dont see that changing.
Drones are cheaper/easier when you're talking industrial production quantities, but in any setting without an actual fully realized AI, you're going to either suffer from light speed delay on control links, or the drone being 'dumb' and therefore easier to 'confuse' and therefore more susceptible to electronic warfare options. And in a setting with a fully realized AI, you still just come at the 'pilot' from the other direction since its still a person.
Then again some settings are designed around making drones not a thing, Wing Commander comes to mind, forcing a fighter/bomber/carrier doctrine based on setting tech. Battlestar Galactica avoided drones for obvious reasons. As did Space Above and Beyond for similar 'war vs AI' existing in the setting. Star Trek also avoids intelligent drones after one of their first AI's went berserk (It's also supposed to be incredibly rare/impossible on their tech base, but if the name of your ship is Enterprise, Bullshit happens on an alarmingly regular basis, impossible every other weekend.)
Then again some settings are designed around making drones not a thing, Wing Commander comes to mind, forcing a fighter/bomber/carrier doctrine based on setting tech. Battlestar Galactica avoided drones for obvious reasons. As did Space Above and Beyond for similar 'war vs AI' existing in the setting. Star Trek also avoids intelligent drones after one of their first AI's went berserk (It's also supposed to be incredibly rare/impossible on their tech base, but if the name of your ship is Enterprise, Bullshit happens on an alarmingly regular basis, impossible every other weekend.)
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Funny thing, it's possible that in the future fighter pilots could fly their craft without ever actually being in the craft. Think about it, you can kitbash a pretty damn accurate sim cockpit setup right now. A set up that identically mirrors the actual cockpit of a real aircraft. All the same dials, all the same levers, all the same switches, and it all works. It shows accurate information for what's going on in the flight sim you're using (Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 is a popular one currently). With MS Flight Simulator 2020 it even models the actual weather in real time. Imagine, your fighter pilot sits down in his cockpit, starts up the engine, and takes off. During the engagement he gets into heated dogfights... All without ever actually leaving the aircraft carrier or base. Instead he's got something like this around him, relaying information from the drone aircraft he's piloting.
Those are great when the aircraft you're flying is as imaginary as the terrain you're flying over and also right there in the room with you but the real world has light speed lag. This is why no-one is directly flying Ingenuity on Mars and that's not even outside our solar system.
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I really want to see that happen... There are a few stories playing with the concept, but they do not tend to be very good/ended early/going to far. I want a hard SF+Mass Effect humanity against the canon Mass effect species story!
Do it!I'm very tempted to write a fairly short ME story based on what would happen if the canon ME scenario ran into humans who'd kept the Cold War mentality going until that point... Not sure how they'd have actually survived doing this, but we can put it down to plot armor
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Yes, which with gravity affecting tech is still far better than being hit.
As long as lag is kept below 50ms the human won't notice the difference. Which probably means no live video feed, only preprocessed positional data once they're in battle. They can then also replace the appearance of the enemy with a known skin to reduce the time it takes the pilot to recognise, react, and respond to what's happening.
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Self-guided torpedoes is possible as cutting edge 1930s technology and mass-producible in the 1940s. Self-guiding missiles is cutting edge early 1940s and mass-producible in the late 1940s. You don't need anything like a computer, just a few vacuum tubes to do even quite advanced self-guidance like proportional navigation. I really doubt that there were computers in the actual missiles before the 1970s.
I hope this is mostly due to software bloat and laziness: "We always use guidance.missile() even though its 23 petabyte in size because writing it from scratch would take time!" and not "We always use guidance.missile() because we don't understand how to make a guided missile without using guidance.missile()". The latter would be pathetic.
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To the Council races, it's too close to AI for a missile (or anything that isn't living organic matter) to be capable of course correction on it's own. Doesn't matter if it's actually an AI, VI, or even just an empty jar of peanut butter with a knife stuck into it. If the guidance system can make any sort of decisions on it's own, it's "too close to being an AI". Thus why their "torpedoes" are actually unguided rockets.
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Rorschach's Blot's Watch.
EDITED TO ADD: Since it's now on AO3, link provided.
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... you're saying this a lot, but to my knowledge (and looking at the codex) 'too close to an AI' has never been mentioned in ME regarding guided missiles. It's just never mentioned at all. We know that disrupter torpedoes aren't guided, but that's about it. You could make the argument that guided stuff is 'too close to an AI', though that seems a bit sus when the codex points out that ground forces in the ME are supported by veritable fleets of drones, but guided missiles are just not mentioned.
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It's probably a distance thing. The drones can easily be slaved to omni tools with no appreciable loss in effectiveness as planetary distances are just not that large. The missiles need to have increasing levels of autonomous action the further away from the ships they get, once the latency gets to more than a few 10ths of a second real time control is impossible. Don't forget that latency comes from double the distance as it requires a response.
FYI latency is how long a signal takes to travel, lag is how long it takes to exchange information and is always at least the latency value. Which is why it is impossible to play multiplayer fps over a satalite Internet connection.
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Actually, it is. Not directly, but in ME1 you can ask the VI tour guide in the Citadel about VI. Again and again throughout the games you are told about how paranoid the council is about AI via in-game dialog and codex entries. It's to the point that the only automated turrets you'll encounter are all being used by criminals or are ultra black projects that nobody is suppose to know about. The only missile/torpedo tech that is ever mentioned is unguided rockets that have to be launched from 'knife fight' range. They are really paranoid about AI, and the possibility any tech that can make decisions might become an AI.
Also, remember that drones can be controlled remotely. In fact, they are controlled remotely.
Also, remember that drones can be controlled remotely. In fact, they are controlled remotely.
Definitely not impossible, but not terribly fun for many involved.
Counterstrike vs internet randos, it was still possible to get kills and help the team despite 1000+ms ping.
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And how many times were you fragged just because you couldn't see them coming?
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Does it matter? The assertion was that it's impossible. I've known people who played MMOs using a dialup connection. And I've downloaded 750 megabyte video files via a dialup connection and a torrent file sharing program. Possible does not always mean pleasant. It just means it's possible.
I am well aware of long-haul, long-wave RF. I am aware that the earliest radars were HF/VHF frequency that technically had that capability, though not necessarily enough resolution or interpretation processing. Equally, there are modern, platform based radars in use that have effective OTH capability and atmospheric effects that can mimic that capability (and incidentally prove my point about TTL values).Not quite. Beyond the Horizon radars (and radio communication, BTW) are a thing.
Over-the-horizon radar - Wikipedia
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I am going to pull a technical copout and say all of that is irrelevant based on the size of the prospective platform - a missile or fighter frame, notionally in space.
I indirectly mentioned it when talking about economies of scale, but I believe you are correct regarding directly specific topic training.
That greatly depends on your definition of a computer. Arguably, a clock either is a digital, or historically a mechanical computer. Both of your examples needed some form of processing capability in order to fulfill there function, else they would not have a "homing" function. The Apollo series moon landings used a very small, but very accurate, program to track star alignments for position management, but it would be difficult to call that a "computer" by today's standards.
I am in emphatic agreement that today's coding has more to do with bloat and laziness rather than a lack of understanding.
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This is sheer pants-on-head stupid. Has nobody in the ME 'verse taken even a basic electronics engineering or programming course?
Most of missile guidance can be summed up as "see thing. follow thing. explode when close to thing".
With this level of ignorance i'm a bit surprised they use computers at all.
You also need to internalize that a good chunk of the lore is based on writers who were focused on a "good enough" story while being too lazy to go into internally-consistent details. Edit: Or real world relevant details that might distract from the overall story that involves the use of space magic rocks.
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You missed a big one. When you're not lugging around 180lbs of useless meat, it turns out your 'fighter' is also a heck of a lot faster and more maneuverable.
Performance envelopes for fighters and bombers and the like are far more restricted by "Useless bag of meat passes out on even measly 10g turns" than "we can't build to tolerate those stresses".
As noted, you can build a dozen drone fighters for the cost of a regular one (and without that pesky investment in a pilot. Even non-autonomous ones have 'pilots' safe hundreds or thousands of miles away), but they're simply so faster and more maneuverable that no manned craft is going to be able to counter it. Not only can you trade ten drones for a manned fighter and come out ahead monetarily, you're probably not going to lose ten drones because it's real hard to shoot things down that can pull off turns and acceleration levels you can't.
How many F-35s can a WW2 fighter shoot down?
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Of course it's "pants on head stupid". I think it's suppose to be a subtle hint at the fact Reaper Tech brainwashes those who use it. And make no mistake, mass effect technology is Reaper Tech. Unlike what is believed, the Protheans didn't invent mass effect technology or create the relays. You get told outright by a surviving prothean that they found beacons that taught them build the tech. This I believe is in the first ME game at that.