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Incompatible System

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Negative mass is one of those things that may or may not exist, and if it does will almost certainly be extremely fucking weird.

heraldoflight said:
On a side note does the blink drive and posigravity drive violate thermodynamics? It's been generally agreed that any form of FTL violates the laws of physics and the mass effect more so but do people acknowledge this in universe. How powerful is the Humanx energy generation especially with WIMP field manipulation technology?
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It shouldn't, neither drive actually violates light-speed either; the blink drive cheats by traveling through the 4th dimension to give the appearance of faster-than-light travel through the 3rd dimension, but does not actually 'move' anything anywhere in conventional terms. The posigravity drive uses a mechanism similar to the Alcubierre Warp Drive, which cheats by expanding and contracting space around the spaceship in such a way as to effectively move the ship faster-than-light without actually doing so from a physics perspective.

And the light speed barrier has absolutely nothing to do with thermodynamics, so even if the drives did break it, that would have no impact on thermodynamics.


In short; you cannot travel faster than light, but there are loopholes that theoretically might allow you to effectively travel faster than light without actually doing so.
 
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Neruz said:
Negative mass is one of those things that may or may not exist, and if it does will almost certainly be extremely fucking weird.


It shouldn't, neither drive actually violates light-speed either; the blink drive cheats by traveling through the 4th dimension to give the appearance of faster-than-light travel through the 3rd dimension, but does not actually 'move' anything anywhere in conventional terms. The posigravity drive uses a mechanism similar to the Alcubierre Warp Drive, which cheats by expanding and contracting space around the spaceship in such a way as to effectively move the ship faster-than-light without actually doing so from a physics perspective.

And the light speed barrier has absolutely nothing to do with thermodynamics, so even if the drives did break it, that would have no impact on thermodynamics.


In short; you cannot travel faster than light, but there are loopholes that theoretically might allow you to effectively travel faster than light without actually doing so.
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It's not moving faster than light, it's making the distance shorter strategically. Very important distinction there.
 
Neruz said:
I love that that this sounds like nonsense but is in fact technically correct.
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The best sort of Correct. >^,^<

In a more serious note: I am -really- looking forwards to the Citadel Races finding out more about the Humanx in this setting. I mean, yeah, they're pissing their panties over the implications of the things they've run across so far, but they haven't even -begun- to learn about the real mindbreaker things yet, like moving Relays. Or planets. ^^ The Blink Drive alone basically obviates their entire military strategy, even leaving aside the bit about it making Eezo poof. They don't know that, but they might learn about the Drive, and start building a bridge from the Citadel to Dark Space with all the bricks that would be shat.
 
Valdimarian said:
"It's the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs!"


still funny that we keep finding ways to make that scientifically inaccurate statement accurate in retrospect.
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Wasn't that even meant to be an obvious "fake bragging" that Obi-Wan would just roll his eyes at and continue on about?

Sorta a test by Han to see if the kid and old man had any clue what they were talking about.
 
Vyrexuviel said:
Wasn't that even meant to be an obvious "fake bragging" that Obi-Wan would just roll his eyes at and continue on about?

Sorta a test by Han to see if the kid and old man had any clue what they were talking about.
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That's one of the theories, but really it was Lucas using a cool space term he hadn't realized was a distance and nobody else knew at the time either (remember, this is 40 some years pre google)

After it came out in theaters all sorts of nerds went "Uh... a Parsec is 3 point something light years" and Lucas had to BS an answer. (the answer eventually became "There's a big scary region the Kessel Run has to go around called The Maw and he skirted the edge of it closer than anyone else had")
 
Valdimarian said:
That's one of the theories, but really it was Lucas using a cool space term he hadn't realized was a distance and nobody else knew at the time either (remember, this is 40 some years pre google)

After it came out in theaters all sorts of nerds went "Uh... a Parsec is 3 point something light years" and Lucas had to BS an answer. (the answer eventually became "There's a big scary region the Kessel Run has to go around called The Maw and he skirted the edge of it closer than anyone else had")
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I thought the Kessel Run had a region of space in it full of Miniature Singularities ...
 
Malcanthet said:
I thought the Kessel Run had a region of space in it full of Miniature Singularities ...
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That's what the Maw is. It's a huge cluster of black holes (with a top-secret Imperial weapons research installation hidden inside). Maw Installation built the Sun Crusher, and had a small-scale test article for the Death Star.
 
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Vyrexuviel said:
Wasn't that even meant to be an obvious "fake bragging" that Obi-Wan would just roll his eyes at and continue on about?

Sorta a test by Han to see if the kid and old man had any clue what they were talking about.
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Valdimarian said:
That's one of the theories, but really it was Lucas using a cool space term he hadn't realized was a distance and nobody else knew at the time either (remember, this is 40 some years pre google)

After it came out in theaters all sorts of nerds went "Uh... a Parsec is 3 point something light years" and Lucas had to BS an answer. (the answer eventually became "There's a big scary region the Kessel Run has to go around called The Maw and he skirted the edge of it closer than anyone else had")
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I'm pretty sure the original script notes that Han is bragging, trying to make himself look impressive to the backwater hicks that Luke is and Obi-Wan appears to be, and I recall Harrison Ford saying that that was how he thought of the line at the time.

For reasons that make sense to George Lucas, he decided to instead double-down on it being a serious claim instead of an obviously bullshit boast, which gave us the EU explanation of the Maw cluster of black holes, and the new Disney explanation of the Akkadese Maelstrom. In both cases, there is an 18 parsec 'safe route' that everyone normally takes, and Han basically went 'off-road' through a hazardous area to reduce the distance to 12 parsecs (if you round down) because Han Solo Is Just That Good.


Much like Han shooting first, fans are divided on whether the official explanation is better than the original implication. Personally I prefer the implication that Han is just bullshitting what he perceives to be a pair of backwater nobodies who have never seen a spaceship before, because that fits his character and avoids having to jump through ridiculous hoops to make sense, but everyone and their dog seems determined to jump through hoops, so *shrug*.
 
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Neruz said:
In both cases, there is an 18 parsec 'safe route' that everyone normally takes, and Han basically went 'off-road' through a hazardous area to reduce the distance to 12 parsecs (if you round down) because Han Solo Is Just That Good.
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Having not seen Solo, I can't speak to what might have happened to the Falcon if he'd had a navigational mishap in the Akkadese Maelstrom, but hyperdrives and gravity do not work together well, so I'd instead say that Han Solo Is Just That Reckless.
 
Obviously Han was bragging by pointing out something he actually did, while leaving out that it was because he was intoxicated and got incredibly lucky. Oh, and that he only found out about it after the fact when someone asked him for details on the route he took to see if it was actually viable for normal commercial traffic.
 
rdmcmains said:
Having not seen Solo, I can't speak to what might have happened to the Falcon if he'd had a navigational mishap in the Akkadese Maelstrom, but hyperdrives and gravity do not work together well, so I'd instead say that Han Solo Is Just That Reckless.
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He was carrying a cargo of unstable and unrefined hyperfuel, so if he'd had a mishap he wouldn't have made it to the refinery in time and the Falcon would have gotten all explodey.
 
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Neruz said:
He was carrying a cargo of unstable and unrefined hyperfuel, so if he'd had a mishap he wouldn't have made it to the refinery in time and would have gone all explodey.
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Well, that's another change from the EU, because in the EU, practically the only reason anyone went to Kessel was for glitterstim spice, which was mined by prisoners from caves infested by very large carnivorous beasties that excreted the raw glitterstim as a kind of webbing. When you were sentenced to Kessel, your sentence was 'until you get eaten'.
 
Apparently Lucas was also a huge fan of hotrodding, specifically junker hotrodding, where you take a beat up old looking junker and stick a V8 turbo under the hood that could pace the muscle car in The Fast and the Furious.

The Falcon was an homage to that sort of junker hotrodding: beat up and janky exterior but more horsepower than is reasonable for a beat up old cargo tug. (They play that straight in TFA where they call it garbage, but once Rey learns the name of it she kind of goes "Oh! It's *that* junker" )
 
Neruz said:
Of course, you don't need much of an immune system for a sterile environment, so in the process of adapting to it, the Quarian immune system atrophied itself; why spend the extra energy and nutrition to run a full immune system when there was nothing to infect you?

Unfortunately, by the time the Quarians put two and two together and realized what was happening, their immune systems had already atrophied to the point of being nearly useless. However, the adaptational aspect still remains; if Shepard romances Tali then by the end of ME3 Tali notes that her system has adapted to Shepard's personal blend of microbial life (humans being fucking sewers in that regard) and no longer gets sick from exposure to him.

In other words, yes, the Quarian immune system problem is entirely solvable; Tali even notes so herself in the linked video, saying that if they colonized a new world it would take 'a long period of bio-engineering to recover', which is code for 'we would have to deliberately expose ourselves to the native microbes, starting with the least harmful and slowly working our way up to the stuff that can kill us.'

So yeah, Quarian immune systems are 'weak' because they are highly adaptive, and thanks to living in sterile spaceship environments their immune systems adapted for sterile environments. Like a muscle getting flabby and weak because it hasn't been used for anything in decades, and much like said muscle they can be trained back up to functional. But the process is much longer and harder than it would be if it hadn't atrophied in the first place, and if you push too hard and too fast then instead of getting stronger it breaks entirely.


:facepalm:
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So the whole Quarian problem can be solved by "vaccinating", Quarians can clearly visit other places, either on their own on pilgrimages or otherwise and just gather up microbes, then they test them in small amounts to develop a immune system training set and just breed more bacteria themselves. If this is true the whole "problem" is a fake problem once more invented by authors not thinking things through enough, or accidentally "retconning" themselves into a hole.
 
demonitter said:
So the whole Quarian problem can be solved by "vaccinating", Quarians can clearly visit other places, either on their own on pilgrimages or otherwise and just gather up microbes, then they test them in small amounts to develop a immune system training set and just breed more bacteria themselves. If this is true the whole "problem" is a fake problem once more invented by authors not thinking things through enough, or accidentally "retconning" themselves into a hole.
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It would presumably be a long and difficult process, and as long as the Quarians don't have a planet to live on they'd need to keep artificially 'vaccinating' themselves with pathogens, but yes, it is an entirely solvable problem that is not anything like as major as the fandom often thinks it is.

(In-universe it's not seen as a particularly major problem; see Tali boning Shepard, it's just the reason why Quarians spend their lives in spacesuits. With the species effectively exiled and refusing to settle any planet until they reclaim Rannoch out of pride, it is literally easier to just live in spacesuits all the time than to fix their immune system problem.)
 
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