#ftl radio

[ftl-radio]

#Metro Boomin #Morgan Freeman #not all heroes wear capes #21 savage #drake #Travis Scott #hip hop #rap #music #ftl radio

[brokenaesthetikz]

KEHLANI | R&B Radio

#kehlani #music #rnb #alternative rnb #blue water road #pop #indie #fashion #style #art #sza #doja cat #normani #jhene aiko #neo soul #hip hop #rap #hiphop #drake #ftl radio #bryson tiller #ella mai #musicians #juice wrld #teyana taylor #cardi b #megan thee stallion #saweetie

[marlinspirkhall]

Humans sending out signal after signal, message after message, space probes, emails, photos, light shows, intergalactic fireworks, all in the hope that they're not alone: Please reply, please reply, please reply, ple–

Aliens, screeching across the universe in a brand new FTL ship: CAN YOU SHUT UP? WE GOT YOUR FIRST ONE THOUSAND MESSAGES, DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND HOW BIG SPACE IS?

Humans: oh my goooooosh, hi

Humans: Did you invent faster than light travel just for us? 🥺

Aliens: NO!!!

SETI: Radio message received.

Radio message: We are receiving you. We have decided to answer you in your own language, and–

SETI: New radio message received.

Aliens: Oh no.

Radio message: We have received your previous messages pertaining to life on Earth, and have included our own data packet about life on Big Tree in return. We named our planet before we learned it was only 30% arboreal. Thank you for the golden disc, it was extremely tasty. Haha. Just kidding.

SETI: Data packet downloaded. Decrypting...

SETI: New radio message received.

Radio message: As previously stated, we are receiving your messages and your gifts. We took a photo of our planet with our own photo-capture device, as we were unhappy with the one you provided.

SETI: Data packet update: Warning: Several terrabytes of information may be corrupted.

SETI: New radio message received.

Radio message: This is the Generation Ship Tree Hollow. My designation is Captain Root-Skygazer. Our people have instructed us to fly ahead and communicate with you when we reached the thirty-year marker, as these messages are likely to reach you faster. They request that you stop broadcasting messages with the subject line: 'Oh, how woeful it is to be alone in an uncaring universe (and other similar poems)' because it frightens the children and makes our scientists deeply existential. I, personally, am partial to episodes of M star A star S star H. It has been of great interest to learn historical facts about the longest Earth conflict of your common era. I miss my home, and I am saddened that I will never see yours. This ship has a self-sustaining ecosystem of plants native to our planet, and a crew manifest of one hundred and fifty-seven. The replacement generation currently numbers one hundred and seventeen.

Radio message: Hey, Ball Of Dirt, it's Big Tree again. Lose our number, would you? There must be some other semi-evolved space aemoba you can bother. (Several words untranslateable)

Aliens: Yeah, so your answering machine is going to be like that for a while–

Humans: What was that part about a Generation Ship?

Aliens: We were hoping you could tell us that, actually. We lost contact with them after the 200 year marker.

Radio message: This is the generation ship Tree Hollow. My designation is Captain Cradleroot. Captain Root-Skygazer was my grandfather. Inspired by the speeches of your contemporary leader, Ronald Reagan, I decided to restructure the existing system here which allowed crewmembers to eat as they required. Under this new system, we award tokens to whom we feel has done the most valuable work, and they can redistribute those to the hungry if they wish. But they do not. However, I believe that [...]

Humans:

Aliens:

Humans:

Aliens: This is all your fault, by the way.

#The Generation Ship Tree Hollow #Humans are space orcs #sci fi #writing

[katakaluptastrophy]

The Nine Houses are obviously deliberately technologically limited. Aside from having FTL capable spaceships, the most advanced piece of technology that we see in the Houses is "an electric transmitter box, with headphones and a mic." It's not clear entirely what sort of device this is, but it apparently requires you to stick an antenna out the window.

On New Rho, Cam has a beeping, and therefore presumably digital watch. Nona has to remind her that's it's called a "watch", and not the House term, "clockwork", which rather suggests House timepieces are analog.

There's a projector box embedded in the BoE conference table, which loads an image like dial up internet because they are "using shortwave" - presumably shortwave radio, which can transmit pictures. As We Suffer apologises for the slowness of the image loading because of shortwave, that suggests that other methods of transmitting an image do exist, but that for whatever reason they're not using those. Perhaps they do normally have something akin to the internet, but this is down due to the conditions on New Rho, or being avoided due to House or inter-cell monitoring.

The audio of Juno Zeta's proof of life is on "a little piece of electronics, a fingernail-shaped thing with prongs", which sounds like some kind of drive.

We also see We Suffer in the impromptu command centre in the tunnels with "a headpiece and a flip-top computer", presumably being used for some kind of communicatons or planning.

And of course, there's Cam and Pal's recorder, which from the descriptions of it making squeaks and garbled noises sounds rather like it might contain a cassette tape.

A paramilitary group on a beseiged planet may not be the best evidence for the level of technology outside of the Houses, but if it is in any way indicative, non-House society doesn't seem to have non-space travel technology beyond things that would have been available in the early 00s.

#the locked tomb #tlt meta #I understand that Jod decided he's the only person that gets to play Candy Crush on an iPad in the Houses #But unless non-House society had its own personal butlerian jihad why is an audio file on a USB drive the most advanced thing we see?

[foone]

I'm surprised there's not more supernatural spaceship media. Like, your average little cargo ship is jumping around the outer rim trying to cut some time off their delivery route and they pick up a distress call, so they have to answer it.

(under a readmore cause this got a little longer than I expected)

They warp in to the approximate coordinates and there's a colony ship orbiting a gas giant, stuck in the shadow of it, basically frozen over. It's centuries old, but these sleeper ships from the pre-ftl era were built to last, so it's still broadcasting the SOS. It's not responding to radio, so they need to board it.

Normally this'd just involve turning off the SOS. The ship is clearly dead and not responding to any hails, the crew must be long gone and the reactor is just keeping the SOS going. But this is a sleeper ship, so it's possible there's just no one awake. Stuck in longsleep for god knows how many decades, waiting for someone to stumble on their signal...

So they board it, activate the computer, and it tells them that everyone is dead. The ship launched, and over the 358 years it's been traveling for, every single cryo chamber has been either opened or never had any lifesigns in it in the first place. The last event logged on the computer is 136 years ago, when the acting captain set the ship to orbit this gas giant, and turn on the distress signal. Since then, nothing.

But there's still power on the bridge. There may be something there. So they climb up the decks, passing the grim sight of endless rows of cryochambers lined up like tombstones, all showing red lights of lifesign failure. As they get closer to the bridge, the time of deaths get later. The ones on the first deck were close to the launch date, and the ones near the bridge are nearer to that 136 year ago deadline.

This wasn't a hardware failure. Something killed all these people, one by one, over 220 years.

They get to the bridge. The computers are all powered down, but the power management system is still active. Two of the decks still have their cryochambers powered, but it's the ones that were supposed to be empty. There's no lifesigns in them, so the little computer in the power diagnostic system has been recommending they be turned off to save on energy. Naturally it's been recommending that for three and a half centuries. One of the crew members almost absent-mindedly agrees to the prompt, and those cryochambers deactivate. They were empty anyway, right? The sound of humming from the bridge mostly fades away, as a few hundred cryopods on the deck below power down.

The boarding crew powers off the SOS beacon. They'll alert the authorities to the ship's location when they get to a port, surely someone wants to investigate what went wrong here, or at least do an archeological study. This place is beyond an antique at this point... Wait. What's that?

The power computer says there's still one active power draw, about 1.2 kilowatts, in the captain's quarters. That's too much for a personal computer, but just about right for a single cryo pod. Maybe the captain or someone is still alive? That pod isn't on the network, so they can't see the lifesigns from here.

They head over, and the bulkhead door is still cracked open, with a thick cable running in through the gap in the door. Whoever wired this up clearly didn't have time to correctly reroute the power systems, they just lugged a cryo pod in here and basically ran an extension cord to a nearby terminal.

They pry open the door, and there's a softly glowing cryo pod in the middle of the surprisingly spacious room. It makes some amount of sense, generally on these ships the captain would be the one who has to wake up and deal with any situations that arise, while the rest of the colonists are content to sleep until they reach their new home.

They look in the pod, and there's a man lying there. He's not the captain, though. They saw his photo on the bridge. This is someone else. Some one quite pale and gaunt. Maybe they were suffering malnutrition before they put themselves in the pod?

The pod is softly beeping. It's reactivating, apparently triggered when they opened the door. The pod shows no lifesigns, so it's not worth worrying about, the panel sliding over to reveal merely a well preserved corpse.

And then he smiles. "I'm so glad to see you! When we ran out of food we we're afraid we'd never see another human again. And even through those environment suits, I can tell you're so deliciously human." he licks his lips, and the boarding crew spots his prominent canines.

There's a noise halfway between a howl and a shriek from the floor below. The man in the cryopod leans up his head. "ahh, I see you've woken up my children as well. Marvelous. I hope you brought plenty of friends for us to snack on."

The head of the boarding party lifts her arm to call their ship, tell them to get out of there or drop a torpedo into the colony ship's reactor. Before she can bring it to her face to call, there's a flash of motion. Before she can even realize what's happening, the man(?) in the cryopod is up and holding her wrist away from her face.

As she cries out at the sudden pain, the other members of the boarding party spot movement down the hall. A lot of movement. A wall of thin pale people are running towards the captain's quarters, climbing over each other and pushing each other aside, like a pack of wild wolves who just smelled prey.

The boarding party steps back into the room and slams the emergency close. At least in here they only have to deal with one of those things.

The door hits the cable and bounces off with a loud alarm. It fully opens again, ready to let the hungry mass in.

So... Have you ever noticed how much a cryopod looks like a coffin?

#my writing

[eightyonekilograms]

[vintagegeekculture]

A History of Faster than Light Communications

One of the technologies taken for granted in science fiction and space opera is faster than light communication...or as scifi fans call it, an ansible. In reality, most communications are limited by the speed of light, so it takes a delay of a few minutes to send and receive messages even in a solar system. As 2001 pointed out, it would take 6 hours and back for a radio message to reach Saturn. A traditional radio signal sent to the closest star would take four years to arrive.

Isaac Asimov coined the term “ultrawave” or “hyperwave communications” in his Foundation novels in the 1950s, to refer to signals that propagate along “subspace,” a lower level dimension where travel is quicker. Only information can travel in subspace, but people and objects can’t. Jack Williamson mentioned “rhodomagnetic waves” in a few of his scifi stories, which function as a kind of intergalactic communicator, but also are the basis for a death ray, meaning in his universe, any ftl communication device can be rewired with a minimum of effort by a boffin into a lethal death ray. 

In the 70s, Ursula K. le Guin popularized the term “Ansible” for this kind of communicator, instantly able to communicate regardless of distance. It’s this term that seemed to stick among fans and scifi culture, and most people with this device in their stories call it an “ansible” in homage to le Guin. Ansible communicators are just a part of scifi now, generic scifi worldbuilding, along with hyperspace travel, neuronic whips, space marines, and wisecracking robots. Many scifi writers have ansibles in their stories who are completely unaware of who originally coined the term and where. 

For most scifi writers, instant FTL communication is just a plot convenience to move the story along. Even Asimov, who made overthinking things his M.O., didn’t spend any extra time thinking about it. But James Blish however, put a lot of energy into figuring out how a faster than light or instant communicator would actually work....and he came to the conclusion it would be a technology with enormous philosophical, and indeed, practically religious implications.

Here is what I mean by that. In his story “Beep” in 1954, James Blish came up with the idea of a Dirac Communicator, which is the usual instant, no delay ansible. But Blish reasoned that the only way instant faster than light communications could actually work without any delay is by sending a signal into a null-dimension without time, so every single message ever sent (past, present, future) is sent simultaneously in a timeless null point, with machines only able to decode the time-sealed relevant messages they receive. 

If you stop and consider this, if a technology worked this way, it means that we live in a completely deterministic universe where all our decisions are made in advance. And as Blish was intelligent (and wiseassed) enough to point out in his 1954 story, it means that if faster than light communications actually work in the universe, that free will is an illusion, and that we actually do not have it. The universe is a watch proceeding on a predetermined pattern set at the moment of creation. An interesting conclusion to draw, all from a technology scifi takes for granted and sit in the background. 

#scifi history #ursula le guin

[inbabylontheywept]

Hold Your Breath and Burn

Seventeen hours.

Seventeen hours of sitting in his ruined craft, waiting for the carrier to send someone out to save his sorry ass. Seventeen hours of praying that he’d get out before the waste heat from his scrammed piece of shit reactor officially crossed the line from wring-out-your-underwear to meat-falls-off-the-bone. Seventeen hours of praying he was gonna make it.

And now with one blip of radio noise he knew he was gonna die.

Honestly, it was almost a relief.

He punched in a message through the QRAM system.

Hunter-Seeker nearby. Just caught an IFF ping. Being used as bait. Abort rescue.

A drop of sweat rolled down his nose as he waited for a response. He considered letting it drop to the floor. No need to draw this out any more than he already had.

The computer chirped at him. He almost hadn’t expected a response. Any time spent on him would essentially be wasted.

It was oddly comforting to know that they were willing to waste time on a dead man. Helped him feel less like a casualty on a spreadsheet. There was something human about knowing that someone would waste time on you.

He checked the message.

I’m sorry.

He shrugged. What else could be said? He was sorry too. Dying sucked. He’d bitched a lot about living, but honestly, it was starting to look like a pretty great deal.

He cut his self-pity short before it could even grow roots.

He leaned over the QRAM, suddenly tired.

Now what?

There was a longer pause. No sweat dribbled down his nose. He was glad for the reprieve, even if he knew what it signaled.

Hunt-Seekers are dangerous threats.

An obvious statement. Borderline cagey. Something about it made his hackles rise. He waited to see if another message would arrive.

One did.

Would you be willing to make one more sacrifice for mankind?

Ah.

He mulled the question over. Considered every reason he should say no. Considered every way to say no.

Will it hurt?

There was no pause in the response to this. The immediacy was frightening. He’d hoped there’d be something couched in there, but the straightforwardness moved him.

Yes.

He pinched the bridge of his nose and took a deep breath. He wasn’t dead yet.

So be it.

---

The plan was surprisingly simple. Completely unsurvivable, but simple.

First, he would vent the cabin. He had an emergency O2 tank that would last for approximately three minutes. The safest speed that the cabin could be vented at was a little under fifteen minutes. That wasn’t possible, so they’d have to rush the job and see how he made it. The goal was to take exactly as long as the tank would last, and then hold his breath for the last part, because it would, in theory, be very short.

Step two would be overriding the reactor scram. The boric acid would be pumped directly into space, and the reactor would flair up to 1200 F. That was actually the primary reason they needed to vent the atmosphere first: To cool the interior cabin enough that the reactor wouldn’t simply incinerate him in the first five seconds.

Lastly, he would activate a mini-jump. If he was lucky, the Hunter-Seeker would only detect the exit blast, and warp to the end of his FTL cone. It would then drift through space, lost and confused, for at least several seconds. He’d use those last few moments to consider his life up to that point. Then, the reactor would run out of built up xenon.

The rest would be physics.

Are you ready?

The operator's final message hung in the air. Was he ready? Could anyone be ready for this?

Yes.

Pull the trigger. I'm gonna be the first person in two-hundred years to give Oppenheimer a hug on my first day in hell.

---

Another blossom of crimson splattered across his vision as the pressure gauge crept below zero point two atmospheres. He had no idea what the depressurization was doing to his body, but it hurt like hell. The vac-suit was clinging to his body like saran wrap now, damn near tight enough to break a rib, and it still wasn’t done.

He snuck another peek at the pressure gauge.

Zero point zero five.

He went to suck another shaky breath from the tank and found nothing left. His vision was already fading in at the corners. This was even harder than he’d thought.

He stared at the gauge and willed the last bit of air away.

Zero.

Finally.

He leaned across the console and hit the override on the reactor core.

---

The reactor did not roar to life. There was no air to carry the sound, no messenger in this void save light. And the message that light carried was not thunder, no roaring in the canyons, but heat and pain. The energy didn’t flow out of the reactor like it did in air, it was an immediate, searing, flash of agony.

He couldn’t tell if the vacsuit was melting into his skin, or if his skin was melting into the suit, but he could feel a dreadful wetness across his back, the one part of his body exposed to the war god slinging him through space. He barely noticed the sensation of warping, barely noticed the first hesitant blip that appeared on his LADAR screen.

But barely was still enough.

It worked. The stupid son-of-a-bitch had fallen for it. The Hunter-Seeker set a destination at the end of his warp cone and jumped blind. It was catastrophically lazy, and even as his lungs burned from lack of air, even as his back burned with the blowtorch heat of a dying reactor, he knew that he’d won. There was nothing left to do now but wait.

He looked through the display that pretended to be a window to the outside. Imagined the stars, beautiful and gleaming, suspended over the vastness of space. He saw the faint white shine of the reactor reflected across that glossy screen, felt that half numb pain of fire across his entire back, and imagined that last bit of xenon trapped inside, fading away, lost in the sea of neutrons. Fading, fading… gone.

He could almost swear that the flash of light began right there, right as he imagined it would. He died then, ripped apart on a level that few can scarcely imagine, but for one brief moment before death took him, his underwear was dry in the same elegantly understated sense that space is cold and stars are warm. Four hundred kilograms of highly enriched uranium going supercritical is a magical thing.

The Hunter-Seeker never had its moment to look death in the face. All it knew was that in the space where a carrier should have been, it was alone. And then it too was gone. In the space where it used to be, where it had been, there was little more than echoes of fire and heat.

And then those too faded to black.

#humanity fuck yeah #hfy #science fiction #humans are space orcs #see you in hell

[elbiotipo]

Space flight (in real life) is not actually that exciting besides lift-off and landing, you just input the coordinates, make the burn to the desired speed, and then your spaceship just flies like a bullet to destination. You could need some course corrections and of course you need to keep the spaceship in shape, but computers take most of the busy work.

In my Campoestela universe, the aether, the *dimension* that spaceships use for FTL, is a bit different. It's a bit like a eternally cloudy sky. You do need to sit down and stay alert, much like flying an airplane. Most solo spaceships do it in stages, they lift off, fly a little on the aether, stop in some asteroid in deep space to rest a couple hours, fly again, and then land/dock at destination.

The whole experience is actually very much like long haul truckers.

Beto is, as established, a Space Trucker. So he needs to keep himself awake in those long hauls, and for him, who is often in the role of express delivery, it's even more important. So yerba mate is of course, VITAL, but there's also that has kept Argentines on the road awake for centuries: funny cassette tapes

That's right, since there's no radio in FTL and it's not practical in real space due to light-delay, when you NEED to keep your mind sharp, nothing is better than listening to the jokes of Space Luis Landriscina or Space Dr. Tangalanga or Space Les Luthiers. You can buy them in any gas station spacedock, and you better stock on them because the spacelanes are long

Beto, being a man of culture too, also buys a lot of tapes about history, geography and general culture too, this is why he has so much unexpected knowledge (they're technically podcasts but still). But you know his 'Mastropiero Que Nunca' tape is scratched to death from how many times he has listened to it.

#cosas mias #campoestela #and yes I will find a way to make them look like actual cassette tapes #I guess Space Les Luthiers here would be just Regular Les Luthiers since the spaceship is called Mastropiero and also they're inmortal #physical media is a lot more important in space because of light-speed delay you can't be online all the time so no streaming

[paradoxcase]

John 19:18

THE TOWER HAS R

Since normal humans can't do anything like this anyway and it doesn't seem like John has at this point in the story actually consumed anyone's soul, I guess by "the old difficult way" he's referring to his power level from before that happened, during the part of the story that we're reading now?

This is a piece of land that John just raised from the bottom of the ocean, but it already has a building and a car on it. I guess some flooding happened when the world ended? Also, I think that car is probably all dead, insert Miracle Max reference here

So, it's not like surprising or a revelation at this point, but here is positive evidence that a body can be physically alive and even healthy, but if it doesn't have a soul in it, it's not really living. I think if BOE had observed Gideon's body to be physically alive in some way but lacking a soul they would have described it differently; Gideon's body probably has some big holes in it because of the fence at this point, or at least it probably did at the time that BOE had it, so it wouldn't have been like Ulysses and Titania here, but it's not clear what the extent of Gideon's immortality is, exactly, if it means inconvenient holes get repaired or if she can be alive in spite of inconvenient holes, or what

Also, here we have that true resurrection doesn't just involve the physical act of repairing someone's body and starting it up again in some way, there has to be some element of retrieving a soul, presumably from the River

So whatever this is, I don't think anyone is using it 10,000 years later. The Nine Houses uses this stele system, which seems to be related to radio somehow, but you can't use it to go somewhere that's far away from a stele and they do know where they wind up. And BOE went out of their way to steal a ship with a stele just so they could use FTL travel, so they obviously don't have another means. I wonder what happened with this idea that caused it to be abandoned? Like, obviously the trillionaires who went off in their FTL ships did survive and I guess maybe became some of these other civilizations that John's fighting against, so it must have at least worked a little bit. But the stuff about "oscillating to a prearranged spectrum" makes me wonder if it isn't actually related to the steles at all? Or Augustine was right and there was no FTL at all

Also, I wonder if John does understand the math now after 10,000 years

This seems like such a weird argument to make? Like, I'm not sure if this interaction is happening in public or not. If it's a public thing, I can see them being like, this guy killed a bunch of poor innocent cows, how can we trust him??? but it sounds like a lot of this was private negotiations between John and the trillionaires, I think in those circumstances they wouldn't be talking about the poor innocent cows and would instead be saying things about how it's not a good investment, I don't think any trillionaires are going to be pretending to care about cows for just John's sake. And I mean, one of those guys is probably Elon Musk, right, can you see Elon Musk making this argument to anyone in any context? I really cannot

So again, it's sort of framed as being about the Earth, specifically, and not about the people and animals living on it... although, if this is Alecto's memory of John telling this story to her maybe he is phrasing everything that way for her benefit? Like obviously the greater injustice was leaving all of the people behind. The only real difference between what the trillionaires did and what John was planning to do was in how many people escaped, right? Like, John wasn't out there fighting oil companies and pollution either. Maybe when someone takes the ships you were planning to use to leave instead it's just easier to say "you abandoned the Earth, you cowards!" instead of "you left us behind, you bastards!" because then it's easier to claim the moral high ground, but I think they already could do that, since they were planning to take everyone and that was the whole point?

#the locked tomb #nona the ninth

[pari-treeminders]

Hello once again friends, some interesting updates today...

The latest reports from our dig site have come in, our teams have reported that the ruins have become engulfed in a strange purple fog, seeping out of the walls and floors, at first this oddity was merely a foot note but it rapidly started spreading to the rest of the planet. Our researches are baffled as attempts to analyse it are not bearing any fruit. We hope the arrival of our friends in the @elepharchy and the @darexirepublic can be of help.

Following up on our bandit hunt, our peace keepers have been able to track faint FTL disruptions to another system, there they have found a large ocean world, home to a small Pre FTL civilisation. Our security forces have begun establishing a small out post to watch over this humble civilisation less the bandit menace seek to plunder them unabated.

And lastly, our northern most outpost has report yet another increase in raiding activity, Several attempted raids have been thwarted thus far but barely. If this keeps up i fear a more proactive approach will be required of us.

#stellaris #stellaris rp #peritainia

[ftl-radio]

#a$ap rocky #rihanna #fenty #fashion week #paris fashion week #louis vuitton #virgil abloh #music #hip hop #fashion #rap #streetwear #couple #drake #frank ocean #the weeknd #ftl radio #Spotify

[brokenaesthetikz]

#drake #jack harlow #churchill downs #kentucky #bts #candid #celebrity #come home the kids miss you #ovo #rap #rapmusic #hip hop #lil wayne #kanye west #art #fashion #ftl radio #music #hiphop #rnb #luxury #2am #honestly nevermind #pusha t #rick ross #spotify #music recommendation #Spotify

[galaxy-jessie]

Summary of the 45 minute long interview with Todd regarding starfield:

No fishing

Procedurally generated content includes pre-built locations that will be generated when you land. An abandoned station for example will be generated only after you land on a planet, but the layout of that station is hand crafted. So expect 500+ identical dungeons

Such hand crafted content will not spawn as often, to give planets the feeling of desolation, to make you think you're the first person to ever land there and all you could really to is grind resources

Only 10% of planets actually have life on them, majority will be lifeless as are most planets we know about. So life itself will be pretty rare, scattered on only ≈100 out of "1000" planets

Some planets have only 1 biome. But that's probably related to already inhospitable planets. Can't have a biome if you have no biosphere

Planets with life do have multiple (says "few") biomes

You need to prepare before landing for environmental hazards, such as temperature, radiation and weather (think sand storms or icy winds)

You can get certain ilnesses / health problems (in direct we see "cough" and you can have multiple health issues but we weren't shown a lot of it)

"Planet traits" are mostly geological traits (likely related to just resource grind)

Surveying planets provides data. That data can be sold. The more you scan, the more money you'll receive. So you can earn for living just by scanning planets. Planet traits are included in this scanning

Aggressive animals can and, given the circumstances, will kill all other peaceful animals around

No land vehicles

You'll have to move around on foot or using a jetpack, which comes really handy on planets with lower gravity

Companions aren't mandatory / you can play the game solo without relying on companions, and certain character traits / skills help you with this specifically

There are multiple robot companions but Todd didn't want to share anything about them (so they're likely story relevant). "There is Vasco and something else"

Only constellation followers (4 of them) are romanceable and they have personal quests and affinity system (like in fallout 4). They're "more fleshed out" meaning other crew members you can hire are probably just generic npcs

If you don't like your companion anymore you can "leave them behind" or asign them to some middle of nowhere and forget about them or just leave them to some random outpost to farm materials for you

There are some "local radio stations" to tune

Todd doesn't think he'll be a good radio host

If you want to upgrade stolen ships, you must first pay to register them

Ship building / upgrading is reserved for late game, and it's very expensive

Todd didn't want to share what happens if you're scanned and caught with contraband

"Grav drive" is short for "graviton loop field array"

FTL works by bending space in front of you, like folding a paper and poking a hole through it

Volumetric fog and motion blur are a thing and it's one of the things that made the game locked to 30fps on consoles and Todd doesn't feel like removing those

Generic fetch quests are a thing obviously

Making outposts is for late game, it's expensive and requires some skills for advanced outposts (again like in fallout 4 with charisma perks). Supply lines between outposts is a thing

Outposts can generate revenue

When asked about black holes, he said he is "passing the question" so black holes will likely be very very relevant to the story

Vasco can't wear a hat :/

On a personal note:

I don't think the lack of land vehicles is a bad thing. From what we've seen, we're not supposed to stay on a planet for too long in one spot. So a vehicle for a small area we're expected to explore would be unnecessary. I mean, I see the reasoning not to include them, but I would've prefered if they were a vanilla thing

Radios are most definitely not going to be music stations like in fallout. They'll most likely be distress calls. That, and if bethesda feel generous, we'll get another silver shroud-esque quest

Lack of life forms isn't surprising. I mean, other than our planet we don't know about life anywhere in space. So only 10% of planets having life isn't that unrealistic

We certainly won't be clapping any alien cheeks, but I'm convinced that the game is about First contact. We have plenty of AAA games where humanity works with / against / for different alien races, but one about meeting aliens for the first time, I can't think of one

Black hole(s) will be extremely important, given how reluctant Todd was to talk about them

#starfield #honestly all I want are pets on spaceships. Like in the concept art

[doktorpeace]

I finished Xenoblade Chronicles: Future Redeemed

All in all absolutely phenomenal experience. Truly a visionary and audacious way to end such a popular series. Thematically resonant through to the end and well earned in the resolution it goes for. Beyond this I'm going to put a read more, under which will contain spoilers for the entire Xeno- franchise. That means Gears, Saga Episodes I-III, Chronicles 1-3, and X. I have a lot of thoughts and plenty more marinating to do, but these are my initial impressions.

Somehow managing to connect all of the Xeno- series not to AUs but canonically the same Prime Earth, which contextually is Our Earth is RIDICULOUS in how he pulled it off. It feels truly organic to all of the stories *AND* doesn't contradict any of them! It even, seemingly, directly ties into the beginning of X with it being 'May 23rd, 2022'. Elma arrived on Earth in the early 2020s and I believe she's that blue dot we see flying onto the Earth at the end of the credits.

Smashing all of those different FTL/Outer Space Colonization projects into a single radio broadcast in the background of just one cutscene is truly remarkable. Just a few lines recontextualizes this man's entire career.

And also, to those in the know, it reveals that all three of them: The Earthlife Colonization Project (Xenogears) The Immigrant Fleet (Xenosaga) and Project Exodus (Xenoblade X)

Occur due to Zohar related experiments gone horrifically wrong. Which we know from each series individually. But knowing that all of them stem from a single post-scarcity, conflict-free, truly equitable and globalized Earth, which nonetheless kept on trying different experiments with these godlike processors and all of them went awry is really interesting.

This game in particular very much focuses on the idea that advancement and power and control for their own sake are meaningless. If you don't have an idea behind it, if you don't want to make things the world tangibly better it's pointless.

Future Redeemed successfully ties every Xeno- game into this theme directly, no matter how subtle they are about it in their own content.

The Chronicles games happened solely because Klaus wanted to play God and make a new universe he would control, using The Zohar.

Gears happened because The Gazel Ministry wanted to create a creature that matched the Biblical God in terms of ability which they could control.

The Saga games happened because people wanted this power for transhumanism, to perfectly control the genes and births of every person, to ignore the realities of death and disease, but in doing so became so entrenched in making literal Designer Babies that it cuts off natural human diversity and reduces the people born to mere products and instruments shilled by different companies with different patents.

And all of these happened from The Zohar, a processor/machine mind that far outstrips anything humanity can believe. A thing which the humans of Earth only discovered by chance. Being meddled with purely out of avarice and hubris. The humans of that Earth didn't need any of those things. They'd already accomplished a perfect, post scarcity world. And that's why Alvis, a machine who's sole purpose is to be the logical arbiter between two other AI, when left to his own devices, decided going back to that would be best, no matter the cost.

He saw all of the tragedies in the three Chronicles settings that occurred solely due to Klaus' hubris and realized none of it would happen if these humans, the ones who've only known strife and difficulty and pain, had access to that post scarcity, conflict free, equitable world and beyond this, Takahashi buries the lede a little bit.

All of those previously mentioned projects to get humans off of earth. They're all cover ups by the Coalition Government of Earth. They're all touted as great advancements for human progress and potential but in actuality they're all just covering up massive, horrific, failures which would each result in the destruction of the Earth and its people. It's just Klaus' mistake had such immediate and tremendous consequences it couldn't be covered up.

Everything was destroyed in an instant. And we see, in Gears and Saga, that those decisions still ultimately do lead to an unimaginable amount of human suffering, just not on Earth. All they've done is ship off that suffering, literally, to some far reach of space.

Underpinning all of this is a distrust in the government and their motivations. A distrust for authority who claims they only want best for you.

Which is why Fei returns to living a quaint life. It's why Shion and Kos-Mos return to their normal. It's why Shulk refuses to become a god. It's why Rex and Pneuma live simple lives. And it's why Noah throws away the Sword of the End.

Each has the chance to become an ultimate authority, to have complete dominion over the lives of countless others, and they all give that up to just be...human. This franchise is truly something special. I cannot wait to see what comes next.

Please, Takahashi. Let us go back to Mira now.

Thank you, truly, @andawarmgeek, for sending me a download code out of the blue for Future Redeemed. This was an experience that I won't soon forget.

#Xenoblade #Xenosaga #Xenogears #Spoilers

[basiliskfree]

Can you tell me what the hell a Lamp is? From what I've seen, they are some sort of alien, but I also haven't seen all the posts about them and I really do not know... anything about them? If you could please explain in one post what they are, I'd be nice. Thank you.

Sure (as I been meaning to, and happen to finally have free time) though as their like...A whole culture and species that I'm still active build this is the cliff notes version.

Lamps are in fact Aliens, one of the four Sentient species in my current novel project Pilotlight. They have main models Units, the small individual Hexapods. Ships large spaceships that Units live it and Waypoints Giant Dyson Rings that produces both Ships and units. (see below)

they are carbon based, with copper blood running there Organic systems though at their core they a silicon brain that Supports their A.I system. Think a Computer using that uses biological systems as it's movement and live support systems. They are Deaf by human standards, Speaking mostly in light both visual and radio.

They where original design to map the universe and build stable wormholes for their creators. Who disappear well over a million years ago, and the lamps only have some corrupted files about. Along with their sister species the ambassadors (who I'm reworking) they still carry out the programing even if it's pointless. Spectrum Lamps have a lot of options about this though and have been finding their own path. They are one of the two groups of lamps (also nine times out of ten when I say Lamps it's this group)

Oldest of the two is The hivemind with is the original system that was left by the Creators that's just doing it's job. The Hivemind should be thought of more as something like an ant hill where none of it's members are really Sentient but perform complex tasks. it's build vast wormholes networks and is made up of billions of ships.

The smaller group is the Spectrum lamps which are individual lamps that became self aware and have left the hivemind, About 5 000 ago before the start of the story enough of this lamps left the hivemind to start their own society. So if I'm every taking about Cultural Stuff with the lamps it's this group. below is an image of a unit from each group.

Both Groups have a Ship and Unit Setup where you have a large Ship then they with have units connected to that's ships network, how this system works is a bit different in each group. As one more of just a server and the other is a more complex family structure. Spectrum Lamps don't have any waypoints within there System so it's unknown how that would work.

Lamp ship are the fastest in known Space, both in there STL speeds and their Jumping systems allowing FTL space travel.

#basilisk's art #pilot light #lamp aliens #ask #long info dumb #@dimps35