Post by Adapa on Oct 6, 2010 19:47:40 GMT -5
Hello. I haven't yet had the chance to try out the mod, but hopefully I'll become a member of your community in the near future. However, having read the lore section and discussed with Xanarkan, there are a few points I'd like to have some clearity on about the setting.
First of all, what exactly was the Avant like? Being a celestial colony ship, it presumably either carried it's passengers in cryo sleep, was a living worldlet where the populance lived for generations, or was capable of some sort of faster than light travel, although this is never specified anywhere.
Secondly, why exactly were the more general conclusions of the discoveries of Caleb Zheckshan so surprising? Assuming the Avant didn't have faster than light travel, (come to think of it, it doesn't matter if it did, since it would have required time to slow down in a way that didn't crush the passengers,) it must have had plenty of time to do optical scans, and even if these would have been lost with the ship's data banks during the crash, someone among the passangers must have had taken enough interest in the world they were approaching to look at it when they were close enough to see so, and see the four bands of sea, jungle, desert and ice cap.
Also, although this is nitpicking, surely the stars wouldn't twinkle in the story Smuggler's Run, if they were above the atmosphere and there were no air fluctations to distort them? Also, Avantasia's northern sea would presumably be wracked be strong tidal forces, if one of the system's gas giants is close enough to dominate the sky as soon as you're out of the atmosphere. Although the word dominate might not refer to it's size, since it's also described as a faint cresent. Can anyone confirm this?
Speaking of Avantasia's oceans, although meteorology isn't my field of expertise, I would suspect that most of the planet would suffer hellish north winds near the surface, and strong south winds near the cloud layer, since there is only one ocean to the far north, yet most of the planet to a stretch far south of the equator is covered in jungle, which requires a lot of rain to maintain.
I would also raise a few hopes for the space travel system, which I understand will be under development for quite a long while still. First of all, would it be possible to avoid the sci-fi cliché of Constant Thrust = Constant Velocity? It would be really cool if the system included proper acceleration and breaking manouvers, and fuel management, rather than just assuming that in the future you can fly anywhere in the star system in five minutes no explainations given. Also, a really cool feature of space travel which I'd quite like to see and is often sadly neglected is gravity slinging, which besides being a great way of conserving fuel both for acceleration and breaking, just looks really cool.
My last point is related to what Xan told me of the equipment system, and I've yet to confirm this for myself, to feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. For weapons, the ranking of materials is as follows: Tier 1 is "Basic", Tier 2 is "Copper", Tier 3 is "Tin", Tier 4 is "Carbonum", etc.
I'd like to raise a question with the third Tier. Tin by itself is a far too fragile material to make a good weapon, unless you don't mind your sword bending or fragmenting when you use it. Some alternative uses of tin for weaponry, rather than using it to smelt weapon directly would be to either reinforce weapons with tin smoldering, use tin and copper to make alloys like bronze or bell metal, or if you want to be creative, you can make a niobium-tin alloy to make some form of EMP weapon, although the power cell needed to drive the required current through it as well as power the thermoelectric Peltier cooler required to keep it cold enough to be supercoducting, or close to it, would probably be so powerful that it'd be illegal by established lore.
I thank in advance for any replies, and hope I will enjoy my stay here.
First of all, what exactly was the Avant like? Being a celestial colony ship, it presumably either carried it's passengers in cryo sleep, was a living worldlet where the populance lived for generations, or was capable of some sort of faster than light travel, although this is never specified anywhere.
Secondly, why exactly were the more general conclusions of the discoveries of Caleb Zheckshan so surprising? Assuming the Avant didn't have faster than light travel, (come to think of it, it doesn't matter if it did, since it would have required time to slow down in a way that didn't crush the passengers,) it must have had plenty of time to do optical scans, and even if these would have been lost with the ship's data banks during the crash, someone among the passangers must have had taken enough interest in the world they were approaching to look at it when they were close enough to see so, and see the four bands of sea, jungle, desert and ice cap.
Also, although this is nitpicking, surely the stars wouldn't twinkle in the story Smuggler's Run, if they were above the atmosphere and there were no air fluctations to distort them? Also, Avantasia's northern sea would presumably be wracked be strong tidal forces, if one of the system's gas giants is close enough to dominate the sky as soon as you're out of the atmosphere. Although the word dominate might not refer to it's size, since it's also described as a faint cresent. Can anyone confirm this?
Speaking of Avantasia's oceans, although meteorology isn't my field of expertise, I would suspect that most of the planet would suffer hellish north winds near the surface, and strong south winds near the cloud layer, since there is only one ocean to the far north, yet most of the planet to a stretch far south of the equator is covered in jungle, which requires a lot of rain to maintain.
I would also raise a few hopes for the space travel system, which I understand will be under development for quite a long while still. First of all, would it be possible to avoid the sci-fi cliché of Constant Thrust = Constant Velocity? It would be really cool if the system included proper acceleration and breaking manouvers, and fuel management, rather than just assuming that in the future you can fly anywhere in the star system in five minutes no explainations given. Also, a really cool feature of space travel which I'd quite like to see and is often sadly neglected is gravity slinging, which besides being a great way of conserving fuel both for acceleration and breaking, just looks really cool.
My last point is related to what Xan told me of the equipment system, and I've yet to confirm this for myself, to feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. For weapons, the ranking of materials is as follows: Tier 1 is "Basic", Tier 2 is "Copper", Tier 3 is "Tin", Tier 4 is "Carbonum", etc.
I'd like to raise a question with the third Tier. Tin by itself is a far too fragile material to make a good weapon, unless you don't mind your sword bending or fragmenting when you use it. Some alternative uses of tin for weaponry, rather than using it to smelt weapon directly would be to either reinforce weapons with tin smoldering, use tin and copper to make alloys like bronze or bell metal, or if you want to be creative, you can make a niobium-tin alloy to make some form of EMP weapon, although the power cell needed to drive the required current through it as well as power the thermoelectric Peltier cooler required to keep it cold enough to be supercoducting, or close to it, would probably be so powerful that it'd be illegal by established lore.
I thank in advance for any replies, and hope I will enjoy my stay here.
