Cornflakes

There have been for ages now. As the references section of wikipedias antimatter rocket article shows :V Also: what do you need such an laser array for in an antimatter engine? o.0

I have yet to see any construction game where reverse engineering of functional constructs would take months without any artificial timers. With that "fark it" mentality any blueprint will last days at best.

studying physics does things to your mind maaan! The realistic physics may not be a good idea for a game, but maybe the "basic idea" of the whole can be used? Maybe in the form of interplanetary "acceleration gates" or similar? Something that can throw you through a solar system at faster than normal speeds or lower fuel consumption.

Hm... temporal loss sounds more reasonable... "transfer shock" or something that temporarily removes the upper parts of your learned skills... Hm... Could be reused for other occasions as well, for example as side effect if anything similar to performance enhancing drugs exist in the game. Still not sure if i like it, but its less "nope" than permanent skill loss (Also, how would that keep people from throwing nuke-tipped ships at each other? Just automate that thing )

I'll just quote a favourite webpage of mine on that topic "one lousy Newton of thrust takes three hundred freaking megawatts!!" (two newton for the case of a mirror sail instead of absorption or an on board laser, aka double efficiency) http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist.php#id--Other--Photon Thats the absolute physical upper bound for the efficiency of a photon drive. You cannot go better while staying physically correct. its also independent of the wavelenght of the light you are using, you just trade photon amount for photon energy. The only advantage photon drives have is that the spaceship itself doesnt have to drag around much in terms of reaction mass or reactor. But you need a spacecraft thats essentially a mirrored baloon that ideally has no density at all So you can scale that thing basically to infinity, which you have to to get any kind of useful thrust out of it The whole thing is so woefully energy inefficient that its much more efficient with the seemingly trivial space access in DU to throw a ton or two extra reaction mass into orbit and fly to the next planet over using a more mass inefficient drive. as a note to /how/ power hungry those things are i did some math: for the 100kg "a couple of days" (i chose three days for my calculation) probe to mars during minimal separation earth-mars (54.6 million km) you need a whopping 24 gigawatts of power to drive that thing! And the power rises linearily with mass, for a 10ton craft you need 2.4 /terawatt/ to do the trip. About 1/6th of the world energy consumption of today. And that is in addition to the small side effect of the thing being a giant laser death ray which can engage pretty much anything within an orbital diameter of its host planet. With all the assorted political and gameplay problems of a doomsday weapon that can strike a large part of a solar system.

So you mean once people got the hang of building automated weapon systems to strip others of skillpoints /then/ the skillpoint loss on death will be included? The eve devs spent now a decade re-/designing their game, and considering that skillpoint losing mechanics there are slowly being phased out (or already are, am not completely up to date) tells me a lot about how good it is for an mmo to have skill decay

Skillpoint loss? I only remember talk about losing your inventory contents

heck even that wouldnt keep me, if theres voxel based destruction i'd just cut the ship apart piecewise and copy what i see. if that deconstruction happens with voxel tools or a low powered laser doesnt matter much.

And how does that prevent anyone from making a copy of a ship he has physical access to? The RDMS is nice and dandy to limit the usage of your assets, yeah. But theres nothing outlining any system that would prevent me from copying a ship block by block once i built it.

The problem is not finding punishment, the problem is how to detect it. How do you as a player tell that the ship in front of you is a "bootleg"? how would the software tell that this ship (which to the player is obviously identical to some blueprinted/patented design) is a copy and no original design? Without going through the very computationally expensive process of comparing it block-by-block with blueprinted designs. And even if you can check all existing designs for similarities, where would be the cutoff for enduser changes? A lot of problems i dont see a solution for.

regardless of how efficient the AM generator will be, unless its producing more energy in antimatter form than you put in (E=mc²) it will be more efficient to drop the energy directly on some reaction mass. Instead of going through the hassle of creating antimatter, keeping it from annihilating your generator, funneling it into the thruster and let it annihilatr there. Take a high powered laser, feed it with the power you'd otherwise feed into the AM generation and let it shoot on some rock or water as reaction mass. You skip the two M/AM conversion steps and dont have hard radiation to deal with.

problem is: how to do so? how do you prevent people from making copies of your constructs? (without deadlocking the things and saying "its a blueprint based construct you cant change it")

meh, i'd probably let the lore around antimatter completely out of the game tbh. too many people complaining that it doesnt behave realistically (cause any antimatter engine would be a nuclear death beam of doom) also, when you have that much power available to create antimatter on the spot with those rates, you are better off just using the energy directly to ionise and accelerate any random material with that power. why bother creating antimatter, shoot a laser with the same power at a piece of rock for reaction mass

well, considering that its likely that you can make a blueprint of every built thing you own... and the game under guarantee being unable to check every single blueprint file for overlap when you submit a "new" (slightly modified or modified and then reversed) one... theres not much one can do to prevent theft.

meh, im fine with magic Direct Matter to Energy converters id actually like a system thats based on them. basically everything in the game can be used as fuel. feed the material into a "burner" segment of your generator, creating a [technobabble] with a material dependent "spectrum" and total available energy. then you have to route the [technobabble] then has to be routed through a series of power converters which absorb a part of the spectrum (with varying efficiencies) and convert a part of their absorbed spectrum to usable power and waste the rest as heat. so the order of absorbers would matter as you'd have to arrange the absorption spectra in a manner that only the converters with the highest efficiency get to absorb the relevant parts of the spectrum. so you could power your devices with anything you find in the world, but its dependent on the material and the reactor if you get much out of it. the total available energy per piece of "stuff" would be highly material dependent with the easiest to aquire materials (rock...) having really low amounts of power per piece (somewhere close to being barely breakeven with the minimally needed energy to mine them and with ideal power conversion). the spectrum of the material would also be dependent on how easy they are to aquire. rocks would have a relatively annoying to use spectrum to make them hard to use for general purpose energy supply. "average" materials, which could be the classic fuel resources (hydrogen, uranium, thorium) would have pretty easy to use spectra to provide comfortably to use energy supply for the large masses of players high energy and power density materials (dunno, dark matter, element zero, [insert favourite scifi energy source material]) would have spectra that are very hard to adapt to and would require pretty large reactors for that but would provide the largest net power output. (for capital ships and other high power applications) the whole system can of course be expanded with other parapharnelia, like containment field generators and "plasma" heaters (with total available power being dependent on some highly nonlinear temperature/pressure function), but the basic system is that the player "burns" materials and converts them to energy via some spectrum mechanic. (i designed that initially for a completely different game with procedural material and component generation, so there wouldnt be a done setup for each material after a week)

im pretty sure that most pilots have not that much of an idea how to build a good jet engine, and the people who build jet engines wont have that much of an idea how to fly an airplane which has the engines mounted. sure, a pilot will have more understanding about avionics and aircraft technology in general than joe average, but will he know how to build an engine from scratch? very unlikely. i think there should be at least two basic skill trees which are mostly independent. using and creating obviously, in the one you learn how to use stuff for the greatest effect, in the other you learn how to build stuff with the greatest effectivity. there is some overlap, basic training in the respective other tree would be necessary for the highest echelons of both trees, but not much beyond that. you dont need to know how exactly the HEAT warhead is built to use it for maximum effect, you only need a rough idea of what it does :shrug:

And? did anyone claim anything different?

collision physics != mass calculations, though. when theres any calculation of accelerations based on mass and thrust alu will improve the speed of a craft compared to some low grade steel

and fission, and chemical burning...

we transform small amounts of mass to energy and back all the time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_binding_energy#Mass_defect

what would be interesting to have is some way of remote power transfer capabilities. for orbital solar power stations and the like. just a thought *vanishes back into the shadows*

Yay consensus! (Aka i made people think in the same way as i think is correct )

There are still better ways than to destroy the one ship that you are allowed to build. Take for example the system the game from the depths uses. As long as the object isnt manually removed from the game its blueprint always stays intact and the player can repair it back to full health. The blueprint could give you the right to create and maintain one such ghost. To "free" the ghost you have to destroy its current body. Number limitations, repair capabilities, no grief potential. And you can steal everything, and if its with social engineering. Repair crews need build access to the blueprint, especially the ones aboard of larger ships. How do you keep them from, even accidentally, creating a new instance of your ship and destroying it thus? the ability to sabotage ships should be there, yes, but that should include proper actions to damage or take over objects and not a build action somewhere afar from the sabotaged object. And what about stealing ships? With your one time blueprint variation its completely pointless, because the original owner can destroy your price with the press of a button. Regardless of him having prepared proper self destruct devices that a boarding party could work around but with a "magic" ability that the attacker can do nothing against.

Depending on the features of the RDMS you dont need separate objects for blueprints. A BPC would just be a license to access a BP x times. RDMS access could manage all of that. All that would be needed from the game's side would be a "use unlimited" and "use once" power for blueprint access. The RDMS could handle the rest. As a thought would it be interesting if RDMS tags could be attached to objects. Where posession of the object would give the player the rights the tag includes Dunno what it would be useful for, but better have an useless idea than no idea but an use for one :V

Social interaction should improve the game, and not be a hard limiter