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Post by peridot on Oct 6, 2016 23:15:22 GMT
Did I say visible? Indeed the CMB is not very bright at visible frequencies. And yes, zodiacal light is a fact of life for optical astronomers, as the Galactic radio background is for radio astronomers, and the poorly-understood X-ray and gamma-ray backgrounds are for those of us who look at those frequencies. But the hardest kind of radiation for a ship to control is its thermal emission, so the real question is about thermal sources at the temperatures ships radiate. Exhaust plumes are a bit special because you're probably stuck with spectral lines, which have (effectively) a much lower background. But for the ships' thermal radiators you probably want to focus on near-IR and optical, maybe extending down to far IR for really determined attempts at stealth.
Can a source be seen against the zodiacal light? It's going to be very hard to answer that without knowing more about the instrument. A big enough light bucket can measure the zodiacal light in the region of interest as well as you want. GAIA, with its 0.7 m^2, has a limit of G magnitude 20, which is about 60 MW at one AU. That's G, of course, so visible light, where the zodiacal light is probably a worse problem than down in the IR (the sun peaks in the visible, after all). And if getting things to space is cheap, putting big mirrors on telescopes is also not a big challenge.
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Post by peridot on Oct 6, 2016 18:03:49 GMT
So after some digging, it turns out these particular weapons are min-maxed to take advantages in the numerical integrator's inherent inaccuracy. Because coilguns apply highly nonlinear force, exacerbating it can cause the integrator to approximate the acceleration very badly. Reducing the integration timesteps by a factor of 100x reduces that particular coilgun's exit velocity down to about 2 km/s. Making even finer timesteps would reduce the exit velocity further to it's more accurate state. Such is life with a numerical integrator. Coilgun force equations are too complex to solve, and must be approximated in this way (as are railgun equations). Unfortunately, increasing the simulation accuracy to fix the issue causes performance to plummet until things are unusable. I'll likely just have to clamp the values in these cases to the kinetic energy. This is happening with Runge-Kutta methods? You may want to look into how those are being implemented, as you should be dynamically adjusting your time-step size to suit the needs of the problem. Indeed, there are robust adaptive integrator codes out there that can produce accurate results for a huge range of problems. The better ones - typically ancient but well-tested open-source FORTRAN codes - can also detect when they've hit their limits, so that the game could simply outlaw anything that breaks the integrator. Or let people minmaxing wait for their results. One could even have an impressive-sounding "please wait for electromagnetic simulation" dialog box. I believe VODE and LSODE should be robust in this way - pretty bulletproof solution-wise, and with a good enough interface for the game to fail gracefully. FORTRAN, of course. If you're in C++, Boost provides several good adaptive integrators (including some high-order symplectic ones for the orbits). There should be C implementations floating around too, with permissive licenses. But yes, integrators robust enough to handle scientific problems are quite possibly not robust enough to handle players determined to push them to the breaking point.
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Post by peridot on Oct 6, 2016 17:44:43 GMT
I haven't any experience modding ships yet, but might one not want a high-efficiency low-thrust engine for non-combat maneuvers and a low-efficiency high-thrust engine for combat maneuvers - including boosting "forward"? Maybe the checkbox should be for whether the engine gets used for non-combat moves? (By "combat" I guess I mean dodging?)
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Post by peridot on Oct 6, 2016 17:06:52 GMT
I apologize for the fact that this post is way more basic than most of what's in these fora. But where should I go to ask basic UI help questions? Things like "can I re-pause combat after I undo the initial pause?" or "what, exactly, do the intercept and flyby icons do?" or "how can I tell which weapons are inaccurate so I can disable them when the game tells me to in the capture-alive mission?" I don't see anything obvious in-game, and there's no obvious help wiki or other documentation. Are these questions suitable for the gameplay discussion forum?
Thanks.
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Post by peridot on Oct 6, 2016 15:17:27 GMT
What, you don't like using pretty princess pink for your nuclear death machine?
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Post by peridot on Oct 5, 2016 21:44:22 GMT
Most of the radiation - most of the photons in the Universe - would be 2.7K blackbody photons, the cosmic microwave background. There will be oodles of point sources, mostly stars, peaking in the near IR or optical, a modest radio background, and a decent number of variable point X- and gamma-ray sources. The distinctive feature of ships is that they'll move against the background of stars, so monitoring with an array of space-based telescopes distributed around the Solar System should spot any realistic ship. Exactly what one would have to look for depends on ship design (how hot do you let your radiators get, for example). Precision tracking of ships can use active radar, particularly from ships in combat, but a collection of space telescopes would get a decent trajectory just from the optical/IR, given time.
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