Communications Time

Future Game
1

Communication time will be very important for Society through Space stages. I imagine that you’ll need to implement a system eventually that shows how long it takes for messages to reach you from a certain point. On your planet, this would account for factors like distance, terrain, route, etc., and most of the methods would involve physical transportation (foot, horse, ship), before you eventually invented better methods (telegram, radio, satellite).

The Space Stage would look somewhat like a downgrade in this respect, as you jump from instantaneous comms to suddenly having significant communications time, due to the speed of light. However, since FTL will be possible, I can imagine that, with your initial Space stage comms tech being simple light broadcasting, you work along a techline of better methods.

FTL courier ships would be good long-distance, but inefficient short-distance. Eventually, you’d invent some sort of ansible, or wormhole thing, or weird use/misunderstanding of quantum physics, that would let you transmit information FTL without using a ship. Possibly there would be several levels of these devices that are faster and faster, with the obvious end-point doing away with Comms Time entirely.

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2

How fast would the initial FTL be?

3

I think you could do two techs at once, they pop up on the tech tree with the same prereqs. Several times light speed radio (or maybe just gluing a warp drive to a mailbox or flash drive), and truly instant portals that cost a lot and have to be carried to their destination.

4

Should it be possible to generate “infinite energy” from scifi techs?

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5

I mean… yeah, maybe. It should be balanced for game balance, not physics. If there’s a useful design for a thing, we shouldn’t check if it violates conservation of energy, we should check if it’s really unbalanced.

6

That’s a good idea, since with scifi enabled you’d be looking less at what is in line with the scientific theory and more at what makes a good balance and a fun stage.

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7

I expect that the sci-fi techs will start out very hard sci-fi and get softer as they go on. When you’re getting close to Ascension, that’s when you get the ridiculous infinite-energy sources, long-distance no-setup teleportation FTL, absolutely gargantuan colony worlds, etc. Basically like highly-modded Stellaris.

Perhaps there would be some sort of proto-Ascended machine consciousness you’d build at some point, a bunch of networked Matrioshka brains, that generates all of these bizarre technologies, because then you can handwave their physical impossibility as ‘it’s technology running on properties of physics we haven’t discovered yet/haven’t exploited this way yet’.

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8

Scifi techs don’t need many “scientific” explanations anyways. That’s why they’re fiction.

9

They do to ease into them. If you go from concrete understandable things like modern computers or fusion rockets and then, bam! huge ftl starships, I feel like I skipped a step. If I first have to spend a bunch of science figuring out why Einstein was only mostly right, then doing ftl signaling in a particle accelerator or something, then getting limited ftl, then gluing it to a ship, I at least understand every step, even if the science is glossed over. Precursors skip all of that, we can assume they’re been through it, and can move on with our days.

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10

I guess that would make it look natural and tied into the progression line…

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11

Thrive strives for scientific accuracy. An approach where you’re only gradually introduced to sci-fi parts is the best way to hold to this as long as possible; in order to make a good Space Stage, sci-fi will have to be introduced, but minimising it until later on makes sense. It also means the anti-sci-fi caucus won’t go ballistic.

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12

Yeah, this makes sense. Now, when should the player start seeing scifi branches?

13

Ideally, as late as possible, which still isn’t necessarily late. Soft sci-fi should be subordinate to the needs of the gameplay, but if hard techs can be put in place, they should be. I’d imagine your progression would go from Alcubierre drives to wormholes to warp travel and then teleportation.

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14

I guess sci-fi could start showing up when you start exploring beyond your solar system?

15

I don’t think there needs to be a specific delineation like that. Soft sci-fi shows up whenever it needs to. It just depends on when the hard sci-fi stops.

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16

When the hard scifi stops, what sort of scifi appears after?

17

hard sci-fi is sci-fi that has internally consistent rules and basically all of the tech is completely plausible, even if we aren’t sure how exactly it would work. So, when the hard scifi stops, all other scifi can appear, like space opera tech or really anything that isn’t magic, though I think the tech should also follow it’s own rules consistently.

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18

Oh, I though “hard” meant “extreme” here…

19

Isn’t hard scifi classified as stuff that has rules that would work with our understanding of physics? So in addition to being internally consistent (and not “magical” technology) it needs to be scientifically plausible.

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20

So I guess orion drives are “hard scifi” then, right?

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