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[Xenopedia] Alien Anti-Gravity Generator: Technobabble improvement


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Good day. Anti-fun pseudo-autism calling in.

In the Anti-Gravity generator, the functionality is described as "emitting anti-gravitons". I would like to point you to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graviton and ask you to note that as the graviton is a Majorana particle, its anti-particle is, in fact, itself. This causes a Majorana cringe.

The simplest solution would be to keep the graviton compensation idea, but amend it. Option one is to note that its existence goes against pretty much all current theories in particle physics. Realistically, coming to such a conclusion would take years of research before even being considered as an option, as its non-existence is fairly firmly planted in the current scientific paradigm, and that level of doubt should probably be reflected in the report. Personally, I think this is the most boring option (though perhaps the most interesting option, had it happened in the real world!), so I won't bother typing it out.

Option two would be to note that the anti-graviton actually is the graviton, but that the aliens have found a way to increase the odds of annihilation.

The extraterrestrial Antigravity Generator appears to be what allows such vast alien craft to fly through our atmosphere with ease - the weight of the vessels is so great that it would be virtually impossible to stay airborne using only thrusters. The extraterrestrial solution is brilliant: they have created a device that reduces the weight of the ship. Weight (as distinct from mass) is the force acting on an object due to gravity, and the antigravity generator works by creating a localised field that negates a large portion of the Earth's gravitational pull. It does not appear to affect the object itself, simply reducing the gravitational force acting on it. This allows a large UFO to fly using only a fraction of the thrust that would be needed if the antigravity generator were not active - indeed, any alien capital ship that suffered an antigravity generator failure would almost certainly suffer a rather abrupt end. The science behind this device is incredibly complex, but a basic explanation is as follows:

An elementary particle known as a graviton is the force carrier of a gravitational pull, much like a photon is the force carrier for electromagnetic radiation (such as light). Unlike many particles, force carriers like photons and gravitons are their own anti-particles - this means that they can, in theory, annihilate like matter and antimatter do when they meet. Suffice to say that since you feel gravity, obviously not all of them are annihilated. In fact, there's only a small probability of annihilation. One of our senior staff members drew up some diagrams that to my eyes explain it rather elegantly, but even simplified I'm not sure you'd be able to understand the details of quantum gravity. No offense - even I didn't understand it until yesterday either.

In any case, the antigravity device works by redirecting the gravitons naturally generated by the ship along lines on the hull, where they usually don't interact with anything. However, when a graviton from Earth crosses paths with one of these gravitons, there's a chance they'll be annihilated. More gravitons mean more annihilations, and by my estimates about eighty percent of the gravitons can be annihilated, resulting not only in an eighty percent reduction in thruster fuel consumption, but also harvesting energy from the annihilations to further fuel the antigravity device. How this relates to the laws of energy conservation is a topic for further study, but that can wait until I've finished these designs for a hovertank.

Because hovertanks are awesome.

The third solution is to instead emit the gravitons towards, say, the moon, or a different celestial.

The extraterrestrial Antigravity Generator appears to be what allows such vast alien craft to fly through our atmosphere with ease - the weight of the vessels is so great that it would be virtually impossible to stay airborne using only thrusters. The extraterrestrial solution is brilliant: It increases its gravitational pull upwards, as if hanging by an invisible line of gravitons. Weight (as distinct from mass) is the net force acting on an object due to gravity, and the antigravity generator works by creating an oppositely directed field that negates a large portion of the Earth's gravitational pull. It does not appear to affect the object itself, simply reducing the net gravitational force acting on it. This allows a large UFO to fly using only a fraction of the thrust that would be needed if the antigravity generator were not active - indeed, any alien capital ship that suffered an antigravity generator failure would almost certainly suffer a rather abrupt end. The science behind this device is incredibly complex, but a basic explanation is as follows: an elementary particle known as a graviton is the force carrier of a gravitational pull, much like a photon is the force carrier for electromagnetic radiation (such as light). Whereas most objects radiate gravitons in all directions, this device emits only upwards, and is powerful enough that it can compensate for approximately eighty percent of the gravitons from Earth, leading to a corresponding eighty percent drop in weight. Humanity has been attempting to discover the mechanism by which gravity operates for centuries, and this device provided us an irrefutable answer to a question that has foxed some of the greatest minds in history. I shall write a paper and share the knowledge with the world...once I have finished developing a hovertank, that is.

Alternatively, you could throw out the direct meddling with gravity, and instead have the system affect the viscosity of the underlying air currents, thereby providing an explanation for why it's difficult to shoot down using ballistic ground-based turret weaponry, and providing an explanation of how aircraft-carrier-sized ships can stay "afloat". In addition, it has previously been established that the large ships aren't entering the fray early due to having to prepare for atmospheric flight, but the current description of the anti-gravity generator seems to imply all they had to do was compare the amount of anti-gravitons emitted to the ones received from Earth, which is as simple as subtracting two numbers. If you want to carry the graviton theme from the plasma tech, my fourth suggestion is as follows:

The extraterrestrial "Antigravity" Generator appears to be what allows such vast alien craft to fly through our atmosphere with ease - the weight of the vessels is so great that it would be virtually impossible to stay airborne using only thrusters. At first we thought the only possible explanation to be a device that reduced the effects of gravity on the ship - hence the name - but upon closer investigation the extraterrestrial solution is even more brilliant: Utilizing extremely localized concentrations of gravitons near the hull, it dilates the passage of time for the air molecules beneath it - an effect predicted by my late colleague, Professor Einstein. With time passing at a slower rate, they are unable to move out of the way of the hull as it presses on it, and so the ship is essentially resting on a pillow of almost completely still air. This could explain why it is taking the larger ships so long to start descending through our atmosphere: The algorithms required for such gravimetric precision are nigh-incomprehensible, and even the slightest miscalculation could rip the hull apart. Indeed, any capital alien ship that suffered an antigravity generator failure would almost certainly suffer a rather abrupt end.

Since the aliens seem to have done most of the R&D work for us, applying the same algorithms should allow us to mimic their effects on a smaller scale, even if we don't understand exactly how. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a hovertank to design.

Of course, I realize this still is all science fiction, and at some point you're going to run into a statement that makes a sufficiently learned physicist cringe, but my proposed changes at least pushes the cringe up from "A passing interest in particle physics" level to the point where you'd actually have to do some calculations to see if it'd be plausible. For instance, localizing the time-dilation like I suggested would require an hitherto unknown relativistic metric, and smoothness-requirements for space-time manifolds should make any physicist's alarm bells ring, but actually finding out if an approximate effect is impossible requires some serious math. For that matter, even though I suggest "redirecting" gravitons, that's mostly because that statement, in technobabble tradition, shoves a lot of details under the carpet of seeming plausibility. After all, the trick to good technobabble is tricking the reader into thinking they've had all their questions answered, while hiding the actual plot-holes in the questions they don't think about, and if the aliens already have been established through willing suspension of disbelief to have directed graviton emitters that they use in their weaponry, graviton redirection probably doesn't seem like that much of a stretch to most readers.

/Equip flame-retardant Predator armor

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I have not read all of your post because it's a trifle long to be easily absorbable, however getting scientifically realistic technobabble is a bit beyond our means given the size of the team and my research consists largely of surfing Wikipedia. There's also a significant number of projects to get right and I'm afraid I can't rewrite them every time someone finds an inaccuracy in the material. I just don't have the time.

It should also be noted that explaining a vaguely plausible theory in a concise manner (as my edits are trying to do) is probably preferable than coming up with something that is scientifically accurate and twice as long...as the average gamer probably isn't going to want to read a massive wall of slightly self-indulgent text after every research project.

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My apologies for the harsh case of TL;DR. The reason is, somewhat ironically, that I very much realize the perils of time constraints, and so included several example suggestions, which I hoped would be copy/paste-able for relatively little workload.

After all, isn't this a good example of something you could partially outsource to Community Involvement?

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The science could be outsourced there, but I'm not sure the writing could be. I think the writing is actually more important than the science and I think it's important to maintain stylistic consistency, so if we did get the community involved with writing the research projects then I'd still have to spend a long time editing them for writing style. Plus I just want to get the Xenopedia finished for V19 Stable and leave it at that so the translators can get to work properly on the game prior to release.

Hopefully someone will produce a "scientifically accurate" mod for the game that caters for people who would rather have in-depth, scientifically plausible explanations for the technology - I don't think we should put it in the mass-market vanilla game though.

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  • 5 weeks later...

Frankly, I am okay with both the vanilla "technobabble" and the scientifically plausible one.

If it's technobabble, I'm more than willing to put on my suspension of disbelief hat. Chris has done an impressive work of giving good flavour to the Xenopedia, especially the autopsies (the sebillians having unspecialized stem cells as an explanation for regeneration is one of my favourites), so I feel alright with letting a few anomalies go.

If someone makes more precise details to some researches, I'm very curious to see what it'll be like, I always love to see what people come up with in a matter of explaining the unexplainable, as long as it means something in the end.

(A good example to my confusing and poorly-translated point is in Fallout, when you travel to the Glow, and manage to get information on the Forced Evolutionary Virus. Not only is the vocabulary precise, but if you're willing to bypass a few points that aren't ultrarealistic and go on with suspension of disbelief, then it gives a whole new flavour to the story, giving acute and believable details on the alien and sci-fi elements you're dealing with).

Edited by Ketham
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