Cyclops moonpool on the Aurora
Weapons_Free
Join Date: 2017-12-08 Member: 234323Members
Join Date: 2017-12-08 Member: 234323Members
Stupid concept, but what if there was a section of the Aurora that you could clean up. And once that’s done, the player would be able to open large bay doors, these once open would function as a superior moon pool for the cyclops. And around this moon pool would be a operational work area where building would be operational i.e. able to add lockers along the walls.
Maybe the player would be required to repair a power bank where they could deposit power cells in order to power this area. This “laboratory” would look pristine and lack all “crash” looks. This of course after extensive work and time from the player.
Perhaps this area would be comparable with the P.R.A.W.N. suit...
Maybe the player would be required to repair a power bank where they could deposit power cells in order to power this area. This “laboratory” would look pristine and lack all “crash” looks. This of course after extensive work and time from the player.
Perhaps this area would be comparable with the P.R.A.W.N. suit...
Comments
Do we know this?
Is there even any real evidence that Alterra isn't from an aquatic branch of humanity?
The Aurora may not have been designed for aquatic planets, but it seems reasonable to me that as a fairly large space vessel it could have hangar bays for smaller space ships that could be retrofitted for use as a cyclops moonbay.
We know from PDA entries that the Seamoth is designed to be used under water and in space, I don't see any reason as to why the Cyclops couldn't be used for both under water and in space as well. I mean, look at the space vessel used by the crew in Cowboy Bebop - it was designed to gather fish from the seas of Jupiter Ganymede, a moon in orbit around Jupiter. If society in the future seeded other 'sea environments' to produce and capture fish, it makes sense to have a space-vessel that can both travel there and to be able to harvest the fish.
There's also the issue of when a space vessel is moving through space and suddenly impacts into a planet, not all of it manages to survive the crash. Take this episode of Star Trek: Voyager "Timeless": in an attempt to return Voyager home faster with an experimental quantum slipstream drive, the ship unfortunately instead crashes into an icy planet. Chakotay and Kim (who piloted a shuttle ahead of Voyager to help them navigate, and as such survived death) have searched for the lost vessel and after 15 years, have returned to try and fix their mistake:
In the realm of Star Trek, "full impulse" is the speed of light. Now we don't know how fast the Aurora is travelling, but it has to be moving pretty dang fast in order to execute its slingshot maneuver around Planet 4546B. With this in mind, it's pretty safe to assume that when it's shot out of orbit and hits the planet full-force, much of the internal structure has been compressed to the point it's just a metal pancake. This also helps to explain why there's not as much of the vessel we can explore, despite it's size from the outside (not to mention also whatever hapless crew members that happened to be in those levels, we never find later because they were immediately... 'downsized' upon impact).
Impulse drive is generally accepted to be a sub-light drive. The problem is that there really isn't any defined speed for it. It's definitely not supposed to be the speed of light, though.
The Aurora had to be moving at a much slower speed, no matter what is said ingame. What's more, if it was going to fly by 4546B, then even after being shot by the Precursor Gun, it (or its fragments) would still flyby 4546B. The Captain must have deliberately decided to land the ship after it was mortally damaged while he still had control due to it being the best quick choice to best survive.
As for the Aurora having a moonpool, the ship doesn't look like it would be able to land on a planet. Unless there's landing gear I haven't seen yet. Maybe the procedure was to go down in the space/seamoth, then construct the forward operations base and the cyclops for work on the planet?
It was defined in Star Trek The Motion Picture. Impulse is .9 of warp. Once you pass warp (impulse speeds) 0.999, warp drive kicks in. Star Trek First Contact did the same thing. They had to keep accelerating. So the Phoenix rocket sped up through impulse speeds to reach warp 1.
While this may be true, it has been stated that the cyclops and the seamoth are both able to be employed in space, so how would they use these technologies in space without some sort of bay that accesses space? I think that there must have been a way for the aurora crew to deploy and build the phase gate, and would this not require the removal of large quantities of supplies from the aurora? i.e. large bay doors, possibly capable of being modified by a common device that rearranges matter in order to build things?
I don't know about the reference to .9. I would need to go back and watch that again, but that is NOT how warp drive works in either Star Trek or reality.
You can't "speed up to warp", and it doesn't just kick in ever. You have to create a warp bubble around you which causes you to slip through space at an incredible speed. You aren't actually moving, though. The bubble is moving while you sit mostly motionless inside of it.
I honestly don't know what you're referencing with First Contact. They clearly engaged the warp drive which suddenly threw them into warp speed. They weren't even anywhere near light speed by that time.
...or the quarantine enforcement platform's laser hit the Aurora at a side-glance, instantly slowing it down enough to be forced into 4546B's atmosphere.
To have that much momentum in a laser beam to deliver to the Aurora, the energy in the beam would be massive and likely would have destroyed wherever it struck the Aurora. And there's no way the momentum would have been transferred to the whole ship, so the Aurora would have ripped apart. Even if it had been transferred to the whole ship, the crew and a lot of the interior would have been smashed, even if strapped down. No one would have survived.
@scifiwriterguy
This post got kinda lengthy, so for the sake of not posting a big 'ol Wall o' Text, the details are inside the Spoiler sections.
Building on what @cdaragorn said - which is a good reference to an Alcubierre drive - we can safely assume that Aurora is either a sublight ship (which creates all kinds of problems by itself) or was sublight for the leg of the journey that took it by 4546B.
The catch is that the faster anything goes, the more momentum it has. The more momentum, the more of an outside force is needed to affect the object. Thus, a gravitational slingshot for a ship moving at superlight speed would require one massive gravity well. No moon or planet will do, even most stars probably wouldn't produce enough of an effect to be worth the name. You'd need to curve your ship around the well of a hypergiant star or a black hole in order to substantially alter course at that speed, and I can't say I'd recommend doing either one. So we're basically limited to STL travel during the flight phase where Aurora encountered 4546B.
(On top of this, the lore requires it; part of Aurora's mission was to check for the Degasi and/or its remains, and blowing by at FTL speeds isn't the best way to recon a planet. Net-net, the most likely explanation is that the "gravity slingshot" justification was just a smoke screen for the recon job. Realistically, there'd be no need for an FTL ship to pull course corrections like that.)
The second thing we can probably do is write off the QEP as a laser. There are too many things counting against it:
* Light does have pressure, just not tons of it. Aurora took one heck of a knock, and while a laser can exert pressure on an object sufficient to produce thrust, it's very low impulse. It's like a steady wind on a sail compared to the Orion drive. (Which, in case you're not familiar, was the brilliant plan to set of nuclear weapons behind a spaceship to provide thrust.)
* There's only one QEP and it's mentioned (or at least it was) that it can hit anything near 4546B. Lasers can be "bent" by gravity, but not enough to provide huge amounts of deflection without a correspondingly-huge gravity well. Gravitational lensing proves that gravity-light interactions produce deflections, but only with either 1. large wells, or 2. long distances.
It's also worth noting that lasers produce thermal effects on targets, not kinetic effects. Particle beams, on the other hand, produce kinetic impact effects. Based on everything we can see - and the lack of details that forces conjecture in the first place - the best candidate for the QEP is a high-energy particle beam. There are several flavors, of course. Positrons would produce big booms on impact, but not a lot of push to shove the ship off-course. Antiprotons would give an even bigger boom, but that should've taken off the ship's entire back end at a minimum, and that doesn't fit with what we see in game. A proton beam, on the other hand, uses high-mass (and thus high-impulse) protons out of the atom, which accounts for the effects on Aurora's course and fabric, as well as neatly explaining why the smaller Sunbeam was completely obliterated. Now, if I were writing the story elements for Subnautica, I'd peg this as being an alpha-beam weapon. An alpha particle (yes, the form of ionizing radiation) is a wad of an atom's nucleus, specifically a pair of protons and a pair of neutrons. Neutrons have, relatively speaking, tons of mass behind them, and the four particles together could be easily accelerated and yet impart tremendous force on anything they hit. The added mass makes beam-bending more complicated, but it still is reasonable.
The other advantage, from both a plot and realism perspective, is that the beam would produce an effect over time. Rather than having to do everything in a single moment, the beam would act on the Aurora over the span of several seconds (judging by how the QEP behaves during the Sunbeam intercept). All the beam would have to do is decelerate the Aurora below orbital velocity for 4546B to make it crash. Given that the Aurora was probably already traveling very slow to more effectively search for the Degasi, the unexpected deceleration effect of the beam - coupled with likely engine disruption - would drop her into the atmosphere before she could recover.
Hey, this was fun.
Side note: the QEP probably only has to worry about gravity beam curving to hit its target. There's likely other QEPs to give full coverage of 4546B, likely around 20.
Main note: parabolic orbit speed at periapsis, Ie. escape velocity, is squareroot(2) x circular orbit velocity. And to knock on the Aurora to drop it from above escape velocity to below circular orbit velocity, well, for Earth near the surface, it's 11.2km/s for escape velocity and 7.9km/s for circular orbit velocity. And 4546B seems to be about the size of the Earth.
So that's an interaction that needs to produce a delta-V of more than 3.3km/s. Having that delivered to the Aurora in a brief time would fatally squash the crew, even if they were in fluid with a fluid-breathing system (for maximum acceleration and surge protection). The Aurora itself would likely be torn apart and partly vapourized.
It also brings up the question of why the QEP fired on a spacecraft that wasn't landing on 4546B but just going by. Also has a blast-if-it-get-this-close order?
So that means one of two things happened. Either the Aurora was struck and mortally wounded in a flyby of 4546B and the crew then decided to land to survive.
Or the Aurora was already going to land on 4546B. Which makes more sense for the QEP to fire upon it.
At some point, I think the in-game lore stated that the QEP was the only one on the planet. Maybe that's been changed?
Odds on, the QEP's programming had it engage anything that entered orbit. From a containment standpoint, it makes sense; ship enters orbit, detects something odd on the planet, lands to investigate. The Precursors just decided to jump the gun (har!) on that event chain and just whack anything that comes into range. They were also nice enough to add a caveat into their targeting algorithm that if the ship in question is needed for a dramatic moment, it holds fire until it's within visual range.
The only thing I'd raise a however to, though, would be the assertion that Aurora was coming in for a landing. A ship that size wouldn't be built to ever be planetside; built in space, work in space, die in space. Laying aside the considerable problem of the strain imposed by a ship with that kind of bulk trying to rest on a planet's surface, the energy cost required to first soft-land the thing and then get it back into space would be enormous. It's not impossible, but it's sure impractical. Splitting the difference, we could assume that they were coming in for an orbital insertion, though, which would enable them to drop smaller craft to investigate anything on the surface they want. Or, they really were doing a parabolic fly-by that, if they detected something, could've been normalized into a stable orbit with enough engine burn.
That's what TMP and First Contact did. Why was the Phoenix moving and accelerating than? Why did it have to reach "Critical Velocity". TMP clearly counts Impulse as a sub warp speed, but apart of the overall scale. There are times we saw ships engage in a stand still. But also while moving. So both have to be accepted.
Because the Phoenix was Zephram Cochrane's first "starship" (that itself was retro-fitted from an old rocket ship) which had his experimental warp drive engines installed. As he (and Riker) were the first to ever achieve FTL space flight (chronologically speaking; nevermind the fact that the Enterprise-E was already present with 24th-century warp drive technology #TimeyWimeyBall), Cochrane had to build up speed before activating his drive. Since no one had attempted it before and inertial dampeners hadn't been invented yet (good luck jumping from standing still to instantly travelling that fast without any support), that's why they had to do it "the old-fashioned way" first.