Page 124 and 125, interesting times afoot.

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Dahak
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Re: Page 124 and 125, interesting times afoot.

Post by Dahak »

Username wrote:Oh boy Oh boy Oh boy, things are really getting interesting now! :o

I don't think it's possible for the Umiak to reverse-engineer any Human advantage on such short notice assuming a scout got nabbed.
The Humans did IIRC lose a scout in this general direction some time back. The one who's captain the Belarmine was named after.

Now that probably requires a very unlikely combination of events to for example skip her ship off the surface of Hyperspace to somewhere the Heirachy could get hold of it.

entity2636
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Re: Page 124 and 125, interesting times afoot.

Post by entity2636 »

icekatze wrote:The Highwind class shuttles have a listed acceleration of 20g. 19,200 solon equals 5.82 hours. At a constant acceleration of 20g for 5.82 hours, the total displacement is ~0.2876 AU. (~2.33 light minutes.)

I don't know what the initial velocity was when the Highwind was launched, but given that Strikegroup 51 is still next to the Leido-Sala post, I am guessing that their initial velocity was not significantly higher.

My conservative estimate is that everything is happening within a 1 AU radius sphere, possibly much closer.
Decided to check the math with some estimations and indeed everything appears to be much, much closer.

1) The shuttle can't be accelerating all the time and they need equal time to slow down again. Let's assume, that the acceleration at 20g took 1 hour and initial speed was close to zero: on page 107 they started engine burn and on page 111 Tempo says they have reached their cruising speed. During this time our friends had a couple of conversations and the comic pages appear to follow each other directly, without significant breaks in the timeline. That would give us a distance traveled of 1270940km and a cruising speed of 2541880 km/h

2) On page 123 we see that the shuttle is about half way between the jump points. If the total flight time is estimated to be about 6 hours, they have traveled about 6.35 million km, or 0.042AU. That would give us a system diameter of a bit less than 0.08AU which is not totally unreasonable - the semi-major axis of the planet 51 Pegasi b is ~0.053AU

Arent
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Re: Page 124 and 125, interesting times afoot.

Post by Arent »

Arioch wrote:Farseers don't detect thought, they detect the presence of the mind.
It would be better to argue that they can do some kind of "astral perception". In moo2
the Elerians could see the whole galaxy, even uninhabitated planets.

If you freeze down a brain, there won't be any electrical current & therefore no mind.
Unless you take the position there are things we do not yet understand, like a "soul".

boldilocks
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Re: Page 124 and 125, interesting times afoot.

Post by boldilocks »

Arent wrote:
Arioch wrote:Farseers don't detect thought, they detect the presence of the mind.
It would be better to argue that they can do some kind of "astral perception". In moo2
the Elerians could see the whole galaxy, even uninhabitated planets.

If you freeze down a brain, there won't be any electrical current & therefore no mind.
Unless you take the position there are things we do not yet understand, like a "soul".
If you freeze down a brain, doesn't it turn to mush?

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CrimsonFALKE
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Re: Page 124 and 125, interesting times afoot.

Post by CrimsonFALKE »

Well shit has hit the fan but will we get more pages like 78-79?

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Arioch
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Re: Page 124 and 125, interesting times afoot.

Post by Arioch »

SVlad wrote:What is approximate lightspeed delay from that buoy to Highlander-7 and to Leido-Sala post? And from Leido-Sala post to Highlander-7?
The white dwarf system is very compact, so the communication lag in most cases is less than 4-5 minutes.

Arent
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Re: Page 124 and 125, interesting times afoot.

Post by Arent »

boldilocks wrote:If you freeze down a brain, doesn't it turn to mush?
With our current technology, you would destroy a lot of cells, but not all. You can freeze/unfreeze liver relatively well, because
that organ can quickly regenerate. The question is whether it would be possible to refine that technology to a point where
the damage is negligible.

Krulle
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Re: Page 124 and 125, interesting times afoot.

Post by Krulle »

And the thawing quick enough to be of tactical use.
No use freezing the bodies (and mind), then sneaking behind the lines, only for the thawing to take 3 days, making your ships sitting ducks while the defenders come to your location....
Vote for Outsider on TWC: Image
charred steppes, borders of territories: page 59,
jump-map of local stars: page 121, larger map in Loroi: page 118,
System view Leido Crossroads: page 123, after the battle page 195

Arent
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Re: Page 124 and 125, interesting times afoot.

Post by Arent »

Krulle wrote:And the thawing quick enough to be of tactical use.
No use freezing the bodies (and mind), then sneaking behind the lines, only for the thawing to take 3 days, making your ships sitting ducks while the defenders come to your location....
It depends how you imagine future technology. In Alien & similar movies, you often see some kind of cryonics that either
needs some hours for waking or even some kind of regenerative medicine to repair the damage done by freezing. If you
just take the position that in the outsider universe something like that doesn't exist you're fine. No one says that outsider
necessarily has to accept science fiction tropes of these movies.

Krulle
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Re: Page 124 and 125, interesting times afoot.

Post by Krulle »

Well, in a Sci-Fi story setting, you just hand-wave it as "technology acquired and under control....

I just wanted to point out that this freezing and thawing of sapient beings may be strategically irrelevant, depending on exact point of technology.....
Vote for Outsider on TWC: Image
charred steppes, borders of territories: page 59,
jump-map of local stars: page 121, larger map in Loroi: page 118,
System view Leido Crossroads: page 123, after the battle page 195

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Arioch
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Re: Page 124 and 125, interesting times afoot.

Post by Arioch »

Literally freezing humans (and most organisms) causes permanent tissue damage; the damage can be reduced by quick-freezing, but I'm not sure it can be eliminated entirely. "Hypersleep" in most settings (2001/2010, Alien/Aliens, Avatar, etc.) is usually not literally "freezing" the subject but rather putting them into some form of cold-temperature hibernation. You can see from the displays that they still have brain and cardiovascular activity.

Some settings like Niven's Ringworld series have temporal stasis fields that literally put an organism in suspended animation, but Umiak don't have the technology for anything like this. But I'm not sure that even that would work... detection of the mental signature is more or less instantaneous and therefore might not be dependent on the flow of time.

An Umiak will still be detectable by a Farseer even if it is sleeping or hibernating or anything similar, short of actually killing it. Telepathy in outsider requires that there is some sort of physical characteristic to consciousness; Farseers aren't detecting brainwaves or thought, they're detecting the physical presence of the mind.

Gorbash
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Re: Page 124 and 125, interesting times afoot.

Post by Gorbash »

Arioch wrote: An Umiak will still be detectable by a Farseer even if it is sleeping or hibernating or anything similar, short of actually killing it. Telepathy in outsider requires that there is some sort of physical characteristic to consciousness; Farseers aren't detecting brainwaves or thought, they're detecting the physical presence of the mind.
And humans can't be detected because they have no mind to speak of. :P

Really, though, the implication thusfar has been less that the humans don't have a physical structure that can be detected, and more than their minds naturally (or unnaturally) deflect telepathic intrusion, including long-range senses. Maybe instead the Umiak have found a new species (or even a cybernetic modification) that allows them to have a mind that does not have that same physical characteristic.

I'm still kind of betting on enslaved Loroi brains-in-jars arrayed into some kind of psychic defense shield, but that just seems like something the Umiak would be gross enough to try.

WalexB
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Re: Page 124 and 125, interesting times afoot.

Post by WalexB »

Ahhh awesome two new pages. Amazing hard sci-fi webcomic. Thank you "arioch".

WalexB
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Re: Page 124 and 125, interesting times afoot.

Post by WalexB »

Siber wrote:So. Some possible explanations of this come to mind.
Some of these are plausible, but we know too little of the hidden truths about this, in particular the distant past -- which surely influences the present.
The big background questions are 1) What is the role of the "Well of Souls" black hole? 2) Why did some past master species create blue skinned variants of existing naturally evolved species? 3) The imagery of the "Historians" is clearly "evil" by the tropes of webcomics, what exactly is their angle?

I personally think that the human ship was destroyed by a third party, which may be the Historians or some other as yet unknown player. So far it is pretty obvious that both the Umiak and the Loroi are fast-reproducing highly advanced species and that must be scaring a lot of their neighbours and not so neighbours.

Arent
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Re: Page 124 and 125, interesting times afoot.

Post by Arent »

Arioch wrote:Literally freezing humans (and most organisms) causes permanent tissue damage; the damage can be reduced by quick-freezing, but I'm not sure it can be eliminated entirely.
Yes. If you say that this is not possible in Outsider that is completely fine. Of course I do not know every detail of your world & can only guess how the Umiak might have tricked the Loroi. & of course I don't want spoilers ;)

inxsi
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Re: Page 124 and 125, interesting times afoot.

Post by inxsi »

I think I've convinced myself that Beryl's shocked expression is either from:
a) [much more likely] the realization that the Umiak are able to penetrate Loroi defenses much more than she had assumed and that this problem is beyond just the current system
b) [more humorous and I think there is some truth here] the realization that she will likely die before getting to call Captain Jardin by his first name or shake his hand. I wonder if the dynamic between Beryl and Alex will change if they get out of this one. (Edit: This is not to suggest that any of this is driven by romantic feelings.)

ShadowDragon8685
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Re: Page 124 and 125, interesting times afoot.

Post by ShadowDragon8685 »

You could still use a fleet which is automated to a very significant degree. Farseers detect concentrations of minds at distance, they can't, say, pinpoint a single shuttleful of folks at interstellar distance, IIRC.

You could probably get a fleet down to below the critical threshold if you wired a few specialists directly into it and had them remote-controlling robots to do maintenance and stuff.

Also, if Farseers detect the physical presence of brains, that raises the question of how, when Loroi brains and, say, Umiak brains are almost certainly extremely different - topographically if nothing else. The only way I can see that working is if the Soia engineered everybody's brains to have some kind of specific structure that allows psychic contact, which Humans, as naturally-evolved sapients, would not have;
However, this also raises the question of how Loroi can detect and psychic with naturally-evolved nonsapient life, such as the fauna of Perrein, which IIRC they are more than capable of.

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Arioch
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Re: Page 124 and 125, interesting times afoot.

Post by Arioch »

ShadowDragon8685 wrote:You could still use a fleet which is automated to a very significant degree. Farseers detect concentrations of minds at distance, they can't, say, pinpoint a single shuttleful of folks at interstellar distance, IIRC.
This is incorrect; Farseers can detect a single Umiak mind, if it's the only mind in a star system. What they would have trouble with is distinguishing it amongst other minds nearby.
ShadowDragon8685 wrote:Also, if Farseers detect the physical presence of brains, that raises the question of how, when Loroi brains and, say, Umiak brains are almost certainly extremely different - topographically if nothing else.
Again, Farseers are not detecting the physical brain; they are detecting the mind, or consciousness itself.

ShadowDragon8685
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Re: Page 124 and 125, interesting times afoot.

Post by ShadowDragon8685 »

Arioch wrote:
ShadowDragon8685 wrote:You could still use a fleet which is automated to a very significant degree. Farseers detect concentrations of minds at distance, they can't, say, pinpoint a single shuttleful of folks at interstellar distance, IIRC.
This is incorrect; Farseers can detect a single Umiak mind, if it's the only mind in a star system. What they would have trouble with is distinguishing it amongst other minds nearby.
Okay, that's kind of OP.
Arioch wrote:
ShadowDragon8685 wrote:Also, if Farseers detect the physical presence of brains, that raises the question of how, when Loroi brains and, say, Umiak brains are almost certainly extremely different - topographically if nothing else.
Again, Farseers are not detecting the physical brain; they are detecting the mind, or consciousness itself.
That seems to be a straight-up contradiction of what you said earlier.
A mind which has been cryo-frozen is not conscious. It's been suspended; there's no consciousness to detect, because there's no activity going on in the mind.

boldilocks
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Re: Page 124 and 125, interesting times afoot.

Post by boldilocks »

ShadowDragon8685 wrote:A mind which has been cryo-frozen is not conscious. It's been suspended; there's no consciousness to detect, because there's no activity going on in the mind.
Total suspension of the processes that make up the mind would require a level of cryo-freezing that would surely cause irreparable damage.

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