Tag: sub

Give me a ping, Vasili.

Gaming

Over at the Ancient Gaming Noob, Wilhelm discusses briefly his need for a flight sim MMO and then posts about World of Warplanes.  He asks in the title and at the end, “What else do we need?”

I’ll tell you what we need: World of Submarines.

688 Attack Sub
Give me a 30 degree down bubble, engines at one-quarter, heading... somewhere over there where you heard the pinging.

The best part of this idea is that it wouldn’t need a high-end gaming system because I wouldn’t want to have a vehicle shooter where you drive around in your sub, strafing as you launch torpedoes at other players.  No, I’m talking about 688 Attack Sub type play, sticking closer to reality.  The player gets the deck of his sub, from which he can get status readouts of his hull and other systems, sonar screens, maps.  The only time “real” graphics would come into play would be through the periscope and if the game is restricted almost entirely to submerged play then all the periscope would get you is a view of other periscopes.  In fact, you could even remove it altogether and include “periscope depth” as just a place to go to get communications and other elements.

Taken a step further, without a new for huge graphic worlds, you might be able to have multiplayer subs, with people connecting together to run various stations.  Sure, you can run a boat on your own, but wouldn’t it be more efficient to have a sonar tech giving you the readings, a driver taking your directions and someone else loading and firing your torpedoes?  Damn right it would!

Someone, somewhere needs to get on this immediately!

Infinite Dimensions

Random Thoughts

Previously, I wrote about there being two kinds of time travel.  More specifically that there are only two kinds that work and make sense without leaving giant gaping holes in the stories.  Now I’m going to spin-off into an examination of dimensions…

The Big Bang

If you ignore the faith-based beliefs that the Universe just sprang into existence when a deity willed it to be, then you pretty much have to accept the theory of the Big Bang, that everything exploded out of “something”.  For a while, science and science fiction grasped on to the idea that eventually at some point down the line, the Universe would stop expanding and would begin to contract.  People really like this idea because it lends itself into a nice loop.  Everything racing back together, getting faster and faster, exceeding the speed of light, warping back in time billions and billions of years and then exploding again.  The end is the beginning.

Assuming a warping of space and time, it isn’t hard to jump to the idea that when the Big Bang happens again that it doesn’t have to be exactly the same.  In one way of looking at it each version of the Universe is happening in sequence.  The end of Universe 1 is the beginning of Universe 2, and end of U 2 is the beginning of U 3, and U 3 to U 4 and so on.  Thanks to the warping of time and space, however, you can get to the idea that these Universes are also happening simultaneously but somehow out of phase with each other.  This conjures up the idea of wonderful strangeness, like in our Universe there are nine planets (Pluto, I’ll never let you go) but in one of our neighbors, X-1 or X+1, there are ten and due to some sort of anomaly, that tenth planet occasionally influences or even crosses over into our Universe.  Your keys weren’t sitting on the table the whole time you were looking, they had actually slipped into X-1 but found their way back eventually.

Now we have evidence that the expansion of the Universe isn’t slowing, and may even be speeding up.  It’s hard to tell what is going on with all the dark matter out there and whatnot.

Echoes

But how does an examination of dimensions of this sort relate to time travel?  You have to stop thinking so three dimensionally.  What if the Big Bang wasn’t just a simple explosion, but instead ripped right through space and time.  Now you have Universe 1 beginning, and then a tiny fraction of a second later Universe 1 sub 1 begins.  A tiny fraction later Universe 1 sub 2 begins, and U 1 sub 3 shortly after, and U 1 sub 4, and so on.  And infinite number of Universes trailing behind us through time.  And since we are just as likely to not be the first Universe as we are to be it, there are an infinite number of Universes extending out in front of us as well.

Now, when you travel through time, you aren’t really.  You are simply jumping to another copy of our own Universe.  Jumping forward in time by one hour is actually sliding to a Universe that began exactly as ours did but an hour out of alignment.

The very first time that I thought about this was when I was watching the movie Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.  In it, Rufus explains to them that no matter what they do or where they go, they have to keep an eye on their watch because the time in San Dimas is always moving forward.  This is because the phone booth isn’t actually travelling in time, it is sliding between dimensions where the intended time is happening “right now” and when they return to their own dimension if they’ve been gone for an hour it will be an hour since they left.  Time marches on, so to speak.  The only real problem with that theory as far as the movie is concerned is Rufus’ stated reason for being there.  His mission would appear to be a closed loop (he’s going back in time to help them with their report because he did go back in time to help them with their report that they almost failed), but then you get the paradox of how that loop got started.  It would have to be that a Rufus (or someone) from a Universe that didn’t have a successful Bill & Ted pinpointed the need for them to pass the history exam 700 years prior (or however long they needed) and traveled to the appropriate world to fix it, then returned home to live in his unacceptable world (or maybe he didn’t go home).  In that world, 700 years later, Rufus climbs into a time machine in a perfectly excellent world to go back 700 years to ensure it still happens… or rather, that it happens for someone else.  So either lots more cross Universe communication is happening, or only one world every 700 years gets to be excellent.  In a manner of speaking.

Of course, the second movie completely throws that out the window with all the jumping forward and backward and delivering items to themselves.

But assuming the Echoes theory is true, it means that you can’t change your past or future.  You can only change the worlds offset from your own, and in order for your world to change an offset you needs to be the instigator of change.

No matter what, thinking about time travel this much will probably give me an aneurysm.

They Never Learn

Gaming

From CVG:

“They’ve got 14 million players! Gimme a million and I’m good! We’re real good at a million, right?” He added: “We don’t need everybody to migrate. We just need some of them – and I’m full confident we’re going to get them.”

So, if you were to, I don’t know, pay attention, how many subscription MMOs have a million players?  Four.  How many of those have a million after you exclude Asia (because, honestly, those numbers are not the same since they don’t all pay the same or even similar monthly fees)?  One?  And the numbers for the sub one million mark don’t look much better, with most of them being at or under 500k.

Do you really want to come out and say you want and are going to get a million subscribers?

I wish them the best.  Really, I do.  And I hope the intonation I’m reading into that quote means that for a business plan they have a much more realistic number in mind for success.  But I’m also fully prepared to mock them when they face-plant.

A Grilled Cheese Sandwich

Random Thoughts

The wife and I went to breakfast this morning. Now, I am not a breakfast person really… I like cereal, I like bacon, sausage, good hashbrowns or potato cakes, and occasionally pancakes… I hate eggs, which seem to be the staple food of most restaurant breakfast plates. So we go to IHOP because she loves it. I scour the menu. I want to eat something, but not alot of something. Normally, I get the sampler, sub out the eggs for some extra bacon or something, and ask if they can sub out fries for the hashbrowns (IHOP’s are far too greasy and often undercooked in the center of the pile while be overcooked on the edges), but I’m not that hungry and eight dollars is a little much.

I finally spy the kids menu and decide I’ll settle for the grilled cheese with fries and get a side of bacon. $2.99 for the grilled cheese and fries, $2.19 for the bacon. Good deal. Only, the waitress informs me that you must be 12 or under to order from the kids menu. So I ask, “Is there an adult’s grilled cheese?” She tells me there isn’t, but they can make one, only they’ll have to ring it up as a side of toast ($2.19), a side of cheese ($.89), and a side of fries ($2.59)… $5.67 for the exact same meal they will sell for $2.99 to a kid. Add in my bacon I wanted and the meal is $7.86, which is actually more expensive than the sampler that contains twice as much food (two eggs, two bacon, two sausage, two ham, two pancakes, and hashbrowns). Ummm… what?

So I get a burger. I order it plain (as usual), and I even say, “I’d like it plain, with nothing on it.” It comes with lettuce, tomato and mayo. The waitress gives me an eat-shit look when I tell her I wanted it plain, like as if my decision not to eat what I didn’t order was ruining her day. IHOP just lost me as a customer, for life. Let’s hope the wife can forgive me.