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Discussion / New autobattle

« on: June 01, 2012, 04:33:57 pm »

Hi. This is the thread about my new autobattle proposal (http://ufoai.org/wiki/index.php/Proposals/New_autobattle)
For those of you who do not know, I'll describe how autobattle works right now: two teams stand against each other and fire at each other in turn, with the probability to hit calculated entirely from magic numbers and dice rolls. By saving just before the battle and reloading several times, you can as well win without a single casualty, or totally loose.
The system that I propose is of course not perfect, moreover, I myself already found a big flaw in it, which needs a bit of thinking. But I think that it's still better than what we have now in every way possible. For some reason the idea was fiercely rejected, with the reasons, which will much more apply to the current system than to the proposed.
Anyway, I was looking at the code, and I think I'm ready to do my bit in a noble task of making UFOAI better. The only question remains: how do you like the autobattle to be improved? I do not want to spent my time writing the code which won't be accepted, so we need to think of a system which will satisfy everyone. Or do you, seriously, think that what you have now is the best simulation possible?

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Discussion / Alien propulsion won't work IRL

« on: May 29, 2012, 07:36:24 pm »

Since you want to be a "hard sci-fi", you should change your alien propulsion ideas.

It uses direct matter-antimatter annihilation to generate thrust by injecting protons and antiprotons into the reaction chamber, then channeling this explosive force out the back of the engine.

Well, sorry, but this just won't work this way. The linear momentum preservation law tells us, that in order to move forward, we need to throw something backward, easy as that. Suppose the antimatter itself is this "something". 1000 points of AM is 10 grams, while a full tank is ~50 points, means, 0.5 grams + 0.5 grams of matter = 1.0 gram. Assume the engine efficiency is 100%, and this gram goes out at the speed of light. The mass of the ship is... well let's say 30 tons (the mass of MiG-29). 3*10^9 / 30*1000*1000 = 100 m/s. The full tank provides one-time acceleration to the speed of 100 m/s in the absence of friction. Happy journey!
In the air, this engine can still work as a ramjet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramjet), although ramjet is working only on high speeds, and you have to think of some other propulsion system to give the ship initial acceleration.
But anyway, in space - you're out of luck.

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Linux / Gentoo overlay

« on: September 29, 2010, 06:23:23 pm »

Do you have a gentoo's overlay with ebuild for SVN (or git or whatever) version?

I'd like to see the developer's version but do not want to install anything outside portage.