New efforts!

[scope.creep]

Tab 1-2-3 tab 1-2-3 tabHOLY GOD WHICH BUTTON DID I BIND NUKE TO HELPHELPHELP

N. Definitely the N key.

I used an extensive bind file system and customized each character, but nuke powers were always N. Don't want to hit that accidentally, but when I want it, I don't want to have to hunt for it.

[CrimsonCapacitor]

When I played blasters is was more like:
Tab 1-2-3, tab 1-2-3, tab 1-2-faceplant!

I had an NRG/NRG blaster named "The Mighty Faceplant" on Triumph for just this reason.

[ukaserex]

Mine was simple. 3 [AIM] 4 [Freeze Ray] 5[Build-up] 6 [Bitter Ice Blast] 7[Ice Blast] 8 [Ice Patch] Duck around corner for melee bad guys, repeat as necessary.

Very simple. Very rarely would I face plant. In dense mobs, I'd do [TP Foe] onto an ice patch and let loose blizzard or sleet depending on how many followed the tp'd foe.

Ice/ice blasting was great fun!

[Dying Breath]

:O

This is not sex ed!  This is English!

Glad you cleared that up before announcing the oral quiz.

[Graydar]

I wonder why the SEGS project isn't more of a topic here?

[KennonGL]

OK, can someone explain Time Dilation to me?  I just cannot wrap my head around it.

So, say I want to send a letter to that new alien colony planet 10 light years away.
I send out a ship that travels at 0.5 C and thus experiences no discernable time dilation.
The ship/letter arrives at the planet in approximately 20 years.

Now, instead say I send out a ship that travels at 0.999999 C and therefore experiences massive time dilation
(as I understand things).
The ship/letter itself experiences approximately 10 years of time, but from my point of view it will take thousands of
years to arrive at the planet...

That just doesn't make sense.  It's still only travelling 20 light years.  By that train of thought, I'd do much better
to just always send slower ships out and they'll arrive centuries before the faster ship? 

Could I wait a couple of years after the fast ship leaves and then send another ship out at 0.5 C and have it somehow
overtake the fast ship and arrive at the planet first? 

Huh?

[Arcana]

All of this talk about keys. A CoH player I know who shall remain nameless had an amusing way to describe blasters. "Oh blasters are easy! Tab, 1, 2, 3, Tab, 1, 2, 3"

This is the first time I've heard of someone binding awakens to the tab key.

[Vee]

OK, can someone explain Time Dilation to me?  I just cannot wrap my head around it.

So, say I want to send a letter to that new alien colony planet 10 light years away.
I send out a ship that travels at 0.5 C and thus experiences no discernable time dilation.
The ship/letter arrives at the planet in approximately 20 years.

Now, instead say I send out a ship that travels at 0.999999 C and therefore experiences massive time dilation
(as I understand things).
The ship/letter itself experiences approximately 10 years of time, but from my point of view it will take thousands of
years to arrive at the planet...

That just doesn't make sense.  It's still only travelling 20 light years.  By that train of thought, I'd do much better
to just always send slower ships out and they'll arrive centuries before the faster ship? 

Could I wait a couple of years after the fast ship leaves and then send another ship out at 0.5 C and have it somehow
overtake the fast ship and arrive at the planet first? 

Huh?

Wait, you have interstellar travel and you're still writing letters?

[Arcana]

OK, can someone explain Time Dilation to me?  I just cannot wrap my head around it.

So, say I want to send a letter to that new alien colony planet 10 light years away.
I send out a ship that travels at 0.5 C and thus experiences no discernable time dilation.
The ship/letter arrives at the planet in approximately 20 years.

Now, instead say I send out a ship that travels at 0.999999 C and therefore experiences massive time dilation
(as I understand things).
The ship/letter itself experiences approximately 10 years of time, but from my point of view it will take thousands of
years to arrive at the planet...

That just doesn't make sense.  It's still only travelling 20 light years.  By that train of thought, I'd do much better
to just always send slower ships out and they'll arrive centuries before the faster ship? 

Could I wait a couple of years after the fast ship leaves and then send another ship out at 0.5 C and have it somehow
overtake the fast ship and arrive at the planet first? 

Huh?

If you send a ship at 0.5c to a destination 10 light years away then from your mostly non-accelerating frame of reference (that is not moving much relative to the destination) the ship will take 20 years to reach the destination.  However, relative to the people on the ship it will take slightly less time: about 17 years.  That's due to lorentzian (special relativistic) time dilation.  The people inside the ship experience time slower relative to the outside world.

You might think that means they see themselves moving faster than the relatively stationary observer - after all they are crossing 10 light years in less than 20 years.  However, that's not true because they also experience lorentzian contraction: space contracts in the direction of motion, so they don't see time moving slower or themselves moving faster: they see the actual distance between them and the destination shrink, by exactly the same factor as above.  No matter how much time dilation they experience, they will never observe themselves moving faster than the speed of light.

Now you propel that ship at 0.999999 c.  The lorentzian is now 1 / (sqrt(1-(v/c)^2)), which in this case is now 1 / (0.0014) or about 707.  That means while you see them take about 10 years to traverse that distance, the people on the ship experience about five days.  Relative to you, they still take a very long time to get there, but relative to their own clocks the trip takes a lot less time.

[KennonGL]

OK, that makes a lot more sense.  Thanks Arcana.

So if I sent a baby hamster rather than a letter, from my point of view
(standing "still" on the origin planet) it takes 10 years or so to get to the
destination planet.

But from the baby hamster's point of view, the entire trip only took a week
or so and he's still a baby hamster when he arrives. 

[Dev7on]

I know all you guys are feeling down thinking about City of Heroes everyday. Here's a story to help lighten up your day a little: A friend of mine told me he was at a club a long time ago and saw a guy in the middle of the dance floor doing City of Heroes emote dances.  ;)

[eabrace]

This is the first time I've heard of someone binding awakens to the tab key.

https://images.weserv.nl/?url=campusriot.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2012%2F08%2Fi-see-what-you-did-there.jpg

[Arcana]

OK, that makes a lot more sense.  Thanks Arcana.

So if I sent a baby hamster rather than a letter, from my point of view
(standing "still" on the origin planet) it takes 10 years or so to get to the
destination planet.

But from the baby hamster's point of view, the entire trip only took a week
or so and he's still a baby hamster when he arrives.

Yes.  We do this for real with subatomic particles.  When we send particles extremely fast down collider tunnels we see that they are "younger" than our wall clocks would suggest they are because they take significantly longer to decay.  We think they should last for a millisecond (for example) and then decay, they actually last seven milliseconds and then decay relative to our clocks.  Relative to "their own" clocks they lasted the normal one millisecond.  While they are moving faster, they age slower (relative to us).

Incidentally, one of the reasons we deduce that neutrinos have mass is because they fluctuate between different neutrino states.  Colloquially, I could say that because neutrinos can change state, they must experience time.  That means they must travel at some velocity less than the speed of light, and that means they cannot be massless.  The actual argument is a little more complex involving spin states, but it kinda captures some of the flavor of the argument.

[LadyVamp]

Yes.  We do this for real with subatomic particles.  When we send particles extremely fast down collider tunnels we see that they are "younger" than our wall clocks would suggest they are because they take significantly longer to decay.  We think they should last for a millisecond (for example) and then decay, they actually last seven milliseconds and then decay relative to our clocks.  Relative to "their own" clocks they lasted the normal one millisecond.  While they are moving faster, they age slower (relative to us).

Incidentally, one of the reasons we deduce that neutrinos have mass is because they fluctuate between different neutrino states.  Colloquially, I could say that because neutrinos can change state, they must experience time.  That means they must travel at some velocity less than the speed of light, and that means they cannot be massless.  The actual argument is a little more complex involving spin states, but it kinda captures some of the flavor of the argument.

I'm guessing ramming a human down a large enough collider tunnel wouldn't work to make him/her live 7x longer.  Otherwise, we could live for 200 - 500+ years.

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

I'm guessing ramming a human down a large enough collider tunnel wouldn't work to make him/her live 7x longer.  Otherwise, we could live for 200 - 500+ years.

Only from the viewpoint of people outside the collider. From the viewpoint of the accelerated person they would live a normal lifespan. Although the difficulties of getting food to them might make it shorter. That and keeping the accelerator running flawlessly non-stop for half a millennium without hitting anything; which, admittedly, would make a mockery of the "collider" moniker...

[Arcana]

Only from the viewpoint of people outside the collider. From the viewpoint of the accelerated person they would live a normal lifespan.

From the viewpoint of people outside the collider the person in the collider would strike the collider walls at 0.99c and vaporize themselves, the collider walls, the collider, the collider complex, the people outside the collider, and probably a substantial amount of the country the collider was located in, in much less time than it takes for human eyes to register seeing anything.

Particle colliders use magnets to steer particle streams.  They are unlikely to work on people nearly as well.

[CrimsonCapacitor]

From the viewpoint of people outside the collider the person in the collider would strike the collider walls at 0.99c and vaporize themselves, the collider walls, the collider, the collider complex, the people outside the collider, and probably a substantial amount of the country the collider was located in, in much less time than it takes for human eyes to register seeing anything.

Particle colliders use magnets to steer particle streams.  They are unlikely to work on people nearly as well.

Unless that person has a magnetic personality...

THANK YOU!  I'M HERE ALL WEEK!  TRY THE FISH AND DON'T FORGET TO TIP YOUR SERVER!

[Graydar]

Unless that person has a magnetic personality...

THANK YOU!  I'M HERE ALL WEEK!  TRY THE FISH AND DON'T FORGET TO TIP YOUR SERVER!

*The crowd boos, blasters begin to tab-1-2-3*

[LadyVamp]

From the viewpoint of people outside the collider the person in the collider would strike the collider walls at 0.99c and vaporize themselves, the collider walls, the collider, the collider complex, the people outside the collider, and probably a substantial amount of the country the collider was located in, in much less time than it takes for human eyes to register seeing anything.

Particle colliders use magnets to steer particle streams.  They are unlikely to work on people nearly as well.

Time to bulk up on those iron supplements.

[Arcana]

Time to bulk up on those iron supplements.

There's also the question of what that much force would do to a human body if it could be exerted.  I think it would probably turn you into a liquified fruit roll up, but I don't want to solve the relativistic momentum equation to be certain.  "Some form of goo" would probably be in the general ballpark.

If I'm remembering correctly, the kinetic energy possessed by our hypothetical human being travelling at 0.99c (the velocity at which they would experience about 7 times time dilation) is about 6.1 mc^2.  In other words, it is about six times the energy you'd get if you were to convert their entire mass into energy.  Let's say they weigh about 70 kg (154 lb).  That would be ... about 4 * 10 ^ 19 joules.  A megaton of TNT releases about 4 * 10^15 joules.  So this would be ten thousand megatons of energy.  This is I think approximately the total yield of all the nuclear weapons ever created by all the nuclear powers combined.  The Chicxulub asteroid impact, for reference, delivered about ten thousand times more energy than that.

So one megaton bomb times ten thousand equals Speedy.  Speedy times ten thousand equals mass extinction.