you bring up a good point John, and i will give you that. The real reason I think that the producers 'put' or 'left' these things in the game is for the suspense. I mean, what is better than to have all of us sitting around here sharing ideas about THEIR game? This may have just been a 'plublicity stunt' to maintain Freelancers open-endedness.

BTW: I have enjoyed reading the feedback you have recieved, and i am happy to contribute.

If the monkey's are just an easter egg, and the game was so rushed and incomplete then why did they bother to modell monkeys in the first place? I mean, wouldn't it be easier to add the corona or whatever to the star than it would be to model a whole knew race? I think their going to use more of the monkeys.

.....as it turns out, apes were put on Earth by the don kawhatever to spy on us. They're actually really smart.

I understand that, and i believe you. I dont think that it is an Easter Egg, but i am assured that they left it in there for a reason. They want us to talk about it, and maybe they could generate ideas from our reasoning.

perhaps it was thirty rotations, but that is still alot faster than what we get. And no, none of the planets are rotating, though the neutron star is. Go to Omega-41 and check it out. If you look closely, you'll see it is spinning, though very slowly. So if they make the star rotate at all, it should at least be at a more appropriate rate.


-From the gates of Heaven to the depths of Hell; one, the Protecter; sees all, knows all, defends the innocent.

It could very well be spinning at 30 rps, after all time in freelancer is a very relative thing. As far as i can figure, Trent was on a freeport base that blew up, latter that day he prevents an alien race from destroying mankind. There is no reference to Trent taking naps inbetween missions save "go out and get this much money before I will speak to you again," and the planets do not rotate either around the sun or on their axis, their terrain suggests however that the planets do rotate so their should be 'nights' and 'days' within the system (obviously granted that they wouldn't be standard earth 24 hour days) Although, Trent could possibly nap while he is flying with autopilot on. Or possibly time moves a lot slower when traviling at trans galatic speeds. Or there is no time to begin with, and everything in Freelancer is in a frozen state of time, and the fact that the neutron star moves at all in a frozen state, means it is spinning infiniatly fast in a non-frozen state.

or you know the programmers simply didn't include time.

The monkeys are the Dom Kavash[!

Aye yae yae! About the spinning stars and spinning planets. I was under the impression that this system was a dead system. Based on the Dwarfs you see in every sector. Now arnt dwarfs just dead stars? So basically this system is dead and old hence why the Dom have left it. And becuz the stars have becum dwarfs maybe the gravitational field they possesed to keep planets spinning around it would have depleated. Hence why they dont spin or moove. How could you have trade lanes and exact coords on bases and planets and stations if each individial system inside sirius was mooving? You would have to have trade lanes that could navigate around the sun while still keeping satraight and in line with all the others and still lead you to the dsestination it says it takes you to. I think it would be tomuch for the human race especialy a part of the human race that wasnt as smart as the other half hence why the coalition gained the advantage! I definatly think the Dom are NOT coming back. MAYBE there is a rival race to the Dom that like to inhabit dead systems and eat up all the reasorces. Maybe this is the real reason the Nomads were left there and the Nomads think we are it. The Nomads would be a pretty easy way to annoy and hault a rival races advancment towards a future battlefield with the Dom. They are sorta like a fire and forget missle. The Dom dont expect to have to monitor there progress nor inspect the damage they have done. Maybe this race will catch up with the humans. Then maybe the Nomads have a fail safe and will alert the Dom as to any huge changes. I think the Nomads can see a diferance between humans and anuther race. And see this as an unexpected event. Im sure the Nomads are going as planned they think we are this race and see nuthing as being abnormal. Then I think did the Dom know of us in the milky. Maybe they didnt think we were advanced enough to make the trip out there. Or maybe they didnt even think we would have a reason to. Or maybe they just gave us to much credit as to not being stupid enough to inhabit an old system that has been dead. I think Im done. If I contridicted my self tell me!

---

guy's chill a bit the fact is that all humans in the sirius sector are people from the sol system and got to this system in the five sleeper ships the hispania was one of them and from that ship the corsairs and the outcast came the will never fight to take over the system because they are somting like freinds of the other ships. in fact the only reason wy they atack transports is that they don't have the nececery recources because when the arived the best spots where already taked by the other colinists

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they are planning to invade rheinland systems to vipe the red hessians out... just a thought
oh and the outcasts infilitrate and corrupted all 4 houses with their cardamine trade, they controll most of the criminal groups in sirius ...

Is there day & night in space? It's all dark, day or night..

The 30 revolutions per second rate of neutron star rotation John Bown mentioned is for one particular neutron star... The one at the center of the Crab Nebula. It has been observed to emit radio signals at 30 pulses per second, caused by the focusing of the emitted electromagnetic radiation at the radio wavelengths of its rapidly rotating magnetic poles. That's why these neutron stars were formerly known as "pulsars".

Interesting thing about the Crab Nebula neutron star is that also "pulses" in visible light wavelengths, and this has been observed by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Different neutron stars have different spin rates (hence different pulse rates). I'll have to check if there are any observed by radio astronomers to have spin rates so slow that it's discernable by the human eye (i.e. less than 24 revolutions per second). I don't see any reason why there wouldn't be, though.

As far as modelling black holes go, the game could have included an arbitrary black hole (with no real physics of course) if the programmers wanted to. Notice how one gets blown up if one's ship gets too close to a planet (without using the docking rings), which obviously also pays no heed to real physics. So likewise the programmers could have set a destruct limit if a ship approaches a bit too close to a game object representating a black hole if they wanted to.

And to answer another previous poster's rant on how we know nothing about black holes, I disagree. Back when Einstein first predicted the existance of black holes but we have no observational data to confirm the prediction, yes, we knew nothing about black holes. But with all the observations of phenomenon astronomers have done since then which so perfectly follows Einstein's predictions, one can only inevitably conclude that black holes do exist.

And no, black holes can't suck something in if there is enough angular momentum to sustain an orbit at a given distance. For example, if one of the stars in a binary star system collapses into a black hole (i.e. its mass is above that of my handle, heh heh), its companion will not be sucked in if it is orbiting fast enough, even though it is merely a few million miles away from the event horizon. This phenomenon has been observed by astronomers (look up the works of the NUKER team hunting for supermassive black holes using the HST for example) and the math can be easily worked out and proven using Newton's equation on gravitational attraction between two objects.

One can even use a black hole as a "slingshot" to accelerate a ship-- Like how we used the sun to slingshot our space probes onward to the outer planets. The latest example would be the Cassini probe, which used the sun's gravity to slingshot it on its way to Saturn, providing the equivalent in boost of speed to that of 75 tons of rocket fuel.

End of "reality check" rant..

Obligatory humor line... "Yes waiter, I'll have a bottle of Dom Kavash, 1934 vintage, for my party." "Oui messeur... Very good year."


Edited by - Chandrasekhar Limit on 12-04-2003 16:46:41

*** spoiler alert!!!***

On Monkeys And Robots:

first off, my theory is that the Monkeys and the Nomads are related. To get to them, and insystem, they are swarming with radiation and alien organisms! Isn't it clear?

The Monkeys and the Nomads are both horrible and tragic consequences of the Dom Kavash being invaded by alien organisms, further mutated by the extremely high radiation levels in the Omicron and Border World systems.

The Nomads took the "brain-in-a-jar" path, like those big-headed dudes in Star Trek or Tim Burton movies (10,000 quatlus on the newcomer!). The Monkeys, on the other hand, devolved into blue-class laborers and idle loafers (no jobs, no repair bay, no supplies, hanging out in bars, etc.)

A speculation following on that might be the amount of Cardamine one had in one's system before being invaded/mutated; perhaps the Nomads were originally the Dom Kavash's graphic designers and game programmers who mutated their own chromosomes with Cardamine and Cheetos, which modified the alien organism mutation effect. Food for thought.

and the robots, who were the Dom Kavash's datasystems, were also mutated (i suppose that would have to be from the background rads or microwave). I mean, bribing a robot? Obviously, they have corrupt data...






Edited by - Relayer on 12-04-2003 11:53:11

Edited by - Relayer on 12-04-2003 11:54:26

Guys, I happened to watch a thing on neutron stars yesterday on the science channel. They spin 30 times a second, and their atmosphere is only 5 millimeters thick. They send out a pulse at each of their poles, and one thimble a its actually mass is about 10,000,000 tons. I'm damn sure you wont be happy after landing on one of them. On the black hole subject, I have a thought too. According to the show i watched, black holes move around a lot. The sirius sector would not be the same after this, and those planets near it would have definetly been destroyed. So, with this in mind, I believe that it would be too dynamic to include a black hole, and everything would change.

> black holes move around a lot

I'm sorry, but that's bunk.

Black holes, just like regular stars, have mass. The only way a black hole can move is through gravitation from some other object. There is no such thing as a black hole that can move around on its own to wipe out star systems and planets like you are suggesting!

In terms of relative galactic motion, a black hole does not "move around a lot" in relation to the rest of the stars in its galaxy. It will orbit a galactic core just like it did when it was a star, just like any other stars in the galaxy. It will appear stationary to observers in other star systems in the same galaxy.

If you are referring to the rebroadcast of that episode on stars from the Universe 2001 program narrated by John Hurt on the Science Channel, I don't ever remember seeing anything about black holes "move around a lot" in that program.


Edited by - Chandrasekhar Limit on 12-04-2003 21:11:29

sorry about that, i had it worded wrong. you are right, thats what i had in mind when i said that. but we have to determine the center point to which it orbits. I recently visited that unknown system, and looked at the 'black hole'. It does not look like a blak hole, i just think it was some weird background they put in. besides look at this: if you do a 180 degree turn when facing the 'black hole' in that system, then you will be facing another really weird looking background. wtf is that? thats just something i had to write in about, because it seemed strange at the time. any ideas?

hm.. i read most of the first 2 pages, a bit of the third... and omg.. it is long..
well, my dig:
dom kvash = baboons?? um.. even though they predate humands by 50 million years.. they had the technology? and um.. baboons? you'd think they'd dress up a little.
and as for the black holes.. don't starlancer have one similar? i was kinda impressed by the enormous warp hole. you litteraly get 'sucked' in. i think that might be the starting line for a real working gravity in space, not only for black holes, but planets, and stars, and stuff.


presently, my world is upside down, so if u do not mind, u'll have to tok to my a$$