Dragons with rockets

Recently, i finished Divinity II…. actually, make that two months ago, i finished Divinity II…. And what can i say? it was more or less crap. The only good points of the game? Changing into a dragon and no class-based restrictions on skills. However, everything else is more or less crap. With difficulty hikes at almost every turn, it is like saying if you don’t follow a strict route, you’ll die.

The ending was crap. You think you’re all so good and saving the world then it turns out everything was a lie and the world is destroyed anyway. Sure, this sort of story plot may work for a novel, but for a game? No. Doesn’t work at all. Does this mean they plan to make a sequel? They better, cuz this game has more bugs and loopholes than my grand dad’s garden. The saving system needs work (esp. on the xbox system), the distribution of difficulty needs to be better arranged, and for crying out loud, if the main focus is being able to transform into a dragon, better make sure we can transform into a dragon for at least 70% of the game! About 80% of the time i find myself walking on the ground and feeling like a puny insect being ready to be squashed. Also, it would better for more indept character customization. How about a dragon customization as well? I’m not talking about just armour and stuff, i’m talking changing the entire look of the dragon.

Anyway, i’ve gone off on the loony bus, buying about $800 CAD worth of games from ebay. I’m nuts, i know. So i’m waiting for a whole bunch of them to arrive sooner or later. First, we have Ar Tonelico 3 (ps3), then we have God Eater (psp), End of Eternity (ps3, the english version is called Resonance of fate, i think End of Eternity sounds cooler), Luck Star: Net Idol Meister (psp), Sengoku Hime (ps2 and psp. Though i played the pc ver. it’s always nicer to see improved character designs), Fate/Extra (psp, where you can make your own character fight in the holy grail war!! but it’s only a pre-order for 18-march, not much longer!!!), and Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep (psp). Now i’m just twidling my thumbs whilst i wait…. oh, and doing my essays and writing more junk.

There’s something about writing i found out that is rather similar to manga…. or at least in my perspective. Both require the power of luck. For manga (according to Bakuman, which is a manga itself), there are two types of mangaka, one who calculates, and one who doesn’t. The ones who calculate see the trend of what people are into and then start drawing. These guys just want to be popular and would do as the fans want. Basically, they crowd pleasers. The non-calculating types are the ones who draw what they want and hope they make it big. It is usually these sort of people who make it big.

Now, when we look at writers, especially fan-fiction writers, we are also classed the same way. Those who follow trends and write what everyone is writing, then they change accordingly to their readers’ taste in a rather radical manner. I wouldn’t call these people real writers though, as they are merely following what others tell them to do. The other type of writer, is the one who writes what they want to see done. There are tons of misses if you follow this. I am this type of writer, and i have about a 70% miss on my stories. A couple have a good following, but it isn’t considered a really good thing. I write what i want, and if people like it, they follow. Luck, that is all there is to it.

Well, i’ve revised my dragon age fic and have started to write it out. Finishing my fable story. I decided that i wouldn’t write a continuation of the fable fic, since i have too much things to write about and not a lot of people follow it. Personally, i hurried in its production to the point where i think it’s junk. Why did i post that anyway? A couple of original story ideas began floating in my head again…. it’s that time of the year, huh.

While writing my sci-fi fics (Star Ocean 3: To what End? series, Jedi Knight: Regret, Macross F: Upon Gentle Wings, Gundam Seed: Face in the Mirror, EVE online: Lost Hope), i began to tinker with ideas about the different possibilities of technologies. This is why i love sci-fi fics, you can invent so much shit and it would always make sense. But of course, these things have to be within the realm of reality. There must be designs, problems and flaws. You can’t pull a black box out from a hat and expect everyone to know what is inside. Everything is within the realm of the imagination, and that is where the problem also lies. Everything within the realm of sci-fi is close to what we humans know and understand. Our image of aliens are limited to a mere jigsaw of animals and plants on Earth. Our ideas of space travel is fixed within the boundaries of large hunky ships that looks more like a scrapyard than an actual flying ship. By and large, our imagination is not limitless. The limit is actually till the atmosphere of our planet. Until we can venture out far into space and see for ourselves things that we have not seen before, then we would be stuck here with limited views.

Anyway, while tinkering with ideas, i came up with two main engine designs. We know that engines are the core of any space exploration. Without engines, you aren’t going anywhere. The problem with engines in space ships, is that they tend to use new and crazy elements. But even those have limits, strangely enough. And fuel is always a problem. I was planning to put these two engine types that i created into the fleets of my Star Ocean fic. The first one was one i had been thinking about for a long time, since i was 15, to be exact. A vacuum engine. While it does sound a little strange, and i admit, it is weird, it works on the suction power of vacuums. Not the household appliance, but rather the vacuum of space. Now, for a vacuum to actually have suction power, there must be a difference in 1) pressure, 2) air (particle density). I haven’t gotten all of the physics down, and i admit that i hate physics, flunked it a couple of times and never touched it again (though the textbook was a good weapon). By utilizing the constant suction power of vacuum, then recycling the air, power could be generated. At first, the idea of using this engine had placed it outside the space vessel, where it would utilize the vacuum of natural space to propel itself forward, much like the jet engine of most commercial planes.

Problems with this is that once the air pressure and particles go through, they are both of in equilibrium, resulting in an instant loss of power. More or less, this method would only last a second. Not very productive, i should say. Then the idea shifted to placing a particle in a vacuum tube, and rigged the tube in such a way that pressure is constantly shifting, resulting in the particle to move through the tube at extremely speeds, generating heat and power. More like radiation and microwaves, but energy, nonetheless. However, this idea is also dumb, in more ways than one.

So i shift my focus onto the next idea. The black box engine. I call this one the “black hole drive”, or “Pandora’s engine”. Why? Because it is better not to touch it. I was watching a discovery channel special on John Hawking’s theory of everything. While that documentary only did a brief summary, and explained it in extremely simple terms so that even a monkey would understand, i nonetheless took in as much information as i could. Black holes, as it seems, are a collection of anti-matter. Supposedly in the universe, multiple split instances of particles suddenly coming into existence together with their counter-part, anti-matter. And within that split instance, they fuse back into nothing once more. While it sounds all fancy and cool, not to mention completely unrealistic, it is in fact, real. Or at least in theory. Anti-matter exists, we know that, and when anti-matter gather, they form a black hole. Everything would be pulled in, planets, light, time. The concept of time is distorted, light doesn’t exist in black holes, it is a simple devouring thing…. or un-thing…. anti-thing? whatever.

Black holes get smaller, in truth, as the anti-matter would soon try to compress and cancel each other out. However there is only so much it can contract (note that by the same theory, our universe has expanded out greatly after the big bang, and will soon slow down and start to contract once more). Once it has reached a certain size or mass (or unsize or unmass… i think i better stop), it would be managable. The black hole engine suspends a small black hole, and wraps the black hole with another black hole. Sounds impossible, doesn’t it? I thought of placing a second black hole next to the first, but i would think the attraction between the two would result in a rather catastrophic explosion, or implosion, wouldn’t you? Wrapping a second black hole around the first seemed to contain the energies that the two would generate, or at least control its flow. The radiation that both black holes emit, together with the energies they would release upon close proximity with one another would provide a strong, and very long lasting energy source. At least in my head. However, this engine is too dangerous. Go out of control, and an entire fleet would disappear in an instant. Not a very pretty sight. All in all, both designs of the engines are flawed, but they work in the context of being mere sci-fi.

I haven’t exactly worked out all of variables for both engines, though i have done rough design plans. I’ll need to think up of ways to further straighten out each idea.