Of UFO’s, Nazis and secret antarctic bases

[devinpatterson]

Well I took AP physics in high school so I suppose I can try and crunch some numbers. In all honesty though, I doubt we are going to have more a lot more damage than a big nuke would do. I'll start with a 100,000 ton (assumption). I can't do any kind of drag co-efficient/angle of approach etc. Just the mass starting from low earth orbit at 0.

[devinpatterson]

Impact force from a falling object KE= 1/2mv2 (the two is squared, don't know the ASCII symbol)*

KE=Kinitic energy (in joules)

M=Mass=kg, (100,000 metric tons just a guess)

V=Velocity=meters/second (terminal velocity of sky diver 200kmh 55m/s)

 

KE=1/2(100,000,000)(55)(55)=151,250,000,000 Joules. Hiroshima was 80 terojoules 80,000,000,000,000**

If I did the math correctly it looks like the ship isn't even a terajoule, so I don't think we have to worry about a global scale or anything. Maybe just a very large impact crater. maybe something like meteor crater in Arizona (AZ crater meteor was estimated to be around 50 meter diameter, but was traveling much faster at 12.8 kilometers per second)***

 

*http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/flobi.html

**http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/MuhammadKaleem.shtml

***http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Crater

[TrooperScooperMKII]

I'd imagine that the ship would be more aerodynamic than a person, especially if it's the typical flying saucer and/or has energy shields. Also, the Titanic was about half that weight, would have had less equipment and supplies and more open space, and was probably a lot less dense- warships are pretty heavy, but a space-age ship would have more advanced materials...

basically I'd imagined a lot more speed and somewhat greater mass, but it's vague enough to wave away.

So what about the wreck? I like the city fragments idea.

[Ruadhan2300]

who's to say the ship was completely unpowered during the crash?

you can easily handwave it with some surviving crew activating an emergency landing system which was able to slow the ship enough to prevent a holocaust event :P

they have hover tech, I'd imagine they also have some emergency programs in the event of a crash-landing.

 

I like the idea of the ship crashing, I prefer the idea that it was slowed enough to prevent wholesale destruction of the area, but still impacted the ground hard enough to shatter it into several pieces.

 

also raises the possibility of random parts of the ship still hovering well above the wreckage which can only be reached by the ship-board teleporters XD

 

 

 

obviously I've been thinking about this, I actually -started- a project like this, its why I made the Mothership Zeta resource master file previously mentioned :P

 

I didn't get far, but the ideas remain.

my idea is that this is Mothership Gamma that crashed, and it's landed in a canyon system, to reach it, you go through the usual doorway into another part of the mojave. where you find yourself boxed in the canyons. preventing you from getting up to where the wreck itself is. this has advantages in preventing the player from being able to climb over huge sections of the wreck, or see that it's not really very damaged (laziness :P) and so on.

One of the assets I put together for that mod was a twisted and ruined version of one of the huge struts that holds the science section of the ship to the rest of it.

I'd be delighted to work on and donate resources to this mod if it gets further than background speculation, I guess I've already donated the core of it in the form of the resource master file :P

[devinpatterson]

who's to say the ship was completely unpowered during the crash?

you can easily handwave it with some surviving crew activating an emergency landing system which was able to slow the ship enough to prevent a holocaust event :P

they have hover tech, I'd imagine they also have some emergency programs in the event of a crash-landing.

 

I like the idea of the ship crashing, I prefer the idea that it was slowed enough to prevent wholesale destruction of the area, but still impacted the ground hard enough to shatter it into several pieces.

 

That definitely sounds like teh best option from a plotline POV and modders POV. It allows us the most flexibility to keep the pieces and parts we want for that part of the mod while still conveying the catastrophic destruction of the impact.

 

also raises the possibility of random parts of the ship still hovering well above the wreckage which can only be reached by the ship-board teleporters XD

 

Nice touch

 

 

obviously I've been thinking about this, I actually -started- a project like this, its why I made the Mothership Zeta resource master file previously mentioned :P

 

I didn't get far, but the ideas remain.

my idea is that this is Mothership Gamma that crashed, and it's landed in a canyon system, to reach it, you go through the usual doorway into another part of the mojave. where you find yourself boxed in the canyons. preventing you from getting up to where the wreck itself is. this has advantages in preventing the player from being able to climb over huge sections of the wreck, or see that it's not really very damaged (laziness :P) and so on.

 

That would be great for LOD too. Now that we have access to honest hearts, were you thinking of zion resources for the canyon? Also if we did a canyon that was in tribal lands (or any other highly superstitious group), and the tribals thought it was a sacred or cursed place we would have a reasonable explanation for not having every tech raider within a few hundred miles plundering the wreckage. along with the abominations being a deterrent.

 

One of the assets I put together for that mod was a twisted and ruined version of one of the huge struts that holds the science section of the ship to the rest of it.

 

Yes, definitely, I like that vision. And who's to say with the advanced alien technology in composite materials (and what have you) large sections couldn't survive. I had originally envisioned the crash site as using something similar to bomb 19 (http://newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=41639) in a high mountain valley. But I believe your canyon idea would be more practical

 

Plus if a section of the science level survived, we can have some abominations running about. If I remember right in zeta, those guys were pretty tough.

 

I'm also curious if the inertia shields prevent falling damage. It seems like they should. Opening up the possibility that aliens that had shields and were in surviving sections of the ship may have lived through the impact. My original thought was that the only survivors were a landing party or two that were on the surface or in scout ships when the space battle began.

 

But it might be kind of cool to have a aliens version of robinson curuso. A single alien survivor or very small group of alien survivors, living in their scavenged wreckage trying to survive the abominations and native fauna with their cobbled together technology. They (or he) could have a mix of their surviving technology mingled with human tech. Perhaps their/his greatest project would be constructing a beacon or communications device. That would be an interesting visual with scavenged alien consoles wired to human small satellite dish with human radio equipment scattered about. Tribal aliens makes for a paradoxical but very interesting picture in my mind.

 

I'd be delighted to work on and donate resources to this mod if it gets further than background speculation, I guess I've already donated the core of it in the form of the resource master file :P

 

That would be awesome, not just because your a skilled modder (saw you had 3 pages of files you'v contributed to NVnexus) but also because (as you'v mentioned) without your zeta restored mod this whole idea would be a no go in NV.

The biggest obstacle to a NV ver is putting together teh floor plans of zeta (and the antarctic) saucer. I'm wondering it it wouldn't be easier to port the zeta dlc and simply strip away anything that wasn't in NV's resources, rather than painstakingly recreating zeta's interior cells. By the time we were done stripping out any resources that weren't in NV the only thing we would really be importing from the zeta dlc is positional data of the interior cells.

Edited July 23, 2011 by devinpatterson

[devinpatterson]

I'd imagine that the ship would be more aerodynamic than a person, especially if it's the typical flying saucer and/or has energy shields.

 

Truthfully I couldn't guess on teh sheilds, but it certainly could be more aerodynamic. A saucer is of course very aerodynamic, it's why we enjoy Frisbees so much. But that's assuming it's vector is parallel to the edge, and it looks like it just started slowly falling after the space battle. So it was probably falling against the bottom/widest portion of the disc with a lot of atmospheric resistance or tumbling.

 

But for comparsion a 30-06 bullet that was falling to earth (not it's muzzle velocity, just it's downward arc) hits about 300kph. So if you plug that in you get 320,000,000,000 almost twice the impact of the 200kph. But still only 30% of a terajoule and Hiroshima was 63 terajoules (I had mistakenly qouted it as 80, but that was the Nagasaki bomb).

 

 

Also, the Titanic was about half that weight, would have had less equipment and supplies and more open space, and was probably a lot less dense- warships are pretty heavy, but a space-age ship would have more advanced materials...

basically I'd imagined a lot more speed and somewhat greater mass, but it's vague enough to wave away.

 

I think it will make a better mod this way, and we're only taking a little bit of creative license, to enrich the storyline.

 

So what about the wreck? I like the city fragments idea.

 

You mean like it impacting in a large city?

Edited July 23, 2011 by devinpatterson

[kingban1]

I was thinking that it might be kind of cool to have the nazis already in teh saucer exploring with several search parties. That way your facing not only NV wildlife, mutatated abominations, drones etc, but several seperate nazi encounters. That might be enough actors to flesh out the hulk of the ship.

 

I'd also like perhaps start the quest off with a new radio station that has alien jabber on it. An attempt to send a distress call.....this might be what gets the nazis in the air and out to the crash site. They realize that a surviving alien would be invaluable in their research to decode, translate, teach etc. That story line would imply the aliens in the antarctic being all dead of course, but that does make sense. After all it'd be pretty tough (impossible?) for anyone but a super hero like the lone wanderer to take the ship if the aliens were aboard (unless they were in cyro stasis). It also makes a little plot hook to keep the alien companion with you, since if the nazis get him it's just going to be bad news.

 

Could also make it feel like a race against time to find him first in the crashed hulk

 

Just had a weird idea....what if the crashed saucers impact created a zone full of strange stalker anomalies and artifacts. Might throw a little bit of weirdness into the world-space if the plagiarism doesn't turn the player off. Perhaps the power supply core was ruptured resulting in the effect. The anomalies would be more like traps with fire, lightning, cold etc effects. The artifacts could be items that add resistances through actor effects or immunities. Probably too derivative, but thought I'd mention it since it came up while I was typing this.

What if you end up freeing the alien slaves and once you defeat the Nazi's the aliens occupy the former Nazi base and make it into a sort of alien settlement.

[TrooperScooperMKII]

Floating pieces of the wreck would be cool. Why not have a "city in the sky" sort of thing alongside the towering wreckage? Sort of like how Rivet City was built in an aircraft carrier, the wreck could have been renovated into a makeshift fortress by surviving crewmembers. I'm picturing an impaled section of the alien ship resting precariously on a small rock spire... The PC would have the option to sabotage the antigrav to destroy the floating segments (last ditch effort to keep the Nazis from getting their hands on it, an attempt to kill all the aliens, or just to watch the pretty explosions...) as 4 years of continual operation after sabotage + reentry would wreak havoc with surviving tech. Begs the question as to why they simply didn't attempt to gently lower the hovering piece to the ground. Perhaps the system was only meant for emergency repulsion and doesn't have an off switch?

 

Maybe they tried lowering a smaller segment by deactivating the antigrav system, and it shattered on the ground.

 

ETA: Diesease could be a major issue for the aliens; think of the problems humans had when trying to colonize Africa/the New World, and picture having an alien crew in a survival situation on an irradiated Earth. They could have hazmat suits of sorts. Of course, given the Mothership Zeta aspect, I'd imagine that the aliens would have similar atmospheric requirements.

Edited July 24, 2011 by TrooperScooperMKII

[devinpatterson]

What if you end up freeing the alien slaves and once you defeat the Nazi's the aliens occupy the former Nazi base and make it into a sort of alien settlement.

 

Good followup, although they might prefer zeta itself since it's fully functional. Thanks for bring that to my attention.

[devinpatterson]

Floating pieces of the wreck would be cool. Why not have a "city in the sky" sort of thing alongside the towering wreckage?

 

That's a cool visual

 

Sort of like how Rivet City was built in an aircraft carrier, the wreck could have been renovated into a makeshift fortress by surviving crewmembers. I'm picturing an impaled section of the alien ship resting precariously on a small rock spire...

 

Well we have an exterior model of the ship from the space walk segment, so we could probably cut the saucer up in blender add some charred textures then we'd have some pieces to play around with, but we'd still have to add "interior" meshes to those fragments. Fill them up with debris, rubble and some scavenged furnishings and that might work. Not sure though, since we'd be looking at texturing & meshes (and placing objects in) the "interior/inside", if you follow what I'm saying. I'm just starting to check out tutorials in blender so I'm not too sure how do-able that is.

 

I like the idea of it being on a high mountain peak as well, but we would end up paying for that scenic view pretty heavily. If we don't have any original artwork, models etc we could get away with a relatively small mod. Just for example lets say 10MB, but when you through the level of detail in that the game has to generate for a panoramic view of the whole countryside it could add enough LOD data to make the mod 100MB or more. Plus we'd probably have to do some landscaping of the surrounding countryside instead of leaving it at the default the engine generated.

 

So that kind points us to having it in a steep walled valley or steep walled crater. And of course a steep walled crater would be realistic considering the impact energy. Unfortunately neither show off the floating pieces as well :(:down :

 

Also we could have a fog if it was a crater, that would also cut down on LOD and add a nice atmosphere. It could be explained by anything from the impact opening up a volcanic vent all the way to the saucer's engineering core leaking radioactive isotopes from a low grade prolonged fission reaction (But they probably don't use fission, maybe fusion or anti-matter or some other exotic tech) or somesuch. If we use a canyon we just have to make it wind around a bit and won't need any fog.

 

 

The PC would have the option to sabotage the antigrav to destroy the floating segments (last ditch effort to keep the Nazis from getting their hands on it, an attempt to kill all the aliens, or just to watch the pretty explosions...) as 4 years of continual operation after sabotage + reentry would wreak havoc with surviving tech. Begs the question as to why they simply didn't attempt to gently lower the hovering piece to the ground. Perhaps the system was only meant for emergency repulsion and doesn't have an off switch?

 

Well since we're more or less forced to have it in a valley or crater, you could get an effect that is similar to floating, but couldn't be turned off. Meteor crater in AZ has most of the mass of the surviving meteor embedded in the crater wall (umm I think it was the east cliff or something). We could have our pieces of ufo embedded at different levels and use Ruadhan2300's idea of t-pads connecting them. It wouldn't be as visually stunning as floating, but it would work well in a few different ways. 1. it gives us a lot of key quests to unlock pads to various pieces. 2. it removes any worry about "why they simply didn't attempt to gently lower the hovering piece to the ground." 3. it does make their little setup very defensible (a nazi shock trooper party could probably overwhelm them and capture t-pads, but most wildlife wouldn't be able to) and 4.It could allow me to put saucer fragments in the cliff face (external mesh facing out) instead of having to model an internal mesh for each fragment (hope that makes sense, I'm not sure of the best way to convey it).

 

The downside with 4. is you won't see any views into the inside of the ship fragments from the crater, just views of the hull. So all the interiors of the fragments would be interior cells, with some extis to the crater that would put you on top of the fragments. But put rubble on it, lots of wreckage some makeshift shelters and I think it would work out pretty well. I'll try to sketch a pic out for reference.

 

ETA: Diesease could be a major issue for the aliens; think of the problems humans had when trying to colonize Africa/the New World, and picture having an alien crew in a survival situation on an irradiated Earth. They could have hazmat suits of sorts. Of course, given the Mothership Zeta aspect, I'd imagine that the aliens would have similar atmospheric requirements.

 

Yeah something to ponder

Edited July 25, 2011 by devinpatterson