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Posted: 10 Sep 2006, 20:31
by SinbadEV
I remember seeing someone online getting it to work... if was only hot enough to start fires... which owuld be hot enough to light sales and such
... now I need to find the link.
edit: found it...
http://www.solardeathray.com/ is this site a fake?
Posted: 10 Sep 2006, 20:48
by Erom
A friend of mine (also MIT connected) once used a giant frenel lense to burn stuff into lawns. It was hot enough to cook the grass to a nice brown, but it took ages to actually set it on fire. It would be nearly impossible to set something thin like a sail that had fluid cooling on both sides from the wind on fire.
Posted: 10 Sep 2006, 21:02
by SinbadEV
TANGENT:
I had this idea for a real would invention, basically we set up a grid of fiber-optic repeaters that would take sunlight from one side of the world and send it to the other side of the world, after the enormouse inicial costs to set it up, you could have sunligh-lighting available everywhere on the planet at once.
Posted: 10 Sep 2006, 21:29
by KDR_11k
Repeaters read the incoming signal and send their own, I don't think that'd work.
Posted: 10 Sep 2006, 21:30
by SinbadEV
Well... repeaters isn't the word I'm looking for... but I think your right it wouldn't work...
Posted: 10 Sep 2006, 21:35
by Egarwaen
esteroth12 wrote:in the retest, people were challenged to get it to work... and some people from MIT almost got it, it just burned it too slowly to be a feasable weapon
The MIT Test.
It was, in fact, viable, but was heavily dependent on weather conditions. I think Boston is slightly farther north than Greece, so Archimedes would have had stronger sunlight. Also note that Archimedes did not actually have to set the ships on fire. "Serious smoke" from no obvious source would probably have been enough to panic the sailors. Still, within ten minutes of good sunlight, five people working with about a hundred mirrors managed to create an open flame. Assuming Archimedes had a few dozen Greek troops at his disposal to move mirrors around and an entire harbour to work with, he'd easily have been able to obtain similar results.
They also ran a
test with the Mythbusters in which they obtained similar results.
Posted: 10 Sep 2006, 21:50
by SinbadEV
Honestly the most valuable effect here would be to entirely blind everyone on the ships... that plus smoke, plus, if the suns right, proper open flame... especially if you get lucky and hit a keg of lamp oil or something...
Posted: 10 Sep 2006, 22:14
by Egarwaen
Or one of the very flammable projectiles used to attack other ships and set them on fire...
Posted: 10 Sep 2006, 22:26
by esteroth12
or you could shoot an arrow with a burning rag doused in oil on it... :\
Posted: 10 Sep 2006, 23:50
by Egarwaen
esteroth12 wrote:or you could shoot an arrow with a burning rag doused in oil on it... :\
Ah, but everyone used that. Not everyone had an Archimedes who could make your ships smoke and set them on fire with
light.
Posted: 10 Sep 2006, 23:51
by esteroth12
um... yes...
now, to de-derail this thread...
maybe you could hack an aquatic structure to be built on land... then you could use the tide strength, too
Posted: 11 Sep 2006, 04:11
by j5mello
i if u put tidalgenerator=1 into the fbi of a unit it will make the map specified amount of energy whether or not its in the water
Posted: 11 Sep 2006, 04:14
by esteroth12
then you lied earlier!

but cool, no hacks needed...
Posted: 11 Sep 2006, 04:49
by Neddie
What if you developed a unit that took the wind energy production value and multipled it by the tidal to find the true energy production and simulate microwave transmitted energy?
Posted: 11 Sep 2006, 17:54
by Targon
Is it possible to have a unit's DPS dependant on windspeed or tidal strength?
Posted: 12 Sep 2006, 01:21
by esteroth12
you can if you can get the windspeed/tidal strength, and through script speed up/lessen the rate of fire... but I dunno if it is possible to call the windspeed/tidalstrength directly
Posted: 12 Sep 2006, 01:53
by Snipawolf
Hmmm... Sounds interesting.. The battlefield can aid or harm one side...
I like that idea, a lot!
Posted: 12 Sep 2006, 02:51
by j5mello
from what smoth said:
tidal cannot be pulled in as its just a fbi tag and doesn't interact with the script at all.
Wind speed can handled in the script and as such u can fiddle with that though don't ask me how
Posted: 12 Sep 2006, 04:06
by Caydr
Wind output is controlled by a multiplier in the unit file, although I'm not sure if Spring uses this sytem or just checks for the wind multiplier tag and gives the default amount of energy.
Posted: 12 Sep 2006, 08:33
by KDR_11k
Apropos script interaction, how does a script know the wind strength and the metal it's extracting? Or is that unknown under Spring and you just use random turn rates?