and here is a bit more to add



I found this at WWW Link

i have a question for the devs or kryo. did the amor and/or the dread lords have hyper space or gates. because the story line says that humans discovered it. which says to me that the amor and the dread lords may not have it. yes i know that they were way ahead of everyone else but that doesn't mean that they knew of it.

Good question. Maybe they knew of it but the Terrans were the first of the younger races to develop Hyperdrive.

maybe but if the dreadlords knew. they would have given it to their children(for lack of a better word)

The Dread Lords were the ones who wanted to destroy the younger races. The Arnor were the ones who wanted to protect them and as mentioned in the story, it started a civil war in which the Arnor almost lost but ended in a stalemate when they both disappeared.

In the game story, only the Iconians had a unified race in that period and the Iconians were in the service of the precursors. The second unified race to appear were the Yor, who were the creations of the Iconians(thats one the thing that the Iconians ever did do).

I read the story a long time ago when I bought the game. I don't know why I still remember.

The Precursors had FTL systems on the level of HyperWarp Mk.3 - much faster than HyperDrive.

The Iconians existed in the time of the Precursors and served them. The Arnor, being Good, found this servitude to be morally wrong, while the Evil Dreads liked it. The Iconians created a non-sentient robotic race - the Yor - to take over their role while the Arnor and Dreads began warring. The Dreads created the Snathi to help their fight, but as we all know, the Snathi are pathetic weaklings(although they are the 3rd oldest race this way!). Eventually the Dread Lords managed to trap Arnoria(the Arnor homeworld) behind an impenetrable barrier and gave the Yor sentience, and the Arnor somehow banished the Dreads to a pocket universe before disappearing themselves - only to reappear in the Twilight campaign in support of the Terrans. The sentient Yor nearly eliminated the Iconians but a few of them escaped in a slower-than-light 'sleeper pod'. The Yor also eventually managed to scavenge a Precursor-built FTL system - the Ion Drive that they start sandbox games with - but by then, the Humans had already developed HyperDrive. After the Yor-Iconian war, it's fast forward a few the in-game story begins with GalCiv 1.

The Arnor and Dreads look exactly like humans, but they were created artificially by the Mithrilar. The Arnor couldn't sense time passing and only 1100 Dread Lords ever existed, according to various bits of story on this site and in the game.

Right. What did I say? Tamato, Tomato.  

these guys wouldn't have cared about ftl if they didn't age.



these guys wouldn't have been a true race but a break off of the arnor or something like that.

Yes, but your surroundings often require speed. And they did age, apparently but very slowly. I think it was the Arnor who aged but slowly and the Dread Lords, who were almost like the mithrilar, aged but ultra-slow like.

That other story is not the story of the game. It is just a story. Brad never said that that is how it was supposed to have happened.

On the subject of a hyperdrive engine works like a stargate, you may have missed a point. A hyperdrive only bends spacetime around the ship, creating the tunnel so to speak. Effectively the steep hill example was correct in that inside the tunnel the ship still relies on both types of propulsion for travel, and therefore limited to available power. With 2 stargates this power input is much greater, or GC to SG difference in it is the SG stargates demolecularize the matter and then transmit this energy faster than light to reassble before the event horizon.

Very good point. I think he is trying to say that the difference between stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis is that in those series the Stargate unassembles you and reassembles you on the other side while the GalCiv stargate influences spacetime to reduce the distance between the two points. The ship is still travelling at conventional speeds but it has a shorter distance to cover.

There is a difference between the Stargate series hyperdrive and the GalCiv one because the Stargate series hyper drive works via 'Hyperspace'. The GalCiv hyperdrive works like the Galciv stargate does.

i would hope so since all the humans did was take a Stargate shrink it and stick it on a ship. and removed the need for a catcher gate.

which takes me back to my original statement. in that Stargate in galciv is faster than hyper drive, the later engines would reverse this. the reason that hyper drive is preferred is that you don't have to send out a generation ship to another star system to build a catcher gate. thus when you add the last part to the speed of the Stargate and add the fact that you can only go between gates. then the hyper drive, which allows you to go where ever you want to is a lot faster than the Stargate.


faster in this case is probable on the order of 1 tenth of 1 percent of increased speed.

For a Dread Lord, 100 human years feels like 1 human hour. Got that bit from Draginol's 'The Reluctant'. I don't know how the Arnor aged, but apparently they could sit down and stare off into the distance for a VERY, VERY long time(to us) without needing anything( but probably getting bored ).

FTL communication has already been shown to be possible (via quantum entanglement), though the technology to make it practical is a long way off. Read the book Ender's Game (referred to there as "ansible"), for an example of the potential practical application of this phenomenon.

If FTL communication is possible, then why not FTL travel? It may be very hard, and beyond our current understanding, but quantum physics clearly show FTL happens all the time, it should just be a matter of figuring out how to bend it to our will.

As for the stargates, if you have one that can instantly launch a ship faster than the speed of light, then setting up the stargate on the other end to "catch" ships is easy enough..... Just "launch" a ship at an appropriate fraction of the speed of light towards the destination for the second gate. As soon as the ship is launched have it begin firing its engines to decelerate. The initial speed should be such that the ship can maintain an effective gravity of about 1.2 earth normal while still allowing the ship to come to a halt wherever the gate is meant to go. Doing this will ensuring the personnel won't suffer from any bone or muscle deterioration due to a lack of gravity. Once the ship gets to its destination it can set up the gate and use it to head back to earth. The biggest issue is of course providing enough energy to power the engines the entire way, but if you have stargates you can probably work this issue out as well.

Admittedly doing this would still take a while, probably 10 to 20 years to setup a gate at Alpha-Centauri, but it really isn't that bad overall, and is entirely reasonable assuming you have an "instant speed" stargate to start with.

I thought Proxima Centauri was the closest.



Communication travels also. The difference is mass.



I think I already made the point clear enough before. Look back into this thread's off-topic arguments(it spun off into other threads too :)). If you can find some reasonable argument, I'd be happy to listen.

same system.


alpha is the main star. proxima is the closest.

Travel between stargates cannot have been instantaneous, else why aren't stargates used in the game? Use a hyperdrive to toss one somewhere else, and poof, instant travel?

No, no.

My theory is this:

Star Gates are effectively massive cities in space - enormous, expensive, and immobile. The system itself is relatively small, as it is the enormous fusion reactor built into the system that occupies the most volume. Star Gates worked by creating a massive fold in space around the ships using them, which could effectively 'drag' the ship towards its destination. The limitations were numerous - Star Gates were one-way until a return gate had been constructed on the other side, the course could not be deviated or interrupted at any time, the efficiency was dubious, and the duration of a trip increased exponentially with distance as the forces in the initial warp would equalize and 'slow'. Hyperdrive itself was not a new technology. However, Hyperdrive was the debut of the real miracle created by Humans - it included and was the first system to use Hyperfusion. An entire Star Gate could not only be shrunk a millionfold and mounted locally, but this also meant that because the warping bubble could be altered and maintained instantly, ships could 'steer' through space with the device, and the energy requirements dropped significantly, thereby shrinking the overall size of the device to one easily mountable on almost anything. Most importantly, acceleration and top speed could be maintained as long as the device had energy, and the galaxy adopted a standard of speed measurement. Because the warping effect on spacetime did not involve relativistic speeds and physically shorten the distance, time dilation is not an issue.

Stargates are no longer used for a reason, so there had to have been a major problem that hyperspace overcame. Energy demand was not the problem, as Hyperfusion was, technically, the *REAL* innovation by the Humans, not Hyperdrive. The requirement for two Stargates sounds plausible, but again, why couldn't we just use Hyperdrive to move a Stargate around now and still benefit from instant travel? My theory there is based around the description of artificial gravity and the 25k Drengin shock troops. If Stargates were instant, there'd be no need to have the archaic rotating hulls. The description of artificial gravity says:

"The Drengin fleet that conquered the Torian home world in the pre-hyperdrive era were all without artificial gravity and relied on a stargate that still resulted in a travel time of nearly a year. Two of the troop carriers in that journey had a malfunction in their rotational axis control during the journey resulting in having over 25,000 Drengin shock troops having to live out their remaining lives in space."

Clearly stargates are not instantaneous. They must've been fairly slow, perhaps slower than hyperdrive. There must've been an advantage in putting hyperdrives on ship, so my idea was that Stargates would make a linear 'path' to their destination that couldn't be changed or slowed in-flight.

According to Draginol/Frogboy backstory or tech descriptions, the humans' real innovation was inertial confinement fusion("Hyperfusion"), which was more efficient than the magnetic confinement that the Drengin and Arceans had used. The laser-beam tech required for IC Fusion to work so well came apparently as a byproduct of beam-weapons research by the divided nations of Earth. This "Hyperfusion" is what made the extreme miniaturization of stargates possible, leading to Hyperdrive.

As of current reality, our ICF systems can't even produce enough output energy to power their own lasers. And the only beam-weapon research to actually amount to anything yet are Raytheon's Active Denial System and Boeing's Airborne Laser. The ADS is merely a non-lethal pain ray, and the ABL is so huge that it needs a 747 to fit inside.

That's what I just said in that enormous paragraph



Yeah well, remember computers in the 60s?

If you want "realistic" then skip the hyperdrives and have only wormholes and near light speed travel (even that is a bit iffy). The Algebraist by Ian Banks is about as close to realistic travel/timescale as you can get, turns in a game following that model would have to be on the order of hundreds of years, not just weeks, variable game speed could work and pausing when needs be like sim city, but it doesnt work so well in a game like galciv2

According to the back ground story and reality, to travel at sub light speed between stars will take 10,000 years and more. Even at half the speed of light it would take us 9 years to get to the Centauri system. The gates once installed would cut that down to weeks. When the humans figure out how to put the gate on a ship ie hyper drive. They do away with the need of a throwing and catching gate. Meaning it no longer takes 10,000 years to get to the next star. As we all know, no war would ever last 10,000 years.


But as I have said the first tech in this new type of drive would be slower than the gate because a ship wouldn't have the energy of the gate. This would very likely add one to two weeks to the travel time between stars. But as the new techs come in in this area this would slowly change tell the engine would be faster than the gate.


The other thing I realized, is that most civilian ships would continue to use the gate systems. Because the hyper drive engine would be so expensive. So if your building a military ship you want said ship to be able to get any where as fast as possible. If you are a luxury liner you could stick to the gate system and cut down on the expense of the engine and fuel.

Luxury liners would rather keep to out of the Gate, for business purposes. Besides check the GCII:DL intro, the point about trade between gates. The reason why Stargates are so expensive is the energy they use, their fuel is Hyperfusion. The point is... that Hyperdrive is ten-fold faster then the stargate and a million times cheaper and removes the point where you can only go to where the receiving gate is.



I think it was established that stargates between two far-off locations take a long time to set up and still take a lot more time then Hyperdrive.