Strange Signals from the Nearby Red Dwarf Star Ross 128 | Hacker News Reader

Strange Signals from the Nearby Red Dwarf Star Ross 128

phl.upr.edu

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Shivans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent:_FreeSpace_–_The_Great...

OMG the best space combat game ever! Wished it ran on modern windows in high res...

Check out FreeSpace 2, it's got some incredible mods and runs on W10 at any resolution if I remember correctly.

Nice, I loved Freespace and Freespace 2 - but haven't looked at the mods.

I'm currently into Star Citizen, Elite Dangerous, and have also backed http://starfighterinc.gamepedia.com/Starfighter_Inc_Wiki which looks really promising. Oh and Eve-Online, however that's not first person as such.

I loved Elite Dangerous, and poured many late nights into it. Would certainly recommend to anyone looking for a modern space sim.

> Nice, I loved Freespace and Freespace 2 - but haven't looked at the mods.

Do check out FreeSpace Source Code Project[0]. They've upgraded the code and assets to make the game look great on current machines. AFAIK it still requires the original game for the Single Player campaign (easy to obtain through GOG).

As for mods changing things, I highly recommend Battlestar Galactica: Diaspora Mod[1]. It's even better than it looks on the promo[2], and you can do most (all?) of the tricks Vipers did on the show. And you can fly a Raptor too. Single Player storyline is well made, with great voiceovers, and doesn't break continuity with the show.

Oh, and I totally second 'Fjolsvith - FS/FS2 is the best space combat game ever!

[0] - http://scp.indiegames.us/

[1] - http://diaspora.hard-light.net/

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/embed/DWt2m1xtJbw

Cheers, appreciate that. I've lost the physical installers for all my old games but will try to check it out. Looking forward to it!

Elite:Dangerous is awesome. You should try it in VR--if you haven't already, it's almost a completely different game. Target/screen selection by head-tracking works great, immersion goes up significantly, and the holograms are actually holographic.

The dramatically increased spatial awareness and FoV is also useful. I find myself sticking to ships with massive cockpit windows, because I look up at them all the time.

Pity about the resolution, that's all. VR right now is good enough to use... but it'd be so much better with about twice the linear resolution.

Sounds great! I'm presently using a curved 3440x1440 34" 95hz screen with TrackIR, full HOTAS and a quality audio chain (ZXR+ATH-ADG1X). I'm hanging for next gen VR with improved resolution, but meanwhile I find the immersion quite incredible as is - can't imagine it without the head tracking. The soundscape is worth an honorable mention too.

My project team stayed late for weeks playing that game after work. Great multiplayer battles.

Is seems like there is a more recent update [0] to the topic than the linked-to page, but it is really technical and perhaps just a data update.

[0]: http://phl.upr.edu/library/notes/barnard

  V* RY Sex

How this particular red dwarf came to obtain such a name, gives me an inkling that whoever did it must have known the effect it would have on search engines.

http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-id?Ident=V*+RY+Sex

This seems to be a perfectly ordinary name for a variable star:

    V*  - Variable star
    RY  - 16th discovered [^]
    Sex - in the constellation Sextans

[^]: The numbering is a bit strange, it starts at R and goes R, S, T, ..., X, Y, Z, RR, RS, RT and so on. [Edit: I originally did the math completely wrong and said that this was the 50th.]

For more details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_star_designation

Starting a numbering system with "R" may seem weird, but it's perfectly in character for the discipline that declared "metal" to mean "everything in the universe except hydrogen and helium."

"the 2% of the universe that isn't hydrogen and helium", surely.

"The interesting 2% of the universe."

(Though I thought it was rather less than 1%? Enh, apparently I'm too lazy to check Wikipedia right now.)

It has 144 siblings. I wonder how that happened.

http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-id?Ident=V*+RY+Sex&NbI...

Weird. A base 9 counting system? At first, I counted it off as octal (thinking z for zero), which seemed pretty reasonable, but then I realized my mistake.

Now I read the wiki article, and it's not even nonary.

It doesn't actually have a standard base at all; they seem to have discovered several times that there were more variable stars than they expected and had to extend the system in increasingly convoluted ways.

It's worth pointing out that this is a different star than the dimming / 'Dyson sphere' star KIC 8462852 which was covered in the press earlier in the year.

All very exciting!

A Dyson Sphere is impractical and not viable.

I think that the actual theory was phrased as a “swarm of megastructures”. While also "impractical and not viable", a Dyson swarm would be less so than an enclosed sphere.

I dunno, the more I think about how we are a collective of trillions of cells coordinating a mobile, local, semi-closed ecosystem for decades before falling apart, the more I'm inclined to call us impractical and not viable too. Yet here we are.

When people say "Dyson Sphere" they are frequently talking about Dyson Swarms or Dyson Bubbles because a solid "Dyson Shell" is inherently unstable.

When people say "Dyson Sphere" they are frequently talking about Dyson Swarms or Dyson Bubbles because a solid "Dyson Shell" is inherently unstable.

Gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that a civilization capable of building a Dyson structure is not entirely unfamiliar with control theory.

A more serious problem (with the solid version) is that no material imaginable could withstand the compressive forces involved.

I'm imagining a material that can withstand the compressive forces involved.

Dyson himself said the solid version would not work:

> Dyson replied, "A solid shell or ring surrounding a star is mechanically impossible. The form of 'biosphere' which I envisaged consists of a loose collection or swarm of objects traveling on independent orbits around the star."

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere#cite_note-10

Scrith has enough tensile strength, so I'd imagine it could have similar compressive strength...

Scrith is a fictional "unobtanium".

"The tensile strength of scrith is theorized to be similar to the Strong nuclear force" which means "god-level magic involved".

http://larryniven.wikia.com/wiki/Scrith

It sure is imaginable, though.

That's a low bar: we can imagine things that are impossible. We can imagine things that aren't even self-consistent.

See the open pages of chapter 5 - "The Possible and the Actual" http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/lehre/pmo/eng/Dennett-Darwin%27s...

> Gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that a civilization capable of building a Dyson structure

A solid Dyson sphere is a habitat for beings such as ourselves. I am going to suggest that a civilisation capable of building a Dyson structure might be more comfortable with living off-planet, in zero G and/or vacuum and won't need something resembling a planet. If we're assuming cosmic time-scales and super-science, then civil engineering isn't the only science. Engineering the inhabitants to fit the habitat is also possible. Or a post-AI post-biological civilisation.

We have no idea what's even likely at that level, but our best guesses have changed a lot since Dyson structures where proposed in 1960. Which is, in the context of this discussion, a mere instant ago.

It's astable, not unstable. The net gravitational force from the contained star is roughly zero for any positioning of the Dyson sphere. Therefore, it can drift away from perfectly centered, but there's no runaway instability. You can correct its position very cheaply by e.g. modulating the transparency of different sections of the sphere and using light pressure to keep it centered. Obviously there are other concerns, but positional instability isn't that bad, relatively speaking.

Actually, wouldn't light pressure automatically keep it centered (assuming it's consistent enough and therefore the net gravitational force is close enough to zero)?

I'm not sure... I think it might cancel perfectly. I'd have to do the integral to make sure, but at least conceptually if you bisect the sun in half in any diresction, the net momentum flux is equal in both directions. That's only if the interior of the sphere is dark; I don't know how elastic reflections would figure in to this.

Reflections make everything harder, but I think you're right. The situation seems isomorphic to the calculations that prove it's gravitationally astable.

Hmm. I think you're right - the fact that it's a closed surface means you can discard all that inverse-squared-law stuff and just go with conservation of momentum. Darn.

Windows is the most superior operating system in existence.

See that? See how untenable a statement like that is without any sort of evidence, sourcing, or even general thoughts beyond the initial contention? See how it adds as much value to the conversation as shouting "star trek rules!" at a star wars convention?

You're probably right. I remember reading that there are mundane explanations that are much more likely.

I meant to say that "Dyson Sphere" was how it was reported in the press.

I'm no astronomer, but interstellar mysteries are cool...so are stellar ones.

SETI analysis: http://seti.berkeley.edu/ross128.pdf

TL;DR No evidence of aliens.

It's not aliens.

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