physics – Solus Mundi

OC – The “Skateboard”

Where I left off in the last post, I mentioned that I had to use “game logic” to figure out a good way to get the ball wheel design working. Funny thing, I did exactly that. In the real world, we don’t have things that can pass through other objects like a ghost. It might be handy, but that kind of thing isn’t part of our reality.

After pondering the roller/cage problem for a while, I realized — I was thinking in too literal a fashion. I didn’t have to make a containment system like I would if this was a physical object. The solution was to have a support strut that went into the center of the sphere wheel with a ball joint at the end.

The result looked like this:

Why red support struts? Just for visibility so I could see what was going on…

In the background there you can see the blue crane-like rig I used to figure out if the wheels would work at all. It was fun putting it together and making it move around. I call this design the “Skateboard” because there is absolutely no way to directly power the wheels. I was stumped for a bit until a fellow modder Dima helped me out.

The answer? I was trying to apply Body Impulses using the modding API to the frame, but the results were not what I had hoped for. Dima showed me that applying vectors of force to the pivot was the way to go, in addition to using Constraints so the speed didn’t get out of hand.

With that under my belt, I was able to hack something together that not only used a “front drive” but something I like to call “crab drive” — where force is applied to the center of mass so all the wheels turn in the same direction. Think parallel parking and you want to go sideways into a spot. Well if this was on your car, you would have no trouble at all.

Demonstrating front drive mode, then crab mode. Watch the difference in steering.

Not bad, but I’m sure you see the problem in front drive mode — the rear wheels tend to just roll with momentum so sometimes they start to overtake the front and rotate the entire body. That isn’t something I wanted. Crab mode however is rock solid because center of mass is a pretty stable place to apply forces from.

This was my first problem – how to use front drive mode without the back end swishing everywhere? Some might prefer the out-of-control feel of driving that way, but I knew most would be expecting conventional drive, where small adjustments to steering didn’t cause the back end to shimmy all over.

After some research I realized that I needed to apply some counter-force to the rear of where the front drive forces were being applied. In Teardown, the pivot point of the body determines where those forces get placed, unless you calculate the center of mass like I had.

So this meant I needed to figure out how to create a virtual pivot point to apply forces so the tendency to turn/swivel after each forward push was minimized. Let me tell you, that wasn’t too easy. I never had higher math courses and I’ve only recently dove in to Trigonometry, like this diagram below from Gamedev dot tv:

*Is your brain melting yet? Oh trust me, it will…*

That diagram shows what is needed to solve an arbitrary angle using math for a right triangle. Yep, games have lots of math in them, but its all hidden away in functions and other bits.

I had to figure out somehow this “Virtual Pivot” problem before I could even hope to stabilize the driving behavior of Omnicar.

(To be continued)

Mirror, Mirror

Writing

Please help me.

I know you’re looking for proof, some kind of evidence that my fate is what I say it is. I don’t have the means to provide pictures or video. You’re going to have to rely on my personal account of what is happening. I’m influencing electrons in your computer’s memory, collapsing them to states that show these words on your screen. There’s scary things happening all around me, and I’m barely hanging on. Please believe me.

Remember the double-slit experiment from Physics class? The one with a single light source and two vertical openings, projecting on a screen? Its meant to show the duality of light, how it exhibits characteristics of a particle and a wave. Well, they got half of it right. It feeds right into quantum theory, where observing reality produces a given result. Now I know, there’s a whole bunch of hand-waving theory in here, usually concerning cats and radioactive decay and all that other nonsense.

Honestly, I think its because someone in the past discovered exactly what I have, and was so frightened by it they immediately began to obfuscate things to protect everyone from the truth. Or from personal destruction, I guess. Anyway, I can’t tell you all the details, because it will only encourage you to fiddle with reality and that’s the last thing I need right now.

All I can tell you is, its a synthesis between the double-slit experiment ramped up to an entirely different level. You know that the brain’s neurons have microtubules in the cell structure that use quantum effects, right? Well, turns out that is because we’re all embedded in this… structure. I can’t really call it anything else, because unless you’ve seen it, you wouldn’t understand.

I was fiddling around in my home lab when it happened.

I’ve always had an interest in science, and even though I didn’t pursue it in college, I had collected some equipment to perform my own experiments. I was doing my souped-up version of the double-slit experiment, using a salvaged Helium-Neon laser and a few other devices I can’t mention. I put on my safety goggles and flipped the switch.

The familiar banding was there on the screen, and I began adjusting the controls.

WHUMP

It was like a sine wave had materialized on the screen, but not made of laser light. It was… embedded in the screen itself. Not tearing the fabric, just an actual displacement, a rift of amplitude between the flat surface and the wave itself. Thinking I was seeing things, I turned up the gain to be sure.

WHUMP-WHUMP-WHUMP-WHUMP

The crescendo of the sound was flowing through me, and I could FEEL it. Not like standing near a loudspeaker at a concert. It felt like I was moving at right-angles to something else. I wasn’t prepared for what happend next.

The walls, the screen, the entire ROOM started to flicker, like a strobe light firing and at every light burst, that was when everything existed. I was in full panic mode at this point, I tried to hit the switch to stop the experiment, but my hand passed right through it.

WHU-WHU-WHU-WHU-WHUUUUUUUUUMMMMMMP

A grid, sensations of falling yet staying in the same place. My limbs were everywhere but nowhere, my feet on the ground and then on nothing at all. The feeling of alternating infinite plains and earthly sensation wobbled through my mind, until I settled down. Then slowly, I could.. see things.

And what I saw I hoped couldn’t see me.

There were legions of them, leaping around the grid and other formations that I struggle to describe. Something told me I wasn’t in normal euclidian space, where 90 degree angles and the pythagorean theorem still applied. I stayed in this state for a while, slowly pulling myself together. I felt like I was condensing and consolidating. Part of my fear was validated when I saw one of the creatures attack another, and it just incorporated the remains into its body. Not so much eating, but absorbing.

That’s when I felt out for my lab, for anything. The surging electrons of patterned computer memory tickled my fingers, and I knew there was some connection left. It took all of my will to summon the effort of flipping things just so, imagining these words materializing on a screen somehwere. Here’s what I need you to do.

I need you to go into a dark room, and face a mirror. You have to say my name three times, slowly. Focus on me, think about how you want nothing more than to see my face. Its just a hunch, but if I can get you to do this, it will allow me to break through the barrier that I stepped into unwittingly. It has to happen in the dark, because I don’t want the other things to see you when the link is established.

Please, believe in me. I’m not sure how long I’ll exist here if you don’t.

I’ve only been gone a few seconds, but to me it feels like forever.

Budding Universe

Writing

Feynman knew, and we made damn sure he played ball. There was a short stint in the 80’s where we thought he’d write some memoir and leak it to the press, but our boys were on him from the moment he made his discovery, down to his last breath fighting cancer on his deathbed.

The world is different now, connected and buzzing with all kinds of information. People still trust their senses though, which is exactly what we’re counting on. Me? You don’t need to know my name. I’m “Mr. X” to you. The only reason you’re here is because the Internal Security Task Force deemed you to be worthy of being briefed – so don’t waste my time with idle questions.

This goes beyond any National Security concerns. Hell, it involves the orderly progression of the entire planet. Once we conclude this meeting, you will be under observation – so no tricks. We’ve seen them all before, and we know exactly how to circumvent treachery. Snowden? Yeah, that wasn’t one of ours. I can tell you we would’ve had him in interrogation the moment he picked up a USB drive.

Anyway, back to the matter at hand.

We’re going back to 1968, January to be precise. It was the month that Feynman made his original discovery, and in the process – possibly doomed us all. No, the history books won’t have this report – in fact, they’ll report on the surface effects of the Parton model dealing with quarks, but they have the dates completely wrong.

It was in a small lab at Cornell when he finally put all the pieces together. His statement, which I’m going to read to you, must NEVER be repeated to anyone, for ANY reason.

“… sparing the details of the coil design, I managed to finally get our output power to the levels indicated which meant [Redacted], this is easily met by our nuclear pile, so no strain on the local generation systems. When I flipped the switch from the control room, a small bright point appeared in the center of the room, beyond the intersection locus for the target area.

Surprised, I hit the shutdown switch at once – which probably saved my life. A fraction of a second later, the light disappeared – as did most of the contents of the lab. The entire room was in a full vacuum for a number of moments, which equalized as the heavy access doors buckled under the strain, cracking the observation glass and forming a spherical twisted mass of metal in the center, as imploded debri was compressed at high velocities.

After sweeping the area for any exotic particle residue and/or radioactivity, none was found. Severely shaken, I reported the incident to the Internal Task Force, who then suggested that I [Redacted]. I gladly followed this advice.”

It scares the hell out of me just reading this, over 45 years later. We had no idea what we had just unleashed. Since the equipment was lost in the experiment, that wasn’t a problem, but we had to scrub out any mention of the specific circumstances needed to recreate it. That took a lot of work, but we succeeded. We wouldn’t have had a prayer in today’s internet-based world.

What’s the problem? I’m getting to it.

What Feynman’s experiment did was “ring the bell” of our continuum. He was smart, and stopped it before it could result in complete oblivion – however there were some other unintended effects. You see, we’re in a smaller universe now than when it started – and that seems to be holding stable at a given equilibrium, so we don’t dare do any further high-energy particle experiments. The Large Hadron Collider? Yeah, the key elements on that have been changed so it doesn’t overlap the energy domain of Feynman’s portal to disaster.

That’s not all – our little “bubble” universe is barely larger now than 30 to 40 AU, just beyond the planet Neptune. Its also one of the reasons we decided to not include Pluto as a planet anymore, because questions were being asked and we couldn’t give satisfactory answers for something that wasn’t really there anymore.

In fact, the moon launch a year later in 1969 was just a big bread-and-circuses event, because we knew the data and telemetry that we’d get from those instruments would show the truth. And the truth is a big scary monster that will devour the world if it ever becomes known.

Astronomers? Sure, we had to take a few into the fold, the amateur guys are easy because there’s a dense layer of old light that got trapped with us, so it should be showing twinkling stars in the night sky for centuries to come. The real problem is blocking non-terrestrial experiments from opening the eyes of everyone on the planet to the horrible truth.

What is it? Fine. Take a seat, it might be easier that way.

From what the physicists tell me who were personally cleared by Feynman and our agency, we’re currently in a large “bubble” traveling at super-relativistic speeds to an unknown fate. We don’t know if our dabblings in particle physics merely accelerated some unknown process – some of the boys are calling it the “Budding Universe” theory, but one thing is clear — we have no idea where we’ll end up, and what will happen if we stop on a dime.

That’s why we have to lie, fake, cheat and manipulate everything — because without that, we’ll have no society, no order and no future.

You do want to get up tomorrow and not have the world end around you, right?

Good. Sign this piece of paper and we’ll get to work.

Welcome to the team.