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First Officer’s Log (2012.0917): August 2012 Artemis Tactical Simulations – “Peak Performance”

Posted by Jon Sung on 2012.0918
Posted in: Artemis, News, Report.


[Above: CMDR Sung mans the helm station]

If you like Star Trek and you haven’t played Artemis yet, I don’t know what to tell you. Wait, I do: you should play Artemis. You’ve probably got a laptop that can run it. Find five other people who do, too, plus a TV you can connect one of the computers to, and you’ve got yourself a bridge crew.

Or you could find a friend with an office space, a wide-throw digital projector, and the best crew in Starfleet. You might end up making a video like this one with some friends:

And that was the FIRST run of the night, with the reckless and bloodthirsty Anthony Carboni of Rev3Games in the big chair.

Our next mission featured the crew of the USS Loma Prieta herself, with Captain Zach Perkins in command. I would give a complete roster, but the stresses of taking the helmsman position prevented me from paying attention to much other than flying the ship. Flying the ship to victory. [Captain’s addendum, our crew was: Cmdr Sung on helm, Capt Roberts on tactical, LtCmdr Hesser on engineering, Lt Dolgoff on sciences, and Lt(jg) Roodman on communications]


[Above: CAPT Perkins takes the big chair and CAPT Roberts sets up at tactical]

The rest of the night consisted of civilian crews taking to the bridge, some in various states of inebriation that may have helped or hindered; I’m not sure. But they were all awesome. We agreed we had to do it again.

And so we did! For the second night a handful of days later, we gathered some of the first night’s participants and more of the USS Loma Prieta crew, and made some important discoveries:

  • The Artemis missile gunboat is a fearsome engine of destruction and surprising vulnerability
  • Engineers make excellent captains but need some training on the use of shields
  • Space monsters can be an effective if unexpected ally when dealing with massed enemy fleets

It was more fun than we’d ever had. However. We’d long wondered what would happen if we could get another ship’s worth of computers together and try to fly two ships at once: would it be possible to double our fun? No. We quadrupled it. At least.


[Above: The USS Loma Prieta crew on the main bridge]

It turns out that having two ships in the same sector, flying under two different captains, with communications officers talking to each other via FaceTime on dedicated iPads, is at least four times as much fun as it is with just one. The fun expands exponentially (I would expect a third ship to increase the fun by nine).

For our third and last night in the space formerly occupied by Bolt | Peters, we once again assembled the bridge of the USS Artemis, but in the empty upstairs office, the bridge of the USS Intrepid came online. iPads with FaceTime were set by the communications stations, and our missions began. And they were amazing.

We were thinking about trying to battle each other, real Wrath of Khan style, but we had much more fun tackling enemy fleets together, coordinating our movements and battle tactics, warning each other when nukes were being deployed, taking turns flying cover and staging raids on enemy fleets. It was outstanding.

We said goodbye to the Bolt | Peters space that night with simulated battles and a lot of booze, which may explain why we thought it was a good idea to try something at the very end of the night that I later dubbed “WOLFPACK MODE.” We took four computers and made each one an entire ship. Yes, an entire ship: one person manned all five stations, switching between them as best he could, with the highest-ranking officer (me) assuming strategic command of our battle fleet. And we did it! It was not without its travails — we nearly lost one ship — but we emerged victorious after a lot of planning, communication, and frantic, frantic multitasking.

I think it’s been definitively proven: Artemis is the most fun any Star Trek fan with a computer and some buddies can have, full stop. But we may not stop there. You have been warned.

=/= CMDR Jon Sung
Executive Officer
USS Loma Prieta
Starfleet, Region 4


[Above: VICTORY!!!]

First Officer’s Log: (2012.0527) 75th Anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge

Posted by Jon Sung on 2012.0613
Posted in: News.

In an act of supreme cosmic coincidence, I happen to live in the Presidio right above Crissy Field, about a block’s distance from the Golden Gate Bridge, on the future site of Starfleet Headquarters and Starfleet Academy, but I didn’t attend any of the 75th anniversary festivities (exhibition tents! music stages! who knows what else!) on Sunday, May 27th, aside from the food tents and the fireworks show. Why? That’s a story.

The city had shut down access to the entire Presidio except for buses, taxis, cyclists, and residents who had special passes, and I thought I was going to be fighting rivers of pedestrians trying to get around, so I’d resolved to stay home and walk down to the field later. However, I discovered an errand I needed to run that morning which couldn’t be avoided, so I had to make use of my pass to get in and out. To my delight, I discovered that the system worked incredibly well. If I had a hat, it’d be off to whoever worked out the logistics of the roadblocks and police officers thereat — getting in and out was very smooth!

Armed with this knowledge, I felt secure in leaving later that afternoon to go see Men in Black 3 on a spur-of-the-moment impulse with some friends. It was great, btw, and if you liked the first one, you should go see it (nobody liked the second one; we can acknowledge this). When the movie was done, my companions and I reentered the Presidio utterly frictionlessly, the cops waving us past the barriers like VIPs at a big arena concert. It was awesome.

So were the food tents. I don’t remember the name of the one I went to, but I got a nice pile of tasty noodles and a big hunk of delicious chicken on a stick. Grilled cheese sandwiches stuffed — stuffed! — with bacon were also in evidence. There was no beer — no alcohol of any kind, in fact — but this was probably the one and only time that my home’s location would prove to be an advantage (it’s an otherwise lonely existence here in the Presidio; nobody visits you, but it’s okay — I like to think of my time here as keeping the place warm for the eventual construction of Starfleet’s most important planet-side site). It didn’t matter anyway, as the sun went down and it started to get cold, like it always does out here.

I need to tell you that the fireworks show was probably the best one I’ve ever seen. There were plenty of stunning fireworks in a variety of colors, but there were also laser spotlights, volleys of rockets, and showers of multicolored, coordinated sparks launched from the Bridge itself that boggled the mind. Just do a Flickr search for “golden gate bridge anniversary” and you’ll get some idea of what it was like. I’m sorry you couldn’t be there yourself, but if ever there was a good excuse for violating the Temporal Prime Directive, this would be among them. Real talk.

~Cmdr. Jon Sung
Executive Officer
USS Loma Prieta
Starfleet, Region 4

Flight Control Report (2011.1020): Warp Theory for Dummies

Posted by Jon Sung on 2011.1021
Posted in: Report, Science.

Warp Drive Explained: How Starships Move Faster Than Light

If you’ve ever watched a rerun of Star Trek and wondered what the crew of the Enterprise means when they say they’re traveling at “warp speed,” then this is the article for you: an explanation of the theory behind warp drive.

The galaxy’s a big place. In fact, just going from one star to the next involves distances so great they break the mind. Take our sun, for example: our closest neighbor is a star called Alpha Centauri. It’s 4.4 light years away. A light year, by the way, is the distance a beam of light covers in the span of a year (keep in mind that light travels 186,000 miles in one second), which means the 4.4 light year distance to Alpha Centauri translates to 25.81 trillion miles, equivalent to going around the world a billion times. Yes, a billion. And that’s our closest neighbor!

So if you’re going to make a TV show where people fly around in a starship having adventures in different solar systems, the ship should probably have some way of traveling faster than light in order to make the show exciting. Let’s say you want it to be plausible — not 100% true-to-life documentary-quality accurate, but it should at least be sort of believable. It’s a good goal, right?

There are a couple of problems with trying to travel faster than light:

  • The laws of physics. Technically speaking, light’s the fastest thing there is, which makes lightspeed the speed limit of the universe. Nothing can go faster than light. It’s the law!
  • Energy. A rocket engine, the best kind of engine we currently know how to build, works by creating thrust: it makes a controlled explosion whose force is vectored out the end of the rocket, making it move. But rockets can be inefficient: the rocket engines needed to make a single space shuttle go fast enough to escape the pull of Earth’s gravity are huge, noisy, and messy, and they don’t go anywhere near lightspeed. Think about how fast light travels: how would you build a rocket big enough to push something that fast? Where would you put all the fuel? The design challenges are immense, even for a TV show.
  • Relativity. The short version goes like this: Einstein’s theory of relativity states that the closer you move toward lightspeed, the slower time will move for you. Say you get on a ship and I stay here on Earth. Your ship somehow manages to get close to lightspeed while you’re looking at your watch, and you count ten seconds before the ship comes to a halt. Ten seconds passed on your watch, but on mine at home, a year went by. We celebrated my birthday, somebody had a kid, and a whole season of Parks & Rec came and went while you counted off those ten seconds on your ship! The relativity problem makes faster-than-light travel a little weird, to say the least. If you want to make a TV show about a starship, not time travel, you’ve got to find a way around relativity.

On Star Trek they have warp drive. That’s not a name they chose at random. The Enterprise doesn’t use rockets; its engines don’t create thrust or leave a trail of exhaust. Two basic things make warp drive work:

  1. Magical TV sci-fi technology that bends the fabric of space.
  2. The universal truth that objects that are twisted up will always try to untwist themselves naturally — crumple up a sheet of parchment paper and watch it relax, for instance.

Warp drive literally warps the fabric of space to propel a ship faster than it should legally be allowed to go.

Imagine a football. Now dip it in some lard or engine grease (or both, why not). What would happen if you tried to grab it? The football would squirt out of your grip: the act of trying to close your hands on its tail end causes it to pop out of your clutches.

That’s what the engines on the Enterprise do. They put out a “warp field” that bends the fabric of space, creating a kind of bubble of twisted space around the ship that’s like a giant greased-up football. That’s the first thing in action. The second thing (objects that are twisted up always try to untwist themselves) comes into play immediately thereafter: the fabric of space is always trying to untwist itself around the warp bubble, which is shaped in such a way that the untwisting closes on its tail end, squirting the ship forward.

And since they’re doing it by warping space itself, they don’t have to play by its speed limit: the Enterprise can move faster than light. Much faster, as it turns out: the top speed of the Enterprise on Star Trek: TNG is about 1500x lightspeed.

This is also how they get around the relativity problem: inside the warp field bubble, time moves at the usual rate because technically speaking, the ship isn’t actually moving — space is warping around it, making it move.

That’s the theory behind warp drive. According to quantum physicists, it’s apparently mathematically sound. The trouble is that nobody knows how to actually do that first thing: how to make that warp field bubble. The technology, if it even exists, is way beyond us, at least for the moment. But at least we can imagine how it would work, and that’s pretty cool, too.

~Lt. Jon Sung
Chief Helm Officer
USS Loma Prieta
Starfleet, Region 4

Away Team Report: (2011.07xx) Comic Con – San Diego

Posted by Jon Sung on 2011.0802
Posted in: Away Missions, Conventions, Report.

San Diego Comic Con 2011: Rule of Acquisition #3 Embodied

San Diego Comic Con is the vacation you need a vacation from, if you do it the way I do it. Which is to say: you have three entirely disparate crowds of friends who all gather there for a five-day span, and all want to hang out with you. The end result is that there’s a lot of drinking, and while you spend a lot of time on the con floor, you don’t really retain a lot of it.

I did see some Star Trek-related stuff, though: A buddy of mine and I have been looking for a classy model of the Enterprise-C or D for a while, and it’s becoming apparent to us that it’s not going to happen. You can find toy versions that make noises and light up, but what we want is a metal one suitable for display in, say, a shipboard conference room. There’s one company that appears to be prototyping just such a model, but it’s of the Enterprise from the JJ Abrams reboot, which is fine, but it’s no Ambassador or Galaxy-class. I talked to a guy at the booth who said they’d probably make one if the demand was there, though.

There was another booth whose name I forget [Anovos], that was responsible for quality replicas of TNG and reboot-era uniforms. They were, in fact, so high-quality that they completely priced themselves out of any of our range — $500 being the low starting point. Yeesh. Rule of Acquisition #3: Never pay more for an acquisition than you have to! This booth was also handing out Lance Armstrong-style rubber bracelets, but they were gold, blue, and red, with the mottos TO BOLDLY GO, LIVE LONG AND PROSPER, and EXPENDABLE on them, respectively. Three gold and one blue are in my possession, and will no doubt go to the worthy. I should’ve looked around for a booth that sold replica Klingon pain sticks; there’s always enough science fiction weaponry at SDCC to outfit an entire army.

Next time, I’ll have Star Trek-related stories from Comic Cons past to tell you!

~Lt(jg). Jon Sung
Helm Officer
USS Loma Prieta
Starfleet, Region 4