Summer Update - 029

[balder]

New one is up. Guest art by Joe Zuniga of the webcomic Made Up, and a member of our Washington Webtoonists group. I just read his whole archive today. Good stuff.

[Coth]

Special welativity! Quantum physics! Wait, that one doesn't work. Man, there could be a good one about hexes if "Planck length" had an R in it.

[DunkelMentat]

HELL YES. Time works EXACTLY like I thought it would in Erfworld. I feel so fucking smart. I should have posted my theory.

[Werekat]

Wow. Wargame physics and time. Depending on being observed. That's just... Awesome. So you could figure out you were being observed from some hex if you entered it, and noticed the sun was in a different position?

[indecisive]

So I'm lost, is time in a hex the same for everyone in that hex? Does time move faster the more that is being done in a hex relative to a hex where not much is happening? This really is a drunk conversation. I say we table this discussion till about 3:30 am on Saturday when everyone is in the right state of mind.

[BarGamer]

So I'm lost, is time in a hex the same for everyone in that hex? Does time move faster the more that is being done in a hex relative to a hex where not much is happening? This really is a drunk conversation. I say we table this discussion till about 3:30 am on Saturday when everyone is in the right state of mind.

I second this motion.

[Sareln]

Having discussed/argued about special relativity over breakfast before (all the freshman took it as part of basic physics), all I have to say is that this update is fantastic.

[KeiranHalcyon31]

Agreed. So, what would happen if two warlords ("Nostromo" and "Sulaco"), with equal move, move first in their side's turn, in the same stack, expending all but one of their move. The sun has advanced several hours. Nostromo leaves Sulaco behind, entering a hex that has a friendly dwagon in it, along with several other units, none of which has moved yet. Since the units in that hex haven't moved, Nostromo percieves the sun to return to an earlier position. Nostromo mounts the dwagon, moves into one of the hexes adjacent to Sulaco's position (taking, say, 10 minutes, and causing the sun to advance ever so slightly), and then moves into Sulaco's hex. (Nostromo can do this, as we saw in Parson's attacks on Ansom's column.) Where does the sun go? Who has percieved whom? Does it matter if Nostromo takes the other units that were stacked in the dwagon's hex with him? (Does the dwagon count as an observer?)

/me's head a splode

[sixtem]

It looks like the post blew the minds of half of the readership. Awesome.

I guess I should have expected this sort of time given the turn rules, especially for sides in adjacent hexes. Time IS relative, after all... though I didn't expect it in this way.

[Anton Gaist]

Holy boop!

That. That was simply brilliant. Masterfully explained. Once the order is received, a scout unit can move around a whole hex and report back on what it has found, and the time passed would be short enough to allow the next decision to be made within minutes instead of hours.

This is great, it explains why individual speed within the hex is irrelevant. Two units entering a hex, one unit running at 40 mph and another one walking at 5 mph would exit the hex at the same (new hex) time.

Just brilliant.

[Lemarc]

Parson seems to be missing the obvious way to explain his world, which is to tell them the entire thing is one giant hex. Within a single hex Erfworld seems to have fairly similar physical properties to our own world, so they should be able to understand what he's saying if he puts it to them like that.

[Flux]

The sun has advanced several hours. Nostromo leaves Sulaco behind, entering a hex that has a friendly dwagon in it, along with several other units, none of which has moved yet. Since the units in that hex haven't moved, Nostromo percieves the sun to return to an earlier position.

Not true. Since the dwagon is frendly, its turn started the same time the warlords turn started, that they have not moved does not mean no time has passed. Like Sizemore sayed: "Only the order of the actions is important. Time isn't". You cannot travel back in time once you have acted.

[LordDarksea]

Parson seems to be missing the obvious way to explain his world, which is to tell them the entire thing is one giant hex. Within a single hex Erfworld seems to have fairly similar physical properties to our own world, so they should be able to understand what he's saying if he puts it to them like that.

well that explains why he can't get out of the hex, no rocket!

[Amplify]

Parson seems to be missing the obvious way to explain his world, which is to tell them the entire thing is one giant hex. Within a single hex Erfworld seems to have fairly similar physical properties to our own world, so they should be able to understand what he's saying if he puts it to them like that.

Heh I was thinking of exactly that myself, just say it's one gigantic hex which is so large as to cover the planet and explain from there. Looking forward to more such "revelations".

[Banjooie]

Well, no, because Parson's world being one hex would raise a series of intriguing questions, not the least of which being how war is carried out.

It should, for instance, be easily possible to cross the entirety of the world in every single military action, and back, and forth, repeatedly, with absolutely no issue, if it's a single hex.

[darthoctopus]

Has anyone noticed something weird about this? This appears to function in a manner opposite what Special Relativity would predict.

Consider the paradox of the twins, say. It is the twin who gets left behind who ages more than the twin who gallivants around the universe. This is because the moving twin measures proper time, and the twin who stays at home measures coordinate time. On the other hand, to the poor victim who goes on a scouting mission, far more time has elapsed than to the Thinkamancer who sits at home waiting for a status update.

From what I can gather, hexes function as both inertial reference frames (to some extent) and quantised regions of spacetime; if we quantify velocity as the rate of movement between hexes relative to an observer's reference frame (in which he is stationary) we realise that either our definition of coordinate and proper times must change, or the rules of Relativity of Time in Erfworld are very different from the ones here. For one, relativity of time (and time dilation) arises directly from the assumption of a universal speed limit, c. No matter how fast we move, c-invariance dictates that the flow of time from our reference frame slow down to accommodate that speed limit. As we see here, we instead have time contraction: the flow of time speeds up (for you) as you move between hexes. Either there is a universal lower bound on velocity in any reference frame (which doesn't even make sense), or this is definitely not relativity as we know it.

Also, I don't see any references to length contraction (or, if the Lorentz factor is less than unity in this universe, length dilation). Weird.</geekfest>

Of course, gamelike mechanics would naturally dictate that units take the same amount of coordinate time to move the same number of hexes, regardless of their perceived velocity. But if spacetime is quantised in hexes…wait. Hold on. Um. I think I just succeeded in confusing myself. I should get myself into a drunken stupor sometime. Love the update, though!

[HandofShadows]

I think this proves that time in Efrworl is totaly screwed up. Also might be a hint that someone from a Earth (maybe not ours) created Erfworld. It's tather unlikely that a world with no connection to Earth would have the same seconds, minutes and such.

[carisbourg]

I don't know if the analogy is close enough, but I'm imagining "real time" as being a table with an immense number of long little strips of paper on it lying next to each other representing percieved time for each unit. As a unit moves, their strip of percieved time buckles up so that to get forward a little bit in "real time" they have to move further in percieved time. The faster they move the further up their strip buckles.

Then you have the supertime of the side ruler who decides when the turn ends. Along with motion, if the ruler wants to think about something for a while, then every strip on his or her side buckles up in relation to the strips on the other sides in the world.

Now I'd hypothesize that the minimum time the units percieve would be the time the ruler percieves. This would account for there being enough time to do the planning during tBfGK while Stanley was away as well as the period of time that the Transylvitian Escort party had to sit kicking around that one hex while they were waiting for Carpudlians to finish moving. This is the time that either Stanley or Don King percieved.

[teratorn]

The good thing about Erfworld is that hangovers should be pretty short, unless you're under attack from an enemy whose turn goes before yours.

I see no problem with each hex carrying its own clock. It's probably weird for someone at the boundary of an hex. There's still universal time though, sunset and sunrise seem to coincide in every hex (in the sense that a lookamancer would get the same answer in each).

Has anyone noticed something weird about this? This appears to function in a manner opposite what Special Relativity would predict.

They aren't going at speeds close to the speed of light You need to think in terms of general relativity, it's the gravity field that changes.

[DevilDan]

So I'm lost, is time in a hex the same for everyone in that hex? Does time move faster the more that is being done in a hex relative to a hex where not much is happening? This really is a drunk conversation. I say we table this discussion till about 3:30 am on Saturday when everyone is in the right state of mind.

I second this motion.

Carried. Also, we may need some blackboards.

By the Titans, do I love these summer updates. The artwork is the perfect anodyne for the thinking necessary to absorb this particular update.