The Science of Starcraft

I'd be interested in the defence drone or the seeker missile. And ventral sacs

 

Ok, the time has finally come! Head on over to see my first post about how the Zerg fly in space. I did a quick and dirty calculation to test the "mutalisk wings are solar sails" idea.

http://starcraftscience.com/2010/10/18/how-do-zerg-fly-in-space-part-1-mutalisks/

 

Sorry, but I stopped reading when you made two obvious errors:

1) You used an example of a mutalisk attack on a battlecruiser that occurs not in space, but within a planet's atmosphere. There is no reason to assume mutalisks cannot fly by conventional means as well as solar sails. That's right, they are a hybrid model

2) You assume mutalisks have a body composition like most life on earth. Mutalisks do not originate on earth. I think someone else also corrected your size assumption based on novels....which is interesting, I guess you need someone who has read the novels as an information resource lol

 

If you had actually read, you would see that I only used the battlecruiser attack to estimate the mutalisk's size. I never said that they couldn't be a hybrid model, in fact that was the assumption I made going in. I did say that their size, based on my estimate, seems way too large to fly or sail. But then, as we saw, maybe my estimate was way off!

Also, I did the calculation assuming the density of water (which is approximately the density that all life on earth has) and then also recalculated for one-tenth that density just to be generous.

I also re-calculated based on the size estimate that a reader provided from the novels and showed that for that smaller size, the case for a solar sail is even worse. The size quoted from the novels was extremely small and also very stubby. If that were the true size, mutalisks would not look the way they are depicted in the game and in concept art. It makes me wonder whether the novels are considered canon or not and whether blizzard attempts to do any consistency checks for stuff like this...

 

I know, I'm just giving you a hard time.

You can't really fault the discrepency between the books and the game, or really even the concept art. They are aiming at different things. The game has never attempted to do things to scale.

 

Hello,

I'm curious if it's realistic for Terrans to ever encounter a Zerg like threat. In other words, could we ever encounter creatures that have evolved to still be technologically primitive, but numerically and biologically superior enough to actually pose a threat to our military strength?

Much of the Zerg lore is obviously impossible, so you could manipulate the primitive race how you like to make the scenario more plausible.

- No need for them to pose a threat to our very existence. Being able to defend against domination on their home turf is enough.
- The race could be restricted to movement on a planet's surface
- They can have independent minds (but still limited by no tool creation or usage abilities)
- They can have environmental advantages that make it difficult for us to invade their planet.
- They can even be intelligently designed, if natural evolution isn't good enough.
- Please add other restrictions and benefits as you see fit to make this competitive and still viable.

Please also ignore microorganisms and viruses, since they are too small to be considered on equal footing to us.

Thanks!

 

Much of the zerg is impossible?
http://www.starcraft2forum.org/forums/showthread.php?t=24087

Viruses are not on an equal footing. they're better than us.

Zerg is but ONE entity: the overmind. Overmind is philosophical in nature, not scientific. So yes, this IS plausible. -.-

 

I think the stim packs were originally cigarettes, or was that another game?

 

Mutalisk wings must be made out of Handwavium. A rare, valuable substance excreted by stupid game developers.

 

i got some potential topics for your science blog (if you haven't done these already):

Sentries forcefield
Warpdrive (the hyperion goes into warp drive to escape a zerg attack in one of the cinematics)
cloaking