How long does...
- Thread starter mr31337
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ShawnDriscoll
Cosmic Mongoose
See page 50 about Effect, Timing, Go Faster or Slower.
I've never rolled 1D6 to see how long a task takes. In the past, I've played around with subtracting an Effect from what I think a task would normally take. So if a task normally takes 30 minutes to do, and their Effect was 3, the task took 6 minutes instead. If their Effect was -4, 1 hour was wasted.
Sometimes, I'll do the Go Faster or Slower thing. But players tend to go normal speed as a default.
I've never rolled 1D6 to see how long a task takes. In the past, I've played around with subtracting an Effect from what I think a task would normally take. So if a task normally takes 30 minutes to do, and their Effect was 3, the task took 6 minutes instead. If their Effect was -4, 1 hour was wasted.
Sometimes, I'll do the Go Faster or Slower thing. But players tend to go normal speed as a default.
Agreed. It comes down to how much data you're cranking in. Doing Finite Element Analysis on pretty damn shiny machines today can take the wrong side of half an hour to run fairly easily, and that's for what you'd think would be relatively simple shapes in turbulent airflow.
Given that firing a jump engine is, to a degree, creation and controlled inflation of a pocket universe, the modelling task is potentially up there with running a simulation of the big bang...how much processing power do high energy physics labs eat up?
The 'calculation' takes two parts of time, asuming it's akin to running a computer simulation.
First, you have to put in the variables/set up the simulation, and then you press RUN and wait for the jump solution to pop out of the other end.
We don't, off-hand, know which one takes the time.
Whilst a human might take twice as long to create the simulation, the AI might run itself into loops and dead ends and have to run the simulation two or three times longer to converge on a working solution that's the actual 'best' result rather than a local maximum - never underestimate the 'that feels about right' instinct of an expert...
...And if setting up the simulation only takes a quarter of the time relative to actually solving it, then the expert operator still comes out ahead.
Equally, even with an expert/intellect you've still got a human who's got to tell the computer what he wants, and - whilst it's a friendly interface - you've almost by definition got someone who doesn't know what they're doing making the original request.
First, you have to put in the variables/set up the simulation, and then you press RUN and wait for the jump solution to pop out of the other end.
We don't, off-hand, know which one takes the time.
Whilst a human might take twice as long to create the simulation, the AI might run itself into loops and dead ends and have to run the simulation two or three times longer to converge on a working solution that's the actual 'best' result rather than a local maximum - never underestimate the 'that feels about right' instinct of an expert...
...And if setting up the simulation only takes a quarter of the time relative to actually solving it, then the expert operator still comes out ahead.
Equally, even with an expert/intellect you've still got a human who's got to tell the computer what he wants, and - whilst it's a friendly interface - you've almost by definition got someone who doesn't know what they're doing making the original request.
ShawnDriscoll
Cosmic Mongoose
locarno24 said:
In other words, role-play it out.
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