Leading [MMO publisher Bigpoint's] product slate for 2010 will be Battlestar Galactica Online, a tactical space combat and adventure MMOG based upon Syfy’s Battlestar Galactica series. The game, inspired by one of the most popular science fiction series in television history, will launch worldwide exclusively this fall on Syfy.com for a 30 day period. The Unity co-developed MMOG will offer state of the art graphics that can be played directly in an Internet browser.

I’m allergic to the word “browser” appearing anywhere in the same paragraph as “MMO” or even “game”, but that’s usually because it indicates some cutesy free-to-play thing that’s big in Korea, or else a social gaming pyramid scheme.

Fortunately, this doesn’t seem to be case with Battlestar Galactica Online. The game is being developed by a Norwegian studio called Artplant that, as near as I can tell, isn’t yet guilty of any particularly bad online games. In fact, checking their website, they don’t seem to be guilty of many games at all. But they seem to have the right idea.

Players will be able to choose to play as cylons or humans in a constant struggle to control the universe or just survive its perils. A blend of tactical space combat, exploration, and mission-based gameplay will provide a diverse experience. The dramatic missions will define the game’s overall storyline, enabling the player to delve into mysteries of the Battlestar universe. Battlestar Galactica Online will create a new standard for web games, with beautiful 3d graphics and innovative game mechanics bringing a new level of game play to browser based MMOG. Assets from the television production will be integrated into the game to deliver an even more authentic experience.

The biggest obstacle is distilling from the Battlestar Galactica universe something manageable for a first-time MMO developer using relatively modest technology. Because as soon as you say Battlestar Galactica Online, folks probably imagine professions like Raptor pilot, lawyer, politician, cigarette-smoking doctor, or leader of a cult of hot chicks. They might expect a sophisticated character creation tool that can make Number Six, Fatpollo, bald Roslin, or Colonel Tigh with one or both eyes. Of course, the battles should look every bit as good as Star Trek Online, but hopefully better. Finally, there will be an epic and epically incomprehensible story arc, ship-boarding actions, inter-colonial Triad leagues, and exploration of new planets that look suspiciously like Vancouver.

But that’s not what this is going to be. Instead, I think the best case scenario will be something like Dark Orbit, but with better production values, more gameplay, and plenty of fan service. My fingers are crossed.

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This represents a significant improvement in the merchandising of digital comics as compared to the current sales through Apple’s app store, which will make comics easier to find for readers using the new device.

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Official Plot Synopsis: Royce, a mercenary who reluctantly leads a group of elite warriors who come to realize they’ve been brought together on an alien planet… as prey. With the exception of a disgraced physician, they are all cold-blooded killers mercenaries, Yakuza, convicts, death squad members human “predators” that are now being systemically hunted and eliminated by a new breed of alien Predators.

Coming to theaters on July 7th, 2010

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We interviewed Edward Norton at SXSW for the Tim Blake Nelson directed Leaves of Grass, in which he plays straight-laced philosophy professor Bill, and then his redneck, pot growing twin brother Brady. It’s a great movie, and Brady deserve to stand alongside lovable stoners like Jeff Lebowski and Spiccoli. Look for a review later.

Anyhow, you can read the full interview with Norton and Tim Blake Nelson soon, but in the meantime, he did give us a nugget of info on The Incredible Hulk sequel, which he and Tim Blake Nelson were both attached to. As in, is it happening?

"I don’t think so. I think it has got more to do with what Marvel is doing. I get the sense they have this grand vision of unspooling a lot of their characters and then starting to put them together. I think they can only do so many at a time. Obviously, they are doing Iron Man 2 and then getting some of the new ones out."

Which isn’t great news, considering how much I enjoyed The Incredible Hulk. How are they going to make an Avengers movie without the Hulk? Me smash.

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You’re probably wondering what took Amazon so long. After all, the Kindle PC Reader and the international Kindle both came out in October. But it’s not Amazon’s fault. The problem is with Apple, and how Apple allows apps to be made and distributed for the iPhone. With most any other OS (Windows, Linux, Maemo, Symbian, Android, Windows Mobile, DOS*), the reader software would be available everywhere you could download the day it’s released. Not so with Apple.

The funny part about this announcement is that the app has been accessible since forever. All you needed to do to get it was set up an App Store account with a US address.

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OPPO is known as a portable media player manufacturer in its early years in China. The company will launch their first Android-powered smartphone in the first quarter of 2010. The phone will comes with a 3.5-inch WVGA capacitive touchscreen, a side slide QWERTY keyboard and a Wi-Fi connectivity. The name of the model is still unavailable at this time. Stay tuned for more updates.

[Cloned In China]

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I had a discussion recently with friends about the various depictions of space combat in science fiction movies, TV shows, and books. We have the fighter-plane engagements of Star Wars, the subdued, two-dimensional naval combat in Star Trek, the Newtonian planes of Battlestar Galactica, the staggeringly furious energy exchanges of the combat wasps in Peter Hamilton’s books, and the use of antimatter rocket engines themselves as weapons in other sci-fi. But suppose we get out there, go terraform Mars, and the Martian colonists actually revolt. Or suppose we encounter hostile aliens. How would space combat actually go?

First, let me point out something that Ender’s Game got right and something it got wrong. What it got right is the essentially three-dimensional nature of space combat, and how that would be fundamentally different from land, sea, and air combat. In principle, yes, your enemy could come at you from any direction at all. In practice, though, the Buggers are going to do no such thing. At least, not until someone invents an FTL drive, and we can actually pop our battle fleets into existence anywhere near our enemies. The marauding space fleets are going to be governed by orbit dynamics – not just of their own ships in orbit around planets and suns, but those planets’ orbits. For the same reason that we have Space Shuttle launch delays, we’ll be able to tell exactly what trajectories our enemies could take between planets: the launch window. At any given point in time, there are only so many routes from here to Mars that will leave our imperialist forces enough fuel and energy to put down the colonists’ revolt. So, it would actually make sense to build space defense platforms in certain orbits, to point high-power radar-reflection surveillance satellites at certain empty reaches of space, or even to mine parts of the void. It also means that strategy is not as hopeless when we finally get to the Bugger homeworld: the enemy ships will be concentrated into certain orbits, leaving some avenues of attack guarded and some open. (Of course, once our ships maneuver towards those unguarded orbits, they will be easily observed – and potentially countered.)

Now, Let’s Talk Technology

First, pending a major development in propulsion technology, combat spacecraft would likely get around the same way the Apollo spacecraft went to the Moon and back: with orbit changes effected by discrete main-engine burns. The only other major option is a propulsion system like ion engines or solar sails, which produce a very low amount of thrust over a very long time. However, the greater speed from burning a chemical, nuclear, or antimatter rocket in a single maneuver is likely a better tactical option. One implication of rocket propulsion is that there will be relatively long periods during which Newtonian physics govern the motions of dogfighting spacecraft, punctuated by relatively short periods of maneuvering. Another is that combat in orbit would be very different from combat in “deep space,” which is what you probably think of as how space combat should be – where a spacecraft thrusts one way, and then keeps going that way forever. No, around a planet, the tactical advantage in a battle would be determined by orbit dynamics: which ship is in a lower (and faster) orbit than which; who has a circular orbit and who has gone for an ellipse; relative rendezvous trajectories that look like winding spirals rather than straight lines.

Second, there are only a few ways to maneuver the attitude of a spacecraft around – to point it in a new direction. The fast ways to do that are to fire an off-center thruster or to tilt a gyroscope around to generate a torque. Attitude maneuvers would be critical to point the main engine of a space fighter to set up for a burn, or to point the weapons systems at an enemy. Either way, concealing the attitude maneuvers of the space fighter would be important to gain a tactical advantage. So I think gyroscopes (”CMGs,” in the spacecraft lingo) would be a better way to go – they could invisibly live entirely within the space fighter hull, and wouldn’t need to be mounted on any long booms (which would increase the radar, visible, and physical cross-section of the fighter) to get the most torque on the craft. With some big CMGs, a spacecraft could flip end-for-end in a matter of seconds or less. If you come upon a starfighter with some big, spherical bulbs near the midsection, they are probably whopping big CMGs and the thing will be able to point its guns at you wherever you go. To mitigate some of the directionality of things like weapons fire and thruster burns, space fighters would probably have weapons and engines mounted at various points around their hull; but a culture interested in efficiently mass-producing space warships would probably be concerned about manufacturing so many precision parts for a relatively fragile vessel, and the craft would likely only have one main engine rather than, say, four equal tetrahedral engines.

How About Weapons?

We have to consider just how you might damage a spacecraft to put it out of action.

Explosions are basically a waste of energy in space. On the ground, these are devastating because of the shock wave that goes along with them. But in the vacuum of space, an explosion just creates some tenuous, expanding gases that would be easily dissipated by a hull. No, to damage spacecraft systems, you can’t hit them with gas unless it’s really, really concentrated and energetic. So unless you want to just wait till your enemy is close enough that you can point your engines at him, the best bets for ranged weapons are kinetic impactors and radiation.

A kinetic impactor is basically just a slug that goes really fast and hits the enemy fighter, tearing through the hull, damaging delicate systems with vibrations, throwing gyroscopes out of alignment so that they spin into their enclosures and explode into shards, puncturing tanks of fuel and other consumables, or directly killing the pilot and crew. You know…bullets. But it sounds much more technical and science-fictiony to say “mass driver” or “kinetic lance” or something of the sort. Of course, the simplest way to implement this sort of weapon in space is just as some kind of machine gun or cannon. Those will work in space (ask the Soviets, they tested a cannon on their first Salyut space station), and the shells will do plenty of damage if they hit anything. However, space is filled mostly with empty space, and hitting the enemy ships might be a challenge. Furthermore, if the impactors are too large, the enemy could counter them by firing their own point-defense slugs and knocking the shells out of line. Therefore, I contend that the most effective kinetic space weapons would be either flak shells or actively thrusting, guided missiles. The flak shells would explode into a hail of fragmented shards, able to tear through un-armored systems of many craft at once without the shell directly hitting its target, or able to strike a target even after it tries to evade with a last-minute engine burn. The missiles would be a bit different from the missiles we are used to on Earth, which must continuously thrust to sustain flight. In space, such a weapon would rapidly exhaust its fuel and simply become a dummy shell. No, a space missile would either be fired as an unguided projectile and power up its engine after drifting most of the way to its target, or it would fire its engine in sporadic, short bursts. A definite downside to kinetic weapons on a starfighter is that they would impart momentum to the fighter or change its mass properties. Very large cannons or missiles might therefore be impractical, unless the fighter can quickly compensate for what is essentially a large rocket firing. Even that compensation might give the enemy just the window he needs…

Radiation-based weapons that burn out the electronics of a spacecraft sound exotic, but are still potentially achievable. This would be the attraction of nuclear weapons in space: not the explosion, which would affect just about nothing, but the burst of energetic particles and the ensuing electromagnetic storm. Still, such a burst would have to be either pretty close to the target vessel to scramble its systems, or it would have to be made directional in some way, to focus the gamma-ray and zinging-proton blast. But while we’re talking about focused energy weapons, lets just go with a tool that we already use to cut sheet metal on Earth: lasers. In space, laser light will travel almost forever without dissipating from diffraction. Given a large enough power supply, lasers could be used at range to slice up enemy warships. The key phrase there, though, is “given a large enough power supply.” Power is hard to come by in the space business. So, expect space laser weapons to take one of three forms: small lasers designed not to destroy, but to blind and confuse enemy sensors; medium-sized lasers that would be fired infrequently and aimed to melt specific vulnerable points on enemy space fighters, like antennae, gimbals, and maneuvering thrusters; and large lasers pumped by the discharge from a large capacitor or similar energy storage device to cut a physical slice into the enemy craft wherever they hit. Such a large weapon would likely only be fired at the very beginning of a battle, because the commander of a ship with such a weapon would not want to keep his capacitor charged when it might unexpectedly blow its energy all at once once he’s in the thick of things.

Deflector shields like those in fiction are not possible at present, but it would still make sense to armor combat spacecraft to a limited extent. The spaceframes of the fighters would likely be designed solely for the space environment; the actual ships would be launched within the payload fairings of a rocket or assembled in space. If launched from the ground, armor must be minimized to reduce the launch weight of the spacecraft. But if built and launched in space, it would make sense to plate over vital systems of the vehicle. Thick armor would prevent flak or small lasers from piercing delicate components, and might mitigate a direct strike from a kinetic impactor or heavy cutting laser. However, the more heavily armored and massive a space fighter is, the more thrust it will take to maneuver in orbit and the more energy it will take to spin in place. (Here’s where computer games get space combat all wrong: the mass of a huge space cruiser would not place an upper limit on the speed of a vehicle, but it would reduce the acceleration a given engine could produce compared to the same engine on a less massive vehicle.)

I’m assuming that we’d have some intrepid members of the United Earth Space Force crewing these combat vessels. Or, at least, crewing some of them – robotic drone fighters would be a tremendous boon to space soldiers, but the communication lag between planets and vessels in orbit would make the split-second judgments of humans necessary at times. (Until we perfect AIs… but if we’re giving them the space fighters from the beginning, we deserve the robot uprising we’ll get.) The crews will hardly be sitting around nice conference-room command bridges with no seat belts; nor will they be standing upright in slate-gray console pits with glowing glass displays all over. It’s not even a good idea for them to have windows, which would be vulnerable to flak and could give the crew an intense sense of disorientation as the spacecraft maneuvers, and could give them tremendous trouble adapting to rapid changes in light levels as the ship rotates near a planet or star. No, they should be strapped into secure couches and centrally located in the most protected part of the spacecraft. They should also be in full pressure suits, and the interior cabin of the spacecraft should already be evacuated – to prevent fires, or any secondary damage if all the atmosphere rushes out a hull breach. This also reduces the need for escape pods. Camera views from the exterior of the ship and graphical representations of the tactical situation would then be projected directly onto helmet faceplates.

Now, for the final word, let’s say the United Earth Space Force defeats the Martian rebels in orbit. What do we do to hit them on the ground? Well, strategic weapons from space are easy: kinetic impactors again. You chuck big ol’ spears, aerodynamically shaped so they stay on target and don’t burn up in the atmosphere, onto ground targets and watch gravitational potential energy turn into kinetic energy and excavate you a brand-new crater. At some point, though, the imperialist Earthlings probably want to take over the existing infrastructure on Mars. Time to get out the Space Marines!

It’s not terribly expensive or difficult, comparatively speaking, to get people from orbit down to a planet surface. You fall. This is the purpose of a space capsule. What’s really, really, prohibitively difficult is getting them back up again. So, the victorious orbital forces would have to bring in a transport ship chock full of Space Marines and drop them all at once in little capsules (little because they can only be so big for the atmosphere to effectively brake them, and because you don’t want all your Marines perishing in some unfortunate incident). Some orbital forces would remain in place to threaten the ground with bombardment and give the Marines a bit more muscle, but really, the ground-pounders are going to have to be pretty self-sufficient. If they ever want to come back up, they would have to build and/or fuel their own ascent vehicle. (This is the problem facing any NASA Mars efforts, too: getting back up through the Martian atmosphere is much harder than any of the lunar ascents were.)

What Would Combat Spacecraft End Up Looking Like?

There are good arguments to have both large and small spacecraft in the Earth forces. A big spacecraft could have a lot more armor to keep its systems and crew safe, more room for large fuel tanks and electrical power supplies, and larger mass to resist impulses from cannon recoil. However, a smaller craft would be less visible to radar, more maneuverable, and could achieve higher accelerations for constant engine thrust. As with just about any military force, the role of the craft would be tailored to the tactical operations required, so the Space Force would probably include several sizes of craft.

Enemies could come at your ship from any direction in space, which means that you would want to react, strike, and counterattack in any direction. So, you would either have to mount weaponry all around your starfighter, put the weapons on gimbals so that they could rapidly point in any direction, or make the fighter maneuverable enough that it could rapidly point in any direction. Gimbals would be a bad option, because they would introduce points of increased vulnerability, unless they could be very well-armored. I conclude that the big ships would have many weapons, pointed in many directions; the small ships would have a few weapons, with the main weapon systems pointed in one direction.

Maneuverability (angular acceleration) you could achieve with gyroscopes, or by mounting engines or thrusters away from your fighter’s center of mass. For the highest levels of maneuverability, the spacecraft should be close to spherical and these engines should be as off-center as possible, which might mean putting thrusters on long booms or struts. The problem with this kind of Firefly-like engine layout is that it becomes very vulnerable. If a fighter can achieve high maneuverability with gyros, those are probably the best option.

So, I think the small fighter craft would be nearly spherical, with a single main engine and a few guns or missiles facing generally forward. They would have gyroscopes and fuel tanks in their shielded centers. It would make sense to build their outer hulls in a faceted manner, to reduce their radar cross-section. Basically, picture a bigger, armored version of the lunar module. The larger warships would also probably be nearly spherical, with a small cluster of main engines facing generally backward and a few smaller engines facing forward or sideways for maneuvering. Cannons, lasers, and missile ports would face outward in many directions. On a large enough space cruiser, it would even be a good idea to put docking ports for the small fighters, so that the fighters don’t have to carry as many consumables on board.

I think it’s time to sketch some pictures and write some stories!

Space-Wide Peace

I certainly hope we don’t get into any space wars. Human nature being what it is, though, and given how scarce a lot of resources really are on the scale of a solar system or a galaxy, I don’t think it’s out of the question. I would like to think that when we start colonizing other worlds, we will be sufficiently enlightened to do so from on board the Ship of the Imagination, and not as futuristic conquistadores. Still, the part of me that loves science fiction has fun with these thought experiments.

Reprinted with permission from Joseph Shoer. Photo by TG Daily

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No matter how often you play it, you won’t be able to understand the Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker TGS demo unless you know Japanese. Thankfully, all that changes today with a brand new English language demo for your PSP. Based on our calculations, the English translation makes it about 15% more comprehensible than before. Excellent!

The demo will be available on the PlayStation Store and here on Joystiq (via BigDownload) later today. To ensure a problem-free experience, make sure you have the latest firmware update and have at least 103MB of free space on your PSP.

Gallery: Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker

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Paramount has released the newest trailer for Jon Favreau’s upcoming Iron Man 2, and you can view it at Apple.com. Needless to say, it’s awesome.

We get lots of Robert Downey Jr.’s trademark humor (they should call him Tony Snark), Gwyneth Paltrow’s Pepper Potts, a new look at War Machine, a lot of Mickey Rourke’s cool new villain Whiplash and a bit of Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow bringing the smackdown.

The sequel features the continuing adventures of billionaire industrialist Tony Stark and his alter ego, Iron Man. It opens May 7, 2010.

Here is the YouTube version below…

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Disney DigiComics will begin by offering a relatively modest fifty downloadable comics featuring Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and other familiar Disney characters via in-app purchases, according to the Disney Comics Worldwide blog. The company will then begin adding five to ten new comics weekly, continuing storylines.

The comics were originally created for newspapers and magazines in Disney-crazy Italy, though in the future new content may be created just for the application. Series available first, according to the report, are X-Mickey, Wizards of Mickey, The Canterville Ghost, and Phantom of the Opera. Wizards of Mickey is published in the States by Boom! Studios (see “Boom’s Disney Standards”).

Up to 50,000 stories from the Disney archives are eventually planned for release through the app, according to Italy.

The new application represents a divergence from Disney’s digital strategy for desktop, where it’s pursuing a subscription model. Disney Books is now offering over 500 titles online by subscription for an annual fee of $79.95 (see “Disney Makes Children’s Books Available Online”).

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