Game Science Weekly

Last year I wrote two editions of this column I created: Game Science Weekly.

It was barely weekly and only lasted two editions because I got busy with other projects and the column had to be sacrificed.

So I am going to post them here.

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GEARS OF WARS AND 17 YEAR LOCUSTS

In Gears of War (X360) the villains are an alien race called the locusts and have, indeed, some familiarities with a species of bugs, but not locusts. The locusts from Gears of War are said to have emerged from the underground of planet Sera many decades after humans colonized it, before that, no human had ever seen a locust, nor thought one could exist.

The magicicada are a genre of cicadas that has the nick name of seventeen-year locust, that name is derived from the cyclical nature of their offspring. All cicadas lay eggs underground and so the larvae have to dig up emergence holes. What differentiates the magicicada is that their species have broods that emerge in synchrony; there are thirteen year cycle species and seventeen year cycle species. Those are very long life-spans for insects (the parents die not long before the next brood emerges) and could sure be an inspiration to the emergence holes in Gears of War and serve as explanation for the locust’s absence during the first decades of humans in Sera, maybe they have a decades long cycle, we still don’t know, since in the game we are only fourteen years after “emergence day”, maybe they will explore that in sequels.

There are fifteen broods distributed through the seven species of magicicada (three of which have a seventeen year cycle and four that have a thirteen year cycle. “So when will I be able to see a real life emergence hole?” you ask? Well you can see emergence holes from brood XIII right now, they where scheduled to emerge this year and so they are doing. The next thirteen year brood to emerge is brood XIX and they will come up in 2011. But you have to be in North America to see one of the E-holes, the magicicada are only found in certain regions of N.A.

 

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PLASMA GUNS

If you play videogames (and I guess you do, because you ARE reading this) you have probably seen plasma guns in games. This week’s column is about just that.

I will use the Halo series as my base to how plasma guns are portrayed, but you can find a lot of examples in games and movies. First of all we have the plasma pistol and plasma rifle, they are small, handheld guns that shoot beams of light that seem to be very hot and that, after hitting a surface, dissipate quickly. Then we have the plasma canons, mounted on bases or ships (like the tank used by the covenant), also, the rays that come out in different colors (green in the pistol and purple in other guns).

Alright, now let’s go to the science part of this deal. First of all let me explain what plasma is. Plasma is the fourth state of matter, it is an ionized gas where the molecules are further apart and move much faster than in a regular gas. Since there is a lot of energy, some of it is dissipated as light, that light has a color determined by the emission spectrum of the element in question.

Now this is why you can’t make a plasma gun today: since you need to heat a gas to a very high temperature (some plasma can reach Kelvin) you need a lot of energy, the kind of energy that doesn’t fit into a little handheld battery or even a twenty square feet canon. There are many academic institutions and research labs around the world that produce and use plasma on experiments, but all of them need huge, very energy consuming installations to ionize, heat and contain the gas.

Well, so that is it, I hope that I haven’t broken anyone’s heart by telling you that a plasma gun is not possible today. Maybe in the future we can find ways to produce energy much more efficiently and isolate it so it doesn’t melt your arm and the gun.

I would like to thank the help from Ettore Baldini, a very intelligent physicist that helped me research about the topic.

Here are some nice related links:

Color spectra of all the elements

Wikipedia article: Particle beam weapon

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GUS