Destiny never claimed to be hard sci-fi (Destiny)

by RaichuKFM , Northeastern Ohio, Thursday, November 16, 2017, 15:04 (2565 days ago) @ Cody Miller

I just find it hard to believe that Bungie intended to alter the Lorentz transform as part of their rules for the universe. I can buy space magic and time travel, but this seems… oddly specific.

Well, actually, brother,

That's the lovely thing about making up a consistent set of rules for your setting.

You don't have to consciously and intentionally catalogue and explain every facet of the setting's rules, as a whole model. You certainly can, but you don't need to.

All you need to do, is work out the rules that you want, and then portray them consistently with each other. Then, from that, all the little subrules and implications can be filled in by people who care about them. "But isn't that just having your fans make excuses for the work?" It's actually not, because if the system is consistent, then these necessarily little implications are part of the system, even if the authors never thought about them at all.

So, we see that we can see Light, but the we here is the people playing the game. This may be artistic license, as demonstrated by the size of the Traveler, or it may be a thing that people in the universe could have seen.

But it might be that you can see Light, even as it moves faster than light. There are a lot of potential reasons for that. All Bungie would have to do is name one of them, and then things like how that explanation interacts with the Lorentz transform can be deduced simply from the explanation.

The shorter, clearer version:

Destiny is a setting that is, to some extent, like reality, except where noted.

When we see something that's different from reality, we can take that to be true, and then from there work out what it means for all the physics nitty gritty.

Nobody has to explicitly think about all that nitty gritty to do this; they just have to portray the system consistently and completely, which they can do, even if they don't know a certain piece of nitty gritty that's affected by the system, since the system supersedes that nitty gritty.

Does that make sense?