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[EuropeanDorf]

How old is this universe, anyway?

Is it more or less the same as the one we live in, or is different?

[WillowLuman]

More or less the same. It's still around 14 billion years old.

[Dorsidwarf]

I don't see any real reason it even has to be a different universe or at a different time to ours. Hell, it could probbably be set in Andromeda and be entirely accurate within what we know, due to spacelag light speed. Not saying it is, of course, just a thought.

Also, I brought you an art. The SSTO shuttle hitting an alien atmosphere:

[WillowLuman]

Sweet art!

And yeah, even in the far future, intergalactic travel would be very difficult. Even with most FTL methods, it would take a very, very long time to get there. Any galaxy other than the one you're already in is, by default, far, far away. So if you were in another galaxy, even one as "close" as Andromeda, you could be at pretty much any point in human history and still never know of their existence.

[LuckyKobold]

That art is like cocaine, But for eyes.

[WillowLuman]

Anyway, Insanegame, please just change your AI terminology so we can get started. Greek letters are a bit boring anyway, so it shouldn't be too hard to come up with another cool translation of your alien's naming conventions.

The details with other people's characters that I've quibbled over are unlikely to be immediately relevant, so I say we can do the proper start without having to sort those out first.

[heydude6]

how about ultra class AI as a suggestion, maybe UBER instead?

[Dorsidwarf]

Satellite
Planetary
Stellar
Hyperstellar
Hyper giant
Supernova

There you go, 6-point AI rank that isn't generic Greek or completely off the wall.

[Insanegame27]

Satellite
Planetary
Stellar
Hyperstellar
Hyper giant
Supernova

There you go, 6-point AI rank that isn't generic Greek or completely off the wall.

Ok, I was going to use roman numerals, but the same problem as greek alphabet is boring, i guess I'll use your terminollogy. MIKE Is a Hyper Giant in terms of processing power, and is about half the power of a supernova (which is 3/4 power of Kevaks Alpha)

[WillowLuman]

(Clairvoyance activate!)

Kevak's is based on an exponential scale, where each tier is some order of magnitude more powerful than a lower tier, so half or 3/4 is still in the same neighborhood of power. So, the whole "way too big to fit in the suit computer" thing would still be a problem.

[EuropeanDorf]

>Supernova

Stars! Explosions! But why named after these things?

Also, since universe's still only 14*10^9 years old, likely nobody knows how black dwarves work and what happens to red dwarves in the end, since both events take more time than there was so far.

[Insanegame27]

(Clairvoyance activate!)

Kevak's is based on an exponential scale, where each tier is some order of magnitude more powerful than a lower tier, so half or 3/4 is still in the same neighborhood of power. So, the whole "way too big to fit in the suit computer" thing would still be a problem.

the NearRealleans are the most computer-savvy race apart from kevaks AI, which seem to be their own race. the NearRealleans have computers that are thousands of terrabytes of processing power AND memory per suit, of course those suits are only ever used by arctic commanders where there is no chance of boiling to death.
MIKE is about 10 times as smart as albert einstein and hawking combined and then some.

[Harry Baldman]

the NearRealleans are the most computer-savvy race apart from kevaks AI, which seem to be their own race. the NearRealleans have computers that are thousands of terrabytes of processing power AND memory per suit, of course those suits are only ever used by arctic commanders where there is no chance of boiling to death.
MIKE is about 10 times as smart as albert einstein and hawking combined and then some.

How about this - express your character's intelligence in things he can do. Pretty much everything you've mentioned thus far has about as much consequence as Jiggle's very vague "16 times smarter than a human being" remark, and there's clearly an inflation issue at work here. You see, with this post, people will argue that terabytes measure quantity of data rather than processing power and that this devalues their own smart characters and other such bollocks that will only serve to prolong the discussion and keep everyone from getting started.

To circumvent this, don't say a character is "as smart as the planet-sized fuck-off singularity computer", just express it all in things he can do (relevant things!). Keep it simple. Keep it vague. You can't realistically roleplay a thing that's outright stated to be a trillion times smarter than you anyway.

[EuropeanDorf]

What Harry Baldman is the problem of subjectiveness, probably best represented by Dragonball Power Levels (who are actually, by Word of God, meaningless).

To quote certain page:

So, your character's Power Level is off the scale. That's just swell! Too bad it doesn't actually mean anything. Therefore, the contributors of the wiki have created a "scale" to measure a character's power. The Super Weight scale doesn't quantify power by Random Power Ranking using arbitrary numbers, but rather categorizes characters into nine broad categories based on what a given character can do.

[LuckyKobold]

I SAID 12 TIMES SMARTER!