More detailed accelerator/detector upgrades

[sethzenz]

The accelerator and detector upgrades run out quick in the current game (and clicking becomes near-useless). The mid- and late-game could go a bit faster, and the game could be more educational, if there were a fuller suite of historical detector and accelerator technologies, priced to go with the corresponding discoveries. (For example, "Stochastic Cooling" would come a bit before the W and Z bosons.) I am willing to flesh out some suggestions, or even "code up" the data file; please let me know if this would be useful, I of course don't want to duplicate effort or produce something that won't be used.

[kdungs]

I like the idea of sneaking in physics content in the upgrades as well. We'll definitely consider this for 0.4. If you have more ideas like that feel free to let us know.

[sethzenz]

Here's a quick list of ideas for accelerator and detector advances that chronologically preceded each of your research steps. (In most cases they contributed to them, but see footnotes.) The format is "Research: Accelerator advance / Detector advance" All of these should be easy to find by googling and/or Wikipedia if you need a link or more information.

CP Violation: kaon beam / double-arm spectrometer
J/ψ: colliding beams / hermetic detector
τ lepton: proton collider[1] / indirect inference[2]
Beauty quark: multi-hundred GeV beam / statistical analysis[3]
W and Z boson: stochastic cooling / antiproton beam
Top quark: TeV beam / high-precision tracking
Antihydrogen: antiproton decelerator / penning trap
B oscillations: upsilon(4S) peak [4] / advanced statistical analysis
Higgs boson: 40 MHz collision rate / high-precision calorimetry

[1] I cheated and listed the big ISR advance as preceding the τ, which was actually discovered at SPEAR just like the ψ. The tricky thing in the 70's is that the ISR and SPEAR have the interesting advances, whereas the J discovery was old school fixed target.
[2] A conceptual advance. The tau was the first particle with no "smoking gun" or fully reconstructed mass peak. It was just a question of counting the excess of e-mu events.
[3] At least, the upsilon discovery taught an important lesson about statistics in bump-hunting. Look up Oops-Leon.
[4] You could almost say "B factory," but they were discovered at DORIS II (with ARGUS) and that isn't called a B factory

[kdungs]

Wow! This is amazing. I think this gives us a really good direction for the upcoming upgrades upgrade. Thanks a million.

[aidansean]

Hello! Great game, I'm woking on something similar myself in my spare time.

I agree with Seth that this game really drags in the later stages. I'm currently at 1 achievement a day for the past couple of days and that's pretty much killed my interest in the game. I think the pricing curves just need to be tweaked a little to stop the prices from exploding so rapidly later on. It seems you use an exponential increase with a factor of 1.4. Perhaps a quadratic increase is more suitable, as it represents sqrt(n) uncertainties in the data.

As for detector/accelerator upgrades I think it would be interesting to have a mini "tech tree" as well, so that the user needs to make some discoveries to unlock others. Off the top of my head:

B oscillations discovery requires CP violation discovery (and maybe up to level 10 for CPV.)
Getting past level 10 for W and Z discovery requires tau discovery.
Top quark requires W and Z boson discovery.
Higgs boson discovery requires W and Z boson discovery (and maybe tau lepton, b quark discoveries as well.)

This would prevent the user from just leaving the window open and rushing for the Higgs as quickly as they could, which I suspect would be a temptation for many.

Can you add a Standard Model Chart that evolves as the player progresses? In the days of CPV it wouldn't be the full chart. Discovery of the J/psi would flesh it out to the full 3 generations we know and love (with the 3rd generation greyed out as undiscovered.) This would show the user that we didn't have a full idea of the Standard Model from the very beginning.

Perhaps also add computing/statstics advances that reduce the amount of data required for each discovery. This is of course a really really big deal in modern particle physics that I think most of the public don't appreciate.

[davidsd]

You might also consider upgrades which grow the size of the accelerator ring, and also the magnet strengths. These could roughly coordinate with the sizes of historical accelerators.

[kdungs]

Done in v0.9.