Kristopher

Re: Orion Drive space battleship

Hippies are keeping us ground bound basically.

Sure, just the hippies, that's all. Damn hippies.

When we launch the first one, I want it to have an observation deck with a railing, so you can lean out and yell "I'm the king of the world!"

Re: Star HERO with... not magic, really, but...

So... any suggestions?

Re: Orion Drive space battleship

Depends on how fast you want to go' date=' and if you're carrying people, but the basic figures are all over wikipedia. Launch it off a barge in Antarctica and the effects are effectively, Nothing. Absolutely Zero reason not to be using it now other then ignorance and politics.[/quote']

 

The barge doesn't bite it?

 

You don't end up with dead sealife from the detonations?

Re: Orion Drive space battleship

Not as bad as what everyone seems to think' date=' and there are ways to contain it. Want radiation, wear a tab next time you take a cross country flight. Hells, in a Titan III, the fuel and the oxidizer are more deadly and will do more damage to the country side then the warheads. They just don't have the pretty fireworks and the boom stick factor. We blew up all sorts of stuff for a long time all over the place, and we still get outdone by Mount St. Helens much less a real volcano. Still ain't seeing to many radioactive mutant zombies shambling about.[/quote']

 

The hazard is from fallout. And if you launch from a huge steel pad or from the air' date=' there basically is no fallout[/quote']

 

We're not talking about a few tests, though, right? How many detonations, of what size, would it take to get one of these monsters into orbit?

Re: Orion Drive space battleship

From the surface? Um... bombs... atmosphere... uh...

Re: Orion Drive space battleship

Wait...500 20 megaton nukes? Is that a typo? Those would have to weigh at least 1000 tons or more. I think one of the fears about orbital nukes(and FOBS-style' date=' near coastline SLBM launches) was that warning time would be nearly non-existent. Hence the Russian "dead hand" system, among other things.[/quote']

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand_(nuclear_war) for those who don't know about it.

Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible?

From Foundation by Isaac Asimov (1951)

 

TRANTOR-...At the beginning of the thirteenth millennium, this tendency reached its climax. As the center of the Imperial Government for unbroken hundreds of generations and located, as it was, toward the central regions of the Galaxy among the most densely populated and industrially advanced worlds of the system, it could scarcely help being the densest and richest clot of humanity the Race had ever seen.

 

Its urbanization, progressing steadily, had finally reached the ultimate. All the land surface of Trantor, 75,000,000 square miles in extent, was a single city. The population, at its height, was well in excess of forty billions. This enormous population was devoted almost entirely to the administrative necessities of Empire, and found themselves all too few for the complications of the task. (It is to be remembered that the impossibility of proper administration of the Galactic Empire under the uninspired leadership of the later Emperors was a considerable factor in the Fall.) Daily, fleets of ships in the tens of thousands brought the produce of twenty agricultural worlds to the dinner tables of Trantor....

 

Its dependence upon the outer worlds for food and, indeed, for all necessities of life, made Trantor increasingly vulnerable to conquest by siege. In the last millennium of the Empire, the monotonously numerous revolts made Emperor after Emperor conscious of this, and Imperial policy became little more than the protection of Trantor's delicate jugular vein....

Sounds a little like Rome...

Re: The cranky thread

I'm not allergic, but I can't stand menthol, including in cough-drops.

Re: Star HERO with... not magic, really, but...

Human Multiworld Governments/Cultures

Ideas, Roughs, Brainstorming, etc...

The Federated Worlds

Think Earth during much of Niven's Known Space future history, or some of the more oppressive interpretations of Star Trek's Federation, or something a bit like United World from Escape from Terra. Weapons and knowledge of combat skills are tightly regulated. "What it means to be human" is a huge concern, and cybernetic, genetic, and biological enhancement are heavily restricted and regulated. While technically a democracy, things are done to people "for their own good" and untreated "mental illness" is regarded as a crime.

The Laconian Hegemony

Loosely inspired by a mashup of classical and helenic Greek ideology. Inviduals are seen as subunits of the society/state, but individual excellence is encouraged and lauded, as it advances the condition of the whole. The legal system is more concerned with order and progress than with individual justice. The Hegemony is viewed as miltaristic, nationalist, and oppressive by most outsiders. Most people choose mates consciously based on perceived genetic fitness, looking for health, fitness, intelligence, innate talents, etc; recreational, romantic, and reproductive sex are viewed as more distinct and seperate than in other cultures.

The ?????? Coalition

Don't have a full name yet, but the idea is a confederation of worlds, in which defense, foreign affairs, external trade policy, etc, are handled by the multiworld government, but home rule for worls or systems is largely internal. Brought together by concerns for mutual defense and maintenance of independence, given the miltarism of the Laconians and the "for your own good"/"unity of mankind" expansionism of the Federated Worlds. More open and cosmopolitan than the other two mentioned so far.

More to come. Any thoughts or suggestions so far?

Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible?

Coruscant comes fairly close' date=' because a LOT of food has to be flown in every day. How much is a lot? Last time I checked, at [i']least[/i] seventy-two planets are solely dedicated towards food production for Coruscant alone.

Which is really "kewl" for an overdone, melodramatic, operatic setting... but makes no sense at all.

Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible?

Well' date=' cases in point. Risa, used to be a rain soaked earthquake prone dump of a planet until the Weather and Seismic control equipment was installed. Planet Zeltros from Starwars is effectively, Planet Las Vegas. Non Stop party action more then perfect One type climate. Now not the biggest bastion of Star ocean knowledge out there but knowing a little bit of a lot of useless trivia things, reading the info for Hyda IV, makes it look like a perma Sandles resort at first, but turn that info over to a Meteorologist and al they say is, Hurricane. Lots.[/quote']

 

I make it clear to my players that what a planet is known for is not all that goes on there, unless that's all that CAN go on there, and that there are no worlds that are both single-climate and widely habitable.

 

A world known as a "resort world" makes most of it's interstellar trade income on tourism, but still has its own industry, agriculture etc, as one example.

 

A "mining world" might only do mining and some small manufacturing, because it doesn't have the environment or ecosystem to support anything else, on the other hand.

Re: Firefly Hero (reprise)

Hey' date=' Traveller was a very popular game at one time. While I'm talking about this, how many fantasy authors have used their D&D games as fodder for novels?[/quote']

 

The Dragonlance novels read like the novelization of a campaign log.

Re: Announcing Kazei 5, Second Edition

Just sent an email to the sales@ address for Blackwyrm, I need to check on a shipping detail before I can submit my preorder.

EDIT: Order is in, I'm on the list.

Re: TVTropes's opinion about the latest edition of the HERO System

They're making fun of people who don't like how something was changed? Good thing that would never happen around here.

Re: The 5 Creepiest Unexplained Broadcasts

What a terrible article about a potentially interesting topic.

Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible?

Probably not.

Take Hoth for example. Somewhere, there had to be, say, open oceans, at least, or there wouldn't have been snow storms and clouds.

Re: Your Top Ten Science Fiction Writers, and then some.

I've been reading a lot of the "new space opera" over the last few years, and loving it. So finally, I decided to take a crack at adapting it to Star Hero.

 

From Wikipedia:

This "new space opera", which evolved around the same time cyberpunk emerged and was influenced by it, is darker, moves away from the "triumph of mankind" template of space opera, involves newer technologies, and has stronger characterization than the space opera of old. While it does retain the interstellar scale and scope of traditional space opera, it can also be scientifically rigorous.

 

The new space opera was a reaction against the old. New space opera proponents claim that the genre centers on character development, fine writing, high literary standards, verisimilitude, and a moral exploration of contemporary social issues. McAuley and Michael Levy[7] identify Iain M. Banks,[6] Stephen Baxter,[6] M. John Harrison,[6] Alastair Reynolds,[6] McAuley himself,[6] Ken MacLeod, Peter F. Hamilton, and Justina Robson as the most notable practitioners of the new space opera.

 

I haven't read Harrison and Robson yet, but the rest I've found thoroughly enjoyable. And I'd include some of the works of Charles Stross in this category as well.

 

Creating a Star Hero setting in this vein has been hard work, but the effort has paid off. I've been running games like this at conventions for a couple of years, and I always get the same reaction: "When are you going to publish this?"

 

I'm not telling.

Sounds a bit like where I'm going with the setting I'm working on.

Re: Hellish Weather on Other Planets

My answers are like those above' date=' but frankly, with optical/ultraviolet/infrared spectroscopic methods you don't even need to enter the atmosphere to get a decent handle on its composition. That could be done from interplanetary space ... a few AUs away ... in a few minutes, given a dedicated spectrometer (size of a filing cabinet) with a modest telescope (again, size of a filing cabinet) feeding it; both those instruments would be useful for other purposes as well. The from=space results won't be as precise as, say, gas chromatography or mass spectrometry done on actual gas samples in the atmosphere itself (and it won't get you trace constituents, especially if there's stuff like heavy hydrocarbons in the atmosphere), but you will know, at least light-hours away, whether or not you want to walk around in your shirtsleeves or not.[/quote']

 

And that's with what we have right now, today, correct?

Re: Humans nearly went extinct

There's at least one other suspected near-extinction event in the far less distant past, less than 100000 ybp, if I recall correctly.

Re: Hellish Weather on Other Planets

3. Not long. Most thing that take longer to dcipher will kill you so fast it wouldn't matter.

I think you'd have it installed on the ship in such a way that you wouldn't have to step outside to take a reading.

Re: Charging points for tech gear?

You don't even have to go that far; look at the gear in 6E and compare DEF and DCs for contemporary armor and weapons.

You mean the "mundane" gear? What is it like? (No 6E here.)

Re: Charging points for tech gear?

Just taking small arms up a notch from the stats for modern real-world weapons gets you close to a superheroic level (see also, the thread for my SF game).

Re: 1962 Nuke Test jeopardized Apollo program

Huh.

Interesting concept for "interdicting" a lower-tech world for a while.

Re: First Contact Could Be Tomorrow!

And what if the telescopic Marines are infected?

Re: Star HERO with... not magic, really, but...

I still don't have the two PCs together yet, after two sessions. The paranoid prodigy headed off to a system far off in the wrong direction before the run-in I had planned for the PCs could happen, after getting spooked by the incident that was supposed to motivate him to team up with the PI.

At least at the end of the night they were in the same area, a system known as Cold Harbor (that's actually the name of the station, orbitting above the ice/rock moon of a gas giant, but no one bothers to call the planet or the star by the catalog name).

After running off to the decadent resort world of Bangkok, the paranoid spent some time reading through the news archives looking for the next publicly-known "superstar pilot", which turned out to be a young woman from the Laconian Hegomony, making her name as a state-sponsored pilot on the FTL racing circuit. The player immediately asked "Where and when is her next race?" DING! Oh, in a place called the Vorin Expanse, the best place to go would be Cold Harbor, if you can get someone to hack a racing card for you.

Meanwhile, the PI started following leads on the "kidnap" he was supposed to be tracking down, and it lead him to... Cold Harbor. Heh.