Nyrath

Re: Generation starships and their internal society structure A push from outside, eh? Like the player characters coming across an old generation ship? For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched The Sky.

Re: Generation starships and their internal society structure And of course there is the "Metamorphosis Alpha" meme.

Re: What if Earth had rings like Saturn?

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/11/stars-racing-onemillion-mph-through-milky-ways-halo-may-be-from-other-galaxies-video.html So we have an example of an incredibly ancient star from the dawn times when Cthulhu and Galactus were roaming free, that come from the hideous outer darkness beyond the fringes of our galaxy. And your players, predictable morons that they are, will be happy, nay, eager to hop into their starship and run to explore this star of no return with THIS IS A TRAP!!! written all over it.

http://news.discovery.com/space/star-goes-rogue-in-untimely-collision.html I'm sure evil game masters can use this for a diabolical plot seed

Re: Sky Scorcher 1 megaton air-to-air missile (1956) Details of the nuclear shaped charge are sketchy. But you might try going to Google and doing a web search for "Casaba Howitzer" Blasted thing is a directed energy weapon that we could build today.

http://www.videosift.com/video/What-if-Earth-had-rings-like-Saturn Because nothing says science fiction like a ringed planet.

Re: Sky Scorcher 1 megaton air-to-air missile (1956) Yeah, let's dig a second Panama canal in ten seconds flat.

Re: Sky Scorcher 1 megaton air-to-air missile (1956) Yeah, from Striker, the army miniatures game for Traveller. Hollow Californium bullets. Worthless unless you have a Traveller techno-magic "nuclear damper".

Re: Sky Scorcher 1 megaton air-to-air missile (1956)

Re: Sky Scorcher 1 megaton air-to-air missile (1956)

Re: Cut 'em Off at the Horsehead Nebula! Ah, the Despoilers of the Golden Empire is available as a free download from Project Gutenberg. With illustrations. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/24091

Re: Vampire Star Is a Ticking Time Bomb no, of course it is too far away to do any damage. To Earth. But the same is not true for your hapless stable of players, offered a cool million credits by their patron if they place the Uncrackable Walnut of Infinity close enough to V445 Puppis. And he is mostly sure he has the correct figure for when it will explode.

Re: Vampire Star Is a Ticking Time Bomb Better images: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/11/17/astronomers-spot-ticking-supernova-time-bomb/

Re: The Chicxulub impact

Re: Generation starships and their internal society structure Use Google Cache: http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.antipope.org%2Fcharlie%2Fblog-static%2F2009%2F11%2Fdesigning_society_for_posterit.html&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

Re: Starship combat games Trouble was it only accommodated 11 levels http://www.boardgamegeek.com/image/51125 The same designer later make the game "Holy War", but it only accommodated seven levels http://www.boardgamegeek.com/image/69427 I tried adapting it to Red-Blue anaglyph 3D glasses: http://yfrog.com/ephwanaglyphmapjb3g In Battlefleet Mars and Vector 3, they had two maps: top view and side view. Each ship had a counter on each map. Didn't work very well. http://www.boardgamegeek.com/image/9302 http://www.boardgamegeek.com/image/16754 In Worldkiller, they tried to make an angular representation. It too did not work well. http://www.boardgamegeek.com/image/510249

Re: Vampire Star Is a Ticking Time Bomb this is cool too http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap091117.html

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/091117-vampire-star-time-bomb.html The VLT data also suggest that V445 Puppis could one day explode as a Type 1a supernova.

Re: Sky Scorcher 1 megaton air-to-air missile (1956) I vaguely remember another reason why huge nuclear weapons were problematic. Nuclear detonations radiate their destructive energy isotropically, that is, in a sphere. So if your target approximates a two dimensional plane (like a city or a formation of bombers at a given altitude), any energy that does not intersect the plane is wasted. That is, if you target the center of the formation, any blast that goes up or down is wasted. Which is a large percentage of the blast. In order to minimize waste, instead of a 1 megaton detonation, it is more optimal to divide the attack into, say, 100 ten-kiloton detonations evenly distributed in the the plane of the target. More of the blast is concentrated in the target plane, less is wasted. Or so I remembered.

Re: Sky Scorcher 1 megaton air-to-air missile (1956)

Re: Sky Scorcher 1 megaton air-to-air missile (1956) I'm finding hard data about this difficult to come by, unsurprisingly. If you assume that a Soviet bomber can be mission-killed by 3 PSI of overpressure, a naive calculation would say that a 2 megaton air burst would mission kill all Soviet bombers in about a 4 kilometer radius. Naive calculation: R = cubeRoot(Y) / ( 0.408 * cubeRoot(P)) where R = radius in nautical miles (1852 meters = 1 NM) Y = weapon yield in megatons P = overpressure in PSI I've seen mission kill figures from 3 to 10 PSI. This document suggest it is hideously complicated, depending upon such factors as orientation of aircraft with respect to burst. http://nige.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/caw1960-9.pdf

http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=4514 Egads. What were they thinking? Apparently this is what passes for good military planning back in 1956. What do you do about incoming hordes of Soviet nuclear bombers, coming to wipe out the USA? Why, send out a single plane with a one megaton city-killer air to air missile, to vaporize the entire swarm in one go. And rendering the surface under ground zero a radioactive wasteland. In reality, I doubt the Soviet bombers would bunch up like that. (and I used a bit of hyperbole. A "city killer" is generally at least 25 megatons)

Re: A general question? What about Shields? Ummmm, a little bit of thread necromancy? Scuba Hero's last post was in 2006.

Re: Cut 'em Off at the Horsehead Nebula! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Despoilers_of_the_Golden_Empire http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3ab.html#historicalevents