Nyrath

Re: Time Travel in Sci Fi and Games....The Good, The Bad, and the Oh so Ugly... From http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3ao.html#inventWords

Re: Martian avalanche caught in the act Actually, it looks like wormsign to me...

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/01/11/another-dose-of-martian-awesome/ This does not directly inspire a plot seed, but I included it because it is utterly awesome. Though a devious game master could use the image as a subtle clue for the players, perhaps the avalanche is evidence of the bad guys hot-footing it across the Martian desert, caught on a Mars Orbital SpySat.

Re: Looking for a technobabble Term Of course, xenoarcheology is a high risk occupation. http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3x2.html#alien

Re: Duke Saturn & The Astro Commandos (6e) That is a very nuanced construction method. Very versatile, but not too uber-powerful.

Re: Plasma Rocket! Well, technically the great thing about the VASIMR is that it has a far superior "specific impulse" compared to the best possible chemical rocket. The practical upshot is that more of the rocket is payload and less of the rocket is fuel.

Re: Duke Saturn & The Astro Commandos (6e) I vaguely remembered that one of the biggest dangers facing the Green Lantern Corps was Sinestro. The thought occurs to me that one of the biggest dangers that could face the Astro Commandoes is one of their own number who decide to be evil.

Re: The Singularity?

Re: The Singularity?

Re: Plasma Rocket! Yes, this report is about the good old VASIMR engine, which has been in the news for a few years now http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_Specific_Impulse_Magnetoplasma_Rocket http://www.google.com/search?q=vasimr Like most engines of its type, the thrust is low, but the "gas mileage" (specific impulse) is fantastic. It is no good for take off or landing, but it is great for traveling between planets. Also, unlike almost all other engines, it can "shift gears." That is, it can increase the thrust at the expense of gas mileage, and vice versa.

Re: Time Travel in Sci Fi and Games....The Good, The Bad, and the Oh so Ugly... Great paradox. Like in the old movie "Somewhere In Time." Consider, when was the pocket watch constructed?

Re: Duke Saturn & The Astro Commandos (6e) The only thing you have to be careful about is to ensure all the ring holders are of noble mind. Otherwise you've created a "Highlander" situation, where the ring holders will start killing each other in order to increase the power of their rings.

Re: The Singularity?

Re: Lessons from Byzantium Well, there is always Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but that is a little ... dense.

Re: The Singularity? Not quite. It means that sometime in the next couple of decades some clown will invent a computer with artificial intelligence that is smarter than we are. Since your average computer can think about five million times faster than we can, every six seconds it can do as much thinking as we can do in twelve months. It will be able to bootstrap itself into becoming a super computers. Give it a few minutes and the super computer can boostrap itself into being a super-duper computer. In less time it can become a super-super-duper computer. As it thinks faster and faster, and becomes more and more intelligent, it will be the entity making new technological advances and engaging in planned obsolescence in a timeframe of microseconds. If we are lucky, it will allow us to upload our brains into the system so we can participate. Alternatively, the Singularity might come not with intelligent computers, but by increasing our own intelligence. A "Flowers for Algernon" scenario, but without the balloon popping.

Re: The Singularity? Well, if you read some of the writing about the singularity, they go even more extreme. You know how it took a few years for us to go from VHS video tapes to DVDs? They say that shortly before the singularity such changes will be happening on a timescale of microseconds, not years.

Re: Lessons from Byzantium

Re: Nova? Well, the main obstacle to the development of a strong space infrastructure is the lack of anything valuable enough to make it worthwhile. For SF novels, I call such a resource "Maguffinite." In Larry Niven's PROTECTOR, the Maguffinite is magnetic monopoles. It has to be something valuable that is not available on Earth. Say a substance that can cure male pattern baldness or be the perfect weight-loss treatment.

Re: Lessons from Byzantium

Re: Lessons from Byzantium

Re: Nova? True, but there will be some form of government supervision. This will be for the same reason the government generally does not allow corporations to own thermonuclear warheads. I discuss this here: http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3t.html#orbit

http://www.astronomynow.com/news/n1001/07dust/ Go to the link. Look at the picture. I'll wait. Evil game masters will now be grinning from ear to ear. What will your stable of players not do in order to escape When Worlds Collide? Why are the players in that system in the first place? Oh, I imagine that there is some kind of unobtanium that is only formed by planetary collisions, and therefore worth zillions of credits a gram.

Re: Nova?

Re: Nova?

Re: Nova? Well, you have to subtract the transportation cost from that total.