Tom Carman

Re: Transform Anothers OIF

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN) Here's an interesting site. THE EXPERIMENT OF DUBIA Dubia's premise is simple enough in theory. But like most collisions between politics and nature, it gets very messy in practice. Suppose we avoid war, plague, and famine, and the world goes democratic and capitalist? That appears to be the dream of President George W. Bush, or, as he's sometimes known, Dubya. But part of Dubya's dream is that oil goes on ruling the world for another generation. Despite all conservation attempts, carbon dioxide levels go on soaring. Too many people burning too much fuel! Poor countries industrializing will offset any efficiency-savings in rich countries. So our grandchildren live in a world with C02 levels double ours, 600-700 ppm. Double ya! That world heats up. Climate zones move north until the poles thaw. Greenland and Antarctica melt. Coastal nations are drowned. In the end, the sea rises some 110 meters. Global hothouse! It's happened before, of course, on this scale, but not in the last 50 million years or so. But once the catastrophe's happened and the survivors replant, and adjust to redwoods at the poles, and farms in Siberia, and jungles on the prairies, and coral seas where great cities once stood... what if they don't change it back? After all, they may argue, why put the Earth through birth-pains TWICE? Double jeopardy! It's climate change, not climate, that's disrupts communities--both biological and political. So... they leave the new world alone, to stabilize. We think of global warming in the short range--the shock of change. But what's on the far side? What would that world be like? I couldn't resist--even though I admit that any climatological projection this long-term and radical is inherently dubious... Dubia.

Re: Transform Anothers OIF

Re: Transform Anothers OIF True, and easy enough for attacking an accessible focus, but the OP did specify OIF. Technically you'd have to take it away from the user first... Although I might allow it with both an area attack encompassing the owner and focus, plus a targetted attack against the actual focus.

Re: Quantum Flux Tube model railroad with superconductors! There are. They're just very expensive and still crude.

Re: Paper

Re: Force Dome 4th/5th Ed: Forcewall, length 18 hex-sides, height 2 hexes; surrounds 7 2-meter hexes

Re: Religion in Science-Fiction? No, they just need good timing... and avoid long-winded prayers.

Re: Religion in Science-Fiction? Let's not start howling too much about the evils of the crusades (of which there was plenty) as the Muslims do. The latter are quite loath to acknowledge that the crusades were at least partly in response to 5 or 6 centuries of consistent Islamic aggression, overrunning once-largely Christian lands in the Middle East and North Africa, and making significant inroads into Europe before they were finally stopped and kicked back.

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN) In which there was a bit of the latter and none of the former. From FactCheck.org: Summary In late November 2009, more than 1,000 e-mails between scientists at the Climate Research Unit of the U.K.’s University of East Anglia were stolen and made public by an as-yet-unnamed hacker. Climate skeptics are claiming that they show scientific misconduct that amounts to the complete fabrication of man-made global warming. We find that to be unfounded: * The messages, which span 13 years, show a few scientists in a bad light, being rude or dismissive. An investigation is underway, but there’s still plenty of evidence that the earth is getting warmer and that humans are largely responsible. * Some critics say the e-mails negate the conclusions of a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but the IPCC report relied on data from a large number of sources, of which CRU was only one. * E-mails being cited as "smoking guns" have been misrepresented. For instance, one e-mail that refers to "hiding the decline" isn’t talking about a decline in actual temperatures as measured at weather stations. These have continued to rise, and 2009 may turn out to be the fifth warmest year ever recorded. The "decline" actually refers to a problem with recent data from tree rings.

Re: Religion in Science-Fiction? I suspect that this also is a logical fallacy, or just playing games with word definitions.

Re: Extra Limbs and Centaurs Extra limbs are really for manipulation, I think. A centaur's legs provide a good bit of additional Running, and maybe a strong HTH attack (to the rear only), but that's about it.

Re: More space news! You don't toss a perfectly good theory with hitherto excellent predictive properties just because of a tiny glitch. It could turn out that the neutrinos never exceeded light-speed-in-vacuum at any point, they just took a little dimensional shortcut. Which would be a whopper of a discovery in its own right.

Re: Dissecting Powers

Re: How to Build: Lasting Weapon Enchantments Costs might vary not only for raw power, but also utility. For instance, the cheap products would be the flashy obvious Magic Sword! with +1DC and +1OCV. The really pricy one is the dagger that hits like a battleaxe, with Invisible Power Effects to prevent it being recognized as enchanted without close examination on a high PER roll.

Re: How to Build: Lasting Weapon Enchantments For permanent magical items, yes, this is a good way to go. For a lasting-but-not-permanent enchantment-augmented mundane weapon, I think it's a bit much. I don't think I'd use Aid or Transform (in fact I'd ignore the stats of the original weapon altogether). The spell would wholly define the characteristics (damage, OCV, DCV, special attacks and Complications) which would replace those of the mundane weapon for the duration of the spell. Aside from the magical energy cost to cast the spell, the monetary cost for spell components might be anything from half to twice the price of a mundane weapon with equivalent stats (depending on how common or long-lasting you want such enchantments to be).

Re: How to Build: Lasting Weapon Enchantments You can make this as complicated as you like... What it really comes down to is a Heroic game where you buy equipment with money instead of character points. In this case, you are using the purchased spell components to convert a standard purchased weapon into a slightly better/different weapon, possibly with added Complications like "Glows" or "Magical Aura". It's just SFX.

Re: Star Wars: Fading Light at Hero Central

Re: Star Wars: Fading Light at Hero Central

Re: Religion in Science-Fiction? Chapter 6 "The Babel fish" said The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy quietly, "is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish. Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing." "But," says Man, "The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED." "Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanished in a puff of logic. "Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing. Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his bestselling book Well That About Wraps It Up For God. Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation. Quotes from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Re: Changing the roll low to hit and skill check to a roll high to hit and skill chec I mostly play with skill and to-hit rolls as written in the manuals. But if the game is still going in the wee hours and I'm losing focus, then I often switch over to the additive roll-high approach, exactly as the OP described.

Re: Blasters: why?

Re: A galaxy of humans

Re: Steam punk genre The Wild, Wild West TV show was certainly Steampunk, at a heroic level. The later TV movies were pushing that a bit (Loveless Jr.'s "$600 people" played by Shields and Yarnell). And of course the Will Smith movie went totally over the top with robo-spider and flight.

Re: A galaxy of humans I don't know where you get that number. As a late-starting minor-but-belligerent military power, Barrayar controls 3 systems. I would put the Cetagandan Empire at upwards of a half-dozen, probably a dozen. At least a dozen polities are mentioned in the books; most may be single-system, but others are less clear. I don't recall a mention of Beta Colony having colonies of its own, but Cordelia Naismith was captain on the Betan Interstellar Survey Corp when she explored the world that became Sergeyar (Barrayar's third system). And I got the impression that we were only seeing one end of the Wormhole Nexus.