Dr. Anomaly

Re: The cranky thread

Re: Giant Snake Fossil Found I never thought I'd say this to you, Lucius, but you lack faith and imagination on this! Give a few extremist wingnuts time, and I'm sure they can find a way to blame this on us!

Re: The Icarus Planet

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER

Re: The cranky thread Well, this turned into an unexpectedly rotten day. I finally get home, after a long day at work, only to find that I can't GET home because there are 7 -- count them, 7 -- fire engines & swarms of police cars, etc. blocking off my street and my apartment building because there's been a fire. After a bit more than an hour of waiting, I finally get in... the fire was in the apartment above mine. It stinks. I have a rotten headache from the fumes. And I've got water coming through the ceiling in various places because, of course, they had to douse the place above to kill the flames. It could be worse... it could have been my place that had the fire. But right now, I'm having flashbacks to a couple of years ago when I got flooded out from above, in the neighboring building, and had to move to this building... and how many books, collectible cards, etc. I lost to water. It's going to be a long night...

Re: Intergalactic wanderer "The best bang since the big one..."

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER Thanks, all. I've actually been thinking about starting up the Magic project again, which would include going back and doing some revising. I'm not sure how much time I'm going to have, so no promises when, but I AM looking into it.

Re: How To Create Star Trek Plots Umm... scooped.

Re: superuseless superpowers There's always a few suggestions in an old thread, perhaps starting with the write-up on this page...

Re: superuseless superpowers Universal Translator 18-, Only for translating What The Computer Said into What The Computer Said (-2)

Re: Space drives. You could simplify things a bit if you took a book out of FASA's page re: JumpShip travel in Battletech. There, it was easiest to make the calculations for destination if you always jumped to a point where the gravitational forces (speaking solely in terms of distance here) tended to have a known average value; for most star systems, this would be a point directly "above" or "below" the star, at right angles to the plane of the orbits of the planets. Since planets (at least ones habitable by our kind of life) tend to follow orbits that don't tend to deviate too far from a good approximation of a circle, that means the distance between planet and jump point tends to, on average, change very little over the course of the planet's orbit. Since the distance between planets and jump points varies by a relatively small percentage during the planet's year, this means the planet's gravitational influence on the jump point tends to be pretty stable, too, making the jump calc about as easy as they're going to get. This also means the transit time from jump point to a given planet will be pretty standardized, too. So once you've worked out your tables for a given system, the transit time from that system's jump point to each of that system's planets will remain pretty close to constant for any standardized acceleration you chose as your "benchmark". You don't have to worry about where the planet is in its orbit, what time of year it is, or whatever; if they jump into that system, you'll know that for X acceleration the transit time will be Y time units. Of course, this does lead to a disadvantage as well: if the zenith and nadiar jump points are so easy (relatively) to calculate for any system, then if Ship A is known to be going to System B, there are only two relatively small areas of space where an enemy would have to put a ship to be pretty much guaranteed to intercept Ship A when it arrives in System B. Sort of the way that a strait or canal between oceans or the mouth of a fjord make natural choke points for water ship travel, and hence ideal ambush points. Of course, from the perspective of a GM, you get a massive bonus for that kind of restriction, and I don't mean making it easy to ambush the PC's ship. Under a set-up as described above, FASA also mentioned "pirate points" -- points of temporary gravitationally flat areas that form, change, and vanish as time passes and the planets move in their orbits, because such points are formed by the interactions of the various planets and the star of the system. Such points are usually MUCH closer to the planets, so transit time from them would be MUCH shorter than transit times from the zenith or nadiar points; on the other hand, without VERY precise data on the bodies of the system and their movements, it wouldn't take much to calculate and jump to a jump point that doesn't in fact exist... In other words, it gives the PCs an exceedingly dangerous, nail-biting way of cutting off crucial time to beat someone to a destination, or to avoid waiting interceptors by avoiding the common jump points; and, as we all know, if you give players a risky way to do something, they will try it, sooner or later (and probably sooner) because they'll rationalize they "have no choice" or "the risk is worth it" or whatever. If it works, great... they've got the thrill of taking a huge gamble and having it pay off! If it doesn't work, then you get the fun of running them through what happens when a ship misjumps... a result that, according to common lore, no ship has ever returned from... And, of course, if you need to surprise the PCs earlier than the enemy could possibly show up, the enemy could choose to risk a "pirate point" jump...

Re: Help with plot Have the pirate attack happen, but they aren't after cargo... they're after Peter! Why? Well, he's the previous owner of that ship, so they figure that he must know how to get into the secret compartment / how to operate the secret, illegal equipment installed on it / etc., which will be important after they manage to actually get their hands on said ship, which they are also currently hunting. Of course, Peter's player is going to go "Huh? WHAT are they talking about? There's nothing like that on that ship... I ought to know, it used to be mine!" Then just grin at him. A couple more attacks/raids (by different groups / agencies / clans / whatever, looking for Peter for the same reason) should give them ample incentive to find that ship THEMSELVES, and find out what's going on; if they don't, they'll never be able to sleep soundly, and sooner or later, someone's going to get the idea of eliminating them instead of capturing them, if for no other reason than to keep a rival from getting the information out of Peter... The fact that he doesn't have the information, and doesn't even know what it is, is beside the point!

Re: The Icarus Planet So Andromeda is the First Galaxy... And... okay... I guess the Gnomes of Zurich are our Overlords of Delgon...

Re: Astronomers detect mystery flash Not anymore.

Re: Astronomers detect mystery flash

Re: Strange Asteroid Stalks the Earth

Re: The Icarus Planet Just what I was thinking; this discovery now has me wondering where Eddore is... !! If Ploor is here, that means this is the Second Galaxy, and it's only a matter of time before Boskone moves in and occupies us!

Re: Alas and Farewell, Digital Hero Any chance of making it a purely 'volunteer' publication in terms of submitted content, and perhaps some editing, with the HERO PTB having final say/editing before putting it up? Maybe trying it as a quarterly like that, as I don't know how much stuff we'd get in that way. What I mean is this: Volunteer authors/artists submit materials to a (hopefully) volunteer editor. After a time, when enough materials have been submitted, the volunteer editor puts them together, then submits them to Hero. After some fine-tuning, Hero "publishes" the issue. And yes, I'm thinking Hero would still charge for this, though the articles and such would be submitted voluntarily, free. Here's the benefits: The volunteer contributors get the satisfaction of giving back to the community, and get some name recognition. Those who want Digital Hero get a Digital Hero. Hero gets a bit of revenue (probably small, but hey...) without having to put out any (or not much) in the way of resources themselves. Thoughts...? Or am I completely off my rocker?

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... From the first session of our new Teen Champions game (and my first home RP game in a year and a half): "A necromancer in a city sees what you see in an airport... lost souls waiting to leave." "I did not see the goat. I did not touch the goat. I did not go near the goat. And anyway the goat lies." "He arrived C.O.D. -- Coffin On Delivery." "Y'know, 'Second Hand Store' means something entirely different in a land of Igors."

Re: Photosynthesis vs. Solar Cells? Oh, and McCoy? I know that photosynthesis uses only part of the available spectrum; my thought was that if the process were efficient enough to be worth looking at, we might be able to do some tinkering (genetic engineering) to produce a plant that used a wider slice of the spectrum, grabbing more energy.

Re: Photosynthesis vs. Solar Cells? Yes, Cancer, that does help; thanks. Crud. I was hoping this might be one of the cases where Nature had an answer that we could imitate / fine-tune / whatever to do a better job than stuff we created from scratch ourselves; looks that that isn't the case. Ah, well... back to the ol' electronic brain...

This thought was sparked by mention in another thread of some progress towards "artificial photosynthesis", and I didn't want to derail that thread, so I thought I'd start a new one instead. One of the ongoing problems with solar cells is that they just don't put out much power. And that started me thinking about photosynthesis, which also gathers solar power, albeit into a chemical energy source (sugars). Now, leaving aside for the moment the difficulties with getting at, in a usable (probably electrical) form, the energies stored in the sugars by photosynthesis... how does photosynthesis stack up vs. current solar cell technology in efficiency of energy capture? That is, for a given surface area that is solar cells, vs. an equal surface area that is photosynthesizing, which captures more of the incident energy? (I realize there are all kinds of variables in this, not the least of which is the exact make-up of the solar cells in question, and the particular species of photosynthesizing plant. I'm hoping for some kind of general comparison.) If this kind of information exists, I have no clue where to go looking for it. Does anyone else have any ideas?

Re: SFX Question... What's in those blaster clips? Well, a modern firearm cartridge is chemically-stored energy that is designed to exert a mechanical force (forcing the bullet down the barrel) but it would take quite a bit to turn a magazine of bullets into something that could provide a much longer-term, slower-released mechanical energy. If the charge packs are single-shot chemical energy stores designed to deliver electrical energy, as has been suggested, that analogy (and the reasons it couldn't be done quickly or simply) works fairly well.

Re: Legion Flight Ring? Here we go: Legion Flight Ring