DShomshak

The Economist article notes the atmosphere difficulty. OTOH the felloow proposing this -- Hang Shuang, at the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics -- has built a prototype x-ray transciever for "a particular, specialized purpose": Communication with spacecraft during the early stage of re-entry when a sheath of plasma around the vehicle blocks radio communication. The air is still thin enough for x-rays to penetrate. It's a two-step process: the spacecraft uses x-rays to communicate with a satellite in orbit, which relays messages to the ground by radio. I'm not sure how big a problem the radio blackout period is in practice, and I'm not sure I'd want to be on a spaceship with x-rays beamed at it, but it's an innovative proposal. As for missile defense... heh. The article notes: "America does not skimp on shooting missiles out of the sky. Its 2018 budget allocates #19.3bn to the task -- roughly equivalent to the entire defense budget of Canada or Turkey. Since 2001 it has splashed out over $130bn." For ground-based midcourse defense against as-yet hypothetical ICBMs from North Korea or Iran, it has spend $67bn (and rising), making it "the Pentagon's fourth-most expensive weapons system." Four interceptors supposedly have a 97% chance of stopping a single missile. Against 12 missiles, it is still 30% likely that one missile gets through. "The average revolver offers better odds for a game of Russian roulette." Still better than all 12 definitely landing on American cities, but still not great. Dean Shomshak

Also: What kind of fantasy is this? At one extreme, a setting could be soaked in gods, spirits and magic, like (say) the setting of White Wolf's game Exalted. Or at the other extreme it could be very naturalistic, with magic quite rare, as in Middle-Earth. Knowing more about the world will help us make suggestions you can use. Dean Shomshak

A few days ago on on one of the public radio programs I listen to (I forget whether it was All Things Considered or The Daily), someone from the Brennan Center think tank discussed some of the laws that presidents can suspend by declaring a National Emergency. Apparently, there's quite a lot of them. One mention: Bank accounts can be seized without due process. Another: Laws forbidding tests of chemical and biological weapons on unsuspecting civilian populations can be suspended. (Um. I would have thought there were plenty of other laws that would forbid this without any need to specify it, but whatever.} Now, my sieve-like memory makes me not the best third-hand reporter, so perhaps someone else can find and post a better source. But declaring a National Emergency where none exists suggests unsavory possibilities and unsavory intent. Dean Shomshak

Plus I just find her voice really annoying. She always sounds so earnest , like whatever she says is so important for you to understand. Vocal mannerisms are not at all a rational ground for favoring or disfavoring a candidate, but well, there it is. Dean Shomshak

That's a point. Fantasy races do tend to be a bit, ah, "one note." Helps make them distinctive from each other, but... As others have mentioned, ranged weapons are particularly good for deserts. Dunes won't change this, because you can't quickly duck behind a hundred-foot dune to evade attack the way you'd duck behind a tree. (Unless you can move really fast.) Slings and bows are the two classic ranged weapons that just about every culture develops. If you want to get a little more exotic, combine them as the sling bow -- a real weapon, though not as common as either slings or bows. It's like a bow, but instead of firing an arrow the bowstring has a cup for firing a bullet. The staff sling is another variation/elaboration. A little harder to make and use, perhaps, but the staff that extends the user's arm (and consequent force) could also be a goad for driving animals, a walking-staff, a rod of office, or anything else for which people have used sticks. Dean Shomshak

Aaand I was right. Dean Shomshak

Hey, I can post again! (No idea why this comes and goes.) I thought of another reason the SCOTUS conservatives might back Alabama: To support the death penalty. I get the impression that opposition to the death penalty mostly comes from the left (though I haven't seen any statistics on this) -- notably on the grounds that it is applied preferentially to minorities and the poor, and even when there is strong evidence of bungled defense or active malfeasance by the prosecution and the state. So, enabling an execution in a deep red state, in the face of state misconduct, might just be a way of sticking a finger in the eye of liberals. It's not so much to privilege Christianity as to privilege states that still hold executions. But this is speculation on my part. And even if I'm right, it's possible the justices are not consciously aware of their motivations. Dean Shomshak

Oh, it's an excellent look from the POV of Evangelical conservatives. Dean Shomshak

The Feb. 2, 2019 issue of The Economist has three space-related articles: * A proposal that x-rays might be better than radio for interstellar communications. They spread out more slowly, don't scatter as much, and there's a whole lot less natural x-ray sources to mask messages. * A bit of rock brought back from the Moon by Apollo astronauts may originally have been a bit of the Earth. The two-gram grain from the Fra Mauro highlands is a bit of the slashed debris from the Late Heavy Bombardment impact that created the Mare Crisium. The zircon and quartz grains in the rock, however, are of a sort unlikely to have formed in Lunar conditions; they more plausibly formed on Earth. (The brief article doesn't say what features lead to this conclusion.) So, one LHB impact could have splashed the rock from Earth to the Moon (which at the time was only a third its current distance); then another impact put it on the Fra Mauro highlands; and now it's back to its planet of origin. This interests geologists, because the Earth has very little rock that is relatively unchanged from that long ago. (You can judge the rarity by geologists considering being through two massive impacts still "relatively unchanged.") * And an article on Pentagon proposals for laser-armed satellites to shoot down missiles, in the latest iteration of "Star Wars" missile defense. The article notes the vast expense of existing missile defense, the likelihood that it would fail against relatively small numbers of missiles, and a "detailed and scathing" analysis of boost-phase interception that the National Research Council produced in 2012. I simply remember a Scientific American article from the 1980s that concluded the laws of physics make any space-based missile defense system, well, considerably harder than advocates make it sound. Dean Shomshak

Oh, I think you're doing pretty well. Dean Shomshak

Mea culpa; I tossed off a factoid I'd heard or read (and might have misunderstood at that) and did not check the numbers. I apologize for passing along... <gasp> Fake News! I don't say that it's right that Pugetopolis can so completely dominate state politics, but it's a fact that will not change any time soon. Washington state initiatives are a whole other rant. Suffice to say they've given me a fervent belief that the Founders were right in avoiding direct democracy. But they do sometimes give clues where voters' minds are at. In this case, even Pugetopolis won't back a carbon tax enough to ram it through. @Pattern Ghost: Yes, reasonably competent and intelligent, in that he seems able to speak in coherent sentences. Sometimes. And he seems to have some notion how government works. Sometimes. It's a low bar.? Dean Shomshak

I look forward to seeing this. Dean Shomshak

Well, actually that's true. But King, Pierce and Snohomish Counties hold enough population that they now overbalance the rest of the state. Dems hold every statewide office but one, IIRC, and both legislative houses. So if Washington can't pass a carbon tax, the odds don't look great for anywhere else. Oddly, the state's latest gun control initiative passed in every county, even in conservative Eastern Washington. So it's easier to pass gun control than a carbon tax. Dean Shomshak

So, considering villain teams instead of solo villains... Some super-teams work for larger organizations. If the sponsor is villainous, so is the team. The classic form is the team of super-soldiers working for an evil government (or one of those shadowy, malign government agencies that were de rigeur in Iron Age comics). Evil corporations are another classic, such as the Serpent Squad teams assembled by Marvel's favorite corporate nasty, Roxxon. Or in the CU, VIPER sponsors a number of villain teams as super-powered backup for its regular agents. Your campaign's international criminal/subversive/terrorist agency can do the same. You can also make a villain team distinctive based on why its members stick together. This usually connects to their goals, but not always. For instance, a team of villains might stay together because they were all part of the same origin event. For a further variation, the villains might be related. I recently heard of a study that a very small percentage of American families account for a surprisingly large percentage of American crime. And no, this isn't Mafia-style organized crime: just families where everybody is a criminal -- mostly petty crime, from shoplifting to burglary or the convenience-store level of armed robbery. Some of these criminal families go back generations. Let them be mutants, or all be exposed to the same radiation accident, and you've got a supervillain team. Dean Shomshak

Many years ago, the radio program A Prairie Home Companion did a "Red Scare" spoof about Creeping International Canadianism! "A Canadian takeover of the United States: Could it happen? What would it look like?" Dean Shomshak

Washington State governor Jay Inslee is still playing it coy (or maybe dithering). As a Washingtonian, it would be nice to see our governor in the White House. But Inslee can't possibly win. See, he's earnest, experienced, reasonalby competent and intelligent... but not charismatic. A Democrat in the mold of Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry and other election-losers. The old saying is that Republicans fall in line, but Democrats need to fall in love. And the party apparatus keeps producing dull policy wonks. (It doesn't help that Inslee's signature issue is climate change, on which he has consistently failed to achieve anything even in a deep blue state. Two of his carbon tax proposals have now failed at the ballot box. And polls establish pretty clearly that while a majority of Americans say climate change is a problem, they will not tolerate even the slightest possibility of economic hardship in order to do anything about it.) Dean Shomshak

Okay, one wacko. But if I'm not letting conservatives screech about "violence pervading the Left" because of that one guy who shot at the Republican congressmen, I'm not willing to accuse the Party of Trump of systematic, Fascist-level political violence because of that guy either. I try to be better than that. (Don't always succeed, but I try.) (The far right does seem to attract a lot more such wackos, though. Link to study available on request.) Dean Shomshak

In revising the home dimension of Tyrannon the Conqueror, for the CU, I built it around toroidal stars and planets within a smoke-ring galaxy. Of course the artist completely screwed up the illustration. DEean Shomshak

My PBS station has been airing a series called "The Dictator's Playbook," comparing the careers of 20th-century dictators and showing their methods for gaining power, keeping power and leading their countries to ruin. A useful reminder that while Trump may have the 'tude, he is nowhere near the depths attained by the likes of Mussolini or Saddam. (Yet.) Like, Trumpists aren't bombing Democratic party offices or kidnapping and murdering Democratic politicians. So, perspective. In view of yesterday's events, I found special interest in the account of Mussolini's rise to become Prime Minister of Italy. His Fascist Party had only a few seats in the Italian parliament when he made his bid for the job. When he sent thousands of Fascist thugs marching on Rome, threatening mass violence, King Victor Emmanuel II still had control of the military and police: They could have crushed the few thousand Fascists, though not without cost. But the king and his government blinked, giving Mussolini the job in hopes of buying civil peace. Wow, did that turn out to be a mistake. Never give in to a bully. Democracies can resist takeover by dictators, if the institutions and the people who lead them hold firm. Dean Shomshak

Yesterday, All Things Considered interviewed two groups of prison guards who aren't getting paid due to the shutdown. Some highlights: * Mockery from the inmates came as no surprise to them. * Noted that inmates working sub-minimum wage prison jobs are still getting paid. * Many bribe attempts from inmates, promising that money can be given in return for smuggling in cigarettes... drugs,,, cell phones... guns. * Even in this small number, they knew a fellow guard who attempted suicide over this. (He survived.) * They are all extremely angry at being used as political pawns. Or hostages. Some to the point of tears, and I don't see prison guards as delicate flowers. It's horrible to say so, but if the guards at a prison quit en masse and walked out -- leaving all the doors unlocked behind them -- I could not find it in my heart to condemn them. Dean Shomshak

The Feb. 2019 issue of Scientific American has a nifty article on the geology of Venus. The planet is a lot harder to study than Mars and has received far fewer visits, but scientists have found clever ways to make use of what information they have (mostly radar scans of the surface). Some think there's evidence on nascent plate tectonics. Dean Shomshak

Interestingly (to me at least), this seemed to be about the position of a German minister who explained on the BBC why the EU wasn't going to make any offers to the UK regarding Brxit. If I understood him correctly, he said that you couldn't negotiate with someone who couldn't settle on what they actually wanted. Until the UK government could settle on a position, the EU had nothing to work with. And it isn't their job to keep making offers until the UK finds something it likes. Dean Shomshak

Keep in mind that the CU tries to include every well-known comics trope and element, even if they fall apart the moment you apply any critical intelligence to them. Like, alien invasions are a thing in comics, so the CU has alien invasions. And as you say, these would be a Big Deal that changed how people viewed the world -- except it hasn't, because comic books do try to keep the wider world looking familiar to the readers of their time. But it's all there ready to use, whether your thing is alien invasions, persecuted mutants, super-powered hidden races, or what-have-you. Beyond that... You accept the tropes, or you don't. I'm more okay with them than I used to be, because I no longer regard the real world as 'realistic.' I still have problems with one trope, though: Supers having existed since World War Two. In the comics, it's because they've been published so long and have tried to backfill and tie in everything the company ever published. But the longer you have supers exist, the harder I find it to sustain the acceptance that the wider world still looks just like ours. It's why in my own setting supers first appeared in public in 2000. The consequences are still working themselves out. (Just as importantly, PCs can be the first to do things, like be the first to fight an alien invasion. In the Marvel or DC Universes -- or the CU -- you're the 5th, or 50th, to fight an alien invasion. Whoop-de-do.) As one of the CU creators (I designed a bunch of the mystical stuff), I say: It's all done as a resource for you. Pick what you want, ignore the rest, rework it to suit your tastes, we're fine with it! Dean Shomshak

This reminds me how, waaaay back, I played around with the random society generator tables in an old edition of Traveller and got belters with steam-era tech level. After a bit of thinking, I concluded it could work. IIRC John Ericson, the engineer who designed the Monitor, experimented with solar-powered steam engines. So, if an asteroid belt has lots of water and isn't too far from its star, you could have steam rockets with big mirrors to provide the heat; and in microgravity, not much thrust would be needed. Dean Shomshak

Another book I read years ago: Future Magic by Robert Forward. A bit further-future tech (but still within known physics) such as Antimatter Propulsion and various ways to build Space Elevators. Doctor Forward is a physicist as well as having written a few SF novels (notably Dragon's Egg, about the discovery of life on a neutron star.) Dean Shomshak