ajackson

Re: Looking for a technobabble Term I have the ability to read. The purpose of the mission is technology acquisition, not knowledge of ancient civilization.

Re: Looking for a technobabble Term

Re: Solar Systems Like Ours in the Minority The problem is more those systems with gas giants that are either within the life zone, or inside the life zone; modeling strongly suggests that the presence of an inner system gas giant makes rocky planets in the life zone vanishingly unlikely.

Re: Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ???

Re: Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ??? I am quite uncertain how your experiment is supposed to be structured, but all observers will agree where the beams collide, they will just disagree on the length of time it takes to pass through the wormhole.

Re: Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ??? Well, if the wormhole isn't involved in the experiment, it has no effect. If we assume the wormhole is involved (i.e. we have a single generator and send one beam through the wormhole), travel through the wormhole is instant with respect to the reference frame of the wormhole. Since the wormholes are in the train and moving at the same speed as the train, that is the same as the reference frame of the train, and the two beams of light meet in the middle of the car (all observers will agree on where they meet, though many observers will claim that transit through the wormhole took non-zero and possibly negative time).

Re: Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ???

Re: Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ???

Re: Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ???

Re: Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ???

Re: Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ??? Okay, the physics-savvy answer is that instantaneous communication is a nonsensical concept within the framework of general relativity, because simultaneity is not well-defined under GR, and in any case entangled particles cannot be used to transmit data. Thus, the answer cannot be clearly defined. If you have an option that actually allows data transport (for example, the two ends of a wormhole), the answer is yes, it sends messages to/from the future.

Re: First Known Binary Star Is Discovered to Be a Triplet, Quadruplet, Quintuplet, Se More than that. The separation is at least a quarter of a light year; with current tech we're talking millennia.

Re: Another Way to Destroy a Planet: the Strange Matter Bomb

Re: Another Way to Destroy a Planet: the Strange Matter Bomb

Re: Another Way to Destroy a Planet: the Strange Matter Bomb If this were a real threat, strangelets generated by random cosmic rays would have already converted the Earth to a chunk of strange matter.

Re: Quantum Propulsion Machine May Lead To Propulsion Without Change In Mass Photon drive, most likely. Pretty much anything that looks like a reactionless drive actually either doesn't do anything, or functions like a photon drive (in which case it also doesn't do anything unless you have an incredibly sensitive detector).

Re: Weapon Speeds and Casting Times You can also just muck with the basic rules: eliminate the speed stat, and make speed a feature of powers. This doesn't work well with the speed chart (since the rules for changing spd score are messy), but it can work with variants. For example: Racetrack System: create a 'racetrack' with some large number of boxes and a marker for each character (including NPCs). When you take an action, move your marker forward by a number of boxes equal to the cost of that action, and proceed to the next character. The next character is determined by track position: the person furthest back on the track always gets the initiative (for tied characters, a tiebreaking system is needed). The current segment (for time purposes) is equal to the position of the person furthest back on the track; when the last character moves past an end of turn marker, everyone gets an end-of-turn recovery. A character may choose to delay, in which case simply remove the counter from the track; when a delaying character wants to act, he simply puts it back on the track at the current segment. A normal attack costs 4 segments; +1/4 for 3 segments, +1/2 for 2 segments, +1 for 1 segment; this does apply to DC calculations. This means you can give a fast weapon a lower segment cost, but it will also then require more strength to increase its damage by +1DC.

Re: Alas, no more Independent!

Re: BOOM Table vs HERO Actually, it's only 93 body on a single hit, that was 93d6 normal, not 93d6 killing. I'd give the earth 10 Body and ~80DC damage negation, on a logarithmic scale the line between undamaged and total destruction is fairly small (note that the Hero system is not designed for realism, and doesn't do it very well). If a kilogram of TNT is 8d6N, which is ballpark correct, a ton should be 18d6N, a kiloton 28d6N, a megaton 38d6N, and the normal range of nukes should be around 33-40d6N (11-13d6K). Of course, this may seem unduly un-scary (see realism).

Re: BOOM Table vs HERO Usefully, you can convert from powers of 10 to powers of 2 fairly easily; it's roughly division by 0.3. Thus, 10^6J is roughly 5 DC, 10^9J is 15, 10^12J is 25, 10^15J is 35, 10^18J is 45, 10^21J is 55, 10^24J is 65, 10^27J is 75, 10^30J is 85, etc. Complete destruction of the earth, moving pieces to infinity, should be 93d6.

Re: Considering an Alt with Munitions. Regen is never a bad defense, but it doesn't scale up as fast as damage, while LR actually scales up faster than damage. In general, you want both healing and mitigation, and there are more sources for healing than sources for mitigation.

Re: Considering an Alt with Munitions.

Re: Considering an Alt with Munitions. If you're a traditional dex/ego build, lightning reflexes. Alternately, just slot Quarry and your defense is 'kill them before they kill me'.

Re: Considering an Alt with Munitions. I've retconned out of 2GM on my munitions toon (when AR is on cooldown, I use gatling), but I may pick it up again later as a way to build stacks of enraged (I'll have to test whether enraged stacks are worth it).

Re: Abilities Discussion I use bind macros to make my power sustain until broken by something (out of energy, duration exceeded, action taken which cancels the power). For example, if the power is in slot 5, you'd use '/bind 5 PowerTrayExec 1 4'.