Cancer

Re: what to do with a psychic gorilla This sounds suspiciously like the managers at a former employer of mine. Y'know, it makes a lot of sense that that place was run by murderous psychic gorillas.

Re: The "Nice Happy" Thread I've been fully employed (after being laid off on 12/30/03) for a full calendar year as of tomorrow. I'll re-open the Knappogue Castle tonight.

Re: Answers & Questions Q: What's the least of your worries if you try to give oral sex to a fire elemental? A: "We haven't had that here since 1969."

Re: what to do with a psychic gorilla Retconn him into becoming a latter-day version of Idi Amin. He could pull it off, except for the scadzillion wives thing.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings I hate it when I find myself having to comment my own code with things like # This is complex and unspeakably lame, but that's the way it is now.

Re: Musings on Random Musings

Re: A Thread for Random Musings Time to play with self-modifying code today. I'll send word when it eats me.

Re: Requiem 8d6 INT Drain, Continuous, Recovery delayed by weeks, side effects Double Effect On Self.

Re: Musings on Random Musings Bah. The "Flaunt It" button doesn't do anything .

Re: Answers & Questions Q: What's the second half of the double feature with Vampire Chainsaw Nympho Interns of Fu Leng? A: In a waterbed, between Katrina and Rita.

Re: Musings on Random Musings Gotta be careful with that sort of thing. I was once given a T-shirt with that same sort of thing, but it had the triple-integral version of Maxwell's Equations on it. Trouble was, the equations as printed on the shirt were wrong ... there were a couple of "typesetting" errors in them. And that sort of invalidates the whole point. The folks who gave it to me were somewhat crestfallen when I pointed that out.

Re: Determining Gravitic Pull As someone who wears the "math geek" badge with a sense of bitter pride ... Simple gravity is pretty straightforward. Tides could be important but are hugely difficult in the general case. I can imagine a metamorph that would boost himself into C-shaped dumbbell, put all the mass at the ends of the C, arrange the poles (ends of the C) on either side of the target, then rack the density up to get induced local gravity, and let the tidal shear rip the target apart. One can almost do the math for that on the back of an envelope. But that's simplest of many tidal-shear style attacks I can imagine, and the others get really icky fast. And just think, we haven't even mentioned the really fascinating effects of General Relativity! Put someone under and intense enough gravity field ... and we're talking circum-black-hole here ... and their clocks slow down, and the energy level in their emitted light (laser guns) drops, too. It's one hell of a set of sfx for a SPD and EB Drain, though....

Re: WWYCD: An Alien among them In the short term, hope he encounters someone with something other than a shoot-first attitude. In the intermediate term, ponder that the fundamental question about life elsewhere in the Universe is answered in the affirmative. In the longer term, worry about malnutrition.

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to keyes_bill again.

Re: Base with Disguise, but not Concealment I thought it was in a Starbucks at the top of the Space Needle.

Re: Force Field powers help? Missile reflection, energy weapons only. The Sfx would be: Create a corner reflector with your force wall, and any incoming energy beam that contacts the reflector is redirected back exactly parallel to its incident path, but going the opposite direction.

Re: WWYCD: Power Loss Mr. Terrific has powers that come from taking "power pills" of his own invention. He has four different pills, and can take at most one of each a day. Each pill lasts 2 minutes tops. My interpretation is that he would find that his pills stopped working. He'd probably futz around in the lab for some time trying to figure out what happened. It would also end his career as a test pilot. But his mainline job as a biochemist wouldn't be affected, so he'd end up dabbling in biowarfare agents to relieve the boredom.

Re: Odd Power or Sx?

Re: Determining Gravitic Pull (I didn't check your math; it doesn't feel terribly off, though.) You may be able to relate that to STR equivalent via the Lifting rules, too. Assuming that the weight that a given STR can lift corresponds to inducing a 0.1 gee acceleration upon the lifted weight, and now you can try relating the passive effects of gravity in that way. Use the scaling law for how acceleration changes with distance, and at that point you have fully defined the passive gravitational effect of the gravity field in the same terms as Telekinesis: its STR equivalent, with the direction always directed toward the gravity source. [That could lead to some serious inconsistencies, though. By no means have I thought this through, trying to mesh HERO with real physics.] There's gonna be some "collateral damage" things that are harder to figure ... atmospheric pressure is one. Another is damage to structures. A lot of structures are strong enough to stand up against gravity ONLY if gravity is directed in what the building thinks of as "down". Even very minor changes to that could cause structural failures.

Re: Determining Gravitic Pull Your life will be simpler if you use scaling relations rather than the raw equations. for example, instead of going back to G = G m1 m2 / r^2, use a = g * (m / m0) / (r / r0)^2 where a is the acceleration of the "target" caused by gravity of the "caster", g is 1 Earth gravity (9.8 meters second^-2), m is the mass of the "caster", m0 is the mass of the Earth (6.0e+24 kg), r is the distance from the center of the "target" to the center of the "caster", r0 is the radius of the Earth (6,400 km). Another form, the logarithmic one, is log( a / g ) = log( m / m0 ) - 2 * log( r / r0 ) or log a = 1.0 - log( m / m0 ) - 2 * log( r / r0 ) Where in that last one, a is meters second^-2. As long as you are consistent, it does not matter which flavor of logs you use, of course. It turns out that for astronomical objects (stars, black holes, etc.) you will more commonly find things listed in solar units or centimeter-gram-second units. (These are the units I keep in my head, actually; it turns out in cgs units, the mass of the sun and the luminosity of the sun have the same exponent, 33 ... solar mass is 2e+33 grams, solar luminosity is 4e+33 ergs/second.) Then you can use log a = 4.44 + log( M ) - 2 log R where a now is in centimeters second^-2 M is the mass of the "caster" in solar masses, R is the distance from the center of the "target" to the center of the "caster" in units of the solar radius (7e+5 km). (The surface gravity of the Sun is 28 times the surface gravity of the Earth.) 1 AU = 215 solar radii. 1 parsec = 206265 AU. Do not soil yourself by trying to use light-years.

Re: Determining Gravitic Pull Err ... sorry, that's exactly wrong, as long as you're far enough away. Shape doesn't matter at all. I refer you to Gauss's Law. It could matter if (for example) you had a standard spaceship trying to escape the grasp of a humanoid 1 AU tall. If you (the ship) are nearly in its grasp, then you have to use the integral of the mass distribution, because you're "inside" the gravitating mass, sort of. But if you are safely outside the gravitating mass, it can be formally shown that shape does not matter.

Re: Determining Gravitic Pull AAAARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH Here I was ready to get lots of productive work done this morning and then you post this.... sigh. Some general comments here, and quantitative ones later. General comment: on a human scale, the effects of self-gravity are extremely negligible and differential gravity (tides) are smaller than that. Standard solid matter ... rock, ice, metal ... does not deform under the force of its own gravity until you have a chunk of it on the order of a couple of hundred kilometers in diameter. A standard freshman physics homework problem is to determine how large an asteroid you can jump off strictly with leg strength. That depends on density, obviously, but solids (and liquids) have a pretty narrow range of densities, mostly in the range 1 to 10 (grams/cm^3 == metric tons/m^3).

Re: Complicate the Person Above Doh, scooped. Thag13 is a scholar and a hero. On the south wall of his cabin in the mountains are the mounted heads (or similar trophies for those that didn't have heads) of the demons he's defeated in the course of his daily duties.

Re: Complicate the Person Above Keith Curtis is a clever wag, with a deep understanding of the paradoxes of reality. He has created a propositional calculus with which he can refute anyone's existence, a truly fearsome tool. When he uses this on a person, they not only are expunged from this Universe, the Universe is by the very act remade so that they never could have existed. It is, of course, impossible to list the victims of this most fundamental form of vengeance. As long as I keep up my payments on my "reality insurance" I have no worries about this happening to me.

Re: Astrogator's Handbook Handy quote from a recently-published paper, relevant to judging the completeness of any of these local star lists: "It is estimated that [approximately] 32% (18%) of nuclear-burning stars within 33 pc (25 pc) of the Sun remain to be located." pc = parsec = 3.26 light-year The undiscovered ones are low-luminosity (and therefore faint) and have space motions similar to that of the Sun, so they are not easily distinguishable from more distant (but intrinsically more luminous) stars. By "low luminosity" I mean what are called very late M-type dwarf stars, which have masses not much above 0.08 solar masses (the cutoff mass for starting hydrogen fusion in their core).