Cancer

Re: Answers & Questions Q: So should I take condoms along, or am I being overly optimistic? A: August 6, 1945.

Re: Walking On The Sun

Re: Atmosphere I think a dome is the "quick and easy" method, and uses the same sort of hand-wave technology you already have to posit for cheap, fast interstellar/interplanetary travel. You're right, punching a hole in the dome would be lethal, but all you have to do is use the same technology used to keep fist-size meteoroids from punching a hole clean through your spaceship as you go through space at exceedingly high speeds. Terraforming a planet involves many orders of magnitude more material and more time, and you can only do it when both the surface gravity and the incoming stellar radiation is about the same as Earth's (and by "about the same" I'd guesstimate a factor of 3 to 5 ... the old game Spaceward Ho! used a factor of 2.5 for this, and that is actually probably a decent number). I.e., you could terraform Mars, but you couldn't terraform Pluto. But you could build a dome in either place.

Re: Walking On The Sun Danger, WIll Robinson, Danger! Stellar atmosphere geek in maximum geek-out mode! Depending on where you are -- if you blunder into a sunspot, in particular -- you may need protection against strong magnetic fields as well. The strength of the high-energy particle bombardment (one part of the "radiation") is tightly correlated with the local magnetic field strength. Part of the issue is that the Sun doesn't have a surface; it's gaseous throughout, so defining what you mean by "surface" pins down the physical conditions you have to protect against. The temperature is characterized at 5770 Kelvin, but it varies with height. The gravity isn't that big a deal, only about 20 times that of Earth's surface (and that's constant through the area in question). The gas pressure depends on the altitude ... high up it's vacuum, deep in it's rather high.

Re: New Ship Map A few years ago I took a cruise and thoughtfully kept a handout of the deck-by-deck floor layout, explicitly for use as gaming source material. I should scan that and upload it. I admit that I was ... taken aback ... by being on a cruise ship with a displacement of 90,000 tons. The American aircraft carriers at Midway were less than a third of that, and the Iowa-class battleships' standard displacement originally was 45,000 tons.

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER

Re: What's in a Name? The Yogi A bear who is diabolically clever at stealing picnic baskets. Uh, wait, no.... The Yogi was approaching full manhood when the tides of WW2 swept over his home in Burma. In that backwater theatre, bottom of the priority lists for materiel, there was not the massive firepower applied elsewhere, but it was enough. His family, his village, everything he knew destroyed in a bitter three-week battle. Even the name of the place was lost, as the Allies misapplied a neighboring town's name to the place and promptly forgot about it. And he himself left his birth-name behind in the charred remnants of dwellings, fields, and corpses. A penniless wanderer, he found that strangers were more cooperative than he would have guessed. If he asked for directions, he got them. If he asked for food, he had a meal pressed into his hands. If he asked for a ride, there was a space in the back of the truck that he was offered. When he arrived in a refugee camp, he saw that it wasn't that the world was populated by generous people. Hundreds of other displaced people asked -- begged -- for things from the soldiers, the civil authorities, each other. Most people asked in vain. But not him. As long as he asked for something reasonable, in the person's power to grant it, it was given to him. Not necessarily politely, but it was given to him. He made his way into India, living on the power of his simple requests. Even language did not seem to be a barrier, as he met people whose words he could not understand, and who failed to understand him until he asked them for single concrete thing. One day he found himself at a demonstration that turned into a riot. The police lost control of themselves, and used more than truncheons and the flat of their sabers on the peaceful demonstrators. He found, amid the chaos, a young woman who had an arterial wound in her arm from a slash. He asked the berserk soldier for a bandage, and scarcely pausing between blows, the soldier threw him a first-aid kit from his belt. He got the woman's bleeding under control and sent her home. He made his way to the coast, onto a steamship to England, and into a slum of other Burmese expatriates in London. He walked into banks and asked for money. He walked into haberdasheries and asked for clothes. He walked into schools and asked for lessons. He got them all. He housed, fed, and clothed his compatriots in the slum, and it was they who dubbed him "the Yogi", because of his serene style as he asked for the impossible things he was able to get. Though he made sure of his own comfort, he cared most for those around him, seeing to their health and simple needs, rewarding loyalty with loyalty and the gifts of his own uncanny powers. Eventually he learned to manage his bounty, nurture what he received. Slowly he built a financial empire, starting with simple moneylending in his own community, building up to finance small businesses, then large ones. And he attracted notice. The authorities wondered how he got so rich so quickly from so small a start. Inquiries were made, his friends were prosecuted for fraud. He himself was arrested several times, but he was never held for longer than a few hours; come nightfall, he would ask for his release and out he went, despite direct orders otherwise. He went underground, now a wanted man. The authorities couldn't hold him, but they could pick apart his legitimate holdings, and everyone around him was hounded. He responded by robbing banks ... if getting money simply by asking for it constitutes robbery ... and by embarrassing politicians by walking into offices and asking for compromising information, getting it, and publicizing it. An uneasy truce developed. The Yogi was allowed to keep his "gifts" and his friends were left more or less unharassed as long as he didn't ask for too much. Now in old age, he became simply "The Yogi" in his working-class neighborhood. But he still had his powers, and someone tracked him down and made him an offer, which he accepted. Now The Yogi lives in an undisclosed but tropical location, but makes irregular travels to exotic places at his employer's expense, talking to strange people. On his travels he buys things, things that are strange and very expensive, but he is successful at buying them where others fail. He's asked for guns and explosives, for viral cultures, even for fighter planes and fissile metal. And he's received it all. His employer is very happy with him. He's never asked the couriers who his employer is. He doesn't really care, although Interpol is deeply curious about who is acquiring all those weapons. The Yogi lives in comfort now, surrounded by a small community of pleasant and admiring young people, who provide him with everything he asks. Next up: Crotalus

Re: A Thread for Random Musings Man, I hate it when people knock on my office door when I'm looking at the cat suit thread.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings The blackberries have started being pickable in Seattle. We got 3 quarts Saturday on the right-of-way, then two more on Sunday morning, drove up to my father-in-law's, and he turned most of that into a cobbler. Yumm.

Re: The cranky thread $5k on short notice is hard. Got an extra vehicle -- or other similar-price hardware -- you can sell (and stand to part with)?

Re: Gravity Trap I'll check this out. Recently I was trying see how to "cost out" this sort of thing (actually a simple gravity reversal effect), and never got an answer I was really happy with. Thanks.

Re: Gravity Trap From your description of what you want as the effect, this is an Entangle with some funky sfx. I think this becomes more obvious if you think about what you want to have happen to fliers who may get caught in the trap. Someone butt-naked with Flight ought to come plummeting to the ground, and without an Entangle effect you need some odd mechanics to make this happen.

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? There's a nursery on Aurora Ave. A couple years ago they had a little topiary elephant out in front with an upturned trunk, which had a little sprinkler head in the end of it, so it made a cutesy little fountain. One day we stopped outside the place, and saw where the water supply hose entered the elephant. I'd spray water out my nose too....

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Swap out the Bach organ. Put in Chet Atkins - Guitar Legend, The RCA Years, disk 1.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings Not far from where I live there is an Einstein Middle School, which seems to be unremarkable in every way. One day in a shopping mall I saw a muscular junior-high student wearing a bovine expression and a jersey that said "EINSTEIN FOOTBALL". I said nothing, but I admit my internal reaction can best be described as a cold sneer: "Thou blaspheme."

Re: Campaign Ideas: Why are they on this ship? If you want a really dark campaign, assert that the PCs are all "designated spare parts": clones of a type-O (that is, universal donor) tissue type, and have been given some training to keep them useful until their primary purpose -- source for vital organ donation for other personnel (all rich a******s who are the political bosses/ship owners) -- becomes active.

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Changing disks. Now some J. S. Bach organ works, Marie-Claire Alain performing. Tocatta & fugue in d minor, fugue in g minor ("the little"), and so on.

Re: Questions and Suggestions for my next campaign. I think current airships use a hydrogen-helium mix: just enough helium to make the mix not flammable. As others have pointed out, hydrogen gives more lift, as well as being much cheaper. I don't know the proportions, unfortunately.

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? I have a 5-year-old Discman, playing John Fogerty's Premonition ("But you knew that.").

Re: Super City Three Chernobyl Island Local nuclear power plant, with a remarkably unstable control system and whose reactor containment vessel was repossessed shortly after commissioning. Somehow obtained a liscence to dump its waste into nearby Mutagen Swamps. Because of the appalling level of radiation escaping into the nearby environment, it was deemed unnecessary to have security systems (other than the gaudy chain-link fence) or night watchmen. Because the radiation immediately overexposes photographic emulsions on the site, no photographs of the interior of the plant are available. Overseen by the mayor's "clever" son-in-law since he was released from Eastern State Hospital For Microcephalic Youth.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat 1. Singing along with the Oscar Meyer ad on TV. 2. Having the genie around while reading One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish to your toddler. ("I wave my hand with a big swish swish/Then I say 'I wish for fish!'") 3. Taking the genie while going Christmas carolling ("We wish you a Merry Christmas...") [DOH! You guys are fast!]

Re: A Thread for Random Musings He who findeth sensuous splendour in the hot pink bodies of luscious damsels is not righteous. Hmm. Once I cleared my browser cache, the new server stuff works OK despite my antiquated browser. Cool.

Re: Repulsive Odor

Re: A Thread for Random Musings "And are you, by any chance, politically extreme, religiously frenzied, girdled with explosives and dangerously insane?" "I like to think so." -- from 9 Chickweed Lane, about a year ago

Re: Let's Talk Lovecraft Psssst. Hastur. Pass it on.