Zeropoint

I don't know what that is but it needs to die. Do I need a flyswatter or a recoilless rifle?

A: "Starfleet vessels don't carry spare bulbs . . . but if combine an empty whisky bottle with a previously unmentioned type of subatomic particle, we can jury-rig something in the third act."

I'm STILL thrilled that we know of exactly one species that sent a flying saucer to another planet to disgorge a nuclear-powered robot to drive around shooting lasers at things . . . and it was us.

Let's see . . . the sword has powers against undead, and Roy's dad appears to be a ghost at the moment . . .

I keep waiting to hear something described as "the holy grail of archaeology".

Why do most machinist's toolboxes have a drawer sized specifically to hold the Machinery's Handbook? Why do botanists, geologists, or birdwatchers carry field guides? Almost all knowledge workers keep reference materials handy.

It would be something for nothing in terms of physics, too. If an FTL bowling ball can release enough energy for an Earth-shattering kaboom when it hits, then it has to HAVE that much energy, and therefore that much energy would be required to put it in the FTL state. If the bowling ball can be gotten up to FTL speeds without supplying teratons of energy, then it won't release teratons of energy when it hits a planet--it'll go "through", or just drop out of warp, or do something else interesting that doesn't release any more energy than was put into it in the first place.

Damn it, what does Tennessee have that Oregon doesn't? I demand Oregonium!

How to Become a Lich in Five Easy Steps Everything you Wanted to Know About Hex but Were Afraid to Ask Hmm, I should go through the stacks at the university library and note some interesting names that could be tweaked a little.

This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.

I may not have been clear. In my proposed system, the distance of the jump is determined by the strength of the gravity well at the jump point and by the ship's velocity at the jump point; what's on the other end is irrelevant.

Christopher Taylor, I think that "tacticool" stopped being about "useful" some time ago.

I had a thought about this once. Almost all fictional depictions of FTL drives require the ship to be away from gravity wells and massive objects. What if it were the other way around--what if a gravity well were required for a jump? After rolling that around in my head for a bit, I came up with the basic concept: the ship's jump is determined by the cross product of the local gravity and the ship's velocity relative to that gravity field, at the point in space and time when the jump drive is activated. This has a few ramifications for travel. The most obvious is that you can jump out to interstellar space easily enough, but getting back in to a star system is going to be tough, because the gravity field there is so weak. Another is that accuracy in piloting and timing will be important (actually, given the distances involved and the accuracy required, ships might be lucky to hit their target star system at all) since errors in position, time, and velocity at jump activation will affect the jump vector. Ships with low acceleration will take longer to set themselves up for a jump, and a ship's FTL range will be limited to some extent by its delta-v capacity. It might make sense to make interstellar jumps from a star rather than a planet, both because you can get a stronger gravity field from a more massive object, and because the star's gravity field changes less with distance than a planet's does (well, only because you can't get that close to a star). Ships might make a short hop from a planet to the star, and then jump to the next star . . . or they might have to fall in toward the star both to use its gravity field for the jump AND to build up the necessary velocity. This kind of a drive wouldn't really be suitable for a freewheeling space opera, where characters are expected to travel from place to place as easily as they might use an airplane.

Well, it's only 20 gauge, so your wrist might survive if you don't try to fire both barrels together.

So is it for killing cars and killing burglars? Or, for use when you're riding in your car and also use when you're riding your burglar?

Speak for yourself, man. I couldn't seduce an nymphomaniaical succubus.

Don't forget that Li-Fi--wireless information transmission via modulated environmental light sources--is going to be coming soon, and will offer much higher data rates than WiFi, without the issue of polluting the airwaves for yards and yards around.

Yeah, it's terrible. I do have to say that I haven't seen anything like that happen, but maybe I just don't know what to look for. I wonder if there's anything I can do to actually HELP.

That's a tough question. Most people would probably agree that the police have the right to prevent two individual people from settling their differences in a manner lethal for one of them and hazardous to everyone else in the area, like having a shootout at the mall. The main difference seems to be that the police are a "duly constituted authority" with a recognized legal mandate to perform such enforcement, while the Organians are just stronger. Do I have the right to stop a pair of toddlers from hurting each other? Does my relationship to the kids matter? I don't know how good that analogy really is, but it seems to me that I'd be in the right to stop a couple of kids from hurting each other if I could do it without hurting them myself or otherwise restricting their actions.

I've always found it amusing that some people won't order things online because they're worried about someone getting their credit card information, yet they don't give a second thought to handing their physical card to someone who'll take it out of sight for minutes at a time.

Remember, Jesus had a REALLY bad weekend for your sins.

My Shadowrun Missions character keeps the wireless on one of her guns turned off at all times, just in case.

I'm responding to Christopher here. 1. Seatbelts: You claimed they're useless. However, we've SEEN multiple occasions where seat belts would have prevented injury or at least kept crew at their stations, ready to respond. 2. Holodecks: I agree that they're necessary for training purposes, and for morale purposes on long missions. However, if it were up to me, I'd put a manual circuit breaker in the wall just outside. 3. Surge Protection: I hope I'm not understanding you correctly, because it looks like you're claiming that the ship NEEDS fatally exploding consoles to protect more important parts of the ship. Even if, for some reason, explosions WERE a necessary part of protecting warp cores from power surges, those explosions shouldn't be happening inside manned control consoles. Preserving control equipment and personnel is also good for keeping the ship alive. There's no good reason for the control consoles NOT to be on an isolated low-voltage power system with fiber optic links. 4. Brig Force Field Failure: Why not bars for containment and force fields for isolation? 5. Single Point of Failure for Weapons: All of your statements (except the bit about JLU) sound like reasons why it's NOT a good thing for one thing going in wrong in one place to affect all weapons. Real life military vessels typically have local direct controls for everything that can be controlled remotely. 6. Transporter Delivered Nukes: Transporter scramblers wouldn't stop you from TRYING to beam over a nuke. However, I agree that the Federation in particular wouldn't feel comfortable with such a severe tactic. 8. Not Using Spacesuits: Eh, I could go either way on this. While you're correct in observing that the failure rate of the sensors and biofilters approach is pretty low, the cost of such failure is pretty high. 9. Children: Not buying it. We've had cases of long deployments away from home in the real world, and people handled it without their kids. 10. Bridge at vulnerable place: "If it is such a bad idea, why do we keep doing that in real life?" We don't. That is, military ships don't. Civilian ships have everything controlled from the bridge, but civilian ships are not expected to engage in combat. Military ships have a bridge located for good visibility, because the bridge is used for piloting the ship in harbors and other tight spaces, where you need to see what you're about to run into. However, the ship is merely steered from the bridge--all that's up there is a wheel, a compass, and a chair for the guy giving orders to the guy at the wheel. All the ship's command and control functions, equipment, and personnel are located in the Combat Information Center, which is safely positioned in the center of the most heavily armored portion of the ship.

$10 Billion is peanuts compared to a war.

Fun Fact: I spent six years in the military and never once touched a live weapon. I was Navy. In boot camp, I feel asleep during the safety briefing for the live fire exercise (because as a gun hobbyist, I was already quite familiar with the extremely basic information they were presenting) and wasn't allowed to participate. Once I got to the ship, there were regular weapons qualification exercises, but we Nukes weren't allowed to participate (someone, at some level, understood that the toxic social environment of Reactor Department led to Nukes having mental issues, I suspect). So, in Hero terms I have WF: Small Arms and maybe a point of KS: Firearms, but it has nothing to do with my military service.