Zeropoint

Wow, I knew that the Pancor Jackhammer was a rare gun, but I didn't know that there was only ONE in existence! Thanks for the video link, Freakboy6117.

As for where monsters come from, for my homebrew world, I had vague ideas that they arose as sort of a natural world-cleansing system. The evil that mortals do corrupts and pollutes the world, and over time that evil is collected and gathered and made manifest as a monster, which heroes can then destroy, purging the world of that amount of corruption. This would explain, for example, why monsters can be so . . .wrong. I never really did much with that idea, or with the idea I lifted from Diablo 3 about spiders being particularly susceptible to supernatural corruption.

Plants that absorb TNT? Could this be the secret of Goron Bomb Flowers? I'd always pictured those things as producing a lot of cellulose and then nitrating it.

If they brew illicit alcohol in a moon colony, will they have to call it earthshine?

In my homebrew magic system, I just went with assumption that the seemingly high penalty for casting a spell reflects the characters ability to cast it from memory in the space of one or two seconds while someone is trying to kill them--NOT easy! The OP mentioned a spell with a -19 penalty . . . at -1 per 10 AP, that's a 190 AP spell--only a mage of frightening power and skill should be able to cast a spell like that with a casual wave of a hand. A 2d6 RKA lightning bolt spell would only have a -3 penalty; a mage only needs a skill of 21 with Elemental Magic to cast that at "don't roll an 18". I suppose I should point out that I set up my magic system to discourage "dabblers" who only know one or two spells--the category skills and multipower setup make the first spell expensive, but each additional spell quite cheap.

You can be an anti-social injustice pacifist.

Here in the US, the rest of the force would band together to make their lives a living hell for that.

But that's where I keep all my stuff!

Wait, what are time flies? Are they like Langoliers, or related to clock roaches?

On the pulse rifle magazine, I was thinking a "casket magazine" or some similar quad-stack arrangement. Edit: Nope, it just won't work. It's geometrically impossible to get 100 rounds of anything with a 10mm diameter into a magazine with that cross-section. 100 round casket magazines are available for the AR platform, but they're about three times the size of the pulse rifle magazine.

Neat stuff. I sure wish they'd drop the tangle of red tape and legal landmines around suppressors/silencers here in the US. They're good for reducing noise pollution and hearing damage.

That's basically where I come down, too. A world that's "Earthlike except as noted" is just a lot easier for everyone involved. It's not obvious to me what kind of stories or adventures would require, or would work better on, a fantastically different world. . . . Aaaand I've just reminded myself that I like "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic", which depicts a world distinctly different from ours (I mean, besides the fact that everyone is a colorful talking pony)--it's a world where much of nature requires manual intervention, to the point that the sun won't even rise if nopony makes it happen. They've gotten a few stories out of that. On the other hoof, for most of the stories, it doesn't matter much.

There are levels of abstraction in both fields. For example, if you're building a circuit with digital logic elements, you can generally treat them as being no more complicated than the Boolean algebra expressions they represent. There's a lot of quantum mechanics involved at the base level of the individual transistors that make up the circuits, but they're made to insulate the user from that complexity. Even if you're building an analog circuit with discrete transistors, you can frequently abstract the behavior down to a simple current ratio.

Can anyone recommend a good online backup service? I'd like to be able to restore my computer if something Goes Wrong.

The article about it on The Firearm Blog seemed to indicate that this weapon exists for the sole purpose of demonstrating that the AR gas system DOES, in fact, work just fine with very short barrels. Also notice that the barrel length is less than the overall length of a 5.56 NATO cartridge and you can see the tip of the bullet poking out the muzzle.

We've already got a thread asking "how much", and I thought that this warranted its own thread. In the real world, we have to deal with the world that reality gives us. If we're creating a fantasy universe, we're under no such restrictions, which raises the questions of what kind of world do we create, and why? My initial instinct, for example, is to create a fantasy world very much like our own in most respects: an approximately spherical planet with a size, density, and composition similar to Earth's, spinning about once every 24 Earth hours as it progresses in its Newtonian orbit around a fairly standard gravitationally bound ball of fusion-powered plasma. NONE of those details have to be true in a fantasy world. Sir Terry Pratchett's Discworld is one well-known example of a non-realistic cosmology. We've also got all kinds of incorrect pre-scientific conceptions of the world and universe from our own history. Science fiction authors have given us alternate physically possible configurations like ringworlds (which have been around LONG before Halo, kids!) or Alderson disks. We can imagine even stranger things with a little effort; all sorts of crazy setups could look just like home at the local level, and there's no requirement to have a world that COULD be mistaken for Earth by someone standing on it. So, I just wanted to get the conversation started. What have you done? What have you thought about? What kind of especially interesting setups have you read about?

I don't think that we, as a species, know enough about intelligence and its development to properly answer that question at this time.

You're quite welcome. I happen to think that corvids are pretty cool, and don't like to see them disrespected. When you combine the confirmed scientific knowledge of their abilities and behaviors with some of the anecdotal evidence, it seems like they're teetering on the edge of sapience already. I've placed corvids (along with squids, octopuses, cetaceans, and parrots) on my personal "do not eat" list for that reason. Also, I find it amusing that in watching the first of your clips, the crow's behavior reminds me strongly of myself playing a Portal level. Edit: Maybe that's why I like them so much. There's probably a lot of anthropomorphizing going on, but with some of these animals, it's easy to see a person looking back.

Funny that you should say that in the same post where you belittle the intelligence of crows.

"This Little Horsey" AKA "Giddy Up" by the Network Music Ensemble: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeCRNnr5W3c

So it really IS the Red planet!

I'm going to wait until some reviews are in, but I did take advantage of the free upgrade offer. I can always decline to actually change over.

It strikes me as mildly amusing that someone who hasn't even HEARD OF any intelligent species besides his own is spending so much time claiming that OF COURSE his own species' body plan is the objective best for intelligent life. This is incorrect. Are we still reproducing? Yes. Are the offspring genetically identical to the parents? No. Therefore, we're still evolving. It only LOOKS like we've "stopped evolving" because our cultural evolution is far faster than our biological evolution. Yet, new mutations and genetic drift are still occurring.

You seem to be assuming that evolution was "trying" to make intelligent life, and/or that life forms "want" to evolve to intelligent tool users. Neither of these is the case. Humans are not the goal or end product of evolution; we're just a thing that happened one time thanks to a bunch of chance occurrences lining up. We have four limbs, for instance, NOT because that's the optimum number for intelligent life, but because the lobe-finned fish we evolved from happened to be one with four fins. We have ONE example of a sapient species evolving on ONE planet--I really don't think it's a big enough data set to generalize from.

Now I want to play someone who can Turn Undead with the Power of Rock!