Zeropoint

Re: Human bird wings I've thought about this a bit more, and come to the conclusion that my initial thoughts didn't go far enough: the wings don't have to create lift with their flapping motion, they only need to create thrust. As long as they have a positive angle of attack and enough airspeed, they'll generate lift by deflecting the airstream. You can get toy ornithopters built to look like birds that don't have the sophisticated motion of real bird wings, and THEY fly just fine.

Re: Human bird wings I didn't spot it as a hoax, but I did wonder about how the wings create lift when their behavior seemed symmetrical about the horizontal plane.

Re: Killiing a lot of zombies from a safe position. How do you manage to kill 100 zombies with only 75 rounds of ammunition?

Re: Brainstorm: Artificially Slowed Time Well, non-newtonian fluids, specifically shear thickening fluids, come to mind. One example is silly putty: on a large timescale, it'll flow and settle like a liquid; on a short timescale, you can hit it with a hammer and watch it shatter like glass. However, that's not exactly the case here; in slow time, you could tear or crumple a piece of paper in your hands easily, just like normal. The only time it would seem different is if you were relying on momentum to carry your fist or foot through it. You might also have trouble with the fact that the time for an object to fall and the period of a pendulum might not change the same way in reduced gravity, giving you walking trouble, but I don't feel like doing the math right now.

Re: "Neat" Pictures "The Stig"? I think I saw a video about that once:

Re: "Neat" Pictures Zombies can't eat your brains if you're wearing a motorcycle helmet!

Re: Weirdness Magnet I priced it by building it as a Hunted last time it came up for me, using the lower values because weirdness doesn't want to kill you, just mess with you.

Re: Order of the Stick Isn't everyone related to everyone somehow? Shouldn't this spell have killed, well, everyone? Or, does it stop propagating across family lines when it gets to links involving people who are already dead?

Re: "Neat" Pictures I'm not digging the red leotard for Wonder Woman in the top pic (gasp, did I just criticize the work of Lauren Faust? oh well, I hear it's nice on the moon this time of year) but I do like the upgrade to hot pants in the lower pic.

Re: M44 offhand @ 500 yards Ah, but remember: the combat rules are just that: COMBAT rules. It's a heck of a lot easier to shoot accurately in a stress-free environment. After all, the rules suggest that a person with average OCV and the appropriate Weapon Familiarity but no Skill Levels would miss a chest-sized target at one meter about half the time.

Re: Dungeons, suitable for crawling or delving? I was going to go for something along the lines of the size and nastiness of the rats in the sewers increasing until the town realizes that there's a problem and something needs to be done. The PCs are hired/persuaded/court-ordered/hoodwinked into going down there to see what the problem is and put a stop to it. I've got an image in my head of a bar brawl leading to a community service sentence.

Re: Order of the Stick Hmm . . . I don't recall the exact wording of the prophecy.

Re: More Railgun Ding ding ding! We have a winner! I was going to rep you for this, but it seems I can't. That same fact is the driving force behind the development of "light gas" guns, which use a propellant charge to compress an intermediate working gas such as hydrogen, in which the speed of sound is higher, which then acts on the projectile. That yields a higher cap on the muzzle velocity, but the cap is still there, albeit significantly higher. As Christopher points out, the theoretical maximum muzzle velocity for a railgun is . . . light speed.

Re: M44 offhand @ 500 yards Well, I am not an expert on the subject, but it's my understanding that the Mosin-Nagant is a full sized service rifle, built with the assumption that combat would be taking place at long ranges, while the M16 is an assault rifle, built on the assumption that combat is taking place at medium ranges, and also using a lighter round. The lighter bullet would be more susceptible to external influences, as it's not only lighter, but has a higher surface area to volume ratio. In other words, that 30% miss rate might not be entirely your fault.

Re: More Railgun "Quantum junction. Get in both lanes."

Re: Order of the Stick Whoa . . . Posthumous return. Return dooms home. Durkon comes back as a powerful lich?

Re: M44 offhand @ 500 yards Yeah, using a tool to do exactly what it was designed to do is sure a mind-boggling feat. But, that's still some fine shooting for offhand with iron sights!

Re: Dungeons, suitable for crawling or delving? At this point I'm thinking that a dungeon consisting of about a dozen rooms, with four to six encounters including the "boss", would be adequate for an evening's adventuring, especially if there's stuff to be done before going in and after coming out. I'm thinking something along the lines of giant rats in the sewers . . . after all, rats are the traditional starting enemy. That would give me some tunnels and rooms to wander through, with escalating encounters of more/bigger/tricked-out rats, until things end up in a forgotten temple to some kind of thematically appropriate power, where some crazy beggar has wandered in and started using the artifacts to raise an army of rats. In a twist ending, after defeating the super-rats that have just been created, the players will discover that self-styled King or Queen of Rats has no combat abilities . . . how that goes down will be up to the players.

Re: "Neat" Pictures You can do better than that, even! You see, while there are a lot of configurations that the cube can get into starting from the solved state, that set doesn't include ALL the physically possible arrangements of the cubes. So, if you take it apart, and reassemble it in a configuration that it can't get to from solved, it can't get BACK to solved from that configuration. Best of all, you haven't pulled any stickers off, so there's no evidence that it's been tampered with!

Re: More space news! Man, talk about credential inflation. I need a bachelor's degree to tell whether food tastes good?

So, I find that I might be running a Skype game for a couple of online friends in the near future, and I figure I'll need some dungeons. Unfortunately, I've got little experience with design, so I'm turning to the collective knowledge of Herodom for help. Basically, how big should a dungeon be? How many rooms constitutes a session's worth of gameplay? I figure that it'll depend at least partly on encounter density, too, so that's also an issue. What percentage of the rooms should have enemies? What should the balance of room to corridor be like? How much thought do I need to put into the functionality of the dungeon layout? I'm thinking that in the absence of other ideas, I'll use real life buildings for inspiration, but it seems like such things rarely resemble traditional fantasy game dungeons in layout. Am I overthinking things when I look at a dungeon and wonder who dug it, and why they built it like they did?

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN) (non-climate change thread) "Researches in Juno, Alaska, discover room-temperature superconductor!"

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN) (non-climate change thread) Maybe there's still hope that I can retire in a different star system!

Re: Demonic Swarm Seems to me, that's exactly the kind of thing that "Physical Manifestation" is FOR.

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN) (non-climate change thread) Well, "tardyonic" matter can interact with photons, so it would seem to make sense that tachyonic matter could, as well, just from a sense of symmetry. Of course, that assumes that there IS such a thing.