Lawnmower Boy

Re: Your favorite Hero Codes of Honor "I promise to be a true son to all women until my homeworld of Vulcan finds its rightful place in the Comity of Planets." Why do I remember that? Where is it from? Seriously looking for answers to that second question, BTW.

Re: Order of the Stick Oh, come on. Belkar killed a Chaotic Evil NPC, and now he's balanced that. Clearly, he's Chaotic Neutral.

Re: Istvatha V'han - why can't she conquer Earth? She's the Contessa Montesarchi, she has violet eyes, and her home base is on Irunium. She employs mercenaries with swords and alien Mafioso, and has trouble dealing with guys with assault rifles. No wonder she can't conquer Earth. Now, I know there may be skeptics out there, so I'll drop my ultimate argument. If you read Kenneth Bulmer's "Dimension" series (warning, clunky prose ahead), you'll want it to be true, too. More seriously, this would be the Dark Champions version.

Re: DEMON plot help (Warning: Spoilers) All this praise has me a-blushing. Thanks, guys. Hey, look at the rep!

Re: DEMON plot help (Warning: Spoilers) The fall of Demon, as described in Demon:Servants of Darkness, requires that Vander Bleek (unintentionally) assassinate the Edomite when he first comes into his presence. I took the gem to be the means to that end. But if more is wanted, the Thirteenth Floor is critically compromised in the weeks leading up to 2012. Two statted operatives of the Edomite, Devil Dog and Jack Fool, can actually be turned by the Descending Hierarchy, and Jack Fool has access to the Thirteenth Floor. I say that the Liber's main power is to free souls from Hell's grip. The Hierarchy's deep plan is to get even fuller control over Vander Bleek by appearing to give up its main leverage. And, incidentally, it will engineer an encounter between Vander Bleek and Devil Dog in which Vander Bleek has to use this power to turn Devil Dog. It is a minor indiscretion from the Edomite's point of view, comparable to the loss of Morning Star. But Devil Dog is fated to be Jack Fool's Dog.

Re: Strength and Dex Benchmarks Here's a tentative answer for strength benchmarking. Galactic Champions might be taken as a Legion analogue, so it's strongest member is a Superboy equivalent. Rampart/Superboy=100 CKC offers Grond as a Hulk equivalent: Hulk (normal state)=90. There are some characters stronger than Grond/Hulk, but that's as it should be, because there have to be sparring partners to beat up when you apply "Rage-Augmented Strength," p. 61 of Ultimate Brick, to your buffed version of Grond. Brawler is the top-of-the-line normal superhero (Thor?)=80 Diamond=Thing, so Thing =75 Prince Marus is Namor=60 (probably a lowball figure) The brick-played-for laughs, at the lowest end of brickiness scale, is Bulldozer. Perhaps compare him with the Wrecking Crew? Anyway, 50. Tomahawk, a somewhat generic strong-but-not-a-brick character comparable to, say, Spider-Man, is 45.

Re: Alternate Universe: No Industry, No Guns Just because I'm that kind of guy, I'll point out here that the environmental degradation theory of decline for Easter Island is not without its critics. There's a "no more islands" school of Oceanic historians who find it somewhat offensive. And before someone proclaims "PC," I'll point out the parallel Atlantic case, where this theory has been built up for Greenland but ignores all the other Atlantic islands (Faroes, Shetlands, Orkneys, Vestflotten, Outer Hebrides) --and never mind Arctic Russia-- where nothing of the sort happened.

Re: Echo Park Time Travel Mart Why don't you will have done it?

Re: Order of the Stick Clearly Roy is going to be reincarnated as a dark elf female cavalier dual-wielding lances. That's possible, right?

Re: Hypothetical Planets (in our solar system) Plus Counter-Earth. But it's a silly planet. We won't go there.

Re: Regression of Interstellar Civilizations Is that kind of like blowing up space shuttles by sending them up univestigated the day after an accident, or insisting that the government drop billions of dolllars on solar power satellites and orbital weapons that will, y'know, not work? Sorry, but has anyone here looked at Jerry Pournelle's "site?"

Re: Alternate Earth 3: Passionless Christ Made it Roman Catholic. Dostoevsky can explain. At length.

Re: Alternate Earth 3: Passionless Christ Actually, that's what Gibbon's eighteenth century critics said he said. Gibbon wanted to argue that the Romans broke Christianity, so that it could not support and strengthen the state the way that the Church of England supported modern Britain. There are two very interesting works on Gibbon out at the moment: Porter's Gibbon is succinct, Pocock's ongoing multivolume work is fey and infuriating, but a whole buncha learning.

Re: Silly idea: Sword & Source Code I actually used an immersive virtual reality fantasy RPG in my last Star Hero campaign --which was one heck of a long time ago. It was supposed to be the key to the big campaign revelation when the players realised they were interacting at FTL speeds. (The setting was a pure STL interstellar campaign very loosely based on Ursula K. Leguin's Hainish novels, so this was a big deal.) But the players never cottoned on to the point, and the game sort of ground to a halt after I threw them in a petulant "rock falls" kinda death trap.

Re: What gives the "rightful" king the right? Great for gamers; less so for those who shape major policy decisions (notice how I am not bringing up Iraq here? I'm so restrained) on the basis of what they learned around the table.

Re: Alternate Universe: No Industry, No Guns "It's my weekend, and I'll post if I want to/ You'd post, too if you were as MEGO as me-e-e" All natural iron on Earth (leaving a minute and probably overestimated number of meteors aside) exists in some kind of ferric oxide. Rust is not very useful, so chemically, the crucial issue is to find some reactant such that FexOy+R> Fe +RO. Nature has cooperatively provided us with an "R" in the form of carbon. Unfortunately, the production of CO2, CO, etc does not produce as much heat as is required to unrust iron. The solution is to introduce excess atmospheric oxygen and burn carbon to produce the surplus heat required to reduce the iron oxide. Unfortunately, iron-carbon alloys have a lower melting temperature the higher the carbon proportion goes. Melting high-carbon iron will plug your airholes, unless it be your intent to produce high carbon iron alloy. Now, in traditional ironmaking, there are three broad categories of product, designated by their industrial use: cast iron (highest proportion of carbon, up to 4%); steel (carbon 1--2%); and wrought iron (up to 1%). Cast iron not only melts at a reasonable temperature so that it can be cast in molds, it is also very hard. Wrought iron, by contrast, is very tough. Steel has both the qualities of hardness and toughness in a balance between the extremes of cast and wrought iron. Cast iron may be easier to produce, but iron is not a very good casting metal for a number of reasons. Above all, it shrinks in the mold (making it artistically unimpressive) and the casting process carries various impurities into the final form that weaken the cast. This is a very tricky business, still not fully understood in the 1940s, when the use of aluminum additive to suppress one kind of flaw (CO bubbles) nearly caused a fiasco in the Pacific Fleet. If most consumers want steel or wrought iron, you have two choices. You can make fully carburised iron and sell it to secondary industry, where it is turned into steel or wrought iron by heating the cast iron and exposing the hot metal to an air blast so that the carbon is gradually burnt away. Or you can arrange your reactor in such a way that it produces this product. This sounds tough, but it is not actually that hard. You just use a "flux," a composite material that washes the semi-molten nuggets of iron out of your reactor. Because the moisture content of the air will govern just how much heat you can extract from a given amount of air blown into the reactor, iron of this kind made in dry climates such as northern Nigeria and southern India will be inherently superior to iron made in a climate such as England's, as will iron made from ores that are high in their iron percentage in the first place, such as those of Sweden and Spain. All this said, there are two industries that will buy conveniently sized chunks of cast iron ("pigs"). Naval and fortress artillery makers do not care if their guns look ugly or are engineered for cheapness and safety over lightness, and the bigger ships get, the more nail makers are interested in cheap production over individual quality. Ingenious manipulation of water power (or, of course, a steam engine) will yield very nearly automated nail production. Just heat the pig up in a furnace, throw it in one end of the slit mill, and cheap nails come out the other end. If you switch the economics of the industry on their end and go looking for the cheapest way of making cast iron, then the production process starts to look a little different. "All" you need is a big brick tower, granted that you have the ceramics to resist this kind of heat. Fill it with a mix of conveniently available carbon, and iron ore, light a fire, blast air through the bottom (with water or windmill-pumped bellows), and in good time, molten cast iron will drip out the bottom. Moulds for guns, frying pans and even rails can be put in the bottom (note that I'm leaving out one of the most expensive labour costs, puddling). The charcoal ultimately required will be proportionate to the amount of iron that is wanted. England's most important traditional ironmaking industry was located in the Weald forest south of London, because it could conveniently supply shipbuilders and the Royal Navy along the Thames. There was always another healthy industry in the northeast, in Cumbria, and in the Midlands, stretching west towards Wales. As the Royal Navy's operational base shifted west towards the Devon coast, however, a new industry was born in the Severn river valley, which contains several areas where (very bad) iron ore is found alongside substantial deposits of coal. It is most unlikely that the legendary early ironfounders such as Abraham Darby were in fact the first to smelt cast iron with coal. I think their religion has far more to do with their fame than their actual merits, because for reasons that go to eighteenth century English [ecclesiastical] politics, "Dissenters" and "Nonconformists" celebrated innovativeness and "practical knowledge" amongst their fellows. So convenience and a market for cast iron specifically determines the mode and place of the first celebrated experiments with industrial-scale manufacture of cast iron. (Note: Sung China+cast Iron=industrial scale B.S.) The presumption that cast iron could not be made on the same scale with charcoal is certainly right for some reasons. The death of the Wealden industry was long, slow and horrid. As early as the 1730s, a visionary scheme to transfer British ironmaking to America to take advantage of its limitless charcoal supplies had much currency. But we need to be aware of the context. There were other demands on the Weald. Fuel was a key element in the British cost of living, especially around London, and this drove the cost of fuel up in the first place. The Weald was a producing forest in no small part because it was inaccessible to commercial farming due to the fact that its soils would not support roads easily, and one had to move gravel long distances in order to pave them. Traditionally, roads in places like the Weald are paved with timber --a nasty little negative feedback loop. Getting at the more inaccessible wood was thus expensive. There is little evidence that the Weald was running out of wood per se so much as of accessible wood in the 1700s. In Sweden, Cumbria and the Urals, there was no shortage of charcoal, and therefore no reason to turn to coal. Swedish steelmakers, still using charcoal, were among the first to turn to the Bessemer process for making cast steel. Globally, of course, the development of the railroad brought the whole world to the foundry gate and gave a huge advantage to places with convenient access to coal and good communications. Coal-made iron took off, and since this was indispensable to railmaking anyway, created a positive feedback loop. Crucible, exothermic steel ("Bessemer" process and others) made for even better rails, creating the need for a secondary smelting and intensifying demand on fuel. No industry, not even the Swedish, I think, could build a national rail network on charcoal. Traditional ironfounding is a complex industry burdened with a not-very-helpful traditional language and certain hard-to-grasp concepts such as the flux. Like any historical enterprise, it turns out that context is dependent on knowing boring dates and placenames. I find that historians who work on that side of things may also have an allergy to reading technical books about iron and steel making (I recommend the Iron and Steel Institute's comprehensive Making, Shaping and Forging of Iron and Steel, if I have that title right off the top of my head). There are exceptions, though. Some great work has come out of the bicentennary of the first iron bridge across the Severn. See the articles in Kiraly, if you can find them in my again-off-the-top biblio ref. The result of this obscurity is quite unnecessary confusion, much worsened by the way that it is shaped by a long-dead partisan tradition in British history. (Dead partisanship is so much harder to detect, because we don't know the issues.) But if people could make steel in 1200BC (and they could), there is no reason to think that not having coal would stand in the way of any of the techncal achievements of art that we know took place before the beginning of coal-fired iron in Coalbrook Dale in the 1700s.

Re: Genres HERO GAMES may want to avoid (intended to be humorous) "Roll to make your grant application. Chaotic Evil characters can publish their research at this point."

Re: Alternate Universe: No Industry, No Guns It is possible to make all kinds of iron and steel, on an industrial scale, without coal. Nails, even. Three major ironmaking industries emerged in Europe's charcoal fields at the same time that the Welsh coal-fired industry emerged. There would be very significant differences, yes, but the details are much less exciting than might be supposed. One important difference: people would be much, much uglier than in 10,000 BC.

Re: What gives the "rightful" king the right?

Re: Alien Mysteries of the Champions Universe I've actually never had any problems with the Xenovore origin in Alien Wars. The pre-Xenovore chief scientist just had a cannabalism fetish. (I hate you, Internet, for showing me that such things exist.) Maraud is supposed to be the culmination of a Xenovore supersoldier programme, but there's no reason to think that the Xenovores didn't have supersoldiers coming out their stingers back in the XXIst. It's like the Marvel Universe: it was easy to make 'em in World War II, but nowadays they all go crazy.

Re: Order of the Stick No sympathy for Rover?

Re: Alternate Universe: No Industry, No Guns

Re: Alternate Universe: No Industry, No Guns

Re: Alternate Universe: No Industry, No Guns Mild dissent: I declare a fatwa against S. M. Stirling for being a loud-mouthed schnook. (There shall be only one )

Re: Alternate Earth 3: Passionless Christ David Henige, "Numbers from Nowhere." A case where the title says it all.