McCoy

Re: [New Product] Champions Complete

Rod' date=' the nicknames are, IME, used pretty much exclusively in the Hero community where everyone knows what they mean. No one is going to go into a game shop and ask for Fred or the Big Blue Book or whatever. Also, no one is going to type out "Champions Complete" every time they refer to this book for the rest of their lives (just like no one, I'm pretty sure not even you, types out Hero System Sixth Edition Book One: Character Creation). It [i']will[/i] acquire some sort of "nickname", even if it is only the abbreviation of CC.

c²?

Re: Tolkien Elves in Hero

Wasn't the power of the Elves gradually waning over the Second and Third Ages? While undoubtedly still bada$$' date=' Galadriel was probably a shadow of her First Age self. Knocking over Dol Guldur is no mean feat, but it's not as though Sauron was in it, and she had Thranduil and Celeborn backing her up.[/quote']

Galadriel and Elrond had not waned, because of their rings. Presumably Celeborn began waning after giving his ring to Gandolf, so he had been without it only about 2000 years.

Re: More space news!

Not if Bugs Bunny and Duck Dodgers did their job.

They in charge of Nasa's Imperial To Metric Conversion Dept.?

That would explain so much!

Re: Tolkien Elves in Hero

could thier hearing be targetting?

Believe the elves of Lothlórien said they could shoot the Fellowship because they were breathing so loudly, so I would say yes.

Re: How would you make "the Doctor"?

How does he aquire that knowledge? Can he just pull it "out of the universe" like people breath? Or is it stuff he learned from his travels?

Probably his travels and hacking into every database in the Universe.

What about Jimmy Joe' date=' from Little joes pizza at the Interstate 108. Does he know everything about him?[/quote']

May depend if Jimmy Joe is going to do something famous, or infamous in the future.

 

What about Jon Doe' date=' amnesiac patient Nr. 206 in country hospital? Could the doctor tell him his real identity and what he had to breakfast the day he lost his memory?[/quote']

Pulls out the sonic screwdriver, points it at Patient # 206. "You're name is Bernie Schultz, or at least you have his DNA, and you had kippers for breakfast before you got hit over the head and your wallet stolen."

Re: Tolkien Elves in Hero

D'Ho! Animal Friend! Legolas spoke to a horse, then rode it without saddle or bridle, even convincing it to go on The Paths of the Dead.

Re: Tolkien Elves in Hero

I was thinking of giving the character super-acrobatics based on flight anyway. This fits as well.

was their walkign on top of snow also trackless?

Don't recall that being mentioned one way or the other, but almost a decade since I read the book.

Re: How would you make "the Doctor"?

Obviously' date=' a metric ass-tonne of skills. Lots of overall levels. KS: Everything and SS: Science on huge skill rolls so he can eat the penalties for narrower subjects.[/quote']

Yeah, that's the problem with the Doctor as a player character. He knows everything. About everyone.

Re: Yow would you make "the Doctor"?

Time Lord: Prehaps the easest power we know he has...Life Suport: Does Not Age (his ageing is so slow that it might as well be unafected by the ravages of time). He did age ONCE to his true age (Thanks Master)' date=' which I beleve it was 5000 years old cronologicaly, and he was still alive.[/quote']

I believe he was closer to 900.

 

When Rory was The Last Centurion I always wanted him to look at the Doctor and say something like "Stop treating me like a child, I am older than you."

Re: Tolkien Elves in Hero

About the only other thing I remember from LOTR you haven't mentioned is that the elves were able to walk on a single rope like a bridge, and walk on top of snow instead of having to force their way through it.

Re: More space news!

It just now occurred to me that the flimsy' date=' ultra-light box I've been picturing would probably not survive the medium-speed interaction with the atmosphere; you'd need something sturdier and therefore heavier. It still seems to me that a box or "vehicle bay" could have been made to work, but I don't know enough about this to warrant putting much effort into arguing about it, and there's certainly no sense in getting entrenched into the BOX, DAMMIT! position. At the end of the day, one would assume that the NASA and JPL folks know what they're doing.[/quote']

If it gets down in working order, then yes, they did.

Re: More space news!

So, barring some near-magic discovery of a means of going FTL without using ludicrous amounts of energy, we're stuck with slower-than-light travel. A realistic rate of speed is likely to be in the ballpark of 1LY/decade or 1 LY/Century. Well, currently humans can live only about 120 years, max, and their "useful" lifespan for the purposes of a mission like this would likely be more on the order of about 50 years. That's only 5LY at the 10% lightspeed route. So what are our options?

Option 1: Generation starship. Likely slow-moving(1% of lightspeed) because fast-moving requires too much energy for such a large vessel. Faces problems of leakage, breakdown, etc. Needs to stay intact for hundreds if not thousands of years. If you assume one could stay intact and sustainable for 10,000 years, you might have a maximum range of 100LY.

Option 2: Coldsleep starship. Holds humans in cryonic suspension, assuming we've worked out all the technical hurdles to reviving people in such a state. Smaller ship, could travel relatively fast. The only down side is that cryonics experts say that the useful lifespan of frozen tissue is about 1000 years due to radiation damage. So, at 10% of lightspeed, we again hit a max range of about 100 LY.

Option 3: "cold-seed" starship. Holds human embryos in cryonic suspension, with an artificial incubator/womb built to "birth" them, and some sort of android surrogate parents activated to teach them all they need to know. Aside from the ethical problems of "space orphanages", we still hit the same range limits as before, since the embryos can only keep for 1000 years.

Option 4: robots/androids. We abandon the concept of human exploration of other star systems, and delegate the task to robots or androids, who will plant flags, take soil samples, etc. Assuming the same 10,000 year sustainability parameters, maybe we can reach out 1000 LY with a robot crew.

 

Whenever I start to crunch the numbers for this kind of stuff, I begin to understand why there are no alien space arks and probably no alien visitors. The logistics of manned interstellar travel are just really harsh and unkind.

Hybridization. Send out your robots to explore, build a communications array, build infrastructure from local materials (Option 4). By that time we may have a faster way to get there. If noting else, equip the vessel with a light sail, use all available fuel on the outbound leg, deceleration provided by huge laser built by the robots at the destination. Send your cold seed and cold sleep ships to already built infrastructure (Option 3 & 2). If we get the ability to get beyond .5 c we gain some extra time by relativistic time dilation.

Once you have you biosphere set up, send out the next wave of robot explorers. Number of settled star systems increase exponentially, in the blink of an eye (geologically/astronomically speaking) we have settled every suitable star in the galaxy.

Why hasn't anyone done this yet?

Re: Selling All of My HERO 6E Books, 50% Off Cover!

Believe me' date=' I'm gonna grill 'em for all the "how cheaply can I get this there?" intel I can! Thank you![/quote']

Then you want USPS media rate.

Re: More space news!

There's no way they can use hydrogen on this kind of craft. They have an extremely tight mass budget (with the centaur upper stage they where already stretching the Atlas Vs capacity)' date=' and after a eight month trip there's a 20% boil off for hydrogen. That's 20% extra propellant they'd have to launch of Earth in a heavy cryogenic tank (and with hydrogen weighing barely 50g per liter you need a lot of tank). So they'd have to use some long term storage fuel. And for NASA, that means hydrozine, as methane rockets have only been tested once (worked perfectly, much like NERVA and the other good ideas they've ignored).[/quote']

Thank you!

 

As for the logic behind using a sky crane: They want the rover down' date=' dust free and safely. That means they need to have rockets, as aerobraking isn't going to slow 1.2 tons down enough (that's rover plus unspecified landing systems). Rockets plus martian surface equals dust, so they have to separate the rocket and the rover 20m up (or use a heavy dust proof box).[/quote']

They are separating the rover 20 meters above the surface, and lowering it on a cable 21 feet long. Platform does not hover but continues downward as the cable is being played out? The rockets come within 21 feet of the surface and this is far enough away to not kick up any dust?

Re: More space news!

Sally Ride' date=' first US woman in space, dies at 61[/url']

Mustang Sally?

Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again,

Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock

 

Begin, Reagan, Palestine, Terror on the airline,

Ayatollah's in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan

 

Wheel of Fortune, Sally Ride, heavy metal suicide,

Foreign debts, homeless Vets, AIDS, Crack, Bernie Goetz

 

Hypodermics on the shores, China's under martial law,

Rock and Roller cola wars, I can't take it anymore

Re: [New Product] Champions Complete

PDF: $20.00

Print: $40.00

Print+PDF: $40.00

Is that correct?

I want to support this, so put me down for a PDF, but if I can get both for $40.00 I'll take both.

Re: Make Your Own Motivational Poster

Yeah, those mean old prescriptive grammarians, trying to tell us how to write sentences that other people can understand. The nerve of them!

 

If you're Shakespeare, go ahead and split your infinitives and end your sentences with prepositions. Throw in some dialogue that uses double negatives for emphasis. Just remember that when you split the verb form from the "to," it makes it more difficult for readers to recognise that you're using an infinitive in the first place. A dangling preposition demands that readers go back over the sentence and find the referent. Double negatives can be read as negating the negation. Compare it to reading a French passage where the "que" in the "ne que" formulation gets buried, and you spend most of a sentence misparsing the "ne" as a negation. Ditto a German sentence where the writer has decided to bury the second half of the verb instead of putting it at the end of the sentence where it's supposed to be.

 

And if those last sentences read like gibberish to you because you don't read French (or even if you do), consider the fate of the poor English-as-a-second-language reader trying to parse your freewheeling, prescriptive-grammar-be-damned prose. Shakespeare was writing poetry, not writing close analysis.

I refuse to recast a sentence because "that's not how Julius Caesar would have said it."

Re: Make Your Own Motivational Poster

It would not be the first time that English Grammerians attempted to guide the formation of the language by making declarations that the way a large part of the English-speaking population is currently speaking is "wrong". English is driven from the grass-roots up' date=' except when academia coins a new term from greek and latin roots. Various attempts have been made to influence the language from the "top down", but English-speakers are resistant to being told how to communicate unless it actually results in better communication.[/quote']

My pet peeve is "don't end a sentence with a preposition." Chaucer ended sentences with prepositions. Shakespeare ended sentences with prepositions. The editors of the King James Bible ended sentences with prepositions. no one could diddle the words like the Elizabethans, so if you want me to stop ending sentences with prepositions come up with more venerable examples of English than Shakespeare and The KJV Bible.

Re: More space news!

Counter-question:

You need to get that rocket stage off anyway. You can't just keep it lying on top of the rover, it would slow him down.

So why not fly it away? It is only dead weight and a potential explosion/fire hazard. No mater how well the fuel burns, there will always be residue.

Again, why do you need to get it away? The retros are attached to a dust tight box, come down on the retros, wait for the dust to settle, open the box and drive the rover away, leaving the retros sitting on the ground.

Only a potential explosion/fire hazard if the oxidizer is already mixed into the fuel. Is it? The retros can be throttled so not solid fuel. If they are using H₂/LOX, vent the LOX after you are safely down. Not enough oxygen in that wisp of an atmosphere to support combustion.

Re: More space news!

Then how do you want to land it in one piece?

 

"At that poitn we still go about 1 thousand mph".

"[The parachute] has to withstand 65 thousand pounds of force".

"That big parachute we got will only slow us down to about 200 mph".

 

900 kg impacting at 200 mph is still a little bit to much impact force. And propably beyond what inflatable airbags can compensate. If we can eve use it to the ground, because if we don't cut it far enough away it would likely just land directly on our rover (container).

 

Right now you are still arguing this phase being unessesary. Once you accept that it is nessesary, we can discuss if the execution of this phase is right.

No, I am not arguing the retrorockets as unnecessary. Retro's kill the horizontal momentum be it land by rocket or sky crane, agreed?

Specifically what I am questioning is the assertion

In both variants you then fly off the "fly on rockets" section.

If you are down by rocket, is it necessary that you then fly off the rockets? Some posting here are making that assumption, I'm challenging it. Why is the rocket fly off unavoidable? Is there a way to be sure unused reserve fuel is rendered safe?

Re: Dirty Laundry

In Amurikuh' date=' isn't "Not Safe For Work" reserved for anything sexual?[/quote']

In this case, language. I'm not working, but someone accessing the net at work might have problems from the F-word.

Re: Dirty Laundry

Watch' date=' and enjoy. [/quote']

Um, was the NSFW implied?

Re: More space news!

We have already established that every step down to the "fly on rockets" phase is nessesary. You simply cannot get that rover down safely otehrwise.

So that leaves two option to get it onto the ground:

Lower it on cables (current idea).

Just land it in a dustproof container.

In both variants you then fly off the "fly on rockets" section.

I'm not stipulating the fly off would be needed in a "land by rocket" scenario. There has been some speculation here that this is needed because of the hypergolic propellant, but I have not seen that confirmed.

The container would need extra sensors to determine ground contact/point it can fly off. (right now the existing sensors in the rover do that).

And can you confirm that? I had assumed a simple mechanical linkage that would release the cable as soon as it was no longer taunt, which would mean the skycrane was suddenly 900 kg less massive with the same rocket trust and it goes up and away like a balloon with the string cut.

Using an onboard sensor, with the implied program command to release the cable and rev up the rockets, sounds needlessly complicated, but this is NASA after all.

Re: More space news!

"20 meters above the surface, it lowers the rover on a tether that is 21 feet long." [emphasis added]

Anyone else having Climate Orbiter flashbacks?

Re: More space news!

Well, plus they can also explode.

 

Anyway, I speculate that the reason they're not going rockets all the way down is that the propellant necessary would weigh more than the parachute does. At high atmospheric speeds a 'chute is going to produce more drag than the rockets would, anyway.

 

Lots of things about rocket science and interplanetary travel are counterintuitive; I think this is just an unusually extreme example. Still, I can't help thinking there must be a better way. Autorotating propeller? Some kind of balloon? Shrug.

The 'chute i understand. It's the sky crane that makes no sense. Hovering in place to lower the probe then takeing off for parts unknown has to take more fuel than landing by rocket.