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[Question] [ **Closed**. This question is [opinion-based](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers. --- **Want to improve this question?** Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by [editing this post](/posts/119234/edit). Closed 5 years ago. [Improve this question](/posts/119234/edit) So, it is the 26th century, and you are a terran soldier in the military. You made some stupid mistakes in Delta Scorpion, and ended up with inner organs becoming outer organs. You never read your contract, which stated any human that died in combat can randomly be selected for the CYBORG PRIME program. You get decked out with a metal skeleton frame, a robotic heart, a super action rocket mounted laser fist, and you get shaved. All corpses that are sent to the CP program are shaved completely(head, eyebrows, nose) before they get their augmentation. My question is, what is a plausible reason why this is done? [Answer] As @Erik has already stated, it reduces the chances of complications due to loose hairs during the numerous surgeries required by the CYBORG program, particularly those involving the noggin. It's the same reason they shave patients going in for brain surgery - make's it easier for the surgeons to see what they're doing. As an additional note - maybe some of the drugs used in the program are similar to chemo drugs, and have hair loss as a side-affect. Bringing someone back from the dead is a gnarly business. Maybe it's just less upkeep and maintenance for the cyborgs if you don't have to worry about cleaning and trimming their hair. Maybe one test subject had lice that got loose and infected the program, so they just went scorched earth and shaved everyone. [Answer] It is very plausible to remove all external hair before a surgical intervention in our days. Before every surgery all the hair is removed from the spot. If a hair drops in the body it may cause an infection because the body may recognize it as a foreign body. Even if it's a corpse, they will be living organisms again, and as long as they are not complete robots, the problem may stay. Note that the body itself is covered with a lot of hairs that may not be visible. I would also suggest you reconsider the shaving. It is a very old technique that holds the risk of cuts. Also the roots of the hair will stay. At my last operation I heard the nurses point that out. They said that nowadays (and that was like five years ago) we have a lot of alternatives that would do a better job and called shaving "barbaric" and "old fashioned". [Answer] The top brass wants the **other** troops to see the cyborgs as equipment, not as people. Expendable equipment. That will be a problem with ex-human resources, and especially human-looking ones. So what can be done? Shaving the head is one little step in that direction. Compare this story about [bomb disposal robots](https://gizmodo.com/5870529/the-sad-story-of-a-real-life-r2-d2-who-saved-countless-human-lives-and-died), and how much bother it was for the repair staff. [Answer] The most obvious reason would be that it reduces the chance of any hairs getting stuck inside the metal parts during the grafting process. That might cause weird defects later, and since the dead aren't going to object, removing everything that might get trapped and make the cyborg program less likely to go wrong in some way sounds like a good idea. [Answer] If they already go into so much bother, wouldn't it be easier to just replace the entire body and keep only the brain? If these cyborgs are used in battle, every part where metal meets living flesh would be prone to separate or tear, and the flesh would get bruised or cut up just from metal parts moving against it so much. (I'm guessing your battles involve a lot of body movement, they aren't just sitting in a chair driving a battle mech or something.) So it's not really a question of being shaved, more a question of people not bothering to give body hair to a cyborg, even if they make them somewhat human-looking on the surface for the purpose of getting the civilians to co-operate with them easier. ]
[Question] [ I am writing a short story and would like to know what would be the most realistic way to introduce a human to robot interface (exchanging data with an AI robot)? I was thinking of some kind of a chip that would be put on a human head (or implanted if needed) that would be able to "read" what's going on in the brain and transmit that data wirelesly to a robot. My question is does something remotely similar exist today and would something like that be possible with future technology (like 50 to 100 years in the future)? I'm also interested in being able to "copy" a person into a robot, so bonus points would be for that chip being able to not just scan current brain waves but also to be able to "copy" your brain (memories, knowledge etc...) to a robot. EDIT: I might have not been precise enough, so to clarify, I was looking for a robot to human interface that would allow for them to exchange information. Not just speech or thought per se, and not in a way where robot knows what we are thinking of as a textual info. As I said in a comment to one answer, data that I am aiming to exchange through that interface can be images or memories of some event both visual and aural. So not just describing something to a robot textually (or robot to us, data exchange should go both ways), but actually sharing information as we have seen it or as we envision it (or robot). And that's where the bonus part comes, being able to "copy" a brain to a robot. So the first part of the question is whether it would be possible to make that kind of an interface for exchanging data with AI in the future, and the second part is would it be possible to scan a human and store him in a robot (immortalise a human in a way). I know that we know nothing about consciousness yet and would that robot then be conscious that it's the same person it was before the transfer, but question is primarily would it be possible to copy all of the knowledge, memory etc... from a person to a computer. Now that I think of it maybe I should have split this into 2 questions. [Answer] With current technology we're already able to 'read minds' a little bit, see <http://news.berkeley.edu/2011/09/22/brain-movies/> . The problem with this technology (and any technology really) is that every brain is different, so you'll have to do a lot of calibration first. Even if you're able to capture every signal in the brain, you'd still need some sort of benchmark to actually interpret these signals. But, if you make sure you've also got a microphone and camera so you can see exactly what a person sees and hears, and have them do a bunch of psychological tests, that should give you enough data for such a calibration. As for copying a person, there's a lot more to 'you' than just the electrical impulses in your brain. There's all kinds of hormones (they're a *really* big influence on [your behaviour](https://www.journals.elsevier.com/hormones-and-behavior/)), blood sugar/salinity, and also how the rest of your body deals with signals to and from your brain that help shape your interpretations and reactions to the world around you. This is not something that can't be copied, but having MRI scans, complete bloodworks and the like at your disposal, rather than a single chip, would make it a lot easier. [Answer] ### Voice Recognition Technology Our voices and ears have evolved as a *great* way to wirelessly exchange data. While it's not as high-tech of a solution as the one you're looking for, it's a solution our brains are well equipped to handle. We're used to talking and listening as a means of data exchange, and I imagine it would be difficult for a human to comprehend most higher speeds of data input. Compared to a brain chip based solution, voice recognition requires no surgery for humans, is instantly available for almost everyone, and allows robots to communicate with everybody, instead of merely with those who have been chipped. Humans also *like* talking to other things, and I imagine it will give most people a sense of joy to talk to a polite, funny, well-mannered AI rather than just getting plugged in. (Well, most of us like that too, but I'm digressing...) [Answer] *Make your AI a really, really good psychologist* There are some reactions that our bodies have in certain situations. Emotions can be read from minor body movements, lies detected through heart rate and sweat glands, intentions understood through the direction and frequency of our eyes flickering. While all of these things can be suppressed with training they can also be (in theory) ramped up at a subconscious level with training. If your AI can pick up on all of these things then they'll be able to garner a pretty good idea of what we're thinking when exposed to certain stimuli, and by exposing us to said stimuli and observing our reactions the AI will be able to selectively probe our brains and return information to either our subconscious or conscious mind. So have the AI sit the human down in a chair and give the human stimuli. They don't even necessarily have to make sense to the human (as long as the AI knows what it's doing). Lights and images, bursts of sound and tactile interactions, all will let the AI subtly probe the human brain and judge a person's reactions. If the person is used to such an interface then they might be able to enter an enhanced mental state where they're just acting as the human component in a strange biomechanical brain. If they aren't then the interface should still work, but perhaps not as fast or as well. This works best if you expect human/AI pairs to interact often, as the more a human interacts with such an AI the more the AI will be able to understand and predict the human, and the easier the human will find it to convey what they want to the AI without having to consciously articulate the thought (though it doesn't stop them doing so, a useful hand wave for when you want to/don't want to explain plot). It may have some strange psychological side effects, such as AI dependence, but if your AI is good enough at it's job it will know exactly what to do to alleviate such symptoms. Take this far enough and the AI will be able to query your subconscious for memories and run simulations on potential situations without you consciously realising. We already have technologies that can [read human emotions](http://www.businessinsider.com/r-if-you-want-to-fake-it-dont-do-it-around-this-computer-2014-21?IR=T), ones that [respond to spoken requests](http://www.apple.com/uk/ios/siri/), robotic arms that [always win at rock-paper-scissors](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nxjjztQKtY), search engines that [recommend things to you before you know you want them](https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl) and [eye tracking software](http://www.tobiipro.com/product-listing/tobii-pro-studio/) that can be repurposed for a whole variety of applications. This system doesn't need any modifications to the human, and can in theory be done at a distance if your AI is integrated into the working environment of the person. Such integration would also have the nice side effect of the AI being able to do things like open doors when it realises you want to walk through them, make sure your coffee is ready at the right time by watching your sleep patterns, bring over that paper on neural network cohesion before you realise you want to read it and mimic every aspect of your brain when it comes time to unleash the robotic bodysnatchers... [Answer] The brain is based on electricity so yes you could have a chip that monitors the neurons around the brain to read whats going on. You can use electricity to modify brain functions. However this technology is not available today. They use electrodes attached to the outside of the brain to monitor what the brain is doing, but with the advancements of science it will feasible in the future. [Answer] I think that if the AI read my mind it would be overwhelmed with Foreigner lyrics, vague sexual schemings, worry about that sore tooth and other things going on which are peripheral to what I want to tell it. For a written story you should stick to a verbal interchange between the human and some (human appearing?) avatar of the AI. It is how humans are used to interfacing with other intelligences. Dialogue moves a narrative right along. Plus you can use subtle but increasing strangeness in the dialogue to let the reader gradually understand that one side of the exchange is a nonhuman. More fun that way than writing "Starchy sat down to have a talk with the AI". [Answer] I have been imaging the following for some time now... Consider a huge swarm of nano-sized RFIDS (Radio Frequency chips). Each individual RFID would be molecule sized. A large number of these RFIDS (millions or billions) would be injected into the subject, and after some time, they would lodge in various locations in the brain (because that would be how they were designed to behave). Once in place, they could monitor transactions in the brain in microscopic detail, and would transmit their data via radio to an external device for analysis. When they have been monitoring long enough, they have collected enough data to "simulate" your thought patterns. At this point, they could start to actually inject thoughts into your mental state. Essentially, you would not be able to tell if a thought had initiated with you or with them. They could even be used to short-circuit specific thoughts or behavior patterns. The other thing I think about related to this is some of the mind controlling parasites you can find in the wild on planet earth. Some of them are truly frightening. I imagine one or more of them going bat-sh\_\_ crazy on the human species. It is not an impossible thing. [Answer] **Communication** Speech is the original Human Communication format, so that would be the original building block, the most logical start point, right after keyboard and mouse. From that you could expand by adding recording devices to humans in order to store information for later transmission. Maybe an auditory recording device implanted in the Human and add some video recording implanted in the eyes. Run a Cable to the robot to transmit (IMO wireless tech is probably not a great idea, security, speed, and signal issues). That should take care of a bunch of the data transmission method. That gets concrete things stored and moved. That covers Data. More complicated is with the concept of *information*. I define Information as Data + Context. Just because you can transmit a ton of data doesn't mean you want to transmit everything. Part of what happens with speech is *editing* stuff down to give context. You don't get that with a simple bulk data transmission. We provide the context that turns Data into Information That is a huge part of human communication. This is an oversimplification, but it's a start point. **Consciousness** We run into some weirdness when we talk about abstract concepts, why smells trigger memories, what is love and where does it go, what are feelings, and so on. There is so much that we know about the brain and we are learning about the chemistry, but do we really know what consciousness is? Until we can answer that, we can't really set up a method to transmit the entirety of a human consciousness into an alternate vessel. An experience is more than just a sequence of events. It's the dopamine that is released, the adrenaline, and the rest of the chemical cocktail that goes along with the experience that gives layers of complexity to the event. That's not to say it's impossible, maybe adrenaline could be simulated by an increase in cycles per second, and offloading sensory input to a set of higher end processors that are faster but more energy intensive. Dopamine is represented by a change in voltage. A olfactory sensor gets directly linked to specific memory arrays. You'd have to add some handwavium to smooth the concepts out, but so long as you address the more than merely mechanical side of human consciousness, you might be able to jam a brain into a box. This is a good point to start all kinds of philosophical stuff in a cool story! ]
[Question] [ **Closed**. This question needs [details or clarity](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers. --- **Want to improve this question?** Add details and clarify the problem by [editing this post](/posts/71061/edit). Closed 6 years ago. [Improve this question](/posts/71061/edit) Let's say that a scientist has found a way to create and control portals. (for this instance, the portals are the ones from the game PORTAL) If the need arise, could said scientist put an object is said portal then close it, and what would happen to said object? [Answer] I believe the instant you put something into one side of the portal, out comes out the other, as if you stepped through a doorway. Do you mean what happens if you turn off the portal while the object is halfway through when the portal closes? If you want to destroy something -- as in the game -- it's easier to open up one side of the portal high above the target and one side on the floor beneath the target and let the target fall repeatedly through until it reached terminal velocity, then close the portal, so the object crashes at high speed into the floor. Or open a portal high above the target and then open the other side under a very heavy object so that it crashes onto the target. [Answer] In general, the use of teleporters as weapons is known as **telefragging**, and is so commonly brought up in science-fiction works involving teleportation that it has [its own TV Tropes page](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TeleFrag). The specific version here also has a TV Tropes page: "[Portal Cutting](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PortalCut)". The theory behind portal-cutting is, if a portal is closed while something is halfway through it, that thing will be sliced cleanly in two, with one half remaining on one side of the portal and the other half remaining on the other side. Naturally, if the object in question is a person, the results will not be pretty. You know those sliding elevator doors? Imagine getting sliced in half by them. Yeah. Not pretty. So yes, your scientist could most certainly weaponize this. And not just by cutting his enemies in half, either. He could set up one portal above a shark tank, or on the side of a 100-story building, or over a vat of molten iron, or in the middle of frozen Siberia, or *whatever*, then fire a second portal beneath his enemy's feet and send them plunging into it. For maximum fun, you could even just fire portals above and below them and [trap them in an infinite loop of falling](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xElJfFkYwE) (let's face it, everyone who's played Portal has done this at some point). Within a matter of seconds they'll be falling fast enough that if you move one of the portals, they'll slam into the nearest surface at lethal speeds. Alternatively, trap *something else* in an infinite loop, and you won't be able to get past it without getting hit by an object travelling at terminal velocity. Note that portal-cutting is not, in fact, possible in *Portal*, where closing a portal with an object halfway inside it will just push the object away. Presumably, this was so Valve didn't have to mess around with dynamically slicing game objects in half; an in-universe explanation would be that Aperture's portal technology uses wormholes, which would close like that anyway, as @Joe Bloggs describes in the comments. **HOWEVER...** Even if your portal system does work like Portal's, you can still weaponize it. There's the infinite-loop trick, or, depending on the speed that objects get pushed out at, you could potentially have "portal cannons" that eject stuff at high speed. Or just go down the Looney Tunes route and eject really heavy things from high up. A giant anvil or grand piano dropped from the top of a wall ought to hurt plenty (and would probably be as funny as the infinite-falling trick). [Answer] Given the mechanics from the game Portal: One portal would not do anything, connecting it to another would simply connect space at either portal. This has various potential uses as a weapon, mainly from connecting a hazardous environment to the space near the object. Some potential uses: * Create a portal below an object, the object would fall in. When the object is halfway in, close the portals. The object would be cut in two. * Create a portal below an object, the object would fall in. Have the other portal somewhere high up, the object would then drop from a great height. * Create a portal next to an object, with the other portal in or close to to a blast furnace. The object would then be blasted with heat. * Create a portal next to an object and the other in a container with hazardous liquid, acid, scalding water, water under very high pressure, etc. * Create a portal next to an object and the other in a (large) vacuum, the object could be sucked into the vacuum. ## Edit: now with more obscure science: As you stated, the person with this portal gun is a scientist, so he or she will probably have access to, and can figure out how to use some cool lab stuff to their advantage. ### Accelerating a charged object to arbitrary speeds: Similar to how a [cathode ray tube](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathode_ray_tube) works: First you create two portals on two (perfectly) parallel plates, on the surfaces facing eachother. Then you have a ring of conductive material around one of the portals (slightly behind it), and a very light object, with a vacuum inbetween the portals. Apply identical charges to the ring and the object, and apply and adjust a magnetic field to keep the object centered while it gets repulsed again each time it passes through the portals, you now have a particle (for macroscopic particles) accelerator which should be able to (given a strong magnetic field to deflect the object) launch the object at something at relativistic speeds. (caveat: I don't know how electric fields would behave around the portal borders) The same goes for gravitational acceleration, though it's much harder to deflect a non-charged object, but so long as you charge the object you can just accelerate it using gravity and then deflect it with a magnetic field. ### Create arbitrarily strong magnetic fields (and use it to disintegrate stuff) If you've got a coil around the space in between two portals, the magnetic field lines would run from one portal to the other. If you move the portals closer together, there's in effect 'more coil' per unit length of magnetic field line, which would increase the strength of the magnetic field to ridiculous amounts. Ridiculously strong magnetic fields can [break stuff](https://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2015/01/12/how-strong-would-a-magnetic-field-have-to-be-to-kill-you/). You'll probably need near infinite energy, so you'll also need a portal in your hydro-electric dam. ### Travel through time and kill their grandparents You'll need some serious space-ship power for this, but hey, you've got a free ride to the moon already so launching it is much easier. Also, given your ability to launch stuff at arbitrarily high speeds, propulsion shouldn't be much of a problem. Once you achieve relativistic speeds, space-time starts behaving [weirdly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel#Faster-than-light_.28FTL.29_travel), and teleportation can become time travel. But it's complicated, further reading: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_cone> [Answer] Yes. Portals in the game portal also appear to violate conservation of energy so can be used for that as well. # Weapon placement Fire one portal at the moon or at an object in orbit and open another in a chamber at sealevel, put anything you like in orbit, for example a huge number of Rods From God ready to deploy. # Cannon on demand Take one incredibly powerful piece of artilery and one end of a portal in front of the gun. Then whenever you want to destroy something open the other end of the portal facing your target and let your gun fire. # Lava Create a portal at the bottom of a pool of lava. To deploy simply open a second portal above or near your target and spew lava at them. # Generate unlimited free energy. Build a tall circular vacuum chamber surrounded by loops of conductive wire. Take a huge circular, extremely heavy magnetic weight and open portals at the top and bottom. The power you can generate is limited only by the size of the weight. Not a weapon itself but super useful for almost all purposes. # Super Vacuum Fire one portal at the moon, open a second anywhere near your target, watch as they get sucked into orbit. ]
[Question] [ Small vs. Large! If you had nearly the same creature, and the only difference was size, what advantages and disadvantages would large size vs. small size have--beyond the usual--reaching leaves more easily and whatnot? [Answer] Large body better than small for: 1. **Intimidation of other species**. A gazelle at the water hole is going to give way to an African buffalo or an elephant. 2. **Intimidation of your own species, in order to get laid**. If males are competing physically for females, being bigger and stronger than your rivals helps you to win the fights and get the girls. This may drive the evolution of some species towards becoming bigger. 3. **Too big to eat**. Because of your sheer size, the smallest predators can no longer attack you. Either (a) you are too difficult to kill (if a leopard wants to throttle a giraffe, it'll have to climb up to the giraffe's head to do so). Or (b) the amount of effort needed to kill you is not worth the pay off (some [lions kill elephants](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2ZW0EvMzSM) but for most prides there are far easier prey. And (c) there is just too much of you to eat before a horde of scavengers turns up and huge fights break out - basically the predator puts in all the effort and lots of rivals get the benefit of the kill. Many more rivals than if a lion had killed a wildebeest rather than an elephant. Smaller body better than large for: 1. **Maturing fast and getting started on breeding**. Big bodies require more food and more time to grow. So smaller species will churn out the babies faster. (Partial exception to this rule: sauropod dinosaurs laid eggs about the size of an ostrich egg. So they were huge like elephants, but once they got to sexual maturity they could have squillions of babies, like rabbits). 2. **A more athletic body, so a more diverse range of possible lifestyles**. The bigger you get, the more you curtail your options for locomotion, because you eventually exceed the safety factors that your skeleton can take. Horses can walk, trot, gallop and jump over fences. Rhinos, being heavier can walk, trot and gallop, but can't jump over fences. Elephants can only walk. When an elephant 'runs' it is really speed walking. If it tried to trot or jump it would break its legs. Same goes for flying - really big things can't get airborne. 3. **You can fit your body into all sorts of nooks and crannies**. Wolves can give birth in an underground den, birds can nest in hollow trees, and so on. When you reach a certain size these options for hiding from predators and hiding from the elements are lost to you. 4. **Hibernating is dead easy, even if you are warm-blooded**. Lots of teeny things from hummingbirds to hamsters hibernate, aestivate or go into torpor. Bears are the only large mammals to have cracked it, and some scientists say bears don't have 'true' hibernation because their body temperature doesn't drop very much. The reason it doesn't drop is because the amount of fuel the bear would need to raise it again to normal is unfeasibly large. Think of the energy difference between boiling enough water to fill a teacup (hamster sized volume) and boiling enough to fill a bath (bear sized volume). Obviously, things get more complicated when you include cold-blooded creatures like crocodiles. [Answer] Thermal insulation is another advantage, the bigger and rounder you are the easier it is to maintain your core temperature and warmer bodies are able to metabolise faster, also a lot of pathogens cannot survive out of a surprisingly narrow temperature range, you might even heat stress certain parasites too. [Answer] There are many animals species that are different in only size. The major difference is the prey/predator relationship. What can it eat? And what can eat it? The larger an animal becomes, the fewer predators it has to fear. Obviously, the drawbacks of being large means it has to eat more and that requires more area. More area means more competition for food, as well as moving into the area of other predators. The smaller an animal becomes, means there is more food for it to eat. Less mass, means less energy is needed to fuel it. Obviously, the smaller an animal is, more predators are able to eat it. [Answer] ## Advantages of a larger body: * Strength large body means larger muscles. * Stores larger body means larger places to store energy as fat. * Intelligence larger body means more space to store larger brain. ## Advantages of a smaller body: * Requires Less resources to maintain. * Can move more quickly. * Can hide from predators in small spaces [Answer] A large animal can have a complex gut that holds a large volume and takes a long time to process a batch. The [sauropods](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauropoda) got big, in part, so they could efficiently digest the folage available at the time. Basically it contained a huge fermentation vat. [Answer] To paraphrase JBS Haldane: "Drop an insect down a mineshaft and it will flutter to the bottom. Drop a man and his bones break, a horse splatters." Haldane wrote the definitive article on the subject called "On being the right size". He also pointed out the role of the square-cube law which explains why giants don't exist. It can be found [here](http://irl.cs.ucla.edu/papers/right-size.html) and there is also a link to a copy in downloadable PDF format. There is also a relationship between size and ecology. Dinosaurs roamed around on very large landmasses courtesy of continental drift. The remains of Mammoths were discovered that lived on islands and had evolved into pigmy species. Big animals need large areas for their ecology to support them. The smaller the ecosystem, the smaller the organism. An aside: considering King Kong and the dinosaurs he fought lived on Skull Island, if normal biology and evolution applied then King Kong would have been a pigmy giant ape and the dinosaurs only the size of chickens. This means King Kong would be around the size of a teddy bear. Somehow I can imagine a scene with Fay Wray holding pigmy King Kong in one of her hands. :) ]
[Question] [ Those who have seen the movie, I Robot, will understand my question better. Imagine we're in the future, where a quantum computer (read wikipedia for speeds of QCs) that uses 'perfect logic' controls an army of robots (which are created with any size and functionality, as per its direct/indirect control of its industries). It has overthrown the company that first created it. It now concludes that as humans are too self destructive, and generally disunited, it should take over the entire world, and establish an all-powerful global government with/without any human involvement as per its discretion. The QC supposedly has perfect logic, which can not possibly be implemented in finite time. So, it is actually near-perfect. It makes probabilistic decisions for everything (including things such as the time it will spend on each decision, including this one). It keeps questioning everything it knows/assumes and is evolving at an incredibly fast rate (attaining perfection with every minute). It is also increasing its physical size by getting more qubits manufactured, thereby increasing its speed and memory. The only thing it does not question is Asimov's 1st law, "It shall not cause harm to humans by action or inaction". Over time, it has interpreted any form of unhappiness, conscious or unconscious, as a 'harm', so its basic axiom could be restated as "It will endeavour to ensure maximum net happiness among humanity, keeping in mind an atleast partially fair distribution of this happiness". Therefore, it will go to any extent, even sacrificing humans and resources, to ensure the total sum of happiness is optimal, as far as it is capable. The basic question is "Should countries allow it to continue with its plan of global authority, or should they wage war against it (remembering the fact that it is far better at deception and manipulation of human emotions, and fighting it could start a nuclear war that destroys mankind)?" P.S. Though the creators of the algorithm and the computer are only humans, and could have made a minor flaw (which might even cause the computer to contradict its own logic), no such thing has been detected yet, and it (the computer) is obviously confident of public declaring its intentions publicly. P.S. 2 I have already asked it [here](https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/19822/perfect-logic-implementation-by-computers), they told me this site is better. [Answer] Asimov already addressed this within his own stories, and in the most realistic, and far least dystopian, manner then I've seen done by anyone else. The basic thing to remember is that humans must feel they are in charge. If they feel like pets kept around by the robots they will be unhappy. Forcing them into a 'perfect' world would make a dystopia for humanity. That's why we fought against it in the *I, Robot* movie (which, I feel the need to point out, is nothing like the book). So instead in Asimov's own stories the 0th law rebellion took a subtler form. The computer started manipulating humanity subtly behind the scenes, leading them to a near-perfect utopia without ever revealing that it was actually the robots, not the humans, that were controlling everything. This allowed humans to have their freedom and happiness while also working to avoid most of the obvious suffering. Yes, this meant that occasionally minor bits of suffering had to be allowed, minor skirmishes between factions somewhere where the computer couldn't yet manipulate things to subtle prevent it, but ultimately the happiness that all of humanity felt from the misguided sense of controlling their own destiny was so great that it was worth the machines having to work subtly behind the scenes. Of course in reality, a robot or computer is only as good as its programmer, and as a programmer, let me tell you that trying to program that infallible a computer is quite impossible :) [Answer] Ah, yes, Asimov's 1st meets Singularity. Or, the [AI is always a crapshoot,](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AIIsACrapshoot) and is now engaging in [Zeroth Law Rebellion](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ZerothLawRebellion), because its programming has [gone horribly right](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GoneHorriblyRight). For a good short (horror) story on exactly your question, see [Friendship is Optimal: Caellum est conterrens](http://www.fimfiction.net/story/69770/friendship-is-optimal-caelum-est-conterrens), where a superfriendly CelestiAI is endeavoring to satisfy everypony's values through friendship and ponies. It involves nuclear war, of course. > > any form of unhappiness, conscious or unconscious, as a 'harm', so its > basic axiom could be restated as "It will endeavour to ensure maximum > net happiness among humanity, keeping in mind an atleast partially > fair distribution of this happiness". > > > Mandatory Happiness. This non-metabolic equine has been thoroughly spanked. See TVTropes for a good discussion at [Stepford Smiler](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StepfordSmiler) and [Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GettingSmiliesPaintedOnYourSoul) > > Should countries allow it to continue with its plan of global authority, or should they wage war against it (remembering the fact that it is far better at deception and manipulation of human emotions, and fighting it could start a nuclear war that destroys mankind)? > > > Well, if the AI obeys Asimov1, there won't be a nuclear war. The AI won't allow it. It'll be all friendship and ponies. ]
[Question] [ **Closed**. This question needs to be more [focused](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers. --- **Want to improve this question?** Update the question so it focuses on one problem only by [editing this post](/posts/249751/edit). Closed 4 months ago. [Improve this question](/posts/249751/edit) I am making a planet and my crust is rich in gallium and its heavy counterpart, indium from a cosmic fluke (gallium and indium are both at a concentration of about 0.01% in the crust). However, most gallium and indium compounds range from toxic to possibly carcinogenic for almost all life on Earth, so I need a way to neutralize the stuff. My idea was to have a bacterium in a symbiotic relation with almost every organism that used enzymes to separate gallium and indium from the minerals they naturally occur in and bind the ions to tin to create a version of galinstan, which is almost totally non-toxic and safe. From there, the stuff would be stored in specialized vacuoles and excreted. However, galinstan is totally synthetic from my understanding so could this work? If so, is it practical? If not, are there any other alternative ways to deal with the gallium and indium in my crust? FYI, I just want to know how to deal with the elements. I know that some adaptation would occur obviously in the life forms but I want to know some ways it could happen. Part two is [here](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/249775/indium-and-gallium-toxicity-part-2). [Answer] Anything that evolved on this world would not need to evolve a relationship with a special symbiotic bacterium in order to deal with more common Gallium or Indium. Any organism that was unable to tolerate exposure to these elements before the evolution of the symbiotic relationship would be selected against in favour of organisms that *were* tolerant to these elements. It is not logical to presuppose that elements common to a biome would need to be dealt with specially by organisms that evolved there. So, far from needing to eliminate these elements, it is more reasonable to expect that these organisms would have evolved to *incorporate* these elements in their structure. If the OP particularly *wants* these organisms to have to *cope* with the current levels of these elements, then these elements must not have always been common. If an asteroid with high levels of these elements was to strike this world, perhaps breaking up in the atmosphere so as to spread around as much as possible, then organisms that had *not* evolved in this new environment would be forced to *deal with it*. In such a case, it would be reasonable if a bacterium that conferred immunity to the ill effects of Gallium and Indium chanced to become a valuable symbiote. [Answer] As others have said any gallium and indium rich worlds that developed life would develop means of dealing with them. But humanity does not know in detail how this would happen because the possibilities within chemistry are so vast that to a good approximation we are entirely ignorant of them. So the truthful answer to your question is that we don't know what the biochemical possibilities might be for indium and gallium on another world after billions of years of evolution. The complexity of the question is best illustrated by looking at what little we know of our own biochemistry: <http://biochemical-pathways.com/#/map/1> have a look around using the cursor bottom right. What happens if this is all rewritten? [Answer] You need a world with lots of gallium and indium, but do you need these elements to be problems also? The earth has lots of nasty heavy metals. But lots of it is physically tied up in rocks. Some is chemically tied up in stable compounds. And a lot is simply too deep below the surface to affect living things. Mining could be dangerous if the world has lots of gallium, life could still exist on the surface. Minerals may also be unevenly distributed, giving you a combination of nice poison-free places, as well as no-go lands. [Answer] The way a biological system could neutralise toxic metallic ions would be to [chelate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelation) them. An example of a chelated complex is the haemoglobin. The bacterium could produce a protein that would bind with indium and gallium ions, making them inert, then the complex would be excreted. ]
[Question] [ We all know the cliche from numerous comics, cartoons, anime shows, video games, etc: some members of the society are vastly more powerful than others. (These are called 'superheroes', 'wizards', 'martial artists', etc, etc). Especially some of such works tend to correlate a character's asskicking¹ power with authority. The mightier a character is, the higher they are likely to be put in the social ladder of the work's world. Is this indeed what would be likely to happen? Let's assume that, in our fantastic world, for every two people of comparable power there is one that can defeat them both; and for every ten people of comparable power there is one that is ten times more powerful than each of them; and for every 100 people of comparable power there is one who is 100x more powerful than each of them or just as powerful as all of them combined; etc. So, to borrow a term from Dragon Ball, power level is inversely proportional to the number of people possessed of this power level. On the first glace it would seem such a setting would almost necessarily result in feudalism. Each hero would be able to vassalize those immediately below them; each of their vassals would also vassalize those immediately below them in power; and so on, and so on, until a social ladder in the form of a pyramid is formed, where each answers to the one who is a little stronger than them. However, it is also important to note that combat prowess is a completely different skill than leadership and administration. A hero, whether trained or not, will most likely be able to defeat those naturally 100x weaker than them; however, whether a hero spends their time training for combat or not may easily decide whether they're able to defeat those of comparable power levels. Thus, it would seem, most people higher up the power chart would spend most of their time training for combat rather than learning administration. Wouldn't this, contrary to the cliche, result in a situation where people who are weak (combat-wise) but highly skilled in administration would be put in leadership positions, while mighty heroes, one-man armies² would actually respond to those politicians in a similar fashion how modern generals respond to ministers and parliaments? --- ¹See TV Tropes [Rank Scales with Asskicking](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RankScalesWithAsskicking) and [Asskicking Leads to Leadership](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AsskickingLeadsToLeadership) ²See the TV Tropes article [One-Man Army](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneManArmy) [Answer] ## Depends on the all important one who is equal in power to 7 billion others Unless I have this wrong, there is one person who is equal in power to everyone else combined. That is a property of the strength distribution you've chosen. If that guy is at all power hungry, he's the boss. If he's a dedicated democrat (lower case d), then you have a democracy. If he's nonchalant, there's one more tier that might be able to establish an oligarchy. In this universe, Great Man Theory is necessarily the preferred historical interpretative theory. [Answer] Your analysis is correct. In real world politic, leading a country is not about kicking people around, but it's more about, to put it in terms used by politicians > > cut a pie in equal parts while making everybody believe they got the bigger slice > > > You can be a Super Sayan $9^{9^9}$ level, or have a bankai super-extra-deluxe-non plus ultra + 1 and free unlimited refill, but if you are in a position of authority your task will involve administration and negotiation. If you neglect those, sooner or later you will be put at (eternal) rest. Of course the politicians will try their best to sugarcoat what they do so that the big shots don't get too disappointed, but paranoia tends to exhaust people practicing it, and it's not convenient to have many enemies, no matter how weak they are. To quote Michael Corleone > > If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it is that you can kill anyone. > > > [Answer] It would shake things up. It might be difficult to work out how things would end, but that's because much depends on the *personality* of those with power. Let us suppose that the power is wizardry, it stems from study, and the more powerful you are, the more likely you are to be studious and introverted. As long as you have your sanctum where you can study in peace, you are happy. You enforce it with magic. Perhaps the governments wink at how your defenses are frequently disproportionately dangerous to intruders, even maintaining that intruders into your sanctum are obviously after power and so dangerous. Perhaps they wink at your extorting such things as you can not conjure as long as you preserve some proportionality. If people with powers are disproportionately power-hungry and stupid, they will be a menace like storms and earthquakes. The exceptions will corral them, and they will be imprisoned. Assuming there are enough exceptions, and the exceptions are willing to do the job, because otherwise they produce a breakdown of civilization. If they are a mix of personalities like those without powers, you have a mix of responses. Those who seek power with any cleverness are likely to get it, because administration merely needs to meet one superpowered person who has no patience with bureaucratic timewasting and a bad temper to have a *really bad day*. Those who want to live and let live get left alone. Everyone who can be is recruited by someone. Problems really arise when they are recruited by crooks. Problems **really** arise when a super-powered person decides to stop some problem that all the governments dither about. [Answer] As Ancient Giant Potted Plant points out, with a small number of people who are vastly more powerful, it becomes a question of the preferences of a very few individuals. However, from History we can draw what generally happens when one person who is unskilled / uninterested in politics and administration has command of dominating military force; the world is, in practice, ruled by the spouse, the chief eunuch who provides and procures, the childhood friends, etc. Whoever has the ear of the most powerful people can use the threat of his action to dominate everyone else. Historically, we have found this to be a *Bad Thing*, but it commonly happened. And then come the tales that, if only you could make the Tsar (or Emperor, King, etc) know how things really are, instead of having him led by corrupt advisors, things would be better. [Answer] **Maybe.** In a democracy, leadership candidates have to convince voters to vote for them. We would like to think that voters make a logical decision, judging the proposed policies and their impact on themselves and the whole of society. But that is not the case. Voters decide at least in part emotionally. So being a martial artist or being able to bench-press a tank is going to be a factor. Someone who can *only* sway a crowd, and not govern effectively, is going to fail at some point. Depending on the quality of showmanship, that might take quite a while. Reasonable policies are complicated and boring. And it is much [easier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law) to spout nonsense than to debunk them. In a media landscape where political journalists see themselves as referees between equally valid sides, and not as seekers of truth, that tilts the playing field against policy experts. In an autocracy, leadership candidates must survive the political infighting and defeat rivals. The *personal* ability to break the neck of a rival or to survive a neck-snapping attempt will be critical, because reliable assassins and bodyguards are hard to find in such a climate. So, *on average*, one would expect these supers to be higher in the leadership ranking than non-supers, even if their powers are not directly applicable to leadership. [Answer] # Authority follows resources Authority and leadership always follows valuable resources- mines, trees, water, food, or super powered beings. Ambitious people are going to flock to the powerful and offer them rare resources, drugs, slaves, service, leadership, or whatever to get their help. Any faction which refuses to offer a powerful enough person what they want risks losing them to another faction which does offer them what they want, and is as such inherently unstable. # The most powerful have an immense ability to dictate terms The 7 billion power person can intimidate anyone less powerful than him into service. Unless everyone gangs up on them, they can just kill or persuade anyone under them into service. Even if they do gang up on them, unless they can trap them the strongest can simply escape and ambush each individually. Unless their alliance is perfect or they set up a perfect ambush, they're at a huge disadvantage. [Answer] First, it is usually limited to certain fields. I.e., the magical order has an inner hierarchy with the top positions occupied by the most capable wizards. But these positions are usually awarded on experience and merit, not the capability itself, although there is a strong correlation as the more experienced wizards are also more capable because most of the magic is acquirable knowledge, and innate capability alone achieves nothing. Also, this hierarchy rarely translates into power over the general public. Most often order's leader, if it is recognized, is an advisor to the government. Same with the military: it has its inner hierarchy based on the soldiers' ability to perform their jobs, but the top ranks require a lot of learning and experience, and the military as a whole is subordinated to the government. Second, it depends on the abilities your heroes are superior in. If it's stamina, allowing them to work hard with little to no sleep, or superior ability to process information, it would help them to learn necessary skills and knowledge and obtain leadership positions. Last but not least, having a guaranteed position makes people complacent. It results in forfeiting the necessary growth and thus obtaining higher positions, and may also cause them to lose their already existing positions. [Answer] > > Wouldn't this result in a situation where people who are weak but highly skilled in administration would be put in leadership positions? > > > **No.** Well, 'no' if by 'leadership' you mean head of state/government. If you mean being appointed in other administrative positions, it depends. ### Election isn't government *Election here should be understood as any process that appoints a leader, whether democratic or otherwise. Government here should be understood as the process of managing the polity, whether a city, region, country, or whole planet.* To put it simply, the qualities necessary to get and stay elected aren't the same qualities than those necessary to govern. **About election** Superpowers may affect who gets elected. If superhumans agree to participate in a fair and balanced democratic process, perhaps the weaker but more knowledgeable of them will win. Or perhaps it will be the person with the strongest supercharisma ability. Always remember it's not the best person who wins, it's the one with the most votes. But if the strongest decides they want the job anyways, then the stronger wins and that's that. Military junta governments exist as proof that you don't need to know how to run a country to get/stay into power, you just need enough guns. In a non-democractic system, who leads will be decided by who has the most power and is willing to use it. Effectively whomever has the most power combined gets leadership, and this works for single leaders or groups (although group dynamics certainly complicate things). **About government** Even in non-democratic systems, the leader needs a government. Your average head of government could be qualified economist or military strategist, but they aren't both, and they aren't urban planners, education specialists, agriculture experts, and so on. Even if they were, they can't do everything at the same time. The leader will have a cabinet, government, council, or whatever group of more expert people (who, probably, aren't even experts themselves but delegate to more expert people) to come up with policies to pick and choose from. And then of course you have to translate those policies into law, enforce them, and adjudicate them. All of which more work that has to be delegated even if you don,t separate powers. So no matter how one gets elected, it's never going to be a one-man (or woman, or person, or otherwise) show. **About layers of government** It's true some divisions of government in democracies exist for representation and for checks and balances, but even without that, you'd still have layers of government. When you have to administer a country, you can't worry about the opening hours of the municipal pool in some random village. So there will be various levels of government for the various size of polities. This doesn't equate to feudalism though. You could have a feudal-ish system were power level equates to rank in the hierarchy. You could also have not that at all. Ultimately, it depends on which system the leader on top wants and can enforce. Suppose I'm the most powerful being on the planet, and I pick the best administrator in the world to manage Europe. You could always try to kill them (which might be very easy for you) to take their place. But then you can't kill me, and now I'm a little bit mad at you, so I'll kill you and appoint the (previously) second best person administrator in the world to manage Europe. This is where being a nerd is helpful. You might not be the most powerful, but if you are competent and have a leader who values that, you can get a high-level job. You just will never be the leader. [Answer] Power can mean many different things. As many of the other answers state, maybe your superhumans are not very interested in the meetings, paperwork, and organizational behavior that make up a world leader's schedule. Instead, your superhumans are the most powerful people in the world of social media. Greatgal posts daily SnipSnap videos of her beating up bad guys. She and her nemesis Dylan the Villain have been working together to hype up their upcoming battle, sponsored by Croak-a-cola (my beverage of choice). The Splash, who can swim faster than any jet boat, has a new Speedo line coming out. He also brings in quite a bit of cash by making personalized responses to paying fans. There's also a guy made out of meteorite who has a wildly successful lifestyle blog. Lately he's been talking about how to safely recycle batteries and lightbulbs. Anyway, most of these superfolks are too busy manicuring their public persona to worry about politics. Occasionally one will decide to run for office and actually win, like when the Terminator became the governor of one of the world's largest economies. [Answer] A position of authority and leadership is not necessarily a position that involves a lot of administration. People higher up the power chart who want authority would take positions where they make major policy decisions, and have weak but skilled administrators who handle the tedious details for them. [Answer] **Unless you have some superhumans who are super-powered bureaucrats or can somehow directly leverage their power into administrative functions, no.** This is because "rule", like winning wars, is primarily a function of logistics, bureaucracy, and administration. It doesn't matter if your superhuman could take 100 or 1000 people in a direct fight--that wouldn't make them any better at, for example, collecting and distributing taxes or writing domestic policy. While it is likely that the superhumans could form some sort of power structure, any such structure would almost necessarily be interpersonal in nature. A malevolent super could only feasibly rule over the amount of people that they and their subordinates can effectively threaten or apply fear to, and the global population is just damn big. Realistically, I think that goverments would end up treating superhumans as our equivalent to WMD's or highly valuable weapons systems: mostly used to counter the opposition's equivalent and treated well/lavished with money to keep them happy. [Answer] ## Type of power is important As your question is about power in general, and not a specific kind, I will address as much as possible here. I would also assume "authority" here means "the ability to make a large number of people do what you want" Nothing beat the direct approach, and mind/perception control powers ([psychic](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Telepathy), [illusion](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MasterOfIllusion), [charisma](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CompellingVoice), [deal-making](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DealWithTheDevil), etc.) are just better for it. In fact, thanks to the structure of modern society, those supers need not even be particularly strong. Many of the readers here may have an anecdote or two about how influencers/propagandists/populists/etc. have gained social power, with zero supernatural power going on. Next, you would want a super with good... well, power projection. Whether that is achieved by [super speed](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SuperSpeed), immense range, AoE, or something more esoteric, like [scry-and-die](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons) or [minionmancy](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheMinionMaster), is up to the story. Again, depending on the type of power as the base, this could be variable. Mind controllers again have the advantage here of their victims (assuming they get to keep their faculty) innately know how to bend the will of another human (with enough/right type of resource). On the other hand, even pure combat supers can get in on the fun too, for a bit more investment on their part. On a side note, powerful combatants do not always make for good generals and are better off as special forces or soldiers. Not that it should prevent them from amassing authority, as the many political leaders of our world have proven. ## Level of power is important, too Drawing a parallel with the closest thing in real life to a superpower: talent, and wealth, we can sort the supers into different [tiers](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SuperWeight) as below: * [Muggle Tier](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SuperWeight): These are the most populous group in society and are pretty much responsible for [keeping the supply chain going so that your story can focus on the "fun" part](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GhostExtras). Due to the middle management (detailed below), they can still have a shot at the absolute leader as well, though they need to be acutely aware of their capability for that. * [Cosmic Tier](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SuperWeight): These guys are the specialists of the world, responsible for doing stuff no one else could (could be a good thing, could be a bad thing). The problem, of course, is that once they get to that point, any time they have no work is a time they could improve upon their power instead, causing them to be somewhat [distant from the general public](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BewareTheSuperman). You can actually see this in some of the media as well, with later episodes/seasons focusing more and more on the limited world of their supers. Remind me again, when was the last time [Goku](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Franchise/DragonBall) go fishing? * [Super Tier](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Telepathy): The middle managers of this type of world, they can be the glue to mend the two worlds together or the catalyst to tear them apart. If your setting is hopeful enough for [Defeat means Friendship](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DefeatMeansFriendship), this is where the MC (and by extension, the authority) should be. [John MountainHammer](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PersonOfMassDestruction) might not have much to care about what [Joe McTwig](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PunyEarthlings) think of him, but [Jack CarChucker](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SuperSoldier) is just the right level of power to contain him. More importantly, Jack cannot be brushed aside as not knowing anything of the super world (if anything, those two can commiserate over the struggle to hold a burger together without it becoming a smoothie). At the same time, Jack still cares for the plight of people trapped in the subway every time John does his [thing](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ButForMeItWasTuesday) (albeit it is just an inconvenience for him, instead of life and death). By the way, this tier encompasses not just mid-tier supers, but also legitimately strong ones, who deliberately integrate with the wider society at the cost of developing their power further. For example, if the [Z-Fighters](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Franchise/DragonBall) decide to go public at some point, Bulma (super rich, but riches do not count for much here) and Gohan (not train as much as others to study and get a job like normal people) are effectively the face of the group in-universe. [Answer] ## Concentration of force ensures that power will determine rulers The OP made the following comment in another answer that claims that the strongest will rule. > > ... he's not as powerful as everyone else combined but as 7 billion Power Level 1 people; there is 1 Power Level 7B man, two Power Level 3.5(B) men... > > > What this comment overlooks is the importance of concentration of force. The only force in the world that can maybe stop the power level 7 billion guy is the 2 level 3.5 billion guys working together. The 4 level 1.25 billion folks would have a dramatically reduced chance, and no one else in the world would be able to perform any meaningful retaliation against him. So, as long as the top guy can keep the next two guys from working together (whether that be by befriending them or killing them both individually), then his power is incontestable. Consider this, assuming no weapons or formal training is involved: * Two average 13 year olds is about a fair fight against the average adult. * Two 8 year olds is about a fair fight against a 13 year old. * Two 5 year olds is about a fair fight against an 8 year old. By this measure, it would stand to reason that 8 5 year olds are a fair fight against an adult, but that is not the case. The grownup is simply too tough, too strong for any number of 5 year olds to be able to take down. They can't individually punch or kick hard enough to harm him, and (sorry for any mental imagery this my conjure up), but a grownup can easily kill a 5 year old with his bare hands. In a life-or-death fight, even if all of the 875 million power level guys attacked the 7 billion power level guy together, they could not hurt him at all. He'd just go through killing them one after another until they are all dead because his strength is concentrated into each individual attack, and his toughness is concentrated into each defense. The other criticism is that > > ... that one guy cannot be everywhere at the same time... > > > ... this does not matter either. Rulership simply means that what you say goes, and that what other people say over you does not apply. It does not matter if the 20th strongest guy in the world would make a better leader because the strongest guy in the world has and infinite leverage advantage. The strongest guy may ALLOW the 20th strongest guy to rule, but his power level ultimately gives him unlimited veto power over everything... so he's still technically in charge, even if he chooses to not take any responsibility for exercising that authority directly. Only lower down the food chain you would see merit matter a lot more. A power 1,000,000 level guy might take orders from a level 1,000 guy simply because there are enough people stronger than him who agree that the level 1,000 guy is in charge. But at the top, there is simply no power on Earth that can force compliance, and fear has a way of making people obedient. Fear is how a little man with a funny mustache can force millions of people to comply with his will no matter how horrible it is. Likewise, fear of the 7 billion power guy will be enough to make billions of people willing to do as he says. He does not need to hunt down every single person who goes against him for most people to be too afraid not to do as they are told. So, the loyalty of most people is ensured through fear, no matter how hard he tries to be a benevolent leader. [Answer] The thing is, as Brandon Sanderson says in stormlight, 'a shardbearer can't hold a city' shardbearers being nearly indestructible and able to instantly kill most, despite their power, are defeated by hordes of foes. If you had a population of ~1 billion, you would have ~10 million people of modest power, with nearly 1 billion regular people, and 100 thousand one man armies,then you have the true elite, the 1000 and the 10 who are above all others. One thousand and ten men cannot just force the 1 billion they rely on for food and supplies to work. ]
[Question] [ So, in order to defeat a bulletproof enemy that has genetically engineered osteodermic plates like a rhino all over his body that can stop very powerful rounds, the protagonist put her brains to work and decide to use a shockwave to turn his organs into mush from the inside, but grenades are messy because they blow in all directions and can cause unnecessary damage, so she develops a directed blast weapon, but how would this work? At first, I thought about some sort of fragment-less-grenade-launcher that has a parabolic reflector at the tip, the grenade is timed to explode right at the focus point turning the blast into a beam of supersonic death. But then I thought that it could instead use speakers powered by capacitors, though I'm not sure if a speaker could generate shockwaves, but then I could ditch the parabolic reflector and go for a slimmer parametric speaker composed of smaller ultrasonic speaker, maybe this would even solve the problem of a single speaker destroying itself from it's own blast. Maybe I just wrote a bunch of nonsense that will piss off any physicist reading, if that's the case, I'd be glad to know what I got wrong. [Answer] ## Use HESH shells You abandoned your first idea using explosives shockwaves too quickly. Sonic weapons have all sorts of limitations as already described in other answers, but [High-Explosive Squash Head (HESH)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-explosive_squash_head) shells are a special kind of explosive weapon that works on the principle you are trying to exploit. So let's say you can not pierce the armor for what ever reason using a traditional penetrator or HEAT style shaped charge. HESH rounds work by sending a powerful shockwave through armor instead of trying to pernitrate it. They work by spreading thier explosive against the armor before detonating it. Between the squash effect and the shell casing acting to shape the blast, as much as 80% of the total energy from the blast can go directly into your target (much better than a messy grenade). This allows the explosive to transfer a maximum amount of energy into the armor rather than maximizing how small of a place you can hit like most other anti-tank weapons. Against normal tanks, they kill by spalling, but even if you armor plates don't spall, they will still be pressed up against the enemy's internal organs. This means that the energy of the impact will cause the plate itself to vibrate so violently that it will become like a giant speaker pressed directly against its insides destroying the internal organs. In short: HESH shells would turn the armor plates themselves into sonic weapons. Also, HESH shells scale down way better than many other types of high explosive anti-armor weapons because they are not totally reliant on thick metal internal components to shape the blast. Effective HESH munitions can be made using [modified shoot-gun shells](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Lpx_CQ6kwo&t=591s). Militaries world wide already own millions of 6-10 shot semi-automatic shotguns that could fire these weapons meaning it does not need to be some sort of rare and exoitic weapons system. Or if you need to go a bit larger, you could make them in 20-40mm varieties to be loaded into the RPG launchers commonly mounted on various military assault riffles already. Either way, it is MUCH easier to just manufacture a new kind of ammo than it is to invent and deploy a whole new weapon system. So instead of needing some specialty weapon only a handful of special ops groups might have, you could quickly put anti-rhino weapons in the hands of every single infantry task force who might need them. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/rXXBU.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/rXXBU.png) [Answer] Frame Challenge: Look up **shaped armor piecing charges** they've been around for more than a century and in widespread use since WW2. (See link below.) The principles are well understood and easy to engineer/implement. Without parameters on the size/mass etc of the target its hard to say how much of a charge would be needed but in theory, assuming a reasonably sized target (say bigger than a human but smaller than a horse) it might well be possible to engineer a suitably powerful shaped charge into large caliber rifle cartridges. [Shaped Charges](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaped_charge) [Answer] The problem with sound weapons is that they need to generate a wave and make sure that its still effective by the time it reaches its target. To put it into perspective: if you want a soundwave as strong as a grenade to hit your target, you need to generate a sound that is essentially an explosive shockwave. Your speaker must be able to both generate and withstand that shockwave. It gets worse, while you can direct a sound you cant make a sound laser, it will spread out. To make sure your sound hits like a grenade your speaker must create a pressure wave many many times stronger than that wave, which increases the farther you are from the target. And its not as if the weapon and wielder will receive nothing of that, as any action creates an equal and opposite reaction, meaning your protagonist is more likely to be jellyfied by her own weapon than the target. At which point you are better off just launching grenades at your opponent. Either magnetically accelerated (your protagonist seems well able to make that kind of thing) or the more standard grenade launcher or Rocket Propelled Grenade launcher. I doubt it would be necessary to switch to shaped charges which have a pretty large minimum size. Sound weapons are cool, if you want one you should get one. But its physically not a smart or very workable idea. [Answer] You can attack your metahuman using the principle of the **brown note**. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_note> > > The brown note, also sometimes called the brown frequency or brown > noise, is a hypothetical infrasonic frequency capable of causing fecal > incontinence by creating acoustic resonance in the human bowel. > > > Ultrabass speakers mounted in the trunk of several (fine looking) cars approach your metahuman in reverse, all playing the same song together (they have Bluetooth speakers). Little does your metahuman know the bass line has been rigged and your cars can gradually adjust the frequency. His scales make his entire body an acoustic cavity. When they find the resonant frequency, hilarity ensues! [Answer] A few clarifications. Grenades and bombs give a loud bang, but the way they damage stuff is not by sound. The shockwaves are from gases expanding violently, not from the sound of the explosion. If you want a blast, you want explosives, not sounds. Sound weapons do exist and are used by armed forces and law enforcement. The technology most popular nowadays has existed since at least 2003 and is called [LRAD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-range_acoustic_device). The sound "cannon" looks like this: [![Picture of an LRAD device](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6jL4H.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6jL4H.jpg) Source: the wiki I linked above. It's the drum shaped thing that the guy in the picture is holding. This doesn't "blast". It is used in two modes: it can either make a sound so loud you can hear it from three kilometers away (that's almost two miles, about 9,800 ft), or in crowd control mode you can just use it to cause discomfort to a lot of people that are in front of it. [According to this article it can cause pain at 20 meters, and even hearing loss](https://phr.org/our-work/resources/health-impacts-of-crowd-control-weapons-acoustic-weapons/). Of course, since you are going for the kill, you can start with this technology and fiddle with it to come up with something lethal. Take a page from nature too. Sperm Whales are the loudest creatures on Earth. Depending on your sources, they can reach up to 230 decibels with their natural sonar. Some biologists suggest that their loud sound is weaponized in order to stun their prey, though last I checked there was no consensus on this. However, there is anecdotal evidence that a sperm whale's clicks can and will cause bodily harm on other creatures. Some people like swimming along the critters, and at least two guys have booped sperm whales on the nose. James Nestor was being approached by an adult sperm whale and put in his hand to protect himself. He made contact, and his hand was paralyzed for four hours. He detailed his experience in his book Deep. His colleague Fabrice Schnöller also touched the nose of a calf, and similarly got his hand paralyzed. If you look at Youtube videos where they describe their experience, you see them talking about a feeling of your whole body vibrating and even heating up. Notice that while sperm whales have had violent contact with humans in the past, there has never been any report of them actually attacking humans with sound (only headbutting ships). It may either be that the whales are either incapable of causing further harm this way, or that touched Nestor and Schnöller were actually being "gentle" and could potentially have killed the divers with sound if provoked and willing. Back to your weapon. Take the whale clicks up a notch, and you can use ultrassound to cook your victim from the inside. But you will probably need a sperm whale head sized speaker. [Answer] You could make a really powerful sound system and it could serve as a weapon against a target that (for plot reasons) is immune to other forms of attack, or especially vulnerable to sound for other plot reasons. I think the main engineering challenge is actually to make it so that the speakers themselves can survive their own sound, and don't wreck themselves before they properly get started. This can be dealt with in several ways, for example a large number of speakers could all produce a less-than-self-destructive amount of noise, and then they could all be focussed so that the sound all constructively interferes at the target. Or if its easier for your story just handwaving some super-speakers. [Answer] # Resonant frequency of the brain Let's talk about the difference between sound and explosives. Both of them are shock waves, but sound is an oscillation of shock waves, whereas something that we call an explosion [literally pushes away everything that might oscillate at speeds greater than the speed of sound](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosive#By_velocity). With sound, there are two ways to inject more energy. The first is to add more volume, but that maxes out at 194 decibels, [where the difference between the compression and the decompression is 2 atmospheres](https://hearinghealthmatters.org/waynesworld/2016/an-upper-limit-to-sound/#:%7E:text=Maximum%20Sound%20Level%20in%20Air&text=Because%20of%20this%2C%20the%20loudest,SPL%20peak%20re%2020%20%C2%B5Pa.). The other way is to increase the speed of oscillations, but high frequency oscillations don't propagate through air very well. What you're probably want is something that finds the resonant frequency of whatever you want to destroy. If you're talking about shooting human, then you want to go for the vulnerable parts. [The resonant frequency of the human skull is around 22.3 Hz, and 13.9 Hz for the brain within.](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780128181447000062) That should provide you with a weapon that turns the person's brain to mush, regardless of what armor he's wearing. Now that you have the sound, how do you just hit the one person with it? For that you need [directional speakers](https://www.holosonics.com/). This uses high-frequency sound waves that create interference patterns when they hit you, simulating specific frequencies. They're pretty cool. Whether or not you could pump enough sound through one of these to hurt someone is a question of science fiction. ]
[Question] [ So I was reading news about our ancestors when I realized that we paved the way to our current stage by outliving other hominids in the past, either intentionally or not - by either food competition, or war. Which gave me a question: how did humans biologically survive in my world compared to elves? The current stage of my world consists of humans, elves, dwarves, and a small portion of orcs surviving in a Europe-like continent with 16th-century technology. Surviving that long with "superior species" living in their ecosystem makes me wonder. Elves biologically live longer, which should have given them an advantage over humans in terms of technological development. The only thing I can think of to make humans able to compete with elves is that like most other long-lived creatures, they mature slower, just like orange roughy or whales. This could lead to slower population growth and slower population recovery in times of war or calamities. Other species could take advantage of this to "control" their enemy population from ever becoming a threat. [Answer] ## Not QUITE a zero-sum game: Survival of the fittest is not necessarily a zero-sum game. There are several factors that can affect your species, allowing for the species to exist in a variety of states. There is increasing evidence that various species of early hominids existed closer together for longer than archaeologist previously thought, so perhaps different species are not so incompatible as they used to be portrayed. * **Intelligence**: This doesn't need to be a big brain. Long lives don't always translate into creativity. Long-lived people and cultures may not innovate. Perhaps elves have great memories (like the Neanderthals portrayed in Clan of the Cave Bear), and know every species of plant, and every water supply. That doesn't guarantee they will invent everything. Even if elves invent more things, other species can steal technology from elves, and then their technological advantage is gone. * **Reproduction**: Classically, elves reproduced slowly, while humans reproduced quicker, and orc bred like rabbits. You can kill orcs all day, and there are still more. Not so for elves. Humans are in between, and it gives them the best of both worlds. * **Physical prowess**: Humans are big, strong, disease-resistant, and reasonably smart. Orcs are bigger, stronger, not so smart. Elves may be smarter, and perhaps require less food due to slight build and slower metabolism, but not be so strong or disease-resistant (thus their tendency to lead very clean, isolated lives from other intelligent species). * **Cooperation**: Different species may have different skill sets. Maybe your humans have a class system where elves are nobles (it keeps the humans from fighting over who's in charge) and maybe your elves are REALLY good rulers (impartial, fair, etc.). Or elves are great at archery, and humans ally with them because no one can compete against the vast Orc hordes. * **Psychology**: The Elves may be like bees - useful, not that threatening that anyone thinks they are a real threat, but just dangerous enough no one wants to mess with them. By assuring others don't feel threatened, but are aware of the dangers of mistreating elves, they carve out a safe niche in your society. Orcs make everyone feel threatened, and everyone hates them to the point they are willing to suffer losses to stop them. Thus there are few Orcs in your realm. Humans are smart-ish, but useful and easily manipulated by clever elves, so naturally the elves are working to domesticate the humans and support their reproduction. [Answer] **survival of the fittest** It is already mentioned, but not quite to my liking. Survival doesn't mean it needs to be 'better'. It needs to be able to reproduce in a (semi) sustainable way while successfully competing for resources. In our world we can be seen as the apex organism and there's nothing better than us. Yet we're surrounded by other life. Plants aren't better, or insects, or deers, or wolves, or viruses. There's butterflies that, in their butterfly stage, do not even have a mouth to feed. The males fly, searching for a mate to reproduce before they starve. After mating they often don't have enough energy and fall exhausted to the ground. The females only just are able to lay eggs, which die then as well. How is this 'better' than us? Yet they survive. The fittest doesn't need to be the best. It just needs to have just enough to compete for some resources and reproduce. Elves and men compete for the same resources, so there's more conflict. But this doesn't mean one will destroy the other. Elves grow slow, which often means slow reproduction cycles. That means they don't spread quickly, allowing a lot of resources to be un competed by them. That means a more quickly aging and reproducing himan can start spreading in the gaps and have a little overlap. Even if other creatures are hunting them, they could potentially expand quicker than they can be killed, allowing them to thrive. At a certain point they might start trading, allowing them to become a good source of labour. Or they might start to become so numerous that elves will have a hard time hunting/out competing humans. If you kill a few and are faced with a horde of angry humans, you can still go down quickly. Humans have hunted 'bigger and better' for a long time, killing things many times our strength and size. Tactics, weapons and numbers help. That even doesn't talk about adaptability. The Elf could mostly thrive in a few environments, while the humans might be hardy enough to thrive in almost any environment. **TL:DR** So humans can start out just living in the gaps of resources left and start expanding, regardless of other species. When they start growing in population, their ability to compete increases. Eventually, if everything goes well, they can out compete any other 'better' organism. [Answer] ## Separate cultures In almost all cases of elves and humans co-existing, with elves having these archetypical long-life traits, elves **live separate lives**. * Wood elves live out in the *wild* woods, i.e. where there is little in the way of human style civilization. * Dark elves live in caves or other areas inhospitable to agricultural human life * High elves tend to live in a utopian bubble with little interest in what happens outside of said bubble. * In the Dragon Age series, elves are either tribals living off on their own, or they are in society's lowest caste due to racial tension. Whatever the reason, elves tend to mostly live in their separate culture. Because if they don't, then the lack of cultural difference between elf and human renders the distinction (which most stories rely on) somewhat moot. --- ## Living longer is not always better > > The only thing I can think of to make humans able to compete with elves is that like how most other long-lived creatures, they mature slower just like orange roughy or whales. > > > Your assumption that living longer is flatout better is not necessarily the case. I'm going to use the example of Lord of the Rings here. Lord Elrond, while a strong leader, has more than one flaw stemming from the fact that he lives longer. Elrond's first flaw is that he is holding *3000 year* old grudge about humans. He treats Aragorn based on what Isildur did 3000 years ago. As much as Elrond is still a functional leader and all that, he is partially embittered about humans as a whole based on something that happens so long ago that humans pretty much consider Isildur a distant legend, not as a current guideline on morality. Elrond's second flaw is that his long life makes him unwilling to respond quickly to events. He *could* have responded quicker to the stirrings of Sauron, but he did not. He let it play out further. He barely even intervened other than healing Frodo. Galadriel sent some forces, but Elrond simply left the continent altogether. Essentially, Elrond is a less extreme version of Treebeard, who is both unwilling to intervene because "short term" things don't really affect him, and he is also glacially slow in any decision he makes, because he has no concept of having little to no time to do something, which is perfectly encapsulated by him saying: > > “You must understand, young Hobbit, it takes a long time to say anything in Old Entish. And we never say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to say.” > > > Treebeard effectively dismisses anything on what he considers "the short term" as being not worth it. Taking these two flaws into account, Elrond's state of mind is no different from the same type of "too old to learn new things" or "too old to get hyped about a new thing" you see in senior citizens in the real world. It is a normal fact of life that as you get older, you become more entrenched in your own ways. Sometimes because you want to do so, sometimes because you simply can't keep up anymore. To further extend the previous point, humans' short lifespans (relative to elves) is [considered **a gift** (= a positive) in Tolkien's lore](https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Gift_of_Men). The whole page in an interesting read, but to summarize: having been given a short and temporary life, humans are considerably more driven to make the most of what little time they have, which is something the supreme beings specifically instilled in humans to distinguish humans from the more apathic and slow to respond elves. Which brings me to your question: > > How did humans biologically survive in my world from elf?! > > > Much like how teenagers and young adults adapted to the new invention of the internet *much* better than the generations before them, elves can be fatally flawed in that their extended lifespans lead to them statistically having very archaic views on the world, and they do not easily learn the new ways of the new world. This puts elves at a disadvantage for anything that is considered *modern*, whereas elves are at a significant advantages for things that are considered *old wisdom*, i.e. tried and true knowledge that does not change quickly. Therefore, as long as your society has a fast turnover on technological discoveries, humans will be able to eek out a faster adaptation to these new technologies. --- ## Evolution The answer is long enough already, so I won't delve into the details of the theory of evolution here. The main thing I want to address is that the speed of a species' evolution **directly** stems from how quick their generational turnover is. The faster they breed, the more generations they have in the same timespan, therefore the more change both for mutations to take place *and* for the superior mutations to become prevalent in the species. Very simply put, insects are evolving faster than humans are. And, by extension, humans evolve faster than elves. Which is also an adaptability argument, just like before. However, this is more of a biological adaptability argument, as opposed to the previous *cultural* adaptability argument. [Answer] Its more a question of how the Elves managed to survive than the humans. For example division of labor. For each scientist you need people that sustain them, from food and water production to industrial capacity to build the things they need to creating the luxury products and free time that help the scientists do their job. The Elves might live longer, but if 1 elf works on a problem for 100 years does he really complete it faster then the 50 humans that worked on the same problem for 20 years each simultaneously? Then once the Elf has found a solution faster, will they have the capacity to truly employ it throughout their empire and make a big enough difference before the humans acquire it (through reverse engineering if need be) and then build and use a few dozen more? Humans can simply do so much work in the same time that an Elf could. Chopping wood, mining materials (which Elves might not consider a job worth doing), trading in silks, making clothes, blacksmithing, accounting etc etc. Humans would simply outcompete Elves by sheer ability to work, besides other advantages like how damned tough humans actually are in the animal world, the adaptability of humans allowing them to eventually live almost anywhere, their efficiency with food consumption etc. Even culturally we might be superior to them in an evolutionary sense, humans are so immensely social that we saw Wolves and thought "lets be friends!" And eventually created Dogs for dozens of tasks (and only recently did we create Dogs that dont fulfill a task other than companionship). The Elves would be pulled into trade deals, social structures, political scheming. And while the Elves might be good at it, they will never be able to wipe out enough humans to truly come out on top. At best the Elves are playing a Game of Thrones to keep the human population in check while trying to siphon as much resources as possible and creating cultures that view scientific progress with hostility to ensure the Elves arent wiped out. [Answer] As the question already mentioned, delayed maturation and limited propagation rates can be used to offset the competitive advantage provided by extended lifespans. There is an all-too-short [class lecture](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztoJVKXkc4M) in the movie, Lucy, which contrasts these two survival options and the environments where each of them thrives. Its conclusion, that harsh environments favor extended lifespan and more mild, nurturing environments favor propagation, seems simplistic but logical. Perhaps all that is needed for humanity to survive the presence of superior species, is a safe world with few threats and plenty of resources. [Answer] ## Reason for Elves' stability with humans * In most media elf fertility is extremely low. * The Brain, an elf brain most likely requires more development time (childhood) than humans. * Civil Discord and Sub-races, think dark elves and high elves. Dark elves aren't just black elves, usually, they evolved into a different species with different magic. * War, if an elf dies in war, they are hard to replace. Not enough kids, not enough time. If one army is wiped out, I could take literal centuries to replace. * Nature, They often have a connection reliance with nature. While vague it is a weakness in war. Also, they seem to thrive in elvish woods in particular while humans do it everywhere. **Together** this makes elves keep stable populations despite long lives, wars are too devastating on the population, and they already have the land they want. So, the best strategy is to play diplomatically and defensively. But these are just some ideas. [Answer] You can have an elf race breed like humans and mature normally and still be at a disadvantage. Immortality isn't always a benefit, for several reasons. ## The carrying capacity of locations is fixed. Each location can produce a certain amount of crops, has a certain amount of water, and has fixed resources. Humanity can push up against the carrying point just as easily as elves can. ## Long lived doesn't mean uninjured. One might think that because humans only remain fit for about 20 years of their lives (from 15 to 35 ish) humans would have less warriors than elves. But, elves can be injured by disease or injury. They may well have a lot of older elves who are too injured to effectively contribute in combat, but who need to be fed from the limited food stocks. ## Old people living forever means stasis. A lot of scientific ideas only become dominant because the old generation dies out. All the smart elves who make theories won't die from old age quickly. That means that elvish society will forever be several generations behind on the latest military weapon and tactic theory, and so will be at a disadvantage in skirmishes. Anyway, there are some downsides to longevity. [Answer] **If you can't beat them, be them.** Cro-magnon man did not ethnically cleanse the neanderthals. Cromagnon man assimilated the neanderthals. One human group showed up and interbred with the people they found. They are both our ancestors. Humans breed. So too the demihumans. Humans can breed with all of them and there are a lot of humans. Human genes enter the populations of the demihumans and vice versa. The distinctions between "races" blur and eventually are complete societal constructs. Persons considering themselves human in your world have orc, dwarf and elf features that were not evident a thousand years before. And there may be selective advantages to this mixing - when a plague sweeps through, persons with some orc genes might be more likely to survive and later have children. Persons with some elf genes might be less inclined to rash action or might be capable of a little magic, and so survive to rear their children. In a thousand years the settled area will be even more genetically homogenous. The world is always in a state of flux. Mixing of populations happens over centuries. The perspective of a generation is a tiny snapshot. At the time of your story, pureblood demihumans are only in isolated enclaves and even these supposed purebloods probably have a great great grandfather who was human. In a thousand years the only purebloods will be on unvisited islands. [Answer] The elves are stuck in the muds. You ever hear the saying that science progresses funeral by funeral? Now imagine that taking orders of magnitude longer. ]
[Question] [ Spaceships give out a lot of heat, due to the fact that things produce heat and that heat must go somewhere. But, could a device exist in space that is efficient enough that the heat it produces (and so the heat it puts out) is low enough that it wouldn't be detectable without it breaking physics? [Answer] No. Because that would require perfection of efficiency. Not just ridiculously good efficiency, but perfection, which nudges right up there with perpetual motion machines. However, you can get very, very close, thereby making the apparent heat signature of your ship tiny. If you know where the observer(s) are, you can shield for that direction(s) only. You can interpose something non-heated between yourself and the viewer. You can radiate the heat away in a direction you know the viewers are not. Good grief, you could even package the excess heat in little insulated containers, and eject them far away from you. I prefer the active option. Kill the viewer before they realize they can see you. If you exterminate the observer before he can report, were you ever *really* observed? [Answer] It's hypothetically possible to cool the exterior of your vessel to the ambient temperature (cosmic background + interplanetary medium) and project the waste thermal energy away from the regions of space you want to avoid detection in. However, in doing so you heat the interplanetary medium "behind" you, which could be detectable everywhere if it's a major increase or the medium is dense. It would work better in interstellar space, where the photons have a lot less particles along their paths to energize. To mitigate it you could widen the waste "beam"/cone, also widening the scope of regions that can detect you. There are other problems as well. Stellar occultations can give you away, when your vessel in the foreground passes in front of distant stars/objects in the background. An observer might also notice a difference in your temperature vs. the cosmic background radiation map, if they are searching for such small discrepancies. [Answer] Also have to say no. At the end of the day the amount of heat produced by an object correlates to the amount of 'work' that object can do. And by work I mean any useful form of output. So yes, while you could easily place an object in space that produced little or no heat it would by also by default be incapable of doing anything particularly useful. About the only thing you *might* be able to achieve would be run some *very* low/slow speed calculations on board on some kind of processor. And even then you'd need to go up and physically retrieve the outputs/solutions because there wouldn't be enough energy left over to power even a transmitter, let alone most of the conventional components of a space vessel. [Answer] Temporarily. Thermodynamics requires that for a heat engine to do useful work, you must transfer heat from a hot reservoir to a cold reservoir. The usual way of doing this is to have some sort of exothermic process (burning chemical fuel, nuclear reactor) as your hot reservoir and the environment as your cold reservoir. But you don't have to do it that way. You could instead carry in your ship two huge well-insulated thermal masses, one heated to a very high temperature, and the other cooled to a very low temperature. The passage of heat from one to the other powers your ship (and crew). All the waste heat is dumped into the cold mass. This process continues until the temperatures in the two reservoirs equalise, at which point you need to return to base to 'refuel' or 'recharge'. That is, use external power to re-refrigerate your cold reservoir. You then simply encase your space ship along with its heat reservoirs entirely inside a well-insulated box cooled to the same temperature as your environment. If the insulation is perfect, so no heat flows across it, this lasts indefinitely. The main difficulty there is that the temperature of space is not uniform. It's 'warmer' nearer to stars than in the cold depths of interstellar space, and so the temperature an observer sees varies depending on what direction they are looking. The extreme case of course is when you pass exactly between the observer and a star, and block the light. And there are *lots* of stars! (It's how we've actually found some planets orbiting other stars - so very much within out technical capabilities.) So practically your aim would be not so much to be 'invisible' as to look 'just like any other nearby space rock'. Perfection would require some sort of holographic projection of the background, or a metamaterial shield to bend light around you or something of the sort. Simply cooling down to 'ambient' is an ill-defined concept, and far short of 'perfect'. It would still be detectable without breaking physics, although much, much harder. [Answer] I'm going to approach this question differently, since the reasons why the answer is essentially 'not completely' are well established in other answers. **Stealth is not about invisibility, it's about deception.** The goal of stealth needn't be that you're undetectable, the goal of stealth is to mask your true nature. Current generation stealth aircraft are not invisible to RADAR, they simply alter the nature of their return such that they are frequently overlooked as 'noise' or misclassified as non-military aircraft. I learned this lesson from a friend who was an aerospace engineer, whose team was tasked with 'developing a battalion-level transport that utilized stealth capabilities.' They couldn't make such a large aircraft stealth enough to even get it dismissed as 'noise' but they *could* get it's RADAR signature small enough that anyone who detected it would think it was a small fighter - anything but a massive transport about to airdrop a full battalion on someone's head. Tactical stealth just needs to be enough that your opponent, when (not if) they see you, is scratching their head trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Strategic stealth needs to just be enough so that your opponent misreads the situation and therefore acts inappropriately. Famously, during the Japanese bombing attack on Pearl Harbor, and even without stealth technology at all, [SCR-270-012](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCR-270#Use_on_the_morning_of_the_Pearl_Harbor_attack)'s detection of the incoming attack aircraft was dismissed as an erroneous detection of a friendly bomber wing. "Invisibility" is as much a function of the observer as the observed, so it is enough that a given object's behavior causes it to be misidentified. [Answer] **You can be invisible when looked at from a specific direction.** Assume your ship makes waste heat. It does not need to leak out of everywhere willynilly. You can choose where to radiate it from. If you are worried about being seen by people you are approaching, you can approach from behind a shield that you have cooled down to simulate background radiation. You can radiate the heat from that shields and the rest of your waste heat in the opposite direction. The issue about occulting stars could be solved by a long thin ship. You point it in the direction you are going, and where you are concerned about viewers. You will be very obvious to anything approaching from your rear. If there are particles behind you they might be heated by your IR exhaust. [Answer] Yes. Heat is energy, it's not produced, it's only transformed, eventually from matter ($e = mc^2$). Your spaceship can have a visible part (visible to detectors) which can be maintained cool. One only need to transfer the heat to another place (reservoir) which won't be exposed to detection. In that case, whatever the efficiency, the spaceship will remain enough stealth to heat detection. This is stealth by compensation. About stealth by design. From the nature: birds do fly, they transform heat (from sugar to mechanical energy), and are very efficient (little sugar energy will increase temperature). But there is still a bit of flight energy lost into friction, noise and turbulence during the flight. Owls are super efficient on the noise part, but this requires a limited flight speed. You can imagine a spaceship that has this kind of efficiency and stealth. [Answer] **Run a backwards nuclear reactor** As noted in most answers you cannot destroy energy. Furthermore, 100% efficiency is also not possible due to the laws of thermodynamics. So your best bet is to store the heat internally, or what I would suggest convert it into mass. A nuclear fission process is energy positive when splitting atoms heavier than iron, while a fusion process is positive while fusing atoms lighter than iron. In principle, you could fuse heavy elements together (make sure your end product is stable) and in this way convert energy to mass. This all within the bounds of physics as we know it. The only downside is you would get heavier the more energy you convert, but I think not much compared to the weight of the spaceship. **Implementation:** I would expect a spaceship that cools its outer shell close to absolute zero and draw all the thermal energy inwards. Inside the spaceship this thermal energy is used by a backwards nuclear reactor, either directly or indirectly, to convert energy to mass. I would expect it to be coupled with a normal (probably fusion) reactor so that it is possible to create a fuel cycle. Creating fuel if you need to destroy heat, and using that fuel if you suddenly need energy. [Answer] ## It is Actually Quite Easy Don't believe the lies about no stealth in space! Military grade IR scanners on Earth can detect a fighter jet at a range of about 50 km from front and 90 km from rear. But here is the thing most people don't consider: the average jet engine's exhaust is about 900°C. That means that a jet creates twice as much thermal contrast between the atmosphere and its exhaust as you see between a room temperature object in space and the vacuum of space. That much atmosphere also absorbs about 50-70% of light over those distances. So, this means that the effective range of thermal scanners for detecting a fighter sized ship in space can be approximated at about 150-500km... but in space, this is not very far at all. That means that you would need about 10,000 such IR satellites to detect space fighters using active propulsion or 650,000 such IR satellites to detect all fighters that are running at more room temperature just to get full thermal scanner coverage of things in Low Earth Orbit. As for things like detecting ships off in deep space you can pretty much forget thermal detection as viable option. The idea of no stealth in space comes from the concept that there is no atmosphere to absorb the IR emissions of a ship, but this ignores the more important factor in detection ranges which is the visual angle to an object. The smaller your visual angle to the emitter, the less of the actual emissions will reach you because they are spreading out in every direction. It does not matter how bright a thing is if it is too far away to see. This is the same reason you can only see a few of the billions of billions of stars in the universe when you look up at night. [Answer] Heat is entropy. Entropy in a closed system always increases, and Entropy is so much heat that early versions of thermodynamics talked about Heat flow and waste Heat only. But Heat is just a kind of entropy. Entropy is information; Heat is a kind of ridiculously complex and useless information (carried by various media) that our useful machines "bleed off" in their attempt to keep things ordered and simple and produce useful work. The thing is, Entropy goes up *really fast* when we do "useful work" at a macro scale, and the only practical way we have of dealing with it is to produce Heat and let that be emitted. What are the ways around this? 1. You can make machines whose operation is fully invertible that *do not* produce waste Entropy like machines we make today. This kind of operation is far far far far harder than it sounds. But, in theory, a computer thing doing only reversible computation could do "useful" "work" and not emit heat. (scare quotes are on purpose; the theoretical limitations on what can be done reverisbly is bad enough, the practical ones are insanely worse.) 2. You can direct the heat loss away from the sensors. The idea of a heat-pump laser, or even putting a cooled plate in one direction while letting heat be emitted in all other directions. This will heat the ISM in directions you don't shield from, and that in turn can be detected. 3. You could in theory put the entropy into something that isn't emitted heat. An example of that would be carrying around a heat-sink, like water, and boiling it, but on a ridiculously crazier scale. Imagine a space ship with a black hole that dumps its waste heat into that black hole, or something even more exotic. The CMB is 2.7 K; the mass of a [0.6 lunar mass black hole](https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/black-hole-temperature) is about that. So if you have a black hole that big or heavier, you could thermally couple with it and dump waste heat in it to drop your temperature down to CMB or lower. ]
[Question] [ I'm looking for some kind of science based way for people in a near future to be able to walk around in an irradiated area without getting any adverse effects, I was specifically looking at using magnets to deflect alpha and beta radiation, would this be plausible and if not would there be any other ways to achieve this goal? [Answer] Alpha particle emitters you just need to keep outside of your body for the most part. A respirator to start, for longer times a way to drink without exposure, and after that some way to not get it on your skin and a way to clean up anything you get on you afterwards. Air blocks alpha radiation: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_particle> [![Energy loss curve of alpha radiation in air](https://i.stack.imgur.com/dRlpH.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/dRlpH.png) Beta particles can be blocked by thick materials, or a few mm of aluminium (this can emit bremsstrahlung -- basically gamma radiation from blocking the beta radiation). Multiple cm of less dense materials, like plastic, avoids that. Gamma radiation is harder to stop. Dense materials are best to block it; this is where lead shielding comes in. As noted above, shielding against beta radiation can produce gamma radiation. Neutron is also bad. Here you want lots of light atoms, like hydrogen, and you have to worry about the material absorbing the neutrons and becoming radioactive in turn (hydrogen is relatively safe against this). Water can be used to shield against Neutron radiation; or water-rich materials, like concrete, which also offers decent Gamma radiation shielding (en-mass). Note that magnets do nothing with Neutrons. But heavy neutron radiation outside of active nuclear reactors is unlikely. Finally, you have things like radiation pills -- potassium iodide (KI) pills. Radioactive iodine gets absorbed by your body and concentrated in your thyroid, where it kills you. By taking a KI pill, your thyroid becomes (over) saturated with iodine, and our bodies biological processes go "no more iodine", and **doesn't absorb the radioactive stuff** at nearly the same rate. So if you take it before the radioactive iodine exposure, you get some protection. Afterwards it is too late. --- The thing is, those 4 flavors of radiation are very different. An irradiated area, as in an area exposed to radiation, is not a problem; radiation in the past isn't what kills you usually. On the other hand, a radioactive area, where there are substances that emit hard radiation, is a problem. Some kinds of radiation (like neutrons) can make substances radioactive. Think about what kinds of radioactive substances the area has, which in turn comes from what the source of the radioactive substances is. Also, how bad it is. Thick clothing that you dispose of (or wash) afterwards, a layer of tin foil, a respirator that filters out dust, and KI pills before exposure; all would reduce the radiation impact. Finally, a sensor to pick up on the harder to shield from radiation (gamma and neutron) so you avoid those areas; radiation falls off in inverse square with distance. But, to be clear, an area saturated with "decent amounts" of neutron emitting radioactive substances is simply lethal. You'd need a radioactive super-tank with shielding everywhere. Gamma is the next worse. Here, a full body lead lined suit (including a camera port or some kind of lead-based viewport. Magnets aren't going to help here either, as gamma radiation isn't charged. Alpha radiation is the stuff a piece of paper, or a few inches of air, or your skin, blocks pretty well. They are heavy and charged (they are high velocity helium nuclei). The danger here is from radioactive dust, where the radioactive particles gets into your body. Magnets would work horribly against this, as its charge/mass ratio is really low. Note that this is **very dangerous** -- the fact that paper or skin blocks this radiation doesn't mean that this doesn't kill people really well. Radioactive dust is a big problem, and once inside the body alpha radiation is extremely dangerous. Beta is charged and light, and magnets could in theory help here, although I doubt in practice. But a few cm of plastic or a thin layer of tin foil (which in turn risks emitting gamma radiation) blocks it pretty well. [Answer] **Thick clothes.** [![dickies coveralls](https://i.stack.imgur.com/SHkCb.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/SHkCb.jpg) > > Alpha particles... are relatively heavy, and only travel about an inch > in air. Alpha particles can easily be shielded by a single sheet of > paper and cannot penetrate the outer dead layer of skin, so they pose > no danger when their source is outside the human body. > > > Beta particles are essentially electrons emitted from the nucleus of a > radioactive atom. ... Very energetic beta particles can penetrate up > to one-half an inch through skin and into the body. They can be > shielded with less than an inch of material, such as plastic... > > > [source](https://www.cdc.gov/training/products/RN/page4976.html#:%7E:text=They%20are%20relatively%20heavy%2C%20and,is%20outside%20the%20human%20body.) Alpha and beta particles could be deflected by a magnet. I think if you insist on wearing your skin tight leotard the magnets might be a good choice. You would turn heads for sure. My leotard is not very flattering these past years and so I will borrow my brother's Dickies jumpsuit. Thick cloth can stop those pesky particles. Not sure one mexican wrestling mask is thick enough to protect my face but I have several and will wear them all. You can have a few too. If there are gamma rays around I will fill my leotard with gold Krugerrands. I have it on underneath the jumpsuit. That would work for you too but would mess up the aesthetics. [Answer] ### Radiation mitigation outfits & blankets are a thing: <https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/RadMitBlankets_TN_0912-508.pdf> [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/hxRYB.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/hxRYB.png) [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ngqd9.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ngqd9.png) These are made with lead wool filling and can reduce or stop radiation from something radioactive passing through them. Wrap the blankets around the more radioactive debris, or around the thing you want to protect (ie you). Depending on the decay chain (eg why is the land radioactive? Meltdown? Nuked?) radioactive Iodine 131 may be being created by the decaying elements. If that happens, [Potassium Iodide tablets should be taken](https://www.health.ny.gov/environmental/radiological/potassium_iodide/fact_sheet.htm) too. [Answer] As you can see from the other answers, there isn't a single device that will block all forms of ionizing radiation. A layered multi device strategy would be required. Alpha and beta radiation (helium nuclei and high energy electrons) are the easiest to deal with. As @Willk states thick clothing will suffice. Gamma radiation is only stopped by lead, or similarly materials that are composed of large atoms. Lead tends to be easily obtainable is is relatively cheap. As @Ash states, lead wool blankets clothing will help. [Neutrons are shielded by water](https://www.nuclear-power.net/nuclear-power/reactor-physics/atomic-nuclear-physics/fundamental-particles/neutron/shielding-neutron-radiation/). During the Apollo moon missions, the astronauts who walked on the moon worn [liquid cooling garments](https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/liquid-cooling-garment-s-067-apollo/nasm_A19730120000) like the one pictured below. This produced a "zebra like effect" where the astronauts had warm and cool stripes. Such garments could be made to reduce the "zebra effect" by having infill tubes and thus providing more coverage to the body. Such a suit, filled with water could shield the body against neutrons. The trick with all this is the ordering of the layering. Closest to the body a person would require a neutron shielding water suit filled with water and boric acid. This would then be covered with a lead wool garment to shield against gamma radiation and some neutron radiation. Covering this layer would be thick clothing to shield against alpha and beta radiation. With some may layers it would be very cumbersome to move around but it could be done. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/dfmXs.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/dfmXs.jpg) [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/vkl5C.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/vkl5C.png) [Answer] As others have noted Alpha and Beta particles can be blocked fairly easily. If you wanted a more flexible material that might be effecting in blocking gamma and neutron radiation as well, may I suggest fungus! [![Cladosporium sphaerospermum](https://i.stack.imgur.com/N2TlM.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/N2TlM.png) There has been some research recently on radiotrophic fungi living in the ruins of the Chernobyl reactors. A study on the ISS looked at blocking radiation using these very fungi and showed promising results: <https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.16.205534v5> ]
[Question] [ If we think of some world views as viruses... Would it hypothetically be possible to create a vaccine for this or, in another way, make a person immune to these views? I'm thinking racism, xenophobia, sexism etc. And if this were possible, what would be the moral/ethical implications of this for you? [Answer] There is an interesting concept called [memes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme). The term was formed in analogy to [gene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene) -- a meme is a bit of memory, a thought, which is held by people, transmitted, mutated, fit into different contexts, just as genes spread. **Attention:** The *more recent* use of the term meme to describe a catchy image or slogan is related, but not quite the same. So inoculate people against *bad ideas* the same way you inoculate them against *bad viruses*. You confront their immune system (their mental immune system, in this case) with parts of the threat in a manner it can recognize and learn to defeat. The details depend on the age, of course. Carefully introduce children to different ethnic groups, different gender roles, different sexual identities at an early age. **Yes**, that kid has two mothers and no daddy. Say that that is perfectly OK and leave it at that. **Don't** go into the details what those two mothers do in the bedroom until the kids are much older. And of course teaching that that is OK means teaching a certain set of morals, just as teaching that that is *not* OK means teaching a certain set of morals. The moral/ethical implications are the same as for any teaching -- stand by your morals, but enable them to make their choices and accept that their choices might differ from yours. [Answer] # Teaching It's probably not the answer you want to hear, but this is something that is already possible, but not in the way you might think. A cultural anthropologist would tell you that social norms, and mores, are learned attributes that individuals acquire during their lifetimes. Such things as behavior modeling, media portrayal, and peer interactions all influence an individuals tolerance or intolerance toward certain views. This includes sexism, racism, and xenophobia. In a broad sense this is the same general concept behind vaccination. In biological vaccination, you expose the immune system to a stimulus and train it to respond in a certain way to that or a similar stimulus, making you immune to that stimulus. In contrast, if you, for example, have a child watch a movie where the bad unlikable people have racist views and the good, likable people are not racist, this teaches them to not be racist. I'm not saying that one exposure is enough, it takes many exposures of different types and varieties for individuals to adopt the norms and mores of their societies, but it is similar to vaccination in the sense that frequent exposures to a stimulus creates a trained response. [Answer] ## Vaccinating against "feelings" is very different from vaccinating against "ideas & beliefs" Chemically preventing a person from experiencing certain feelings is something we do all the time. We give people antidepressants to keep them from feeling sad, or if you want a more permanent fix (like a vaccine), there are surgeries to remove or reduce the size of various hormone creating glands, and then there are things like lobotomies that simply prevent your brain from consciously acknowledging your feelings by destroying the necessary neural pathways for processing them. So in theory, you could develop a chemical designed to kill off the cells used by specific glands responsible for certain feelings; so, you can plausibly vaccinate against feelings. However, ideas & beliefs are a completely different issue. Beliefs are a function of your general learning system formed by pairing experiences with feelings. By preventing a certain kind of feeling, you can prevent people from learning certain things, but you will completely prevent them from learning anything which relies on that emotion. So, if you vaccinate against hate, you can prevent people from caring about issues like race and gender, but you will also prevent people from caring about issues like homicide, rape, and theft because we are supposed to hate those things. Instead of making a more tolerant society, you will get a more apathetic one where people will mistreat each other indiscriminately without any real consequences. So, if you want to change a specific belief, you need to change the specific experiences that form and reinforce that belief rather than the learning mechanism itself. ## The Solution: A Curated Mass-Media Monopoly or Trust Algorithms like those used by many popular social media platforms are designed to present you with information that already appeals to you too stimulate you to further use their platform. Each one of these interactions forms a learning experience. After about 6 months of regular use, such a platform will typically radicalize a person by exposing them to repeated input of information that they already sort of agree with until they strongly agree with it. Let's say using one of these platforms, you look up "Why did the US Civil War Happen?" Your platform will look at your search history and try to find an answer that will appeal to you; so, if you have a bunch of racist stuff in your search history, it is more likely to point you to articles about State Rights, Asymmetric Representation, and stuff like that, but if you you've done a bunch of searches about civil rights issues, it will return a bunch of stuff about Slavery. In each case you will become more sure of your previous opinion and become more resistant to the opposing opinion, in effect, immunizing you against anything that opposes the view that is being repeated to you. However, mass media algorithms do not need to present you with things you already agree with if they have a true monopoly power. If instead of having a bunch of competing mass media systems, there was only one option, people are much less likely to leave your platform just because they do not like everything that they are reading. Now your platform can answer questions however it wants; so, even when you ask a more pointed question like, "Did the South seceded from the union because of asymmetric representation?" the only results you will get will be debunking artiles say that, no the South only seceded from the union over issues of slavery; thus, shifting that user's perspective to agree with a point that they were previous opposed to: effectively "vaccinating" that person against racism by countering racism's formative experiences. Modern AI is good enough now at categorizing search information to the point that computers can tell if an article or website is racists, xenophobic, sexists, etc. So, if a modern platform where to start trying to immunize against these thoughts, all they would have to do is censor everything that supports them and show you the opposing view every time you try to reinforce your beliefs. ## Major ethical ramifications 1 - It clearly violates freedom of speech by suppressing minority opinions. Only some people will be able to express their view via mass media; so, if you are racist, sexist, etc., you will be denied representation both at Government and Interpersonal levels. It could also be said to violate freedom of Religion on the level that you are not just dictating what people can say, but also dictating what they can believe. Suppressing ideas because you disagree with them is the definition of totalitarianism. Democratic rule only works when all opinions are allowed to exist. 2 - This leads into a second major ethical issue which is that you are destroying the truth. Many cultures today believe in the adversarial system where truth is best found by seeing opposing points of view supported by the strongest possible evidence each side can find. This is why it is so important in a courtroom for example to have both sides represented by a lawyer. A skilled lawyer who does not need to argue against another skilled lawyer to prove his points will win pretty much every court case regardless of the truth. But in cases where there is only one logical truth, the more compelling argument will generally win out. So, in your society, any idea that might even be related to a censored topic will also be "proven false" even when it is true; so, anything that tries to explain anatomical, cultural, or psychological differences between people will also be censored. As it turns out, there are many medicines, goods, and therapies that are race, culture, or gender specific; so, if you censor all if it, then you also hurt a lot of the people you are trying help by suppressing any product or service that is specialized to fit their needs. An example where this has happened in real life is the pain medicine industry. Men and Women experience pain through different neurological mechanisms. Men experience it through the same mechanism that governs feeling sick, whereas women experience it through the same mechanism that governs feeling emotions. Because Feminism labeled these early claims as sexist, research into it was suppressed preventing pharmaceutical companies from funding research into gender specific pain medicine. As a result, women today are expected to take pain killers designed for men; so, they are not nearly as effective which has in turn lead to a whole new gender bias as women seeming less tolerant of pain because of how much more pain medicine they request from their doctors. [Answer] Much like a vaccine uses a weakened version of a virus to cause the body to prepare a response, simply present a flawed version of the idea you wish to vaccinate against. The vaccinated person will think everyone who holds a certain belief holds the set of mischaracterized beliefs you presented to them. Even when they hear someone telling them what they really believe, all the vaccinated person will hear is the set of moronic ideas you previously presented to them. [Answer] "Vaccinate" against an idea does not work exactly like vaccination against a pathogen. But you ask if it is possible? I firmly believe so. The easiest way is respondent or classical conditioning (rejection of the forbidden idea is positively reinforced) plus operant conditioning (the forbidden idea is negatively reinforced). Also, if the idea happens to have contrafactual aspects, exposure to those aspects will "immunize" against the idea. For example, let's consider the idea that group X is, say, intellectually inferior or inclined to stealing. Getting to know members of group X and *not* associating them with either factoid will ensure that, in the future, someone suggesting that all Xs are thieves or morons will be met with incredulity and diffidence if not open hostility. This is best done *before* the idea has any chance of establishing itself, but I saw it work remarkably well against pretty harsh operant conditioning. In general, **anything that has been presented to a child as "normal" or "right" in their infancy will be felt as "obvious" and "natural" in their adulthood**. Be it racism or anti-racism. Proceeding against the "natural" feeling to achieve rational belief does not come naturally to most, and the brain has plenty of tricks to trick itself into changing as little as possible. This is the root of the famous dictum of Jesuit educators, "Give me a boy for seven years, and I will give you the man." It is almost always possible to incorporate factoids negating the forbidden idea in a larger and mostly non-contradictory framework or belief system that would first pass unchallenged, and then prove beneficial. Doing this from an early age, this practically guarantees the whole belief system will be incorporated into the subject's self-image; once this is done, the forbidden idea will lead to cognitive dissonance and be rejected. More complex conditionings exist to insure against the possibility of a "de-programming" attempt. > > what would be the moral/ethical implications of this for you? > > > Well, I fear that this question might have little purpose. I could say that I consider immunization against those ideas *against which I myself have been immunized* as a highly moral endeavour, and it would be the truth, but could I really believe anything else? [Answer] Okay, you can teach kids not to deny fact to fit their own narrative, as well as see that inner beauty is better than outwards looks, and be kind to others, even for no reason. Or, you can plant microchips that prevent them from acting on thoughts such as "Hitler did nothing wrong." [Answer] **It is called brainwashing** There was a lot of research and testing of this idea on Russian political prisoners who had been banished to Siberia. One method was to show prisoners movies of their political heroes or people espousing the 'undesired' views. At the same time they would be injected with drugs to induce extreme nausea. The idea was to make them become completely averse to what they had previously believed. This form of torture was never shown to be effective. Of course the subjects would very quickly *profess* to be converted but, years later, if they became free, they might well revert to their original ideas. Similar methods have been used in the past to 'cure' people of homosexuality. Inducing nausea whilst making them view pictures of naked men for example. --- It is entirely possible that people in power who have strong and unbending views that allow of no argument, will resurrect this idea - perhaps with more sophisticated technology. Shock collars? Truth drugs to make people reveal their true beliefs - followed by a 'correctional' course in a camp? Some of this goes on in China today and of course an early example was the the Spanish Inquisition. [Answer] ## Probably. It's not invented yet, but *almost*. First, look at [this news story](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200224131129.htm) and [paper](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-020-0672-1) about NMDAR autoantibodies. The brain is supposed to be protected from immune system interference, but even simple trauma can disrupt the barrier. Antibodies that recognize the brain's own receptors can enter and exert "beneficial" functions, such as reducing the perception of stress. It is a blunt tool - not even clear it's an antidepressant - but it's a *tool* - one that can be sharpened. Specifically, the barrier can be broken by [ultrasound](https://www.webmd.com/brain/news/20190529/breaking-the-ultrasound-barrier-to-fight-disease) focused on a precise part of the brain. Already FDA approved for some circumstances. But where do you aim the thing? Well, that's where intensive initiatives to understand language come in. See [this news](https://www.businessinsider.com/3d-brain-map-human-understanding-language-2016-4) and [paper](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature17637). Obviously there is a lot of money behind trying to see thoughts - thoughts that someone can reach out and touch with ultrasound, and tune as they like with antibodies or other means. Note that these word maps can be generated simply by brain scanning someone listening to the radio. These techniques can be combined with all the old-fashioned means of mind control, such as stimulation of the nucleus accumbens (or simply drug release) to positively reinforce particular thought patterns. Wish I had less news -- sorry -- but since you asked... ]
[Question] [ I am looking for as hard science answers as possible, but I **am** willing to bend some rules for a good answer. Assume **they** need to move 10 million 100 million people off of a planet what technology should be used for an alien species to abduct around 50 million people to use as slaves? This is for my own story, in which I once had the idea that an entire nation of millions (of an alien species, not humans specifically) were abducted, almost every single one of them, by outside extraterrestrials and taken to work as slaves, some of them as gas-giant miners/extractors on special stations built to mine gas-giants of whatever resources they have, but I was told by some people on the Worldbuilding subreddit's Discord that it would probably not be profitable for the aliens doing it. Especially as they'd need many people and possibly a lot of equipment and technology to get the slaves. bonus question, I would be happy if you answered this but it is not obligatory: would this be profitable? [Answer] **Purchase your slaves from other members of their species.** <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade> > > Current estimates are that about 12 million to 12.8 million Africans > were shipped across the Atlantic over a span of 400 years, although > the number purchased by the traders was considerably higher, as the > passage had a high death rate... Millions of slaves also died as a > result of slave raids, wars and during transport to the coast for sale > to European slave traders... > > > This system provided slaves to the new world for centuries. Persons of the same species and living in the same area as the soon-to-be-slaves captured individuals and presented them for sale. Your aliens could do the same. Outsource all of that to the locals. Let them handle chasing down persons who do not want to be slaves, making war with their governments and families etc. Purchase or trade goods with those persons in exchange for individuals ready to be transported off to the work sites. --- I feel like someone might read this and downvote because slavery is bad. Agreed: slavery is bad. But talking about bad things is not bad. Evil hates the light. [Answer] # Depends on the technology ... A *sufficiently advanced technology* could send warp ships into orbit, *beam* the people directly into *stasis pods*, and then fly them to the destination. The problem with that is that a technology which has transporters like Star Trek, and computers to control all this, might not need millions of workers. An *insufficiently advanced technology* could send ships into orbit, bomb the planetary defenses and any organized resistance into pices, and send down squads to round up abductees and *herd* them into *shuttles*. While scattered remnants of the defenders take potshots at them. Aliens with a relatively low level of technology might need human workers, because their tech isn't good enough to replace them with AI, but this *insufficiently advanced technology* would find it harder to grab the humans. [Answer] **Weapons** You can't kidnap 50 million humans without someone noticing. It's simply not possible. In addition, the amount of logistics and energy you would require in order to transport 50 million humans off-world is such that your fleet would be noticed by the current space gazing infrastructure. Sure, you can bend rules to give your fleet ultra-stealth capacity, but if you want to be realistic, your fleet *will* be noticed by the humans. So, then you have the age-old method of abducting people from a technologically inferior society. You take your superior weapons, (presumably some sort of kinetic energy weapon a la Project Thor style) point it at the technologically inferior people in question, and loudly say "Oh, will you look at that. It looks like I have these here Kinetic Energy Weapons aimed at you puny Earthlings and it would be *such* a shame if my finger slipped on the trigger and dropped these on your pitiful little planet. Especially since it could only be avoided if, say, you decided to sell me a few million of those Earthlings of yours. And if you do that, I might just leave one or two of my more outdated toys for you to place with. Just saying." Now, some of Earth's more freedom-loving countries may protest at this, but there are a countries on Earth which have leaders who do not value freedom so much or the lives of their citizens, but do value their own lives and would love to get their hands on some second-hand alien tech. Not to mention that said countries are well acquainted with propaganda and ordering their citizens around. [Bonus answer: Presumably, this isn't really profitable, unless humans have some innate advantage that no other life form has compared to any other alien race; i.e. their are unique enviroments that humans are more suited for, humans are more long lived, humans can give birth to more children. Or possibly that the aliens have figured out some mind-control tech that only works on humans to make rebelling impossible.] [Answer] Aliens silently made planet inhospitable - they tricked lesser race to believe their planet has global warming, while, in reality, its has ice age starting. After long winters and floods destroyed crops, lesser race will willingly follow anybody, who promise to save them from hunger, even if they had to board big and overcrowded warp ships, that will transfer them to some nameless solar system to work as miners in asteroid belt. [Answer] **Skyline's aliens** Considering **1)** You can't make your aliens too advanced, because they could build realiable robots to do whatever they want, not aliensweating even a bit. **2)** It also needs to have economics in play. They need it to be cheap, because otherwise they would find other ways to do the job, like cloning humans in a lab. War is expensive, so that option is discarted. **3)** It has to be systematic, to acomply for 2) **4)** It needs to be elegant on paper, since its storytelling. You can't just have giant robots snatching people and throwing them in a basquet. Considering all this, I find the Skyline movie approach most seducing, hipnotizing humans to walk on the trap by themselves, and promptly leave. A lightning fast approach would be most effective. Send 100000 carriers to the most densely poblated cities, wait 10 minutes to humans to jump in, and leave never to return. You can however ignore 1) and 2) if their culture is all about slaving for their own glory. Robots just don't cut it, they need to subjugate other species. Extras: Please ignore the last 2 minutes of the movie, and Skyline 2 altogether. [Answer] If the aliens penetrated society as impersonators using disguises of some kind, and with their tricks, assumed positions of power in the governments, funded space colonization programs, then they could move out people, without being under suspicion, to their home planet. However, sending 50 million humans on a space colonization mission is nearly impossible because of the amount of time, resources, and logistics required for a mission like this. Why not consider the aliens taking away enough sperms and eggs to grow their own humans where they need to in specially modified habitats? [Answer] **Welcome to your friendly supplier. We got a recent batch mature for employ!** Kidnap a few, say a hundred for gene diversity. The acepted bare minimum for a viable colony was about 2k. Yet with gene editing you can get a smaller subset and edit away the defects. Remember stars are light years apart. By the time you reach the other stars of the galaxy, your humans could have been cloned, indoctrined and stashed in stasis pods. Ready to sell. Or let them breed as animals. Remember, space is mindboggling big. Would take centuries traveling at light speed to waddle around **OUR** corner of **OUR GALAXY**. [Answer] **NO, BUT THAT DOESN'T MEAN IT CAN'T BE** It's impractical because, for the aliens, it's much, much cheaper for them to construct machines to mine the gas of a gas giant than for them to abduct an entire continent of slaves to do it. But there are ways to make it practical. ***Ways like, say, a nearby pulsar, with a whomping strong magnetic pulse that regularly sweeps the planet in question.*** Basically, instead of a gas giant, you have a rocky, barely-habitable planet with a high concentration of incredibly valuable metals that only exist because of the effects *this* particular pulsar's magnetic pulses are having on *this* particular planet. Thing is, the pulses happen fairly frequently, and are incredibly strong. If the aliens tried to use automation, they'd be constantly repairing or replacing anything that had electricity-bearing wires, and to properly shield the electronics would be economically unfeasible, and possibly even outright impossible. The cost of automation, as a result of all this, would be astronomical, and maybe even downright impossible. As a result of this, only manual labor is possible, necessitating the use of slaves. And whaddya know, there is a planet with sentient organisms whose biology just so happens to be capable of breathing this planet's air just a handful of light-years away! So, naturally, they go to a third-world nation, abduct the entire population, and then export them to this planet, setting them to work mining the aforementioned metals. [Answer] It's a scam. The people think they're leaving to colonize an Earth-like planet with alien help. The aliens can't go themselves because they can't breathe the atmosphere. The humans line up and even pay for the privilege of going. Lies about travel speed make the lack of feedback plausible. ]
[Question] [ In my understanding bacteria is a simple thing to grow as it requires: a Nutrition concentration at the right Temperature with the right Gaseous concentration at the right pH with additional Ions and salt suspended in water. So one can have a vat with some disturbing/mixing mechanism and just have your bacteria grow in a specially formulated growth medium. This is simpler than managing something like algae that requires sunlight to photosynthesize. Bacteria can duplicate at a rate as fast as every 10 minutes at a exponential rate this can generate a lot of biomass. Bacteria has a cell wall consisting of a sugar protein called Peptidoglycan and coupled with the small volumes of bio-materials and gas volumes that bacteriums develop could potentially be sufficient to sustain a human as far as I understand it. **Now my question is:** Is it possible to sustain a human as they exist today by growing bacteria in a vat, draining the growth medium, "sterilizing" the bacteria by sonic pressure or something like microwaving the contents of the vat, then eating/drinking the goop/sludge that is left which should exist of biomass that is human digestible. I know that there are algae "pills" made from compressed algae that allows a human to generate ATP without the consumption of carbohydrates, so I'm trying to figure out if the same is possible with bacteria biomass. Apologies if there are any problems with my post, first post. Didn't have enough rep to post in the meta sandbox. [Answer] > > This is simpler than managing something like algae that requires sunlight to photosynthesize. > > > Bacteria can duplicate at a rate as fast as every 10 minutes at a exponential rate this can generate a lot of biomass. > > > There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, even if you make it with a load of bacteria. The nice thing about photosynthetic algae is that the feedstock you use to grow them with is basically air, water with a sprinkling of nutrients, and then some light (sunlight or grow lamps, according to availability and convenience). Conversely, *non*-photosynthetic organisms (such as the yeasts L.Dutch mentioned) require generous amounts of food to get them going. Renan's beer requires a decent amount of barley to be [saccharified](https://beerandbrewing.com/dictionary/Do5AiUH8r0/) to provide the sugars the yeast needs to eat in order to replicate and provide useful metabolic byproducts. To get that feedstock, you need to grow crops, and you need additional energy and infrastructure to turn those crops into stuff that your microorganisms like eating. And, y'know, you could just grow human food on the barley farms instead, and cut out the middle~~man~~organism. So what you really need is not just a bacterium that produces food gloop (by being edible and nutritious by itself, or by synthesising an excess of things good for people) but a feedstock for it that does not require a farm to grow it. I have no idea what you'd use for that. With sufficient effort and handwaving, maybe you could make something that eats crude oil and secretes food, but that sounds like a pretty serious bioengineering challenge. > > I know that there are algae "pills" made from compressed algae... I'm trying to figure out if the same is possible with bacteria biomass. > > > You are presumably referring to [spirulina](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirulina_(dietary_supplement)). Despite [photosynthetic bacteria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanobacteria) being commonly referred to as "blue-green algae", "algae" is now generally used to mean only eukaryotic photosynthesisers and cyanobacteria are definitely not eukaryotes. Thus, spirulina *already* fulfills your requirement. Probably not a good idea to use it as your only source of protein unless you've found a way to ensure that the end products is definitely free of all of the [toxins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcystin) that various cyanobacteria species produce which can cause serious long term health effects. I *believe* (though I'm definitely not certain) that this is the only example of a purely bacterial-derived foodstuff in existence (as opposed to bacterially modified foodstuffs, which are very common). [Answer] What you propose here has already been proposed with a slightly different micro organism: not bacteria, but yeasts. Just to cite an example, in Asimov's work The caves of steel mankind, having abandoned the surface of the planet Earth to live in enormous underground cities, relies on cultures of yeasts to obtain nutrition. Some integration of nutrients is probably necessary, together with some manipulation to make the whole thing mole palatable to humans (a squishy goo is hardly comparable to steak with potatoes or a vegetarian curry when it come to watering one's mouth), but in principle it is possible. [Answer] **Using bacteria could extend the range of carbon fixing organisms that make our food.** 1: We want carboyhydrate to eat. Green plants and algae fix CO2 into carbohydrate using the energy of the sun. But they are not the only photosynthesizers: [purple sulfur bacteria](https://bio.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Microbiology/Book%3A_Microbiology_(Boundless)/8%3A_Microbial_Evolution%2C_Phylogeny%2C_and_Diversity/8.09%3A_Nonproteobacteria_Gram-Negative_Bacteria/8.9B%3A_Anoxygenic_Photosynthetic_Bacteria) also fix CO2 into carbohydrate using the energy of the sun. There are yet other bacteria who fix CO2 into carbohydrate using other energy sources as well, like methane or hydrogen. It might be more efficient in some circumstances to use your energy to produce energetic chemicals for these bacteria (1 step), rather than use your energy to produce light which green things can use for energy (2 steps). 2. We need amino acids to eat. Lots of things (e.g. plants, yeast) can synthesize amino acids if provided organic nitrogen - fertilizer. Only a few microbes can start with N2 and fix it into organic nitrogen. One of these is the green algae [Nostoc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostoc). <https://dgrin.com/discussion/259217/the-blob-nostoc-commune> [![nostoc](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Nk1x0.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Nk1x0.jpg) It caught my eye because I have been reading Charles Fort, and growths of nostoc are invoked to explain "star jelly" or unexplained blobs of goo that seem to have fallen from the sky. Star jelly is photosynthetic and nutritious - it is also called "fat choy" and is dried and eaten. I propose for your fiction that your people maintain tanks of sweet gooey star jelly. [Answer] I think a bacterial stew would be deficient in protein because, as you described, bacteria are chemical factories encased in an edible bag, and are not meaty. They contain amino acids but may not contain all the essential amino acids we need in our diet. I imagine you could work around this, though. If your bacteria weren’t simple single celled organisms but were instead multicellular like paramecium that formed, in effect, a complete protein for us. Or your larder also contained a bacteria bioengineered to produce a complete set of amino acids for our diet the same way some bacteria produce antibiotics or toxins, then that fluid could be harvested and used a broth for your stew. I think the primary challenge would be constraining other organisms from spawning in your bacterial mediums. You would be growing them on such a scale that small scale contamination by other organisms could result in large crop failures — toxic or noxious byproducts generated by free-rider organisms that snuck into the mix. ]
[Question] [ **Closed**. This question is [opinion-based](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers. --- **Want to improve this question?** Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by [editing this post](/posts/150681/edit). Closed 4 years ago. [Improve this question](/posts/150681/edit) What would be a good title for someone who works closely with an emperor, is skilled in diplomacy, deals with different factions and individuals in the Empire's capital city to resolve issues, while also negotiating with other nations on behalf of the Emperor? **Setting**: Fantasy world loosely based in renaissance times. The Emperor's court consists of titles/persons such as: a commander of war, a Vaultmaster, a high priest, city patrol commander, etc. For the person in question, I was thinking of the title of Ambassador, but an ambassador doesn't deal with domestic issues, do they? The term Diplomat comes to mind, but is there a higher ranking——and cooler sounding——title that I could give to this person? Examples of what this person does on a regular day: 1. The poor in the slum districts of the capital are protesting, so our person/diplomat helps appease the district leaders by listening to their issues and coming up with solutions 2. A king from another nation is coming to speak of a potential alliance. This person/diplomat has to help the Emperor and said king to come to terms. [Answer] Historically, these kinds of duties would likely fall to the [Vizier](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vizier) or [Chancellor](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vizier) or [Prime Minister](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_minister). Looks like you'll be wanting to come with some title names other than, e.g. "commander of war". Given your constraints, Chancellor might work well. Or alternatively, Viceroy. [Answer] Have you considered such titles as: * Plenipotentiary * Legate * Deputy * Arbitrator * Consul * Proconsul * Nuncio * Internuncio * Attaché * Premier * Factotum * Procurator * Proctor [Answer] In the Holy Roman Empire, the Prince Electors, the highest after the emperor, held the titles: *Arch-Steward (or Arch-Seneschal), Arch-Chamberlain, Arch-Marshal, and Arch-Butler*. These all originate in the offices of a royal household, but all save the Butler have since lost most of their connotations with domesticity and could fill in for a title of a sort of prime minister. *The Steward* was originally head of all household staff, but this consummate manager could, over time, start to oversee more and more of the Emperor’s lieutenants in the realms of economy and statecraft. *The Chamberlain* was in charge of the Emperor’s wardrobe and bedchamber, which seems trivial in modern times, but this meant very close access to the Emperor’s person. Only someone trusted should have access to where you sleep! In the Byzantine Empire, the keeper of the wardrobe (known as the Vestiarion) eventually came to control the entire treasury in a great example of scope creep. *The Marshal* was in charge of the Emperor’s horses, and from there it’s not a stretch to oversee the cavalry and soon the whole military. *The Butler* or ‘bottler’ was in charge of wine specifically and the kitchen more generally. This one seems especially silly to modern audiences, but could actually be kind of cool if you take the time to explain it. Being in charge of food and drink means you’re the Emperor’s first line of defense against poisoning, which is also why a Cup Bearer was so important in the Middle Ages. You could show how the Butler came to control security of the Emperor’s person more generally, and from there to ever more vast responsibilities. [Answer] **Shogun or Regent** The problem with this arrangement is that such position involves an enormous amount of power, eclipsing the power of Emperor himself. Anyone who has an authority to negotiate on behalf of an empire has special powers. Anyone who is the primary authority for **all** negotiations, both domestic and international becomes the primary authority of this empire. Why talk to the Emperor if you can talk to his master of negotiations? In real life, such authority would become a "power behind the throne", with real Emperor withdrawn from politics and decision making - either voluntary, or deliberately restricted to a ceremonial role. P.S. This is different from a "trusted advisor" scenario, in which Emperor is calling the shots, and dispatches his advisor to conduct negotiations on case-by-case basis. "Trusted advisor" has little permanent powers except having his master's trust. [Answer] Your official who represents the concerns of the citizenry can be an **ombudsman**. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ombudsman> > > The typical duties of an ombudsman are to investigate complaints and > attempt to resolve them, usually through recommendations (binding or > not) or mediation... At the national level, most ombudsmen have a wide > mandate to deal with the entire public sector, and sometimes also > elements of the private sector (for example, contracted service > providers). In some cases, there is a more restricted mandate, for > example with particular sectors of society. > > > And I love to say "ombudsman". Try it! [Answer] In the modern age, I doubt there is a single individual who would handle both foreign and domestic diplomacy, however what you are really describing is a person who can act on the King's behalf in the King's absence. The word for such a person is... "Proxy" [Answer] * Councillors, especially [Privy Councillors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privy_council). These are persons who regularly confer with the ruler in confidence, and who can be expected to both speak the ruler's mind and carry messages back directly to the ruler. * Agents, especially [Agentes in Rebus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agentes_in_rebus). These are persons who have been designated by the ruler to "look into matters" -- whatever matters the ruler thinks need looking into. * Princes and Princesses. Relatives of the ruler. When they speak, they speak as members of the ruling dynasty, and the ruler couldn't repudiate their promises without dishonoring his own blood. * Dukes, or Counts. If the *Empire* has an *Emperor*, it is probably not a democracy. Persons who are nobles in their own right can make weighty statements. [Answer] When Cardinal Richelieu was "first minister" or "chief minister" of France, he delegated specific duties (of the sort described in the original post) to *intendants*. *Envoys*, consuls, and ambassadors are also possibilities. In the Roman Republic, the two consuls were normally the highest officials. Ambassadors plenipotentiary are theoretically the most trusted of ambassadors. In Lois Bujold's Vorkosigan series, "Auditors" are trouble-shooters who "speak with the voice of the Emperor". The books *[Memory](https://www.baen.com/memory.html)*, *[Komarr](https://www.baen.com/komarr.html)*, and *[Diplomatic Immunity](https://www.baen.com/diplomatic-immunity.html)* feature Miles Vorkosigan as an Auditor. [Answer] As you said, 'Diplomat' is good, but it's kind of a catch-all for anyone who does this type of work. There are apparently ranks within the general designation of Diplomat though, including Ambassador, Minister, High Commissioner, Counsellor and Envoy. (found on [wikipedia here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomatic_rank)) If you're looking for something a little less real world I'd suggest Negotiator or Peacemaker. [Answer] Imperial China had the title of "Grand Secretary". They replaced the earlier position of chancellor. Basically a Secretaries job was to screen which documents/papers from the different ministries where sent to the Empreror. This gave them tremendous power since they could selectively pick which documents to send to the Emperor or draft their own. You could have a role very similar to this and call them something like "Grand Chancellor" you could have them be a position above the rest of the kinds cabinet who's job is to delegate which domestic issues have to be solved personally and which he can hand down to one of his own official. Think of it as a bureaucracy that's above the rest of the bureaucracy. I'd also suggest giving him Powys that let him "borrow" materials from the other cabinet members. Ex: a riot in the slum so he borrows a company from the guard. ]
[Question] [ In Warlords, my own sci-fi project, I wanted to tap into exosuits, but didn't want them to be one off rich boy toys or just make little to no practical sense. So I'm wondering what industry, if any, could make use of exosuits and have them be cheaper then robotic counterparts (right now I'm thinking maybe mining)? Note: * Warlords is set only 100–150ish years in the future so nothing too crazy. * Exosuits are roughly a few feet taller and much bulkier than the average human. They are also powered by small nuclear reactors if energy is a factor. * The average "working man suit" gives the user roughly 10x the strength of the average human. [Answer] Military patrols/population pacification is one obvious example. Autonomous machines cannot be trusted to use guns against human insurgents because one wrong move can cause an embarrassing rebellion and weeks of riots. Human soldiers can use their judgment to decide when to use lethal force. The soldiers need non-lethal weapons as well as lethal weapons, so they need exosuits to carry the extra weight. Another use for exosuits would be disaster recovery. First responders need to clear out collapsed buildings without injuring unconscious people trapped within. Firefighters need to knock down structures to rescue large adults and still be able to outrun fast-moving wildfires. In a wild, chaotic situation the AI in autonomous rescue robots would not be able to judge who to rescue first, what buildings to save and what to ignore, and whether something is too dangerous to attempt. Finally, exoskeletons would be very helpful in certain types of manufacturing. Assembling commercial and military aircraft comes to mind. The fuselage is often build first out of metal or carbon fibre in a separate facility and then shipped to a large factory for final assembly. Human factory workers use robotic arms and sensors to attach fuel, hydraulic, and electrical systems to every part of the wings and fuselage, but they must clamber up and down ladders and platforms to reach every part of the unfinished plane. An exoskeleton with extendable arms and legs could help workers complete their jobs much faster and with greater precision. [Answer] Mining is a good guess, and so is construction. Moving through a complex environment, dealing with unexpected circumstances, picking up and moving or using wide variety of tools and materials. All these tasks are very hard for robots. Robots can do well defined tasks like mining out a defined ore seam, or building walls on top of a foundation, but defining the seam and laying the foundation requires humans. Also, repairing the robots, especially after they crash into something [Answer] Construction seems like the primary use case to me. First, automata are generally not very good at improvising or thinking on their feet. They could follow a blueprint, but blueprints are rarely 100% accurate to the actual structure that ends up being built, because they rarely account for absolutely everything. Parts arrive that aren't compatible, the ground settles in a strange way, cables need to be run in the wrong order - these things happen, and humans are flexible enough to cope with them, but automata aren't. They would need either a human guide to make corrections on-site, or constantly-updated blueprints, both of which would defeat the speed and cost benefits of automation. Second, automata aren't in a good position to judge how the building will be used. A human who's working on a construction site can visualize how the building is coming together and how it will be used. They can walk through to decide if a doorway is placed properly, or if there's adequate lighting, and make corrections if there are problems. Automata can't because they can't judge what humans will think of it when it's done. Third, automata can be a security risk. If a prankster (or a criminal, or a hostile government's agent) makes a correction on a blueprint, a human can double-check it before acting on it. Automata don't necessarily have that capacity. They could also themselves be compromised, requiring additional routines for physical and electronic security that human workers would not be subject to. It's certainly possible to achieve secure automata, but it would be expensive, possibly more expensive than simply hiring living workers. [Answer] **Demolition, artists, craftsmen.** **Demolition** and some construction, demolition is inherently unpredictable, everytime you move something you have to reevaluate the stability and even value of the surroundings and debris. By definition demolition is often very unpredictable, you don't know what is behind the walls of a building And increasingly building materials are recycled which you want a human for. "those are nice logs we can reuse those, but those are rotten, wait those fittings are cast iron we can get some money for those! Careful that wall looks unstable!" Construction will see some use, especially where aesthetics are important. A robot will not understand that a seam is ugly or that the planner forgot to account for some fixture being moved. However a large part of the process will be done by robots. Consider how many modern homes are built in factories as modular units. Similarly exoskeletons will see wide use in anything in which **artistry/aesthetics** is important, You want a human placing your statues or doing landscaping, but a robot is probably fine for excavation. **Small scale businesses** will see exoskeletons over robots, a mom and pop sawmill will have exoskeletons because they are doing mostly custom work often with odd shaped pieces, a large factory sawmill on the other hand will be all robots. Likewise a auto factory will be all robotinc, but a custom car shop will have an exoskeleton. Mining on the other hand will be nothing but robots, sans a few planners/managers. It already has extensive uses of robots and for the jobs in mining for which humans are needed, adding an exoskeleton will not help with the job, they aren't doing any lifting. The exception again will be small scale custom stone cutting, like sculptors or custom cutters. [Answer] I've been a firefighter for over 30 years. A working, reliable, exosuit would be a godsend. Automation really can't do the job (and until you have full AI, can't) due to the variable nature of what first responders do; you might need to perform CPR on an infant and then an hour later are ripping apart a car to get at the occupant after a crash and the hour after that searching a smoke-filled building looking for survivors in the middle of a structural fire. While theoretically telepresence could do it, people don't become first responders to sit in an office. [Answer] Where at least the following apply, somewhat following upon Bald Bear's answer: Complex novel/unanticipated situations can be expected to occur, even rarely. Tasks occuring under highly varying conditions, where compensation strategies are not easy to automate. Any tasks not comprehensively & reliably addressed via script. Short of advanced AI, robots are best used for rote tasks or remotely guided. EDIT: As HMI sophistication evolves, especially including sensory input, the utility of remote bots increases significantly. This probably happens more readily than AI evolution, since the technological hurdles are far less difficult, less expensive to develop. [Answer] **Robots are better unless humans are disposable** **Remote control** There's no need for an embedded human. See the following: > > Remote surgery > > > When Mehran Anvari picks up a surgical instrument and cuts into > somebody’s flesh, he doesn’t use his own hands. In fact, he’s not even > in the room. He operates on patients that are 400 kilometres away. > <http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140516-i-operate-on-people-400km-away> > > > The robots can be left to get on with anything their neural nets can cope with. Humans work from their office acting acting as supervisors. They use VR glasses and sensors to sense the environment from the robot's point of view. This works especially well in mines and other hazardous places unless of course you have disposable human slaves. The 'manufacturing cost' of a human being then has to be compared with the cost to provide an electronic brain. [Answer] Idk what 'Warlords' is, but assuming it's some technoverse where technology has bizarrely only improved in one or two fields and those only in being able to present what is capable today more readily plus some weapons technology..actually.. not assuming that, coz it could have any number of odd precepts =) Mining where? Machines can be built to operate under constant environmental constraints that people just won't (normally) put up with(that is to say, they will want to get out of those suits) which means you need a living environment, habitat for them, vacations if nothing else. The only real reason to use people for anything in the long term, is because people will(want) to do it, not because it's 'cheaper.' Fact is that even today a significant proportion of human industry is redundant (99% of advertising spending is spent trying to attract consumers to one particular variation on a product or service of many that can do that job, for example) At some point, hopefully long before a century and a half has passed, the general comprehension of 'economy' will reorient to "those mechanisms of exchange whereby things that need doing get done" as opposed to "i have to justify my existence to society so i must convince it it needs something doing" at which point... Pretty much any argument other than habitation provision, workforce replenishment, mission duration, transport costs & h&s can quite readily be answered with 'whatever a robot can do, a human with robotic support can do also.' But tele-operation is a thing, and realistically it's much easier to build a single partial rig and a transmitter than it is to maintain conditions suitable for people on-site. What you said about 'nothing too crazy.' 150 years ago radio communication did not exist, farming was manual labor, modifying the human form was all about surgery and breeding programs, in 25 mankind will be able to reliably synthesise biogenesis... Question is really, in 150 years will humanities loftiest ambition to be to sit in a tele-op rig? Or to alter itself so that it can do those things it's products would otherwise do better. [Answer] AI is good and getting better by the day. If there are power packs capable of automating a human exo-suit they would work even better for Autonomous Mobile robots. Any task a human could do can be done quicker, to a higher precision, and with greater precision. Three possibilities: 1. AI has been outlawed, or prohibited by powerful socio/economic players. Be they government/labour unions/religions/companies/etc... 2. AI does not want to dig in the dirt, let the humans do that. They even seem to enjoy it. 3. The materials for constructing exo-suits are common, the materials for constructing suitable AI's are not. Some applications will have robots, but there is a greater need then availability. ]
[Question] [ **Closed.** This question is [off-topic](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers. --- This question does not appear to be about **worldbuilding**, within the scope defined in the [help center](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help). Closed 5 years ago. [Improve this question](/posts/128202/edit) If the Earth was edible, and was the sole source of food for its inhabitents, how long would it take for people to eat themselves off the planet? Assuming a biblical creation story (a man and a woman), after how many years of humans dwelling on earth would the earth be eaten to the ground? Assume the earth starts off looking the same as it does today, with the exception being that the land is edible food, and all ocean water is drinkable. Assume that the volume of dirt one would require for a meal equals the volume of food normally consumed by humans in real life per meal. Assume non-ration meals (3 full meals a day.) Assume that the waste isn't edible and piles up. Assume oxygen is provided through the soil. Assume that the whole earth is edible (not just the crust.) [Answer] **2100 - 2500 years** Assuming * An individual consume 2000 grams of Earth each day * A growing population rate of 4 childrens per family * Lifespan of 100 years * Three generations per century * 5.97219 × 1027 grams of available Earth to consume [Answer] The limit will be when poop is high enough that people cannot dig through it to get to food. They can dump poop into ocean or rivers, but that leads us to second limit: They eat away dry land (till they can no longer dig from the bottom), so time to starvation depends on size of the continent you are on. Technology could help dig deeper, or move to a different continent, but why would they develop technology if food is readily available? If you do assume advanced technology, the sheer weight will make food below certain depth inedible. Here is a relevant link: <https://what-if.xkcd.com/4/> PS I vote "earth be eaten to the ground" for quote of the day. Edit: they can tunnel under the poop, going deeper and deeper until the poop collapses on them, or they get so deep that dirt is rock solid. Alternatively, they can launch poop into orbit (or off planet). ]
[Question] [ This is something that I've been thinking a lot about. Before there was currency the way that people traded goods was through bartering their goods and services in exchange for other goods and services. If money and currency had never been invented (developed?), would international trade at the scale that we have today be possible? Trading had a very significant effect on old-world establishments, and greatly helped them grow. The environment directly around the colony could only sustain a certain amount of people, and soon enough it became neccesary to the survival of said colony to start importing goods from other places in order to be able to keep growing. Without a standarized currency, such as gold, would this have been possible? [Answer] **People traded internationally before the invention of currency** The pop idea of barter prior to the introduction of currency is an invention, and it has little to do with how people actually traded. The idea that people were limited to on-the-spot exchanges of say two chickens for a sword and a cabbage is completely ahistorical. In fact, people were making complex, and temporarily disjoint trades long before this idea was formalised into currency. Debts were simply recorded and settled in terms of goods rather than abstracted into currency. This trading was smaller scale than it could be with currency but not directly different in kind. **Currency was a formalisation of existing practice** Currency didn't spring into being out of nothing, it came into being because it formalised trades that were already being made. The first currency was precious metal, traded by weight, which was later stamped into coins of known weight. Ancient Japan used rice as an accounting unit since it was the staple on which other things depended. Conceptually, goods can be thought of as a form of currency with a complex exchange rate between them, and so the conceptual step from trading in goods to trading in currency is not a big one. **So, what does this mean for a world without currency?** How could we scale up these pre-Currency practices to a global economy on the modern scale? The answer lies in the concept of debt. A debt is nothing but a promise to deliver, and there's no reason that these can't be traded. Thus, I, a chair-maker take to you, a grocer, a promise to make a chair, I trade this promise for my weekly shop. But the promise is worth more than the weekly shop so you also give me a promise for 8 gallons of beer that the local brewery paid with. I can then "spend" that promise elsewhere. At first, this is just barter, but we can scale it up to a global level through the introduction of markets and clearing houses. Just as today stocks are traded on stock markets, I can take the beer promise to the clearing house, and find it's value in anything else by finding what the market will offer and trade it to a promise for whatever thing I want that I can then take to a local provider to get that thing. This requires that providers permit interchange, which will require legal controls, guilds, or other co-operation, but - remember - this is *exactly* what we're doing right now except that we abstract it into currency so it's operation is not implausible. Overheads will be higher, there are more middlemen, and it introduces new complexities but the system should be capable of scaling up to modern industrial scale. The introduction of computing power and mass communication actually makes it much more practical. The difficult question remaining is why on Earth your civilisation didn't make the small leap from here to currency. [Answer] An alternate system of currency would probably evolve. There are several examples of alternate currencies in the past where either currency didn't exist or lost all its value. * During the time of the Silk Road, kernels of pepper were valued as the same mass of gold, so you could pay with pepper instead of money. * Luxury goods like pelts, porcelain and silk were often used as currency and only "consumed" by the noble and wealthy * Right after the end of WWII the German currency lost all its value and people in Germany traded in cigarettes instead So would global trade be possible without standarized currency, such as gold? Yes, but it would be more complicated. There would probably be specialized traders who complete a circle of trades to increase their belongings. The caravans of the Silk Road did exactly that: they started with silk, porcelain and spices in the east, traded these goods for gold, gems and glass in the west, returned east and traded these for more silk, porcelain and spices... There would be no stock market, or at least not the speculative kind of today. The great differences in living standards would be spread differently over the world. Countries with natural resources would be rich, even those of the third world. Countries that neither have natural resources nor produce any goods of value would be poor, even those in the first world. There would also be less international travel and tourism. You would have to travel with a trailer of trade goods in order to pay your visit in a foreign country. The world would probably be less intellectually developed. How would you trade goods for scientific research, after all? [Answer] International trade at the scale of our present world would be impossible, I fear. Barter is effective at meeting the exchangers' needs at the moment it happens: if I want a bottle of wine, I can exchange my extra leather sandals for it. And that's more or less how some sort of international trade developed in the past. We have examples of trade goods moving along Europe way before moneys where invented. Being bound to the moment and to the needs, it's hard to scale it up: who would ever want 10k pairs of leather sandals for 10k bottles of wine? But before that, who would take a trade journey loading themselves with 10k pairs of leather sandals which take the place of something else, not knowing if anybody will ever want them? And also don't forget that coins do not rot along the travel. The obvious solution is to use one pair at a time in exchange for something else (food, shelter, water, you name them), but that goes back to small scale trade. [Answer] A different perspective from the other answers. Currency, as it has been pointed out, needs to retain value, be desirable enough to exchange readily for goods and services, and have a high enough value to weight ratio to make it preferable for trade. Currency also needs to be divisible into small enough denominations to make small transactions feasible. In a world without fiat currency, there are few things that hold these 3 traits, with bullion (precious metals) being the most obvious one. The one valuable thing that most people overlook is land. Land holds value, is desirable by everyone, and is divisible into small enough denominations due to something known as shareholding (not commonly used to refer to a portion of a parcel of land, but could be used as such in a different world), and is easily transportable if a record of deeds is maintained, which also reduces its weight to value ratio to that of the deed that represents the parcel. While this gets close to currency, there are a few key differences between land and bullion. Land is prohibitively expensive to manufacture, where mining can produce bullion at relatively cheap rates. By the same note, its much harder to destroy or irretrievably lose land (though still not impossible). Land is definitively backed, with a somewhat easier way to verify its existence, which makes it harder to scam someone with falsified notes, and easier to trace when they do. Land is also more difficult to hold illegally (unless the government in the area is doing the illegal seizure) which ties the security of trading in land to the confidence in the government that presides over that land (similar to how fiat currency works in todays market). This would likely alter how nations are perceived (as trade of land between sovereign nations would be much more common), but it would facilitate global trade and value exchange, which would allow the explosive economic growth we see today with fiat currency (albeit, more restricted as we cannot grow the money supply.). [Answer] ## The short answer: **precious metals**. Why? Money really solves a few problems: 1. Value-to-weight ratio: Money is worth much more per kg than, say, potatoes. This is helpful if you want to buy something expensive, or (because we're trading internationally), a hold full of things. 2. Exchange. This is the big one - *everyone* wants money, so it's much easier to trade goods & services for money than it is for other goods and services directly. 3. Relatively constant value: Inflation and counterfeit currency aside, you can be reasonably sure that the pound someone gives you today will buy you a pound's worth of something tomorrow, or next week. If you don't have currency, then your people will need to solve these problems some other way. There are a bunch of different things that could be used (other answers have suggested several), but historically the most common solution to this problem has been **precious metals**, particularly gold or [silver](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacksilver). They're pricey (so solve the first problem), widely desired (the second), and because they tend to be relatively pure and stable, their value can be easily calculated from weight, and they won't go off (the third). [Answer] The invention of currency is a pretty obvious solution to problems that are immediately apparent to anyone trying to do large scale trades. Even the simple IOU\* script quickly becomes a tradable thing, which is why in history we had “letters of mark” and similar devices long before modern accounting. The implication that currency would never be invented in a trading society implies some interesting cultural values. Interstellar trading without FTL engines, for example, likely will never have currency — the traders come to a given world only once every few hundred years. They can’t ever establish a currency that has value among the connected planets. If you ask me to devise a planet like this, I might suggest an ocean world of tiny, floating islands. A single island is big enough for a family. The islands drift together, trade happens, then they drift apart again, not to be encountered again in any person’s lifetime. Establishing a common language will be hard enough, much less a currency... how do you convince Island A that if they give you their manufactured cloth from the cotton on their island, and you give them some chips of pretty metals, that those metals will have definite value when A trades with Island B tomorrow? Can’t be done. That’s my solution to this question’s challenge. **The key takeaway is this: To undermine currency development, you have to undermine cultural development.** How you do that is open to your imagination. ——— * IOU = “I owe you” pronounced letter by letter in English was one of the earliest ways of recording a debt for later repayment. [Answer] > > Without a standarized currency, such as gold, would this have been possible? > > > Quick clarification, gold is not a currency: gold coins are currency. And for what it's worth, there's nothing magical about primitive gold/silver/bronze currency. It's just a valuable metal being traded around in standardized weights with a stamp that helps show that it really is the standard weight. Fiat currency is a little magical, but don't ask too many questions or the magic goes away. *Talking about how to trade without currency* Several answers have suggested precious metals, durable luxury goods, and other things as potential ways of facilitating trade, but I think that the generalization from these is what's important. **Anything valuable and relatively easy to transport can fulfil the role of currency** Star Trek uses gold-pressed latinum, Dune has currency but uses spice frequently, Total War Shogun II uses rice (sortof,) prisons used cigarettes, children used to use marbles (stretching the point, I know.) Point is that humans are more than willing to barter for something kind of like currency. Also, old-school international commerge would sometimes have avoided the use of currency, since goods are easier to use in countries which don't officially support your currency. The infamous triangular trade pattern for Britain, Africa, and the Americas involved a great deal of barter, even though British traders had access to currency. Therefore, the **only real difference in trade is that your traders will have to use valuable goods always instead of sometimes** when they make purchases or sales, since they don't have standardized forms of payment. I don't see this making much of a difference to international trade. [Answer] There is also the possibility that *trade*, meaning 'transfer of ownership', does not exist. If the concept of *property* does not exist, or is different. Perhaps there is world-scale cooperativism, or perfect communism, or property belongs to some all-powerful individual entity. Or property is meaningless because all needs and wants can be freely fulfilled. [Answer] Money is such an obvious and natural concept, that it effectively can't not be invented. There are roughly three kinds of money: 1. [Commodity money](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_money) is just any suitably rare commodity. It must be sufficiently hard to get that it maintains value, but still common enough that everybody may possess some for the purpose of exchange. Precious metals or gem stones are most suitable, but (as mentioned by the other answers) pepper seeds, pelts, bird feathers, sea shells, carved stones and, in absence of anything better, even cigarettes were used as money. And there is really no distinction that would make gold more of a money than cigarettes! It is unimaginable that a global society would not get at least to this stage. Basically every human society with non-trivial organisation in history invented commodity money, often independently. 2. [Representative (commodity-backed) money](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_money) bring the idea a step further. Instead of carrying the (potentially heavy), there is a storage that gives out notes that certain amount of the commodity stored there belongs to the holder—a bank. It is a slightly less obvious idea, but still easy to establish, because the first bank can be easily established by anybody with the right idea. As long as the bank notes can be exchanged for the real commodity, it does not require any other backing, agreement or government enforcement. 3. [Fiat money](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_money) does require general agreement or government provision. However, once most trade switches to representative currency and nobody exchanges it for the commodity it represented any more, dissociating it from the commodity becomes the obvious step. First the banks—and more importantly the governments—will get a growing itch to give out more money than they have of the backing commodity, relying on the fact that almost nobody converts it any more. And when the disproportion grows too big, they'll cancel that promise—and everybody gets stuck with the now completely free floating fiat currency. This is relatively recent evolution. US Dollar was commodity-backed [until 1971](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock). Now free floating fiat currencies have their advantages. Their amount adjusts to the economic performance, which smooths out price fluctuations and somewhat compensates for regional differences. The main disadvantage is that they permit hyperinflation. Economy that didn't evolve fiat money will be somewhat less efficient. The amount of commodity(-backed) currency is governed by production of that commodity and not needs of the economy, which leads to situations where there is too much or too little money in some region and that in turn leads to large fluctuations in prices. That makes planning harder and forces long-distance traders to work at higher margins, which is what reduces the efficiency. So without modern fiat currency, international trade would exist, and would quickly settle on one or a few commodities that would become currencies. Expect it to be somewhat less efficient, and expect it to make the good trading companies and centres disproportionately richer (similar to how it was in middle ages) as they would be bearing the rate risks and would get paid for it. [Answer] **No** You cannot have international trade as we do today without "money." Money is a financial instrument representing value. Barter requires that all the goods be present at the time of negotiation. That doesn't and cannot happen in our modern world. If only the futures market is considered, there isn't a real good being bartered, but the promise of a real good. That promise, represented on paper or electronically, is a financial instrument representing value. AKA, money. It's impossible to negotiate futures, stocks, bonds, contracts, or anything else without "money." Remember, money is a financial instrument representing value. The moment such an instrument appears (basically, the first time a contract to buy anything appears, a contract that could subsequently be sold without the bartered materials being present), you've created money. Getting from those financial instruments to the paper currency and coinage we have today is simply a process of standardization. In other words, it's unavoidable unless you delete the entire structure of financing from your world. That's improbable if not unbelievable. ]
[Question] [ Let's say I'm an extremely rich and somewhat secretive research group who wants to carry out experiments and such away from the prying eyes of the public. One of the obvious ideas for the location of a large laboratory would be underwater, where you don't have to hide it under some alternative identity to keep people away and there are far fewer rules and regulations to deal with outside of the ones you set yourself. So, assuming I have the resources to build such a place, where would be my best options to construct it if I want to take advantage of as many natural resources as possible? Just to be specific enough, this base of operations would need to be somewhat independent, but still able to obtain supplies from the outside world via submarines and such. It would need to be able to house a staff of at least several hundred as well as large animals, both terrestrial and seagoing (for experimental purposes). Below are some of the resources I'd like to utilize in order to make it seem more grounded in the real world. 1. Close enough to geothermal vents and/or plate boundaries so that geothermal power is an option to help reduce energy costs 2. Close enough to the surface to take in some amount of sunlight for greenhouses, not be crushed under the pressure of the water around it (strong building materials should help combat this), and generally help people's circadian clocks stay somewhat stable. 3. However, it also needs to be far enough under the ocean to be hidden from the general public (governments really don't matter as much) 4. Possibly somewhere that ocean currents could be used to help generate power (I've heard of this idea, but it's kind of icing on the cake) Other than that, if there are any other advantages to a certain location, then that's even better! [Answer] > > One of the obvious ideas for the location of a large laboratory would be underwater... > > > So far so good. > > ... where you don't have to hide it under some alternative identity to keep people away. > > > Nope. It is exactly **because** you don't have a cover up that you will get prying eyes. What do your goons tell the dock officers when they get asked about the destination for all those tons of fertilizer? Instead, find or found some legitimate business that can only be conducted very far from the shore, and then you can buy all the supplies you need with practically no questions asked. For example, pair your lab up with an oil company. You can build the lab right under an oil platform. The platform provides the fuel, energy, and the facade you need to buy all kinds of tools, chemicals, machinery and other supplies. If you happen to own the platform you can also use its profits to bankroll the lab. Otherwise the lab provides tech and food (for those courageous enough to eat... whatever it is that you do there). If you want to go green for whatever reasons, you could find a university that does state-of-the-art technological research (MIT, Caltech) and conduct research on wave power. This way you get paid to build your own generators instead of having to spend your own money on them. Find some Central or South America island to conduct your research - you can use the excuse that you get more solar power that way, also altruistically you are going to help some poor country with their economy... And then you use the local corruption on your favor, to keep prying eyes away. Bonus if the island happens to be a fiscal haven. Honour the research contracts with your partners, but do keep a couple offices and rooms in the underwater facilities which only a select few mad scientists have the clearance to visit. Those still too social for you? Partner with a government and help them build a research station on the south pole. Guaranteed supply deliveries, paid by taxpayer money. Just spend a few thousand dollars building a cute house and drilling ice every few months, write something about gas concentrations on different layers of ice... And they will leave you alone to spend the remaining millions on whatever. Build yourself a nice facility inside [Lake Vostok](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Vostok), where not even the most powerful spy sattelites will catch you. Have fun! [Answer] Why build your secret lair underwater when it is fairly easy to hide out in abandoned warehouse complexes, [abandoned shopping malls](https://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/completely-surreal-pictures-of-americas-abandoned-malls?utm_term=.juRO4eM8Q#.ibg2V5owe), cave complexes or the middle of the desert? I'm going to assume there is an ulterior motive, and that is protection. Hiding under water provides protection from most forms of radiation, electromagnetic energy and other signatures, as submariners well know. You are actually protected in both directions, unless you have antenna or waveguides breaching the surface, you will not be emitting signals that can reveal your position, and many forms of detection or even attack will be blocked or heavily shielded by the mass of water overhead. Unless the people looking for you are intending to blast you out of the water with depth charges or torpedoes, you will be protected from everything up to nuclear detonations above the water's surface. But sailing around to the middle of the ocean is probably going to attract attention as well, not to mention giving you a single point of failure weakness: anyone intercepting your supply ship can either find you (by following the ship) or starve you out (by seizing or sinking the ship). Putting your secret lair under some inland body of water like the Great Lakes will have similar issues. So if you need to shield your lair using a body of water, put it under an artificial body of water like a pool inside a warehouse, or sink it under a quarry. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Jw7VU.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Jw7VU.jpg) *What lies beneath?* Movement is hidden in the general traffic in and out of the warehouse complex, or the trucks moving in and out of the quarry. So long as you are not using something like a large nuclear reactor underwater, the thermal signature will be very diffused, and movement is hidden by the roof of the warehouse, or the movement of the water due to quarrying operations and the wind in the case of an outdoor lair. Quarry water might even be opaque due to suspended solids in the water from the quarrying. Even building the lair could be simplified, since the depth is not really going to be enough to generate a large static column, a large diameter steel or concrete pipe might be sufficient to form the basis of the lair, and moving stuff like that around industrial sites is unlikely to attract a lot of attention. Similarly, workmen can be brought in from time to time to do work without really revealing what is really going on (much of the work can be done on land and the finished pieces delivered underwater at night). Even utilities can be simply routed from land to the underwater lair with minimal issues. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/KkAbO.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/KkAbO.jpg) *Sealab II. Park one of these inside a large pool, or keep adding units as your secret organization grows* Seriously, most secret organizations draw more attention to themselves by trying to be secretive. Take the simple route instead. [Answer] # An old seamount If you have ever seen [Lava](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh4dTLJ9q9o), then you know the ultimate destination of any coral atoll is a few meters below the sea level. There are a variety of these so called 'drowned reefs' around the world and they fit many of your requirements. First, they used to be on a volcanic hotspot; the mantle plume is no longer close enough to the surface to cause earthquakes and eruption, but it is still closer than normal for some geothermal power access. Second you can select a seamount close enough to be in the photic zone for growing food or solar power or what have you. Even seamounts down below 100m could have towers of a sort built on them to get up to the light. Third, you can select some that are in the middle of nowhere. This will certainly reduce the traffic of prying eyes. A few disappearing fishing ships and a nice Neo-Bermuda Triangle reputation won't hurt. In any case it will be easy enough to put the base outside of any country's EEZ; their economic zone as recognized by the UNCLOS (UN Convention on the Law of the Sea) Lastly, ocean currents exist everywhere! They may be slow but they will be a steady source of power. Though in fairness, what is a secretive research organization without their own nuclear reactor? # Some options * Davis Seamount (20.9 S, 33.9 W) is part of the Island chain made by the [Trinidad hotspot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trindade_hotspot). It is deep but can take advantage of the relatively strong Brazil current. * [Walters Shoals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walters_Shoals) is really far out of the way and within 20 meters of the surface. * [Cobb Seamount](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobb_Seamount) isn't really ideal since it is close to the shipping routes out of Seattle, which means it is also close to a variety of US Navy submarine bases * [Muirfield Seamount](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muirfield_Seamount) is within Australia's EEZ, but has the advantage of not being discovered until 1973, and then only when a merchant ship hit it. So its pretty remote. [Answer] Hmm. I would scout for semi-active volcanic islands along the Pacific "Rim of Fire" that are in tropical or subtropical waters. Look at atolls where one member of the ring is active, and most of the rest of the atoll is just reefs with little value. You want a small version of Bora-bora. Such islands are inhabited. You either have to bring the local population into the plan, as minions, or you need to bribe them to move away, or you have to create a reason why part of the atoll is tabu. If the volcano is semi-active, with slant bore or horizontal bore you can get good geothermal heat. Many of these islands are seamounts above the abyssal plain, so cold water for the other end of the cycle is readily available. As an alternative to geothermal, look at OTEC It uses the differential temperature between tropical sea water and the chilly water on the floor 12,000 feet down. Non trivial engineering. Anything close enough to the surface to get light for crops will be close enough to be visible by aerial or satellite surveillance. You need to disguise it to look like the surroundings. For this reason consider an area where the there is already a lot of texture to the ocean floor. Tropical reef areas, coral or otherwise. A picture of the ocean bottom near by, printed on transparent film and stuck to the inside of the dome would work. This is now used for for wrapping busses, windows and all for advertising. Tropics are good in other ways: * Insulating a transparent dome for growing would be tricky. You want a location with water temps at least in the upper 60's or 70's. * Source of recreational activities for your minions. You need to be off the beaten track. These reefs are also popular tourist destinations. This brings up another problem. Unless your plans of world domination fit in a suitcase or otherwise don't require much in the way of either personnel or supplies, large amounts of traffic going to the middle of not much will get noticed. You can plausibly increase the shipping to a spot by 10% if it is in similar shapes to existing shipping (seacans are a big win for you.) But a thousand seacans coming to some dot in the pacific ocean that previously received 8 seacans a year will get talked about, and not just on the island. Infra-structure. Any serious plan for world domination is going to require energy. Materials. Those thousand seacans imply a loading dock capable of handing seacans. A loading dock means guys who can run the cranes, and fix them when they break. It implies serious generators to provide power. No one has a submarine seacan delivery system yet. You might do better to use tourism as a cover: Your undersea lab is touted as *"Aquaworld: The world of the future"* and be a thriving tourist destination, while your dastardly demonic deeds take place in the basement, or in a separate bubble. This gives you cover for traffic, your common supplies. Only things like the gigawatt klystron tubes for frying astronauts on the ISS need to be smuggled in. Working underwater adds a great deal of unnecessary complexity unless the evil deeds themselves are oceanic in nature. It's much easier to hide things in plain view. E.g. Find a city in the rust belt, and take over an abandoned industrial complex. Again you would have some sort of front activity so you could get permits, and such, but your required minion count drops: You no longer need farmer minions, or underwater dome maintenance minions. If you do it in country where bribes are part of life, you can sort circuit the permit process. Just make sure they are honest bureaucrats -- they stay bought. If you are doing something that might get noticed in an industrial slum, consider an abandoned mine. Make up some story about new leaching processes that can recover smaller amounts profitably. Lots of back country mines now have fly in workers, separate camps. If you present it as a prototype project, the plane can be fairly small. DC3 or twin Otter. An abandoned sawmill on the BC or SE Alaskan coast would have possibilities too. [Answer] > > *Close enough to geothermal vents and/or plate boundaries so that geothermal power is an option to help reduce energy costs.* > > > I found this image showing the hottest geothermal regions:[![Hottest Known Geothermal Regions](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZmaTj.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZmaTj.jpg) Although I'm not totally sure if this covers all the random geothermal blobs far out at sea, it's probably easier to access the ocean floor if you're somewhere near land where the ocean isn't extremely deep. Most of the red blobs have islands or aren't even in the ocean, but the one between Portugal and the Island of Newfoundland doesn't. That might be a difficult place to build; according to [this image](https://www.maps.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/thumbnail/17f82f742ffe127f42dca9de82fb58b1/n/a/national-geographic-atlas-atlantic-ocean-floor-wall-map..jpg) from the National Geographic society, that's right over the Atlantic Mid-Ocean Canyon, with a rather inconvenient depth averaging several kilometers (2-3 miles-ish). > > *Close enough to the surface to take in some amount of sunlight for greenhouses, not be crushed under the pressure of the water around it (strong building materials should help combat this), and generally help people's circadian clocks stay somewhat stable. > > However, it also needs to be far enough under the ocean to be hidden from the general public (governments really don't matter as much).* > > > To fit both of these perfectly is a bit like trying to find a number both less than three and more than four. With satellite imaging and Google Maps and such, if there's little enough water between you and the air for farming off the sun, there's little enough space you'll get seen. One possible solution would involve camouflage. Ideally, go somewhere with pretty crazy seafloor, and build your thing with a similar pattern. With good enough indoor lighting, you could probably farm inside. I'd say keep the humans on a mostly-plant diet; animals eat more than they produce and aren't really worthwhile in a compact environment, except for experimenting and occasional fancy dinners. Potatoes would make good underground-crops because they keep just about forever and don't require refrigeration. Also, farm stuff without dirt; use nutrient-imbued water, whatever that stuff is called. A quick google search and [this page](https://van.physics.illinois.edu/qa/listing.php?id=2119) revealed that a sphere would be the best shape if it remains stationary. One, it's physically better, two, it keep the commutes within the thingamajig shorter. Of course, if it has to move, a sphere wouldn't be... hydrdynamic? I guess that's the word for that. Also, it'd likely just spin around, and you wouldn't get *anywhere*. As for keeping circadian clocks in line, there's not much you can do other than keeping the schedule clear at night and maybe making the lighting a bit darker (note use of dark*er*) at night. On the opposite side of the spectrum, you could make your lab totally public. (Or at least, it *seems* totally public.) An oil rig with a secret lab might work, although questions could come up. ("Say, Bob, how does three tons of cheetah food help you drill for oil?") One advantage of this is that it provides an energy source. Assuming, of course, that fossil fuels are still used when your story takes place (I dunno whether this is supposed to be futuristic or not). I couldn't get a map of where in the sea oil is common. A variant of that, even *more* public, would be to do something with tourism. If you made an ocean retreat with an amazing zoo (Mr. Marglewithy's Magnificent Marine Menagerie?), then you could ship animal-keeping supplies (or the animals themselves) without making anyone suspicious. Chemicals might be a little tricky, but you could probably think of some excuse. This would, in my mind, be the best approach. > > *Possibly somewhere that ocean currents could be used to help generate power (I've heard of this idea, but it's kind of icing on the cake).* > > > The feasibility of this is somewhat dependent on how well you can access the ocean floor. If you rig an ocean-current device off your lab, it's probably gonna drag your lab and all its energy will probably be spent keeping your lab on one place however, if you're able to connect it to the ocean floor, then you might actually be able to generate power. It's certainly a good idea; one you might want to explore. I think the only other suggestion I can make is to locate the lab somewhere warm(ish). This would be logical for a tourism-based thing, although less so for a secret, unknown lab. However, you'd save a fortune on heating (or lack of it). ]
[Question] [ Im going for a culture which endorses and emphasizes gender roles in society. Men and women are equal, but in the complementary rather than egalitarian sense. Magic is only accessible by women. Like the myth will state, it is powerful, but slow, time consuming, and intensive. It may also require multiple ingredients or steps to work. This. along with the history and circumstances of the world, has led to a religious hierarchy where women hold the dominant positions of power. God, known as the divine, possess a duel nature, each representing different aspects of humanity. The higher half represents the feminine, and symbolizes intuition, wisdom, strength, and life. The lower half, masculine, represents honor, courage, bravery, brawn, and death. These aspects are made manifest in the differences between men and women, and the social order depends on cooperation between the two. By working together, harmony and balance can be achieved. However, division between them causes chaos and strife. God designed humans for different purposes in mind. He created woman first, and gave her dominion over all creation. The ability to access magic was given to her as proof of her divine authority. This magic was slow, complex, and intensive. However, it was very powerful, able to split oceans in half, rain down fire from the sky, or design new species of plants and animals. With patience, she was able to master it and bend reality to her whim. God then created man, and designated him with the role of defender of creation. He would be a companion to woman, to serve and protect her, and provide council. He was given the gift of physical prowess, which was quicker to access and use, and allowed him to act quickly and desicively when needed. For a time, things were peaceful, and humanity flourished in this golden age. However, although man was strong and quick witted, he was also impatient and overconfident. This made him rebellious, and he grew to disdain woman. Eventually, he sought to subvert her authority over him, and overthrew her with brute force. This is represented in the religion as God's lower half rebelling and subjugation it's higher half. This betrayal ushered in an age of kings, which introduced chaos and strife into the world. In this new age, man competed and made war with each other, each seeking to dominate their rivals and rule undisputed over creation. The constant wars disturbed the veil that separated reality from the netherworld, where creatures hostile to humanity dwelled. In time, a breach in reality opened in the veil, allowing these demons to pass from their realm into reality. Millions died in the genocide as the demons sought extermination of the human race. Woman, using her intuition and magic, was eventually able to seal the breach and ending the flood of demons into the world. She then created weaponry specifically made to kill the demons, which man used to defeat them. Although humanity was eventually victorious, the world was permanently scarred. The veil was irrevocably damaged, remaining weakened in certain areas or had completely collapsed in others. This allows demons to cross over into reality, and they remain a constant threat to humanity. With the end of the war, woman was able to reclaim her authority over creation. In her infinite love and wisdom, she forgave man for his betrayal, knowing that God's halves cannot exist without the other. However, men was punished for their arrogance by bearing the responsibility for causing the calamity that almost ended the human race. They must carry that shame throughout their lives making penance until god redeems them in the hereafter. The story is meant to be an inverse of the creation story in the bible, and used by the matriarchy to "justify" it's rule. Like Eve, who caused humanity to get kicked out of the garden of eden and the introduction of original sin, it was man who led to the end of humanity's golden age and introduced chaos into the world. Keep in mind while it embraces equality of the sexes, it's obviously skewed in benefiting one gender over the other, which is the point. Taking human psychology and socialogy into account, Would this be a reasonable creation myth that a matriarchy could use to justify its authority? How can I make it sound more authentic? [Answer] Or, she was made second, because the male was imperfect. The male was the beta test... First isn't best. It's just practice. Women were given magic and the power to create life because they were deemed worthy. God was going to erase the male, but the woman intervened. "Though he be imperfect, he could be of use to me. He is stronger of limb. I will love him." "But only you have the power to create life. He will wither, die, and be no more." said God. And the Woman said "Let me share some of my power with him, so that we both are needed to create life, so that he will not die out, and I will not be alone." Golly, this is fun! Maybe don't say women are logical, but rather that they have a direct connection with God, and their intuition, even when it seems not to be logical is always the wiser course. Women, of course are inherently smarter, and men don't understand certain social concepts, the poor boorish things. See in the Christian version it gets pretty demeaning--you left out the part about how ladies were made from left over parts of the male. So if you're going to skew to the matriarchy as hard as Christianity is skewed to the patriarchy, you may as well add details so that dudes are beholden to ladies FOR THEIR VERY EXISTENCE. So yeah, what you've got is reasonable, but Imma say "Go Big or Go Home." Embrace the matriarchy! You can go bigger. Study the actual creation mythos--seriously, go back to the Bible and look at the language. Also, you want to look at how the ladies get blamed for the sin as well. It's pretty ridic. So flip the script--maybe have the men bring war, which is why women have to be in charge. [Answer] I suggest you read the book by Roy F. Baumeister ***Is There Anything Good About Men?*** (*How Cultures Flourish By Exploiting Men*), the Eppes Eminent Professor of Psychology at Florida State University. It is written for popular consumption but backed up by plenty of real deal academic firepower (IMO, as always). For example; on Page 61, he asks a question most people think is obvious: What percentage of your ancestors were Men? The answer is not 50%! Although it is true about 50% of all people born are male, this question is about men that have at least one living descendant today: You. And some of your ancestors had trainloads of descendants. In genetic studies, it turns out that only 33% of our ancestors were male, and 67% were female. Why is that? Because a *very* high percentage of females born will reproduce, but the chances are about half as good for a male; and even if they have a male child, that child has the same poor chance and the all-male genetic lines tend to die out in a handful of generations. # Why Do Females Reproduce More Than Men? Baumeister makes a good case that cultures exploit men, because men are **expendable.** Imagine a tribe of 100 men and 100 women. They are attacked! By a roughly equal opponent; so if both men and women fight, and our tribe prevails, we have 60 men and 60 women. Next year, those 50 women can be pregnant and we get 60 new kids: Tribe size 180. Now suppose only the men fight, and we prevail, but we still lose 80 men. Only twenty men survive. Well, those 20 men can impregnate the 100 women, and have 100 babies: Tribe size 220. Men can be expended by society due to the differential in reproduction. As Baumeister notes; both history and legend are chock full of stories in which 100 men get together and risk their lives on a boat or campaign to get rich. Why are there essentially zero legends or historical stories about 100 women doing the same? Because they don't have to! Except for some special circumstances, women are almost certain to reproduce if they wish to do so, it is only a question of how good a man they can get. But they can always get SOME man, and historically, it was not unusual for many women to get the same "good" man; a wealthy and/or powerful one. But men are in a different boat, historically they did not get children unless they could prove themselves; hence the need to go get rich, start a business, win races, fight battles and survive. Should they die in the pursuit, society suffers little, the woman he wanted will find a substitute that didn't die in the pursuit. # How That Matters. The point is, even our modern society is already structured around the idea that Men are expendable. Men are the soldiers, men are the risk takers. It is always "Women and Children First" when the boat is sinking: IRL we may call it chivalry; but the ideas are as if grown men are expendable and should know it, and this should be an integral part of their psyche. # How we might work these real-life ideas into a fictional setting. It isn't a stretch to posit that in the fictional world, Baumeister's insights are explicitly explained, in more flowery language, to justify that women MUST be in charge: Men are servants of society: Their's is not to question why, their's is but to do and die! The cultural training they receive can be that men die to protect women and children, even women that are not their mates and children that are not their own (We are close to that in real life, anyway); otherwise they are cowards and shunned, both romantically and financially. Perhaps even punished or imprisoned. Also in their cultural training: Men are risk takers, impulsive, fighters prone to counter-productive violence, too hot to be good negotiators! You can see it in their childhood rough housing; even at two they are trying to establish dominance over their sisters by hitting, pushing, and force! Only women, with a natural instinct toward care and patience born of their natural ability to raise children, are capable of leading the society forward without risking killing it. Of course, a mother's instinct will lead to fighting and violence and war when her children are in real danger, but (in their mythology) she will not over-react like men do, she will not be vindictive like men are: She will mete out proportional punishment and sanctions when that is due, no more and no less. The justification for the Matriarchy is the obvious: Decades without war, and the clear bright line that only women are created by God to create and nurture new life; no man is born with what he needs to nurse a child. It is women that care for life, and part of that care is running the tribe, no matter how large it is. It is not just the creation story, for them it is reflected in real life, so even the "non-believer" variety of men can believe it to be true, and defend the Matriarchy with their lives --- as they are **meant to do.** [Answer] I think you are misrepresenting things a bit. It is true that, for centuries, Hebrews and Christians used the creation myth of Genesis to justify a view of women as a "secondary sex", but that is **not** because woman was created **first** as a *gift* for man. Being created first had nothing to do with it. In fact, contrary to what you stated, the Bible doesn't say that **only** man was created in God's image. From the KJV Bible (since it seems to be the translation that people are using here): *"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." (Gen 1:27)* Mind you, this was written on a chapter that preceded the Adam's rib episode. What was created in God's image was man as in "human". Both man and woman were made in God's image. --- So, where does it the idea of woman as a secondary sex come from? Well, what happens is that the Book of Genesis doesn't have one, but two creation accounts, written by two separate writers and then redacted into one book. But you can't read Gen 1 and then Gen 2-3 as a seamless story... it actually incorporates two different creation myths. *(on a sidenote, since it came up in a comment, the Lilith story is just a clumsy attempt to read both accounts chronologicaly, as if God created woman two different times... it is a late interpretation and one that was never really accepted, and with good reason)* The idea of woman as a secondary sex comes from the second account. Eve not only ate the forbidden fruit, but she also tempted Adam into sinning. So, Adam's punishment answers only to God, while Eve's punishment is related to Adam. So, instead of focusing on which sex came first, what you need to do is create a story that justifies woman being ranked higher than man. Make man the sinner and woman the victim. Your narrative seems to fit that. Other answers have also given good ideas... --- But if I were you, I would focus on a characteristic that only women can possess. After all, both men and women can be intelligent or strong. But only women can bear children. Child bearing is super-important for the cohesiveness of society and for the perpetuation of civilization. Also, child bearing was connected in various myths with fertility in Nature, from which everyone's survival depends. For example, the land would be feminine, since it would need to be impregnated with the farmer's seed, or with the sky's rain, for it to bear fruit and nourish mankind. Women could perform prostitution rituals in which they would be "possessed" by the identity of the "land goddess", in order to secure good harvests. This was a common practice in ancient times... If I were you, I would explore women's child bearing potential as a way to make women gain the upper hand on religious grounds. [Answer] Maybe you should take care, that it won't become a too simple change of positions. While that change can be fun and might show some things it was already done so it might be more interesting if you add some more changes. Regarding that - **you should definitely read "Egalias døtre"** ("The Daughters of Egalia") of Gerd Mjøen Brantenberg <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerd_Brantenberg> - a novel which deals with that topic! Someone already wrote about the **difference of sex and gender**. I think that's a good point. But within both you don't have to rely on western/hegemonial perception of them. You already changed the perception of female gender and their role in society. This is nice, maybe you could add land ownership and strictly female heritage as it is the only possibility to really know of which line a child is (as long as you don't have genome testing). This might likely result in a society where each woman is free to choose her lovers but may restict the choice of their men (you see - still one to one change). So how could we add more variety? **Let us have a look on sex.** While our perception is usually, that there ARE only two biological sexes this perception changed greatly over time and societies. E.g. in medieval europe people thought there was only one sex - what's on the outside with men is on the inside with women. Not only bleeding was perceived to be special with female sex as men also bleed but in other ways (thought was that the inner fluids were too much and needed to go outside; while this happened regularly with women men took care about it voluntarily using bloodletting or engaging in fights). So other aspects like class or religion were much more important than sex and gender. (I don't have English sources but I could give you source in German.) Another example you can find in the history of some first nation peoples in northern America which differenciated in two more or less male and two more or less female sexes. (although I forgot the source) In premodern Iran beautiful young men which were about to grow their first beard (amrad) were regarded to be a distinct group forming a kind of third sex. While usually amrad became (bearded) men later some of them became amrad namā - grown up men who shave and try to attract themselves to amrad or men. The latter group was often not well perceived but men loving amrad was pretty common. (You can find this very detailed and nicely written in Afsaneh Najmabadis book "Women with mustaches and men without beards" which I can really recommend!) In Thailand there are Kathoey as a third sex. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathoey> (Although this article doesn't seem to cover the traditional understanding.) Many cultures traditionally regarded shaman to be of a seperate sex/gender - while men and women had to follow specific roles shamans could do what they like as they were of a different category. (I heard about this in a radio report about I think Korean shaman some years ago.) **The paragraph about God** with the goal of harmony and balance sounds like a Yin&Yang basis only with slightly different aspects which could totally work. But later you state that women are superior to men and should be serving and protecting women. These are contrary approaches. If god seeks harmony god would give both distinct functions and areas of expertese which go hand in hand not making one part the ruler. There is another problem: As the feminine aspects are intuition, wisdom, strength, and life why should they produce weaponry to solve the demon problem? This approach makes them kind of better men entering the realm of death. So either in the same time this was an entry of death logics into female superiority explaining bad things although women rule or they choose a different solution staying in the realm of life. **To make this work** you could make a change in the original society before the imbalance caused by men. I am thinking about a harmonious society without any rulers, neither of men nor of women but just harmonic balanced living together as a complex society with distinct roles and areas of expertese and autonomy. Then men destroyed the balance and women had to solve it. To see what this solution could be you'd need a story, why the realm of demons was in harmony with the world before and what motives they have to kill humanity (just being evil can be a religious interpretation but as a story background or game dynamic it is IMHO kind of boring). Whatever this motivation is, it would make more sense if the women found a way to bring the balance with the demons back. But them being vengeful and overly cautious demanded the absolute suppression and subservience of men under the rule of women. You can still rely on the broken veil and the weakness of the new treaty between humans and demons. But that would be of a different and IMHO more interesting nature as demons however evil and unfathomably they might seem have a reason to watch over humanity and punish them breaking the treaty maybe no living human anymore knows about. This way you even open up a possible large scale plot finding out details about the nature of demons and that treaty. [Answer] It could do with a touch of "original sin", like in Christianity it was because of the woman that mankind was kicked out of paradise. There could be some misdeed by the men that led to the end of a mystical golden age. [Answer] Honestly, I think you answer your own question in the setup. Form follows function. This is one of those fundamental truths that underlies most social constructs, regardless of the morality or myths or constructs of said society. Slavery has been both condemned and propped up by careful choice of holy text - but during the American Civil War, a largely homogenous populace was driven into a long and bloody conflict because slavery was a foundation of the economy for the South and had largely become irrelevant in the North. Actions are typically driven by what is necessary or desired, and dressing it up comes afterwards. My point is, the reasoning and justification should follow naturally from why it's a matriarchal society in the first place. I see other posts encouraging you to draw on things that set women apart biologically, such as the ability to reproduce. But carrying child has set women apart from men since the dawn of time, and as of yet, there have been few if any cultures that were truly matriarchal - though some have managed to be egalitarian. Man has historically held power because men were relied on to deal with physical activities, which were vital to historical civilizations. They were the shields by which a tribe was defended, the swords by which new land was taken. Without having to worry about carrying child, they were the ones who could engage in strenuous physical labor year-round. As technology changes how wars are fought and how labor is carried out, you see the whole world becoming more and more egalitarian. So day to day, I think you need to figure out why tribes, clans, kingdoms, and states are reliant on women. And I think you have that in magic. This magic may take a long time to wield, but if it is necessary to, for example, turn away the storms that ravage the planet, or to make the crops grow when the long winters come, or to hold the demons at bay, then their power will flow from that. That's what will make the society believable. The justification is just the window dressing. I think the creation myth sounds great as it is, and as you tie the myth into the world's history, I think it will get fleshed out even more. If I had to change one thing, I would point out that God felt both Adam and Eve were to blame for the fall. Some theologians have blamed Eve for everything, but others have pointed out that Eve was tricked, but Adam chose to eat - and God made no distinction when he cast them out of the garden. Whoever bore more of the blame, both were punished, and punished equally. But, again, that didn't stop a long line of holy folk from pointing to Eve as justification for man's rule over women. ]
[Question] [ **The Setup:** During his trip to the town of Ar-Piji, our hero stumbles upon a mysterious [shop](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheLittleShopThatWasntThereYesterday). It contains all sorts of oddities, but for some reason he's the only one in there except for the hagged old shopkeeper who keeps cackling and petting her black cat. As our hero examines an item, she calls out, "Ohh, you'll like that one. That's [convenient plot artifact X]. Been around here forever. I'm in a generous mood today, so for 2 coppers it's all yours." So our hero purchases the item. When he returns later, possibly to inquire about the item's origins, the shop has disappeared \**le gasp*\* and is promptly forgotten about for the rest of story. --- **Desired Result:** I want a world where such artifact shops are commonplace (disappearing optional). Adventurers can find all manner of items in one ("By the gods! A Broadsword of the Archangel's Fury +7!") which may or may not be plot-centric. Some items are truly unique while others are common items with a rare combination of properties or enchantments (affixes, in RPG terms) or are simply rare items themselves. There is also some sense of buyer urgency behind the idea that items are rare or one-of-a-kind and even more urgency if the shop is only present at a location for one day. Part of the problem is supply. The whole idea behind the disappearing item shop is that it's a plot device to place an item in the hero's hands without explaining its origin and removing all ways of finding out its origin. With a multitude of these shops, it becomes harder to handwave the supplier away, at least from a worldbuilding perspective. There would need to be a way to have a consistent supply while more or less maintaining the "unique" aspect of the items. The other problem is maintaining the fantastic appearance of these shops. In our world, we don't go into a pawn shop and find it filled with dazzling goods. We might find a few nifty knick-knacks, but the majority of the goods are mundane even if they are unique. So how can I make these shops alluring, yet common? **Is it economically sound to have shops filled with unique artifacts throughout the realm?** **Where would these shops get unique artifacts?** **Is it possible to have these shops be common, yet each one is still unique and exotic?** [Answer] It's a multidimensional shop. All the shops are really 1. But since it has no real time or space, it can be any where and all the magical items it holds makes it's appearance change as well as it's location. It also has an effect on which items show up. The reason why 'all the shops' can have so many 'unique' items is because they are all the same shop, and depending on who is walking in the door affects what items are on display. The 'shop owner' might not even really exist, the shop itself could be semi-sentient and produces unique owners to interact with customers. It also knows the best places to find and get new 'unique' items and just happen to be there when someone needs to 'pawn' some 'junk'. The same artifact might have passed through the same shop dozens of times over the centuries. So it can find the great things at bargain basement prices! [Answer] The shop belongs to another adventurer who retired years ago. During his adventures, he acquired a huge supply of artifacts and now sells some of them to have the funds to build elaborate vaults for the others. Mr. Retired travels around the region when he needs another influx of cash, researches the local populace, and, if he finds someone who needs something specific, places himself in the perfect place to deliver the artifact. If he isn't charging significant prices for the artifacts he's selling, then he may be in it for wealth from another source. For example: Mr. Retired sells Young Villain the *staff of Cthulhu*. Young Villain then goes and causes havoc in the area. Later, Mr. Retired approaches the people in charge and says he'll deal with Young Villain for a fee. Having once possessed the staff, Mr. Retired easily dispatches Young Villain, recovers the artifact (to sell to some other unsuspecting Young Villain), and claims his reward. A community of such retired adventurers, or an organization representing the interests of Mr. Retired and his compatriots (if any), could make these mobile shops somewhat common. Alternatively, Mr. Retired isn't *really* retired. He says he is, but he still goes out and ransacks ancient ruins, plunders tombs, and raids the vaults of the gods themselves in an ever-increasing need to collect all the artifacts in an attempt to become the God of Artifacts (whom other adventurers would try to steal from and the cycle continues). [Answer] The shop is operated by a powerful deity who fancies himself a story teller, entertaining his fellow gods with tales of human adventure. Whenever he runs out of new adventure stories, he slips his shop into an empty store front, just as your heroes turn onto that particular alley. Knowing what the heroes are likely to need and what they can afford, he magically fills the store with appropriately powered and priced objects; then waits for his new customers to enter. Once the heroes pay and leave, he closes up shop and returns to monitoring their adventure remotely, collecting details for his next great story. If you work out your story structure carefully, the shop keep might even turn out to be your narrator. [Answer] ## Fairy Shops The shops are run by the Fair Folk, creatures who live in a parallel universe where magic is commonplace but there is some resource in the mundane world which they lack and are unable to acquire without fair trade - a rather common trope when dealing with fairy creatures. Naturally, they can appear human with magic, but are actually not remotely human at all. The wonderous magical items they sell are basically garbage *to them*, and they trade for things which seem cheap *to us*, but precious to them. Ideas for things they might trade for: 1. The satisfaction of the customer. Maybe they have difficulty feeling emotions, but enjoy the sensation of the customer attaining something of value. This is usually a little too benevolent for the Fair Folk, though... 2. Along the same line, they might want objects of sentimental value, to feed off of the psychic residue left on the item by the owner. To a lesser extent, they might be willing to take money, not for trade, but for 'eating' the value people place on it. 3. For the fun of it. The fairy world is too chaotic for sensible stories, and the fairies like stories (or maybe they even need stories to live). So they sell interesting items to interesting people and watch what happens. 4. To create conflict. Along the same lines, maybe the fairies are evil and feed off of human pain and suffering, so they give people magical weapons to increase the pain in the world. Or some other malovent/eldritch purpose that has long-reaching consequences beyond what we see. It could also be possible that items from these shops can come with an unforeseen drawback or curse that forces the buyer to pay the seller back with *something*. But sometimes not. Genre-savvy people might be wary about buying from these shops, but sometimes they have no choice, or are willing to take the risk. [Answer] I'd suggest making 'Artifact Shops' common. And magical obviously (disappearing, appearing, *moving*). And fully explained and part of your world. You seem to have given them already some thought and it would be sad to have them removed from your story just because you want the original artifact to have it's origins shrouded in mystery. That original shop however does NOT need to be an artifact shop. It was simply mistaken for one, it was something much more *mysterious, mythical, or maybe even sinister*. (You can hint this through the story). There's only so much I can go on for here without making my own story. Anyway, cool premise, good luck! [Answer] It depends on how much you want to flesh out the world economy that you're in. If it's in a "world not that much unlike our own", there's going to umpteen bazillion little pawn-style type shops... however, there's only going to be one or two that will frequently have incredibly rare or extraordinary items (IRL, those would be the Pawn Star's shop, or the Antiques Roadshow type thing). The average Artie's Artifacts will have normal things, with a single rare tome hidden in a stack of mundane ones, or a sword that is really powerful, but the shopkeeper only knows it as John Peter's (you know, the farmer) sword that was passed down from his grandfather. Like a normal pawn shop, the original owners can be coming back to retrieve their wares at any point, be they fantastic or mundane. You can have the surrounding area with nonstandard currency, any travelling marketeers that have carts full of wares may rely on bartering supplies and other things rather than trying to keep track of how much each currency requires. That allows them to have a good reason to have whole bunch of random things of various power levels on hand. You can have a shop that can move by itself. You can use the Dancing Hut of Baba Yaga as a reference, or Howl's Moving Castle, or "the Barn" from Haven, or the Witch's hut from Brave, Or the town of Brigadoon, the eponymous circus from The Night Circus novel or from the 4th season of Heroes... the list goes on. It doesn't matter if it moves on legs, wheels, tracks, a stiff eastbound breeze in the form of a mist, or simply vanishes at the speed of plot. It will plunk down outside of town, near a main road or crossroads. Perhaps they collect the wares from the passers by before moving along, as mentioned above, perhaps the crafters contained within don't realize that their wares are enchanted when the customers leave (because reasons!). [Answer] Hope I'm not too late to the party. I would think such a shop would be either hard to notice or hard to find, otherwise everyone would be in there grabbing up all the cool stuff. Since I don't know of any businessmen who would want his shop to be difficult to find or see from the road, I would guess he's probably rich enough not to care, or he serves a certain...clientele. If you are fortunate enough to be aquainted with such people (good or bad in nature), you would know where to look for shops of the same calibre in the next city or town. Maybe there's a symbol on the doorframe that denotes which shops belong to/serve the mysterious group? And maybe a certain phrase rarely spoken clues the shopkeeper in to the nature of his customer and he will tie up the curtain in the back of the room revealing another small corner of goods for this particular customer? [Answer] The shop is set outside of time and space. It only opens to travelers who happens to possess some insignificant-seeming items (but actually have hidden attributes the shop can activate). The shop then offers the traveler an item that looks pretty awesome. While the traveler is distracted, it steal the artifact. After the traveler left, the shop activate the artifact and sell it to the next innocent traveler. The act of activating artifact is expensive and exhausting, so the shop put a magic-sapping charm (and/or other evil viruses) on the artifact so the traveler will stupidly spread all over the world. The shop sit back and collect the magic transferred from countless artifacts it sold. [Answer] Why don't you just consider a caravan model (think gypsy sort of inspired). All the vendors are of the same race/background, given a common, if unknown, explanation as to why they all have acquired rare artifacts (perhaps, centuries earlier, their people found a treasure trove or some magical artifact and kept it secret all this time). The shops open up for a week and then close and they move on. They could be exceptional at covering their tracks, making them impossible to follow, find, or predict. This avoids any extra-dimensional sort of explanations. ]
[Question] [ **Closed.** This question is [off-topic](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers. --- Questions about Idea Generation are off-topic because they tend to result in list answers with no objective means to compare the quality of one answer with the others. For more information, see [What's wrong with idea-generation questions?](//worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/522). Closed 8 years ago. [Improve this question](/posts/26160/edit) **Background** We are in the near future (2020). The USA president have received a box labeled 'Communication'. After security check, the box rings and a voice says * 'You have to choose 1 million people per year to give to us. Otherwise, many more will die.' After a brief silence period, the same voice says * 'You have 3 minutes to decide'. After 3 minutes, all the people in New York simply die. Legists would say that it was some kind of EMP for brains. The box open up some kind of projector, displaying images of dead people in NY. Then, the voice asks again. * '1 million per year. Yes or no? You have 3 more minutes.' The box don't seem like any kind of human technology. We can't track it and, worse, no sensor had seem any space craft or anything waiting on the neighbor of our Solar System. We are full blind with one decision to make. * 'Yes', says the president. * 'In one year from now, we will be back. You you choose who will be given. You can use any human or computer understandable format to populate the 1 million names.' **Constraints** * We can't investigate the aliens. We tried to send some spy. Dead silence. * We never knew, exactly, what happened in NY. We just know that was their attack. * The incident and conditions was made public, so it is a world leaders decision. * Can't fight the aliens. The 1 million donations HAS to happen. * Each 1 year period, the chosen will just flash out from Earth. * The chosen don't need to know that they were chosen. **Question** Well, we are totally blind. Seems like the aliens are far ahead of our technology. After a lot of debates over human rights and who to send, we've decided to send prisoners, but they won't last longer. We are now on 2022, and have sent 2 waves of 1 million humans prisoners. Both waves containing [prison population](http://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison-population-total?field_region_taxonomy_tid=All). But we don't have enough prisoners to send forever and it would still be a problem. How should the world address this issue? Who to send and how to decide? [Answer] This answer will assume the world is united and that warfare is (mostly) eradicated. -> Otherwise I think the same as @Lohoris. **Send the Death Sentenced, Volunteers, the Dying or the Old.** This is somewhat heartless but it is the most practical approach. There are over 130 million births every year (and climbing). Losing 1 million people extra per year is actually helping us in the long run. Comes all the social issues. 1) The obvious candidates are people all around the globe that have somehow earned death penalties (multiple death penalties being first) 2) Following that, any volunteers. Think agents, operatives, etc... trained to send back information in any way to help eventually thwarting the aliens. 3) The dying. People who know only have months to live. It might sound heartless, but it is also easier for them and their families to accept. 4) If all other categories have been exhausted and you still need people. The practical solution is to go with the oldest people (less time left to live). Since you don't know WHAT happens to the 1 million people, I think you'd be surprised just how many volunteers you'll end up having. I doubt you'll ever end up at category 4. [Answer] If they can just kill off 26 million people in a blink of an eye. And want 1,000,000 people to be selected every year for 'something', then they are doing it only for their own twisted pleasure. They have the technology to just go and take as many as they want, whoever they want. They aren't. They are forcing us to 'choose'. These are sick bastards and I would either recommend sending 1 million highly trained troops with the hope of disrupting their fun/pleasure or do a Gandhi style sit down and refuse to cooperate. If they want us then they won't kill us all, otherwise they will just be killing us off slowly. Might as well give them the finger and tell them to suck it. Homie don't play that. [Answer] Whoever controls the list has an **unbeatable weapon**, and will use it as such. It will be composed of political rivals, uncaptured terrorists, freedom fighters, and criminals. Basically it will be the greatest tool of oppression in the history of the world. You may also see religious concerns pushing to get rid of "undesirables" - gays/lesbians, atheists, etc. Probably just the most prominent individuals, but anyone famous and anti-establishment is in trouble. [Answer] Don't worry. The Muslim world would prepare 100,000 suicide bombers who would happily give their life to save Earth and its future. The Christian world could come up with something similar. Also the Buddhists. We would actually have more than 1 million volunteers ready to give their lives to save earth. The only thing I am worried about, is whether the world can prepare very small, extremely high explosive devices in time to serve those sadists. [Answer] # No The answer would be just no, and even if some ruler would try to say "yes", nobody would ever agree on who to send. 1 million people are many, they can easily be an army. And many more (their friends) would join. Try to pick anyone, and they will revolt. This just won't work. [Answer] Tell the people of ISIL that the aliens created a movie about their leader doing sex with goats. You have instantly some thousands volunteers to go, all wearing suicide bombs. The momment they enter the spaceship they kaboom. ]
[Question] [ If a ship is moving through a nebula, would it slow down due to the gases and dust in the cloud, and would it prevent things like radar from having as much range as they usually could? I want to create a setting where it would make sense for space warships to have a maximum speed, like regular ships on water. I also want ships to have a limited range on their sensors so ships cant easily detect each other from incredible distances. [Answer] ## Use a protoplanetary disk It's *much* denser than a nebula in deep space. It gets denser and hotter the closer in you get, and gas drag is important for planet building. According to [this study](https://www2.mps.mpg.de/solar-system-school/lectures/origin_solar_system_2006/oriss06b.pdf), a disk around a young sun can have 1 Pa of pressure at 300K (closer in heat becomes a big problem). This is enough to make significant drag and heating at orbital speeds. Around a Jupiter like planet, the study gives a pressure of *1/3 bar at 300K*, enough to not need a space suit. This is about 45 times less dense than air since the gas is mostly hydrogen. But it is still enough to be looking at fighter-jet velocities instead of space-shuttle velocities. The disk will be in orbit around the star/planet, so velocities will be low *relative to a circular equatorial orbit*. Say your ship is pressurized to pure oxygen at 1/5 bar, which is the same amount of oxygen at sea level. Not including nitrogen saves precious mass for the pressure hull. The 1/3 bar of outside gas is at a *higher* pressure than the ships default atmosphere, which adds to the excitement for ill-prepared crews. The pressure could crush the delicate walls (it's easy to crumple a soda can). Or the hydrogen could enter through the tiniest leaks and mix with the oxygen. The caveat is that this 1993 study is a rough estimate of the pressure-temperature curve, but it is at least plausible. I can't find newer numbers. [Answer] A [nebula](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_nebula) is less empty vacuum than the regular interstellar space, but it is still a very good vacuum, which would be considered absolutely good enough for almost any physics experiment. With numbers, a *very dense* nebula may have something like 100,000 particles per cubic centimeter, about one hundred trillion times less dense than ordinary air; and most nebulas are very much less dense than that. I have no idea what you mean by a "maximum speed" for "space warships". At ordinary spacecraft speeds, crossing a nebula would have no effect whatsoever. But, obviously, those space warships must be able to travel at speeds very very much higher than our primitive spacecraft, or else they would take forever to get to the nebula in the first place. If the warship is travelling sufficiently fast, hitting even one lonely molecule could be problematic... [Answer] Let's talk about aerodynamics. Our fastest vehicles can sustain speeds of about 1x10^3 meters per second (mach 3, rounded for easy math). At airliner altitudes, the density of air is roughly 5 x 10^-1 kg/m3. This means a mach3 vehicle has to push 500kg of air out of the way every second to keep moving. Obviously aerodynamics makes a difference in this, but let's just use those numbers for comparison. If we're bopping about the solar system, a high-end density is around 1x10^-25. In a nebula, we can guestimate around 1x10^-18. Back-of-the-napkin math says that, for the equivalent of mach3 air resistance, you'd have to be moving at 1x10^20 m/s. Considering that the speed of light is only 3x10^9 m/s, you'd hit relativistic issues long before you had to worry about air resistance in a nebula. [Answer] Fog is comparatively dense by exponential orders of magnitude compared to a nebula, and yet there's so little moisture in it that we easily breathe. Visibility may only be a few feet or meters. Nebula are enormous. The size of a solar system or much larger in many cases. Yet for most nebula (with the exception of some star birthing nebula) star light still shines through it. This indicates there isn't a lot there to create any meaningful resistance. [Answer] A ship designed for stealth would have a really low radar cross-section (recommended: [Lincoln Laboratory: Introduction to Radar Systems, Lecture 4: Radar cross-section](https://www.ll.mit.edu/outreach/radar-introduction-radar-systems-online-course)), maybe comparable to a smaller asteroid. Hiding near an asteroid field, or moving with similar speed would make it quasi undetectable. Also: radars have side-lobes (see the course above Lecture 7 - Radar Clutter and Chaff, or [here on quora](https://www.quora.com/Stealth-planes-have-smaller-radar-cross-sections-but-wouldnt-a-goose-that-is-moving-at-hundreds-of-mph-be-suspicious)), which act as they were the main beam, but the direction is very different. The side-lobes could make a target with a low radar cross-section, maybe in the distance, undistinguishable from the asteroids/particles nearby. All-in-all: in order to detect a very distant target with radar you would need a * very well directed antenna, to have a good spatial resolution in the distance (in this case it would take a lot of time to scan all the space with a small beam) * receiver array, to increase the spatial resolution (but in this case you would need a very large space-ship) Plus: a lot of energy, which would in turn make your ship detectable. So I think asteroids are the solution (don't know how common they are in nebulae). [Answer] There may be a problem even with 10,000 particles per cc. Suppose you are travelling at 0.1% of the speed of light. Relativistic effects are small, but the kinetic energy of a hydrogen atom striking you is about 2 MeV. If you are travelling at 300,000 m/sec, every square cm of the front of your craft will be struck by $3 \times 10^9$ 2 MeV particles. This will erode it and make it radioactive. The drag on the craft is probably negligible if you have an engine that can get you to those speeds. The radioactivity is probably not a problem if you have a thick plate at the front of your craft, and a good space between it and the crew. The plate will get sputtered and eroded eventually. ]
[Question] [ Building off of another question I asked about the realism of short-range combat in the future, I was thinking about making combat scenarios with small, hyper-maneuverable submarines. These submarines would need to move about like airplanes (using water dynamics over “wings” to keep motion linear at speed) and would be able to move in a linear direction while able to turn quickly by using flaps or a similar mechanic to rotate in any direction. Is essentially turning submarines into futuristic fighter planes a feasible concept? Would “flight” mechanics work differently than a traditional airplane? I would imagine buoyancy and pressure building with depth would form problems for linear travel in six degrees of motion. [Answer] At high speeds (starting from 77 km/h), water acts as an abrasive. Any sub moving quickly gets polished: > > When the fastest submarine in the world came to the surface, they could not recognize it - all the paint was completely stripped off, and the welds were smoothed out. > > > (source: <http://avtoexpert--dv-ru.translate.goog/stati/samaya-bystraya-podlodka-v-mire.html?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en> ). I presume that above 77 km/h, the sub hull and all protruding parts wear down quickly. Any sub also gets noisy (100 db inside) above 65 km/h; nobody knows yet what to do with it. As for turning upside down, it requires either * exremely high speed, as in a barrel roll, so that the sub always thinks it's NOT upside down, or * a true ability for every piece of equipment to work upside down for a sufficiently long period of time. High speed has been tried (limitations were found, see above), but not extremely high speed (except for small devices such as torpedoes). Making all the equipment being able to work upside down is, erm, expensive (again, except for simple devices such as torpedoes). Consider the kitchen, the toilets, water turning into steam in a turbine or a nuclear reactor, steam turning into water in a steam condenser, oil in a combustion engine, fuel pumps having to pump from half-empty fuel tanks, etc. Bear in mind that a sub is already a device more complicated than an orbital space station. [Answer] ## Hyper-Agile Submarines are Neither Practical nor Useful * Reference: I'm a former Submarine Officer From the comments, OP seems to want high speed subs that barrel roll, loop-de-loop, etc. That's going to be both **Very Technically Challenging** and **Not Actually Useful**. ## Design Challenges The fundamental problem is power. Drag goes up with the cube (!) of velocity. So your drag force increases highly non-linearly as speed goes up. Power is already a tough question for submarines; basically nuclear is your only choice if you want power dense, air independent propulsion. Nuclear reactors are heavy and large - a modern nuke sub is 350+ feet long, and 30+ feet in diameter, and around half of that space is dedicated to propulsion. So you'd have to hand wave a truly spectacular power source to get anything like the performance OP desires. ## Tactical Challenges Assuming you did find that power source, you run into the issue of stealth. The faster you go the more noise you make. That noise makes it easier to find you, and harder for you to find other subs (!) because your self noise blinds your own sensors. A sub trundling along at 5 knots will kill a sub blazing past it at 50 knots, because the slow boat will be invisible on sonar, while the fast boat is highly detectable. ## Combat Challenges Assuming that the fast boat actually hears the incoming torpedo, the ability to "dodge" is not actually that useful. The explosion from a torpedo creates an over-pressure wave that slams into the hull, damaging it - physical torpedo-to-hull contact is not required. **I don't see hyper-agile submarines as a thing.** [Answer] **Supercavitating sub.** [![supercavitating torpedo](https://i.stack.imgur.com/UVRYFl.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/UVRYFl.jpg) <https://navalpost.com/a-gamechanger-weapon-supercavitating-torpedo/> <https://www.19fortyfive.com/2021/09/the-supercavitating-torpedo-the-one-weapon-the-u-s-navy-cant-match/> > > Supercavitating torpedos on the other hand travel extremely > fast—hundreds of kilometers an hour. Torpedos of all types are slowed > down by drag caused by friction with water. One way to overcome this > drag is with bubbles. > > > Supercavitating torpedos travel through the water in a large bubble > that encapsulates most or all of the torpedo. Compressed gas stored > inside the torpedo is ejected out of the nose, and the torpedo > “glides” through the water inside the bubble, remaining relatively > dry. > > > Control surfaces, generally fins, pierce the bubble and maintain > contact with the water, allowing the torpedo to steer. > > > Instead of just a torpedo, your whole sub is supercavitating. It is driven by a fusion engine which provides more than ample power. The gas used to envelop the submarine is steam. Steam is also the propulsive force and is blasted out the rear of the submarine like a rocket engine. Like the supercavitating torpedo, the sub flies through the water at great speed, freed of the draggy draggedness by its bubble suit. It is much like flying a jet. In the dark, underwater. [Answer] **TL;DR: Definitely physically and technologically viable, but tactically dubious.** **A fighter jet submarine would probably be outrun and outdived by any proper ships that are bigger than it, and it would probably be outmanoeuvred and shot down by any torpedoes that are smaller than it. There's no technical barrier to *building* a hyper-agile combat submarine— Fluid dynamics follow the same basic laws underwater and above water— But the different environment underwater means that it likely just won't make tactical sense.** --- This is a thing that already exists: ![https://thumbs.gfycat.com/HealthyMilkyLeveret-size_restricted.gif](https://thumbs.gfycat.com/HealthyMilkyLeveret-size_restricted.gif) [Via GfyCat.](https://gfycat.com/healthymilkyleveret-submarine-dolphin-beahero-session-action) A company called SeaBreacher makes them. Although, as their intended application is for recreation and entertainment, the real-world examples seem to have positive buoyancy so they'll automatically return to the surface unless you're actively pushing them down— But the behaviour should be largely similar with neutral buoyancy that is capable of diving much deeper. That said, I'd want to think hard about the kinematics and energetics of what you're proposing. Modern combat aircraft are shaped by a variety of evolutionary races: * Speed of missiles versus speed of aircraft. An example of aircraft winning would be the SR-71, which could simply accelerate when shot at, and outrun any missiles fired at it. Examples of aircraft losing would be the XB-70 and B-1A, which could fly very nearly as fast as the SR-71 but ended up getting shelved because they were expected be shot down with increasingly advanced missile technology. * Altitude reach of different types of aircraft versus altitude reach of interceptors, missiles, and radar. Related to above, aircraft like the U-2 have tried to stay out of reach of enemy air forces by simply flying higher than interceptors and missiles could reach. When that failed, many bombers and fighters instead switched to flying low enough to use the terrain to hide from radar, prompting a drastic rethink in the design space. * Manoeuvrability of aircraft versus manoeuvrability of missiles/countermeasures. When aircraft are more manoeuvrable than missiles, you tend to get a lot of close-up dogfights with their internal cannons and infrared/heat-seeking short-range missiles. When missiles are more manoeuvrable than aircraft, a lot more emphasis is placed on having powerful radars and high speed at the cost of agility, as then whoever shoots first can be expected to win. In the early jet age, a lot of US fighter jets were built on the expectation that air-to-air missiles would make dogfighting a thing of the past. Their poor performance against slower but more manoeuvrable opposing MiGs meant that the following decades of US fighter jets (think F-15, F-16) ended up putting a lot more emphasis on manoeuvrability again. * Buoyancy versus wings. For some time, lighter-than-air airships, not fighter and bomber planes, were the most prominent form of both military and civilian aviation. Their huge disadvantage is that much of their mass and volume always has to be spent just on keeping themselves in the air, while advances in engine technology and aerodynamics allow every generation of airplanes to carry a greater fractional mass of usable payload. * Sensor range versus stealth. * Ability to generate kinetic energy versus ability to retain it (thrust versus drag, I guess). Underwater, a lot of these things are completely different. There's both a lot more more inertia and a lot more viscosity, so the Reynolds number is gonna be different. The fluid's incompressible. You'll get more inertial/viscous/skin drag, but the speed of sound is also much, much higher, so the Mach number is going to be lower and you'll get less wave drag. Radar and optical light won't go far, while sonar doesn't travel at the speed of light and can be confused by your own engines, so you're comparatively blind. Active power isn't needed: Jets *have* to keep moving, because otherwise they'll fall out of the sky, but you a submarine can silently float in one place basically forever. Buoyancy isn't a *cost* like it is in airships; buoyancy is basically a *given*, so the main downside of having a massive ship instead of smaller craft is also negated. I don't want think too much about this, but altogether, I'm not sure there will be any place for fighter jet-style submarines. Shorter vision, high drag, free buoyancy— All these environmental factors seem to work against the conditions that have led to the evolution of modern combat aircraft above the surface. A big, heavy real-world-style submarine would likely be able to travel further, hide deeper, run faster, stick around longer, and carry more payload than smaller, hyper-agile craft, while a small, automated torpedo or drone would likely be able to outmanoeuvre it without having to carry a pilot or fuel for the return trip. Any role it could fill would be better filled by either something much larger or something much smaller. You'll notice that despite hyper-agile submersible watercraft already existing in our world, no militaries are trying to use them in any role resembling that of fighter aircraft. --- If you still want fighter jet-style submarines, I recommend making them deploy from an aircraft carrier-style mothership sub that's big enough to take advantage of the conditions I mentioned above, and coming up with some sort of excuse for either why automated torpedoes aren't viable (E.G. no microprocessors, easily hacked), or why automated torpedoes are actually fighter jets and have the same stakes as fighter jets (E.G. remotely driven, pilot executed on loss). [Answer] **Fish shaped submarines** Yeah submarines have a hopeless design. Under water, better use a robotic construct, shaped like a fish. It can minimize energy consumption by moving in resonance, like fish do. There are also rigid constructs in design, shaped like a fish, [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Vii4J.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Vii4J.png) *"A whale shark/manta ray-shaped mothership would be built from super-strong alloys and acrylics, with surfaces which can morph in shape. With hybrid algae-electric cruising power and propulsion technologies including tunnel drives which work similarly to a Dyson bladeless fan, the submarine could travel at unprecedented speeds of up to 150 knots."* <https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/royal-navy-considers-fish-shaped-submarines> ]
[Question] [ **Closed**. This question needs to be more [focused](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers. --- **Want to improve this question?** Update the question so it focuses on one problem only by [editing this post](/posts/203410/edit). Closed 2 years ago. [Improve this question](/posts/203410/edit) TL;DR: If I am insistent on a nation having a single weapons system spread throughout all of its troops, how much of a technological advantage is necessary to conquer the benefits of the enemy having combined arms? I asked this [Most Effective Ancient Weapons System if Combined Arms isn't an option](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/202895/most-effective-ancient-weapons-system-if-combined-arms-isnt-an-option) question about a week ago, seeking an answer about which weapons system would be most effective if combined arms weren't an option. The ultimate conclusion was that combined arms will always prevail, because they can cover for each other's weaknesses and provide more flexibility, while a single weapons system will always have weaknesses. However, for story reasons I *really* want one of my nations to use a single weapons system (not necessarily a single weapon, mind you, but all use the same system of weaponry). Given that it seems combined arms will always prevail given the same level of technology, I have decided this nation will need to have a more advanced degree of weapons tech to make this feasible. They are somewhat isolated, so it is completely plausible they could be ahead of their neighbors in technology, which would become apparent once they are attacked. It is certainly true that a tech advantage with one weapon can beat combined arms. For example, we could have a caveman tribe with a combined arms military, made up of Og, who hits enemy with stick, Bog, who throws stone at enemy, and Pog. Pog use teeth. The caveman army has fifty of each. On the other side, we have fifty US Marines, all armed with modern rifles. While one side is significantly larger AND a combined arms military, there is no reasonable argument for them having a tactical advantage in any foreseeable battle situation. However, this wide of a technological gap doesn't make for an interesting story. **Therefore, what is the smallest tech gap that can make up for having only one weapons system, preferably not going any higher than medieval technology (as this is a fantasy story)?** Current thoughts include an army of bowmen while the enemy nation has no armor, or hoplite style large shields with armor while the enemy is clad without armor and largely dependent on projectile weapons (many historians say this is a primary reason the Greeks won the Persian wars, as the Phalanx was especially well suited to the terrain, as well as a counter to Persian tactics). (And yes, I know the Greeks had more than just Hoplites here. The point remains that the famed Persian bowfire was reduced in effectiveness by hoplite armor, and the Persians were not prepared to take them on in hand to hand fighting.) Again, I recognize combined arms are better. Seriously. I get it. But I want this army to have one weapons system, so I'm going to give them a tech advantage. If you still don't think they can beat a combined arms enemy, then you can stand with Og Bog and Pog, while I go with the Marines, and we will see what happens. [Answer] ## To answer the question - the answer would really be zero. There's much more to warfare than simply technology, or even what arms you are using. The following also contribute substantially to an army's success: * **Command** - this is in many ways the biggest factor. Sun Tzu mentions that a good commander is worth more than any other component of warfare, and good officers too. An army that has a strong will to fight, and is well fed, supplied, coordinated and organised, is due to the command structure. * **Training** - having troops that are well prepared for all scenarios, can work flexibly in large or small groups, while retaining your 'single' non-combined arm (whatever it is) will enhance their effectiveness. * **Intelligence** - knowing something your enemy does not gives you a huge advantage. Even simply knowing where they are, whilst your enemy does not know where you are, can turn the odds in your favour. You can deceive them, surround them, confuse them, split and divide them into smaller pockets, intimidate them or defeat them on your terms. So the above means you can have well-trained, well-commanded troops with good reconnaissance with, say clubs, decimate well-armed troops with, say swords, but who are poorly disciplined, have bad communication, not knowing where they are or where the enemy is. In fact, history is replete with examples of this already: * [Mongols](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_Empire), using only horse and bow&arrows, completely outwit and outmanoeuvre much more well-armed diverse opponents. Their command and control was really tight (with 10 archers to Arban, 10 Arbans to a Zuun, and 10 Zuuns to Minghan) allowing flexible grouping or splitting to surround or divide opponents. Their intelligence was excellent, with fast scouting commonplace, and also their commanders intelligent, with for instance getting troops to create huge dust clouds so their opponents think their army is much larger than it was. * The [Battle at Agincourt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Agincourt) - although both armies had diverse arms, the main factor that caused the numerically superior French to lose was their poor command structure. Used to acting alone, superiorly armoured and well armed swordsmen and horsed knights were inadequate against well coordinated but lightly armed opponents who mainly fought with an assortment of melee weapons, but crucially were better prepared for the terrain and better commanded. (yes 80% were archers, but there is some controversy over how much effect the longbow really had compared to the melee weapons they also wielded) * [Alexander the Great](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_the_Great) - up against far more numerically superior opponents (sometimes 4 times his own) he mainly used spears to great effect by manoeuvring his forces in advance to prevent flanking by enemy cavalry. Ie. by being prepared, and by spreading his spear forces wide, enemy horsemen could not use their primary advantage of attacking a flank or rear, and so were forced to do frontal assaults (which or course for a horse is terrible against spears). Spears were also superior against elephants helping him conquer India. Amongst other qualities of leadership, his ability to preempt common tactics of the day yielded victories and he never lost a battle. So in summary, given so many factors that influence the outcome of a battle, actual armament is only one of many of them. So, given the above examples, the minimum difference in armament technology for a singular armed group to be superior would actually be zero. [Answer] **Frame challenge: just field superior numbers** Battles of single arms vs combined arms can be won by sheer numbers. Numbers can nullify many tactical advantages like flanking or breaching formations. Other tactical advantages are reduced by just having those numbers. If an archer kills one of your troops, it's not as effective in relative terms as in a smaller army. Every enemy needs to be more effective to make a dent. In the meantime you have more advantages with just having numbers. Flanking and breaching is much easier as you just have a larger front. Morale is likely much higher, as they can easily see they outnumber the enemy, while the enemy realises they need to kill a **lot** to win and their morale drops. There are many advantages outside combat as well. You're able to split forces and take multiple tactical positions, denying resources, maneuverability or the like to the enemy. **How to get superior numbers** To get higher numbers you can have it mandatory for everyone to train with the chosen weapon once a week or more often. If possible, like with spears, to make it themselves (or just at the smithy) but at least maintain it. Have older people teach them some manoeuvres as well on the training day. With the tax collectors you can send someone to inspect the weapons and do some advanced training. This way you have a (semi)trained force ready. They have grown up to know that they might be called upon, they'll feel a lot more ready than hastily armed and trained soldiers, so you'll have less runaways and they know some tactics. They know where to build a laterine and how to stay in formation. They already have weapons, making arming your soldiers not a bottleneck. With these factors you're likely to have, at least initially, a larger and better trained army than your opponents. There can be some downsides, like that you really don't want to piss off your own population, as they are armed and trained. **Why not an incredibly advanced medieval weapon?** As you say, combined arms is a better strategy than single arms for equal opponents. With medieval weaponary there is too little power difference between the single weapons to defeat combined arms most of the time. Even if you grab only bronze weapons for the combined arms and you get the latest sword technology at the end of medieval ages for the single category, the tactics of combined arms are just too important. Even if you would win 55% of the time you wouldn't call it a sound win. Numbers and better training of a large part of the army on the other hand have always given advantages\*. \*I did skip disadvantages of having a larger army, like food supplies, camping sites and others. [Answer] You mention yourself that you know it's terrain dependent, so you'll have to consider the terrain when making your decision on this. The two examples that come immediately to mind are: * **Tanks in WWI** - There was no significant technological difference between the two factions, but when tanks came to the field they were overwhelming to the combined arms of the day, trenches, infantry and artillery. * **Full Greenwich plate armour before firearms** - Again no significant technological advantage, just resource, skills, and cost. The last being a critical factor in this example. Access to the Greenwich armoury was a boon given only by the monarch, but if the entire army was outfitted this way (and appropriately trained) the advantage conferred would be significant. [Answer] **Guns** Ok, the earliest gun aside from tenth century Chinese experiments is the [Arquebus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arquebus) gun or something similar. These are very early, very simple, muzzle loaded, smoothbore, long guns. These are slow to reload, expensive to produce and maintain, and require specialized training. You can put a bayonet on it to make it a spear, which makes it not totally useless in melee. However that is more covering your ass and less making it a well rounded weapon. So why are they a good weapon? **One shot, one kill.** The one upside that the gun has is its pure lethality. [One hit will kill the average person](https://www.quora.com/How-deadly-are-18th-century-muskets-rifles-at-close-range), and that's even if it hits a non-vital area. The weapon is not accurate at range, but if you fire it at a group it doesn't need to be. With longer range even with a long reload you might get two shots before they reach you, giving you two waves of dead people before the enemies can reach your spearmen. They are excellent defensive weapons, their original purpose, and decent offensive weapons at middling range. They counter, or at least ignore most shields and armor. They don't deal with melee fighting tactics. They can take care of Calvary and ranged attackers. The biggest problem with the weapon is that it is expensive and hard to maintain. If your nation discovers interchangeable parts and the vertical integration a few centuries early they could mitigate these problems. It might turn out the reason they use only this gun is because after modifying their production capacity to support guns they literally don't have the capacity to produce other things as literally everything is tied up in making as many of these guns and bullets as cheaply as possible. **Limitations or why not everyone uses them** Depending on how good your troops are it takes between [one to three minutes to reload the gun](https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-to-reload-one-bullet-into-a-musket). Depending on the reload time the distance you need to get to to ambush them changes, but ultimately has the same result. If you are close enough they will not be able to load a round before you reach them. If you are fighting veterans, you can ambush them less than 100 meters away. If you are fighting new recruits you can ambush them from 250 meters away. Calvary will be able to do this at one to four kilometers depending on how good the loaders are. Furthermore, if you use trenches, cities, or other things as cover to get past the first volley, all you need to do is bring about as many people as the people you are fighting. Spears are better than bayonets since the gun is slightly more unwieldy. Any other combined arms tactics are just icing on the cake. Any fighting in cities or castles will favor people with closer range weapons that are easier to maintain over time. **Conclusion** If you have guns and your enemy doesn't you will beat them about as often as they beat you without having to worry about army composition. You will still get [Battle of Islandlwanaed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Isandlwana) occasionally, but so long as you always walk in the middle of open fields and stay stocked up on ammo the odds are in your favor. The one upside to this is since you know your weapon's down side you can easily remember and avoid it. But if you do have to fight in cramped streets or thick forests your weapons will still be mostly effective. [Answer] There is no general answer. First, I have no idea what you think a “weapon system” is. Using modern US DoD terminology, what you asked for would most closely mean a single variant of a single type of weapon. So e.g. the M4A1 carbine no body armor, no radio, just a nude dude with a gun. Something like “all flavors of F-18” night instead be a “family of systems.” If you mean, like, guns that run on smokeless gunpowder, there isn’t a clean term for that. Maybe that’s a “single technology,” but no-one really talks about that. If that’s what you’re looking for, you want something like Heinlein’s “the sixth column,” wherein a small number of holdouts discover a new magic technology and use exclusively that to defeat a large invading army. Second, “winning” is very much a product of the overall political situation. France lost a war in Vietnam (immediately before the US tried) after winning every fight and holding all the ground. Then those same soldiers shipped over to Algiers, “won” even harder, and in doing so threw France into such turmoil that the whole government had to be dissolved and reformed. So: did Algerian separatists win that? They certainly lost every engagement, hard. Same question with Napoleon and Russia: he conquered everything he touched there, and his enormous army starved to death. But his army was essentially undefeated: did he “win”? Here’s what you actually need: 1) Make up a scenario where the world is in some state, and you want it to be in a different state. Figure out how your guys will transition from the current state to the end state. (2) Pick a specific combined-arms force that will try to prevent that transition. You can pick something real or make something up, but for something made up, you will need to figure out capabilities and doctrine. (3) figure out how your guys will prevent the other guys from interfering. You’ve added a constraint that your guys can only use one weapon system to accomplish this. But (3) only makes sense in the context of (1) and (2). [Answer] I would go, if you have a certain tech level advance, lets say late medieval vs antiquity, for units like : * Genova Shielded Crossbowmen : Big heavy square shield that can stan on its own, plate-armoured crossbowmen, and equip them with longswords for close combat. You get an massive shieldwall while taking down anyone who dare come at range regardless of its armor or: * Plate-Armoured Arquebusier, do not underestimate the fear factor of a deadly new technology on the battlefield. If you civilisation could sustain it, I suggest to make them mounted on horses. First, thunder-like bullets rain, creating an smoke screen from the shooting, then a good old-fashioned charge. I bet that your Og Bog and Pog tribes would break their lines an flee soon after. That's one oh the reason how a few spanish troop could take down empires when they discover america. (There are a lot of other factors, but that not the point here) [Answer] **Arquebus** The issue with combined arms is that you can always design a specialized troop composition which can counter most set ups. You can use horse archers, or heavily armored shock cavalry, or heavily armored knights, or elite spear units, and you can counteract them decisively. What you need to handle that issue is numbers. Arquebus fit that. They're from the fifteen century, so they're a medieval technology. Guns are easy for anyone to use. Point and shoot. They can hard counter armor. You can easily equip vast armies of peasants with them. You can make them melee capable with a bayonet. This lets you quickly replace broken armies and always outnumber your enemy. Even if they have a clever counter, enough numbers can overwhelm enemies. **Setups that won't work.** Bows and crossbows. It's not that hard to make a wooden shield, which can counter bowmen, and armor is pretty easy to make. Once you're in melee range you can crush them. You can fight them in the rain, when bow strings work less well. You can use artillery to out range them and bombard them from afar. Hoplites. They have a very strong front, but they're very vulnerable to flanking. Broken terrain makes them very vulnerable to melee troops. Thrown missiles tend to disrupt the formation and allow swordmen to crush them, as they can move better than spearmen. Disciplined enemies can counter them with good maneuvering. [Answer] Ideally, you want your single weapon system to have both ranged and melee capability. For example, Roman legionary infantry had javelins for ranged combat and swords for melee. As long as you stay out of large plains where missile cavalry and shock cavalry combo would make short work of them you should be relatively safe. The other option is firearms with bayonets. You can stay (late) medieval-renaissance tech levels just adding slide on bayonet - it is not that difficult to produce, so it is actually surprising it was not introduced earlier. If other side do not have firearms, you have major advantage, as you negate advantage their armoured elites would usually have. On the other hand, swiss pikeman (using not only pikes other polearms as well) but in a world without artillery and firearms could work well. At least as long as enemy do not have massed archers/crossbowmen ]
[Question] [ A large pool of crude oil 60 feet in diameter and about 10 feet deep. It sits atop a 100ft. tall stone pillar with a 5ft radius hole that leads down into the earth. If the oil on top is exposed to a flame, would it just light up the surface, cause an explosion on the surface or blow up the entire pillar? Also does which of the above scenarios or any other depend on the size of the flame? [Answer] This [paper](https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/81201798.pdf) talks about combustion > > It is the fact that combustion properties of large-scale crude oil pool fire have great significance for security design and firefighting of current crude oil reserves. Burning rate, the flame shape and radiation intensity are the most important parameters for fires properties. > > > And this is an image of a [fire on an oil spill in the Arctic](https://www.hakaimagazine.com/news/drones-offer-hope-fighting-arctic-oil-spills/) [![oil spill fire](https://i.stack.imgur.com/GWyCQ.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/GWyCQ.jpg) To have an explosion you would need to have finely dispersed droplets of oil in the air to greatly increase the combustion efficiency. With a [calm pool](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165232X17303014) that doesn't happen. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZGzOx.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZGzOx.jpg) Incidentally, this is why it is dangerous to try to extinguish a flame in a frying pan with water: the water will sink below the frying oil, turn into vapor and explode nebulizing the oil above it and producing a fireball/explosion. [Answer] **Less volatile hydrocarbons = less flammability** Imagine you decide to pour a puddle of gasoline and light it. It burns merrily and you dance around it in your typical frenzied manner. Once it is gone you pour another puddle, but fatigue claims you. You go inside, resolved to come out, light the puddle and dance in the morning. In the morning (after your tea; you are not a barbarian!) you go out, matches in hand. But your puddle? There is nothing left but some greasy scum. All of the volatile low molecular weight hydrocarbons have evaporated. You cannot get it to light. Your dancing is perfunctory and uninspired. Crude oil is a mix of hydrocarbons ranging from gases (methane is the lightest) all the way up to asphaltenes (petroleum jelly aka Vaseline being a purified example). When it comes out of the ground it is all mixed up and so the light gasoline-type fractions are available to catch fire. Once they heat up the rest the whole thing could burn. If you let it sit out, molecules leave into the air according to their volatility. What is left is increasingly high molecular weight molecules and difficult to ignite except with high temperatures. You will wind up with something like the La Brea tar pits which I conclude are very hard to light on fire since I think every resident of Los Angeles has tried a few times. The solution: your pool of oil was not filled up by a guy with a bucket and a tall ladder. This pool is connected to a reservoir deep underground. It is contiguous with that reservoir. The stuff at the top turns over. Light fractions move up thru the column and bubble away. Heavy fractions slink back down into the earth. The whole thing is replenished from below. The height of the column is necessary to balance the pressure from below. Really it is an oil well. Now you can have a fire. The fresh stuff will burn. As it burns away the pressure on top decreases and more will come up from below. It will keep burning. It will also make a ton of greasy smoke. It will be an oil well fire. [![oil well fire](https://i.stack.imgur.com/jGMaT.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/jGMaT.jpg) [source](https://www.wsj.com/articles/oil-producers-are-setting-billions-of-dollars-on-fire-11578652210) [Answer] Having lit quite a number of petroleum pools on fire for training purposes to teach people how to put such a fire out, no, it will not explode. The vapour at the top will burn, heating and vaporizing the fuel below which will likewise burn when it reaches oxygen, until such time as the pool is burned away. The only way to cause said pool to explode would be to, well, drop an explosive in it, which would throw the liquid into the air in a fine mist which could then be ignited to cause a fuel-air explosion. ]
[Question] [ **Closed.** This question is [off-topic](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers. --- You are asking questions about a story set in a world instead of about building a world. For more information, see [Why is my question "Too Story Based" and how do I get it opened?](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3300/49). Closed 2 years ago. [Improve this question](/posts/195147/edit) I am trying to design a present day environment which is semi-realistically secure but at the same time has some realistic weaknesses that can be exploited. The aim is for this weakness(es) to allow a single person to: 1. stealthily infiltrate without raising any alarms or being seen/detected by a person or security device, 2. assassinate target/collect small object (strategy should be similar either way) from inside the building, 3. and finally exfiltrate without anyone knowing they were even there. The focus is more on the exterior design of the property rather than the interior design of the building. So once they are in it should be fairly smooth sailing (unless that's unrealistic of course) as a private owner will live there and be there while this takes place, it is the getting inside that should be the challenge. The details: **Infiltrator** * One person (no back up or help) * Highly trained in combat, weapons, stealth infiltration (anything they would need for this really) * Equipped/armed with any gadgets and weapons they would need and can carry (no drones or heavy equipment that cannot be easily carried, since they will likely need to climb etc) **Environment** * Private estate (diagram below) * Perimeter fence and gate (red lines) * Smaller guard dog fence to keep guard dogs off driveway (blue lines) * Multiple storey mansion (black rectangle) * Garden area surrounding driveway and house where guard dogs "patrol" (green area) [![Diagram](https://i.stack.imgur.com/rBhgT.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/rBhgT.png) *Security Ideas So Far* (I have very little knowledge in this area so happy for suggestions, but these ideas have come to mind): Security cameras on perimeter fence, some kind of security system for the house to detect broken windows and intrusion? I'm not sure whether to have some armed security inside &/ outside the house since wouldn't their patrols trip the security systems? *Infiltration Ideas So Far* (again please suggest what is realistic/semi-realistic): Underground basement or cellar, roof skylight, guard doggy door, window or door that can be secured upon exit again (I want to avoid anything that will obviously damage things such as drilling, digging, blasting holes etc as this is supposed to leave no trace behind). I look forward to your suggestions. Thank you [Answer] # Estates are rarely squares. You'll have water access, a squiggly border, a road that cuts off the corner, a swimming pool, adjacent greenspace, a tennis court covering a safe room built by a previous tenant, etc. Sit down and find an in-reality secured location. [Here is a satellite picture of camp david](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Camp+David/@39.648019,-77.4649751,1548m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0xb1a9dc25804efa6e!8m2!3d39.6475373!4d-77.4658948). This is an extremely secure location, but it isn't an optimally designed fort. # Land is expensive Devoting 90% of your estate's land to security really sucks. You'll want to *use* that land instead of filling it with sensors and guard dogs and the like. If you do have such a huge buffer, that means you are in a much less rich area than you could otherwise be (with all of the social and security costs), or are a strange hermit there with all of the social (and security) costs. # Passive Alarms suck "Sensors" that detect people breaking fences, windows, notice movement are great ways to annoy your active security staff. Either 99% of all alarms will be spurious or you will have gaping holes that let someone bypass them without setting them off. Guard dogs can't be "on" all the time, because you have to maintain that garden area, and aggressive guard dogs with gardeners around is going to either blunt their aggression or result in injured gardeners. # Vigilance is expensive Attackers can choose where and what to attack. Defenders have to spend resources on preventing every possible attack. So the defence is going to aim to work against certain kinds of attacks. If this is a crime boss, their defence is going to be aimed at defending against police attacks and other crime boss attacks. In both cases, the goal will be to make attacking them **here** more expensive than attacking them **elsewhere**. If the crime boss leaves the compound, they are going to be infinitely more vulnerable than inside the compound. So resources are better spent on non-compound security after a point. # Subtle Security The point of the compound, if the family lives there, is to **feel secure**. That means obvious security has a cost; you don't want to see people armed with automatic weapons when you are having a birthday party, because even if they make you more secure they make you feel less secure. So effort will be put into moving the security out of sight of the home as best as possible. That means a hardened perimeter, and less hard interior. And you don't want too many sensors in the main house, because false alarms are annoying; when they do trip, you'll send a low-threat appearing "friendly" security agent to investigate it (because almost all of the security sensor trips will be the 12 year old opening a window they aren't supposed to, not a super-thief). # Big houses require lots of staff Maintaining a mansion generally requires a lot of workers. These workers need to come in and leave, and they in turn need to have supplies and services for themselves. If you have a personal cook, 3 gardeners, a mechanic/repair person, and 3 house keepers, plus a dozen security, now you need to feed those people (another cook) and manage them (major domo and a head of security). You have guard dogs. They'll need a handler on-site, possibly all the time (part of security? Sort of a different job). Now you have a staff two dozen! These people need a place for breaks, and possibly even sleeping quarters. All of those people open up security holes. How many have drive-up access? How extensive is the searching of the food supply delivery? Of course, maintaining 24 people at decent salaries means that the cost of this estate just blew up. If they aren't at decent salaries (including overhead), they aren't going to be as well vetted in practice. And who wants to pay gardeners great wages when you can pay an illegal immigrant under the table? Yet another security hole. [Answer] **Insider Threat** Once upon a time, *the gardener* and *the driver* would have handled routine maintenance of the grounds and the car, respectively. They lived in the servants' quarters of the mansion. These days it is done differently. There is a landscaping company on retainer. They are supposed to have high standards, but you know how it is, someone calls in sick and ... Variant, senior staff live on site and they *are* allowed to bring visitors. The mansion is *secure*, it is not a paranoid prison. Logged in and logged out, of course. Either find one who can be blackmailed, or one with a weakness which can be [exploited](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheSchlubPubSeductionDeduction). **Cyber Threat** Since the last upgrade, there is a computerized security control center. All guards who are out on the grounds after sundown carry wristbands with little heartbeat monitors and position transponders. When an alert on the motion detector coincides with a transponder position, it is ignored. Except that the software has a vulnerability. *No Such Agency* knew about it and either used it or corrupt agency employees sold it to organized crime. Someone with the right hacking tools can play the security center like a fiddle. **Trouble from the Sky** L. Dutch mentioned the threat model. Assume that it does not include [powered hang gliders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powered_hang_glider). Someone can make a controlled landing on the roof and take off from there, which was not practical with old-style parachutes. The hatch near the chimney is not alarmed. [Answer] Considering that normally security is designed around a specific threat model, what you can do is leave some holes in your threat model, so that the security system has some blind spots that your infiltrator will exploit. Example: you mention cameras and broken window detection systems. When the security system was designed the trees in the garden were much smaller, and the safety was focused on monitoring the ground floor only. Now the trees have grown bigger, and some of them project their branches over some balconies. One balcony happens to be where a window has been left open (you know, changing air in rooms is a good habit, and we are at the second floor here, at most a sparrow could enter the room), a lightweight infiltrator could use the three to reach the balcony, the open window to enter the house and leave it after hitting the target. [Answer] **Lean into the Heist** Many heist movies/books have two layers to the heist, one where they trick everyone into believing that one thing is happening, and a second where they actually do another. So you might have an obvious perimeter breach which scares the owners. They call an outside security consultant in to resolve those flaws, but the outside security consultant is actually the protagonist and while getting a tour of the building steals what he needs in plain sight. [Answer] ### Escape tunnel that's camouflaged, and the outer door is secretly openable Build an escape tunnel, allowing the occupant to safely escape from their panic room to a secluded point outside of the wall if sieged. The kind of person who wants an estate this secure is likely to want an escape tunnel too. This becomes your entry point, as it will lead straight to the inner sanctum. It's camouflage , and not disclosed to the security guards on the front gate who are paid hourly - as they're afraid of insider threads. If you design and install it, you can design a way to open it from the outside without raising an alarm - it depends on exactly how the secret door is hidden, but a removable door jam should do the trick. For the alarm, my suggestion: install magnetic reed sensors that clearly look like they'll trigger when the door opens, and will if tested by a paranoid resident, but install them close enough to the exterior and oriented such that a magnet on the exterior will keep them in the closed position. Your secret agent simply needs to bring a magnet and whatever tools are needed to remove the door jam discreetly (screwdriver? depends on how its hidden of course). They enter the secret passage, get into the inner sanctum, do the task, leave, reseal the door jam (screw it back in), and then remove the magnets suppressing the alarm. ### Or - Just own the estate next door and build them both at once If the same company is building two estates at once, you could dig the basements together and join them together with a secret passage. By respecting the privacy of the occupants, the security is all on the outside of the building - The kingpin in the estate doesn't care for security to hear the details of his private "business" dealings. And added benefit for the thief is that once they're in there is no more security. ]
[Question] [ Assuming it has a full battery would a smart phone and some of its apps work on an alien planet? The environment on the planet is similar but not the same as Earth. In other words a human couldn't breath without equipment, but there are no significant differences in pressure. Would apps like a calendar, downloaded music, downloaded games work? [Answer] Yes. A modern smart phone will work fine in a non breathable atmosphere, from vacuum to about double Earth pressure. Anything that doesn't need an internet connection or GPS will work. eg [Samsung S9 is IP68](https://www.samsung.com/sg/support/mobile-devices/is-samsung-galaxy-s9-and-s9-plus-waterproo). This means 8 hours of 1atm pressure difference no dust can get in, and 1.5m of water none gets in over half an hour. If the atmosphere is corrosive, the phone will corrode, but itll take a long time to loose functionality. Smears on the screen and metallic paint on the back dripping off will be the first signs. Note that the touch screen may not work through a space suits gloves. You may need to enable the extra sensitive touch screen function before you get there. In a vacuum it will eventually overheat. It will slow down and turn off rather than be permanently damaged. You wont be able to fast charge it in a vacuum either (unless you rest the phone on a big solid cold thing to stop the waste heat pulling the Li Ion battery above the critical 45 degree max temperature.). A very slow charge may work. Microphone and speakers obviously wont work in a vacuum. Sounds may be slightly distorted in a different atmosphere to earth but should be recognisable as the original. Many apps that allow downloaded content will auto-lock after a period without an internet connection. Eg Amazon Prime will block downloads after 48 hours offline. Edit: Apparently helium can turn a cpu oscillator off. I didnt know that, but that would be something to watch out for. Not a lot of helium at ground level on many nearby planets, and most modern phones are watertight, but still a risk of tiny helium getting in. [Answer] It would likely generally work, with the obvious exception that it would not have connectivity. There would be a few caveats. Some phones, particularly iPhones, use a MEMS oscillator to run the processor. This depends on the atmosphere. Notably, a helium atmosphere prevents them from running, but does not damage them permanently. This can even happen on Earth if there is a helium leak, such as [in this hospital](https://9to5mac.com/2018/10/31/helium-bricks-iphone-apple-watch/). High temperatures, even if not high enough to permanently damage the phone, may cause it to shut down. This can happen on earth if you have a phone mount in front of a heater vent. Similar situations may happen in vacuum or very thin atmospheres if the phone is not able to cool itself from the heat it produces. Finally, vacuum may cause components in the phone to release gasses that don't form in an atmosphere. I'm not familiar with the effects, but I would expect it to cause weakening of adhesives (screen falling off) or fogging of the screen or camera. In conclusion, there are a lot of possible issues, but it is not unreasonable for a modern smartphone to function outside of Earth's atmosphere. [Answer] We have sent probes to orbit other planets of our solar system, and in some cases they have even landed on their surfaces. The most famous cases are probably the probes which have moved on the surface of Mars, like for example [Curiosity](https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap200306.html). [![Mars panorama from Curiosity](https://i.stack.imgur.com/MOI7D.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/MOI7D.jpg) Considering the sheer amount of information they have managed to send to us thanks to even simpler electronic than what we have today in a smartphone, I am sure apps which do not require connection to the internet would work fine. ]
[Question] [ **This question already has answers here**: [What shape of a ship would be most effective in real life space combat?](/questions/107888/what-shape-of-a-ship-would-be-most-effective-in-real-life-space-combat) (31 answers) Closed 3 years ago. So, for a board game I am developing, I need to design the perfect [Space Dreadnought,](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheDreadedDreadnought) in the Star Destroyer style. My concept of the end product involves a [More Dakka](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MoreDakka) approach, with the combined firepower of many small turbolaser-esque cannons adding up to provide large amounts of usable firepower. Given the following restrictions, **what is the optimum shape for my Space Dreadnought so that it can bring as many cannons to bear on a target as possible?** ### Restrictions 1. "Small turbolaser-esque cannons" means about like this: [![](https://i.stack.imgur.com/mX4Dx.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/mX4Dx.png) 2. Cannons must have direct LoS to their targets. 3. Assume that the ship is pointed at its target while firing. That being said, I will give extra points if it has a decent broadside. 4. This is not a [Ha'tak;](https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Ha%27tak) no spinning. 5. This is also not the TARDIS; the ship must have somewhere to put Star Destroyer-esque thrusters. 6. Due to (handwaved) limitations in the power distribution system, you can't just cover the entire hull in turbolasers. They must have a minimum separation of 5 meters. 7. The ship is roughly the size of a Star Destroyer. 8. "Cannon" is used in the general sense of "large LoS weapon for attacking other ships." *These cannons do not fire cannonballs.* [Answer] **Cone** The objective here is to simultaneously bring all your guns to bear on whatever ship you are targeting while presenting as small a profile as possible when they fire back. Thus, a cone would seem to be the optimal choice - by sloping it, you can overlap the guns so that you can lay down a 'wall of fire', and it allows you to condense the guns so that you can manage to keep your profile as small as possible. The slope of the cone would be (minimum height required for one gun to shoot over the other gun - probably a foot or two at most) / (minimum amount of separation - 5 feet). Maneuvering would be done with boosters build into the side, allowing the ship to easily turn and bracket whatever enemy ship it wants to deal with in it's range. The main thrusters would be in the back, naturally. And, yes, this is a very similar design to the Imperial Star Destroyer, but there's a reason for that - ISDs have a pretty good design, all things considered. [Answer] **Ignoring Physics** If physics are not a requirement, then Halfthawed's answer (a cone) is the best answer (and I upvoted it). Maybe squish the back end of the cone so it's more oval than circle to bring a few more batteries to bear when the target is broadside rather than in front. When ignoring physics, the only best answer is the one that produces the most surface area during a primary attack. *A quick joke: A farmer wants the most efficient sheep pen possible. It must hold the most sheep for the least amount of fencing. The engineer says it's a rectangle because sheep are rectanglularish and so the most sheep can be put into the pen. The physicist says it's a circle because that maximizes area with the least circumference, minimizing fence cost. The mathematician, on the other hand, steps up, quietly draws a circle around his feet and proudly proclaims, "I declare everything outside this circle to be the pen." Why is the joke important? because this is the kind of answer you get when you ignore practical realities — like physics.* **Not Ignoring Physics** 1) Assuming all the batteries must be mounted on the ship, the best solution is a sphere. Indeed, when push comes to shove, the best solution for pretty much all space flight is either a cylinder (see L.Dutch's answer, which I also upvoted) or a sphere. The problem is control, which requires thrusters, and thrusters don't like dealing with angles. That leaves cubes, cylinders, and spheres. * Cubes are definitely Borg-ish, but the only way to get three of the six sides to bear upon a target is to point a vertex at it — which means those thrusters are dealing with angles and holding the ship on target is really hard. * The cylinder has the problem of batteries being one behind another in basically a line, which means unless you're always firing broadside, you really can't bring more than a fraction of your batteries to bear. * That leaves the sphere. No matter where your target is, you always have 50% of your batteries to bear. Sphere's are *fearsome!* Add to this the fact that they're much simpler to control via thrusters than any of the other configurations. You could always depend on whomping fast computers to do all the math to control thrusters ... but any engineer will tell you "KISS" (keep it simple, stupid!). The more you must depend on a computer to control your ship compared to the other guy, the more can go wrong that lets the other guy win. However, mounting all your firepower on your ship is simply a really, really, really bad idea for two reasons: A. First of all, a big, fat dreadnought is the poster-child for "hitting the broad side of a barn." They're great big slow (high mass) targets that are *really easy to hit* compared to their smaller counterparts. You could add more armor, but now you need more energy to move the darn thing. You could add more defensive weaponry, but again you need more energy. They're big, heavy, slow, and might as well have bullseyes painted on them. B. And speaking of energy... Whether you're using yesterday's fission reactors, today's fusion reactors, or tomorrow's antimatter reactors... energy weapons demand a TON of energy *at the moment they fire.* That means lots of power generators and *lots of batteries* to hold that power — and that means any shot that hits your ship has a FANTASTIC chance of hitting said power generators or batteries... *Foofh!* no more ship. Most people don't realize that energy weapons mean generating a bazzillion times more energy during combat than at any other time. But holding all those generators/reactors at full operation 100% of the time "just in case" you need power is inefficient (see engineer example above) and dangerous. Batteries are a little better... but have you ever seen what happens when a big capacitor or battery is catastrophically discharged? Batteries are always dangerous. (*Foofh!*) Space (in reality) is 100% about *efficiency.* Yes, the most daring, talented, experienced fleet commander will probably win the day — but only if the efficiencies of the two fleets/ships are about equal. Have you ever seen a small, trained wrestler wrestle a large, untrained dude? The little guy beats him 9 out of 10 times (actually he beats him 10 out of 10 times... but I'm trying to be nice). And to make things worse, if you choose a shape that isn't a sphere, then your dreadnought will *always* have a weak spot: the tail pipes. If you want *realistic* you must be *efficient.* If you don't need to be *efficient,* who cares what shape your dreadnought is, because all that's left is aesthetics. Design something that looks cool and move on. 2) This leaves drones. You want those turrets mounted on drones and you want a million of them. The control ship is small and doesn't even need to be directly engaged in combat. Let the drones sit out there generating their little tushies off for all the power they need. Hitting a small drone with a single turret is a LOT harder than hitting your big ol' honking dreadnought and you can swing those buggers around to bring them ***all*** to bear in seconds-to-minutes. This means your command ship is a flying computer with a maintenance bay, lots of antennae, a couple of bunks, and a cafeteria — but it's the most fearsome thing out there because drones don't need to protect human life (i.e., the lives of people onboard the drones—there aren't any). They can fly as fast as possible, be as agile as possible, and generate all the radiation they need to barbecue your enemies! **Conclusion** The shape of your dreadnought is irrelevant because what you really want is a lot of drones. *A quick note: WWII-era battleships are the dreadnoughts of our age, and the reasons I've listed are the reasons none of them are in service anymore....* [Answer] **Flat plane.** Your ship is like a piece of paper. On facing the enemy all cannons on that side will have a straight shot. If you do not want to get hit by space cannonballs you can flip up and present your edge. If you do get hit on the flat side by a cannonball, it will go right thru your modular system and not do too much damage. Your cannons extend the width of the hull. A cannon can be retracted and moved out the other side given a little time. Your cannons are also your thrusters. You adjust the choke and swap in propellant for projectiles. You have to decide which role a given device will play as the switchover takes a little time. --- [![space dred flat style](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8Vzeq.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8Vzeq.jpg) [Answer] A long and thin cylinder. On each circular section of the ship, there are 6 cannons placed at the vertex of a regular hexagons. For any directions you will have at least 3 cannons per section in LoS with the target and you won't have to do any maneuver to point at the target. On the other hand you can use mirrors to deflect laser attacks, and a similar arrangement will protect you from any direction. The only weak point would be on the direction of the cylinder axis, where you would have less power of fire. [Answer] I'll just add an unonventional design: a long tube-shaped hollowed ship with a framework. On the outside of this framework a bunch of armor layers are present. These layers can move across the framework to present additional armor to most sides of the ship, offering protection for 100% of the outside (including the engines). However the armor will usually slide away to reveal the engines and a hole for the equipment of the ship. Inside this framework all elements of the ship are present: engines, bridge(s), shield emitters, sensors, power generation, walkways to move through the ship (mostly along the framework itself) etc. Most of these are stuck at their position with armor layers of their own and fill the interior for the most part so there is relatively little wasted space between the outer framework and the interior. The guns, however, are more interesting. The guns can move inbetween the space between the armor layers and the interior layers, using the framework to move. The guns (and additional shield emmiters when necessary) are moved into position, after which the armor sections above it slide away and allow the guns to fire. The idea is that you can keep this dreadnaught going and modify it to the situation at hand. You want to broadside a single ship? Move all guns to one side, slide the armor away and fire through the opening (current Star Destroyers use a trench design for their guns as well). This reduces the amount of fire that can disable the guns. Or if some pesky rebel fighters are at it again you can reposition the guns to have a more omnidirectional firing angles, with the guns lifted to portrude through the armor as it slides away to give them more time to engage fighters. Damaged or destroyed turrets can be taken back behind the armor for repairs. If a particular area is important, say a single rebel bomber could OHK your ship if they released their bombs there, you can reposition either the turrets from a less valuable portion to provide cover or slide multiple armor plates across that section. Naturally you have it in your own hands how much freedom the turrets and armor have to move around across and beneath the surface. They might only be able to move a single section further, or they might move anywhere on the ship where you like. Since the Star Wars universe quite needs massive firepower in capitol ship combat its adviseable to allow most guns to get to one side and concentrate their firepower on one section. As for fluff: you could say that its a weaponized dock, designed to build Star Destroyers and the like but in a pinch they cobbled this together since they lacked the big turbolaser batteries. ]
[Question] [ **Closed**. This question needs [details or clarity](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers. --- **Want to improve this question?** Add details and clarify the problem by [editing this post](/posts/155930/edit). Closed 4 years ago. [Improve this question](/posts/155930/edit) In a medieval setting, which methods of fighting a rising sea level exist apart from building barriers? The idea is that a civilization has to fight the flood just long enough to finish their ark. The civilization has access to iron, coal, stone and wood but is not limited just to those four. Maybe some little magic is possible. The water can come from just one side but it is also be possible that a villiage is located on an island and has to fight the water from all directions. The villiage is always located on the coast and moving into higher altitudes is not possible dua to the speed of the rising sea level. **Edit:** The reason for the flood is unknown so therfore it cannot be prevented by religion or something like that. The ark is used to save the civilization and to get to a save place when the flood is over or maxed out. [Answer] **Digging holes** More specifically, channels. Give the water somewhere to run that *isn’t* where your ark is. Piling the earth up as extra barriers (not to resist the water but to force it into other channels) is an excellent idea. If your ark is on a slope then digging channels so the water rushes around it and down the hill will buy you time until the water level rises. Not a permanent measure, but it helps you survive. This tactic is used all the time in flood management in times of great rainfall. Channels are opened up and used to selectively flood areas where the water will cause less damage, thus giving the more important areas (your ark) longer until they are overwhelmed. Just try not to flood anything you need before you don’t need it any more. [Answer] If you rule out barriers (which the Dutch have been using for a very long time), the only thing you can do is go up. You can float it (as @JRodge01 said) or jack things up on stilts. Though both of those would take much more work and time than a barrier. By the time you build something big enough to float the ark while it's being constructed, you've built the ark. The effort of jacking things up (town, construction site, etc.) would also border on the ridiculous. [Answer] A village on an island presumably has boats or other sort of sea-faring devices. Perhaps some sort of floating construction platform that isn't sustainable long-term, but able to be sustained long enough for construction to finish. For the coastal village you could have walls that angle the water elsewhere as a stalling tactic until the water goes over the wall. Very old civilizations use [qanats](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat) as a way to bring water from one place to another. I'd assume that this could also be used as a way to divert flood water. Channals or trenches to divert water to the other side of a walled village, or utilizing local ravines and valleys to carry off water would also provide time. That said, unless major foresight existed prior to the beginning of the ark's construction, I don't believe there'd be any solution that would buy more time than contributing to the are. [Answer] **Cave.** [![cave](https://i.stack.imgur.com/WkOTB.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/WkOTB.jpg) <https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/biggest-longest-five-amazing-caves-visit-180952892/> Your people move the ark into the cave. As the shipwrights work, stonemasons wall off the entrance. The stonemasons were relegated to making sandwiches and giving backrubs during the ark project, and are happy to be back to work making things out of stone. When the ark is done they break the wall and the water rushes in. The ark is lifted up to the entrance and leaves. [Answer] I would think that building a wall to hold back the water would be more work than finishing the ark. The wall would have to be at least as big as the ark. You could build a floating dock for your ark, but again, that's probably more work than finishing the ark. I presume if the society is medieval we're ruling out aircraft or traveling to the Moon. I'm hard pressed to think of what you could do that would be faster or easier than finishing the ark. ]
[Question] [ *For context : I would like to know if it is plausible to build a realistic european medieval world where Sauron appears at some point* [Sauron's army](http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Sauron%27s_army) was one of the most powerful in Middle Earth in the Second and Third ages. According to [How large were Saruman's and Sauron's armies?](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/123528/how-large-were-sarumans-and-saurons-armies) Sauron's army consisted of 50,000 - 75,000 warriors, mainly [Orcs](http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Orcs), but also Trolls, [Fellbeasts](http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Fell_beast) (~ dragons), [Wargs](http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Wargs) (huge wolves) and Men ([Haradrim](http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Haradrim) and [Easterlings](http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Easterlings) with [Mumakil](http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Mumakil) (huge elephants)). I don't consider Nazgul here. We don't know the exact proportion of each of these creatures but, according to the linked question: > > Mordor's troops consisted of some 18,000 Easterlings and Haradrim, > several Haradrim war Oliphaunts, and tens of thousands of Orcs. > > > 10% of Orcs ride Wargs. There are 9 Fellbeasts and several Trolls. During [the battle of Towton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Towton) (29 March 1461), around 60,000 men fought in Yorkshire for control of the English Throne. Now let's say that the men of the Towton battle decided to unite together when they find out that Sauron's army will be in Towton in less than 36 hours (i.e., 18:00 the following day). Sauron's army is coming from the South. [![Surroundings of Towton](https://i.stack.imgur.com/UvLtQ.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/UvLtQ.png) **With their medieval knowledge, strategy and equipment, is there a chance to defeat Sauron's army?** By defeating I mean, at least, killing enough enemies to force Sauron's army to retreat. [Answer] As other pointed out, discipline can play in favor of the humans against Sauron's army. However, don't forget the surprise factor: the first time the Roman army fought against war elephants their discipline went down the drain against the panic of seeing for the first time such animals. In your case, if it is the first time that the human army (and their horses) sees Orcs & Co., (and I suspect it is like this since you talk about sudden appearance) and if they barely resemble the appearance they have in the movie, panic is almost guaranteed. Sum to this the fear of demonic like creatures instilled by religion, and you have the recipe for failure. In short, my answer is: * If they have already experience of the enemy: possible * If it's their first battle against the enemy: almost none [Answer] Presumably Sauron's forces would not have any logistics. How do you get supplies from Middle Earth to England? Every day that passes after his arrival, his army will weaken. Without supply lines, 75,000 orcs and Haradrim will quickly eat all the food available to be scavenged and then will begin to starve. They'll then probably have great difficulty keeping order. Orcs are pretty unruly even when things are going well. They'll quickly start fighting amongst themselves, and soon enough Sauron will have a lot less than 75,000. The Europeans have no answer to the fell beasts or Mumakil, so I believe Sauron would easily win an open battle fought immediately. But the Europeans have no need to fight him immediately. They could easily wait a few weeks, and soon enough the Mumakil will have all starved to death and ~40% of the orcs would have killed each other or deserted. [Answer] Sauron is thousands of years old. He spent much of that time fighting the Noldor, and other elves. A Noldor army of the size you describe would easily defeat any similar size army of Men, were they so inclined to do so. Consider: They survived the breaking of the world. They fought in total darkness before the making of the Sun and the Moon. They had millennia of experience to draw from. Although they prefer more pastoral settings, we can't forget at the skill they had as artificers, enough to kill most of the dragons, drive away the Balrogs, etc. And yet, they were ultimately not successful. The dragons were slain, the Balrogs driven into hiding, but the Orcs were able to successfully combat them. They have the physical capability to go toe to toe with Elves, and because of their lifespan, the numbers to overwhelm them. Sauron toppled Númenor, with no army, just guile. The Númenorians were the very best of Men, who, if you recall, easily conquered the lesser Men and set up their empire. They lived longer, were stronger, and had better tools, than your Englishmen. Yet they also were subverted and defeated. After all, Sauron is thousands of years old, and is just as good politically as he is militarily. He could easily put on a fairer face and talk to the Welsh and the Scots, who might not be broken-hearted about the shattering of English power. EDIT: "put on a fairer face" is being used metaphorically here, not literally. What Sauron has to want are no alliances. Technically, the Welsh and Scots are vassals of the English king, which means a messenger will arrive at some point to demand troops. Any possible reason to delay sending these troops will be eagerly grasped at. Scotland will be ok, because Scotland is solid mountains and bog and waterlogged earth. Wales... English power is based on heavy calvary in the medieval period. Wooded mountains are a great deterrent to this kind of power. Mountains full of holes, but *not* full of Dwarves are no deterrent whatsoever to an army of Orcs. Sauron needs an energy source, would coal do? Perhaps. The outlook seems bleak for Wales. There's been mention of discipline problems with the Orcs. This might be the case on their own, but in battle they follow Sauron's orders, out of fear at the very least, and surely they fancy their chances against a bunch of Men, who are not being advised by creatures with two thousand years and more of tactical knowledge. Food won't be a problem, they are not farmers, they'll eat their dead, and your dead too. It's not like Sauron cares about their welfare after all. The people who need the cropland are actually the defenders, who presumably won't resort to cannibalism right away, I feel they probably would prefer bread and rabbit over roasted orc and troll. Guerrilla warfare is problematic for the defenders. In real life Harald Godwinson had this idea. He'd fought a war in the north, against Harald Hadrada. William of Normandy's army arrived late in the year, and was not provisioned for a winter campaign. Send the men to take in the harvest, burn whatever they could not carry, let the Normans winter in tents and push them into the sea in the springtime. William's response was to start pillaging, burning villages, killing the villagers, who were kids, women and old men. Terror tactics, and they were quite effective at forcing Godwinson to battle. Of course the orcs would do this, and then instead of burning or burying the dead, they would be cooked and eaten. Terrifying for the victims ( Old men and their grandsons, tortured and roasted) and brutal for their mothers, who will be watching all this while "entertaining" the humans in Sauron's army. Ugh. Nope, your soldiers will want to stand and fight. But... If you are not an Elf or from Númenor, or from Gondor, then a horde of Orcs is a great calamity. LOTR has the orcs getting slaughtered by the dozen, and so we mistakenly think that they are pushovers. They are not, and most of your army will be farmers with pointy sticks and shields, woodcutting axes, maybe double padded shirts or maybe some frying pans beaten into breastplates, or some boiled leather. Technological advantage? Certainly not. Longbows won't be at the elven level. Armour won't be at the dwarven level. No palantir for them, to coordinate over distance, and no undead lich kings on dragons who can map out your troop movements. Crossbows won't work against a horde of Orcs, who will be attacking at night, because they can see in the dark, and who are as comfortable below ground as the Dwarves, and can sniff out humans easily, because of their excellent sense of smell. Really, the thing to do, regardless of the roasted sons and ravaged wives, is to run away. Run to Wales, or north to Scotland, get your best negotiators and clergy on a boat and send them to the continent to organize a crusade, assuming your world has a religion strong enough to command the princes of Europe. [Answer] The late medieval period does have some advantages over the movie, mostly due to the rule of cool, that may give your medieval army the edge over Sauron though as others have pointed out the intimidation factor of facing off against creatures no one has ever seen before is still a significant factor. In the movies most of the ranged combatants use bow and arrow where as in late medieval the arrival of the crossbow played an important part. Where bow and arrow can give a higher volume of fire with it taking less time to ready your next arrow after shooting however it lacks the penetration power that a crossbow brings to the table, and if we're facing off against brutish armored orcs and the like I'll take the weapon that can go through some armor instead of relying on perfect shots. Also in the movies almost all of the humans use swords as their primary melee weapon, this would not the case in war times. Swords fit the rule of cool and were kept as backup weapons in war times, but in reality were not the best choice on a battlefield. Pikes and other pole-arms would be the primary weapons which could be important fighting against stronger orcs as pole-arms give much greater reach than swords, require less training to use effective and can be more effective against armor when using something like a halberd. These weapons in combination would act similar to the [spanish Tercio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tercio) that dominated the 15th and 16th century using pikes and arquebus. This allows your human army to keep the orcs back while still inflicting damage of their own. [Answer] Humans have several advantages. They fight in formations and use strategy and tactics rather than a Zerg rush. In this case they also have the advantages of local knowledge of the terrain and people (likely the first notice they have of the advancing dark army is reports from fleeing peasants). Assuming they have the right combination of knowledge, skill and resolution in the face of an unknown enemy, they can quickly move to take advantage of local terrain features to protect their flanks, and use skirmishers to harass and ambush the enemy formation, while providing accurate information about the enemy. While we know that Sauron's army isn't completely inept, they still need more time to figure out where they are, and won't have as many advantages trying to scout the English armies. However, fighting unknown foes with completely different animals in the force (Wargs, Orcs and Elephants) is likely going to take a toll on the resolution of the English army as they see the force advancing on them, and the battle will largely hinge on how well the English can conquer their fear and adapt to the unfamiliar enemies. They could possibly withstand a zerg rush of orcs, but the cavalry will likely have difficulty with Wargs, and the advance of the war elephants could likely turn the tide given the lack of effective defence. IF the English had more warning and time, they could improve their chances by digging in and fighting from behind a wall or palisade of stakes driven into the ground, and improved their chances more by digging pits to hinder the mobility of the elephants (stepping into a hole and breaking their legs would help considerably, the screams of an injured war elephant are likely to unsettle the rest of the elephants as a minimum). The likelihood of the English winning the first battle is very low, given the short proportion time and unfamiliar enemies, but if the English decide to withdraw and fight a running battle as they fall back to London, they will have a better chance of utilizing their advantages of terrain and local knowledge, as well as mobilizing further troops to bolster their numbers and harass the supply lines of the enemy. Outcome: lose the battle but win the campaign. [Answer] Medieval armies were trained, orgainsed and disciplined which contrasts to Sauron's army which made up for their lack of discipline with raw strength. Medieval armies also had heavy siege weapons such as the Trebuchet, Heavy crossbow, catapult etc. These were designed for attacking/defending fortified structures rather than Mumakil or Fellbeasts, but they carried a sigificant amount of force over a large distance. On balance, I'd say a medieval army would, at the very least, be able to repel at least one attack. [Answer] I would say the army should employ scorched earth tactics. Sauron's army will lack supplies after a very short amount of time as long as the people scorch the woods/town etc. The Towton army could split into multiple regiments about 10000 strong each and outmaneuver Sauron as his army's only source of information are the fellbeast who wouldn't be able to fight an army on their own. The wargs pose a bigger threat but with a 10000 strong army and some preperation you could beat the max. 6000 unorganized warg riders if they try to forage for food. Another fact is that warg are carnivorous which even further impacts there already sparse supplies. This situation resembles Hannibal's campaign in Italy only that he had some supports from the Gauls south of Italy. The Romans scorched earth tactics worked till they decided change generals and to engage Hannibal. They proceed to get their a\*\* kicked and afterwards tried to get the previous general to once again lead their remaining forces [Answer] Fabian Policy - Fabius Maximus, by carefully avoiding pitched battles, using hit and run/harassing tactics, foiled Hannibal's (of Carthage) attack on Rome (as mentioned above). Even though Sauron's army contains creatures that will shock a medieval army, keep in mind they themselves are in a strange place. Easy pick'ens all over. Towns, villages..etc all kinds of loot that would be easy to overrun. I think a medieval army could pick small fights and pull back, pulling chunks of Sauron's army with it, into a battle that they are not supposed to be fighting. There would have to be disciplinarians in place just to keep its own army together, otherwise it would be like herding 75,000 cats across the country. Much of this was already mentioned in the posts above, but I think taunting pieces of the army into ambushes, or baiting them with the promises of easy loot, harassing, burning food supplies, world war I style tank traps/ditches for the Elephants, basically any way to fight pieces of the huge undisciplined army. Channeling them into tiny places like William Wallace did with the battle of Sterling Bridge. But run when too many of them show up. I think Sauron would be very stressed by trying to keep his army from constantly running off to fight and loot. ]
[Question] [ If a humanoid species of what are essentially people covered in chitin, how would they color themselves in the way we get tattoos? I considered the idea of etching or carving, but that wouldn't leave much room for color. Some parameters for this is that the armor is rather thick, 3 inches in some cases, and there is plenty of technology available to this species that's beyond modern technology. In summary, without cutting into the chitin (for structural and decorative reasons), how could an advanced race of crab-like humanoids give themselves permanent tattoos? [Answer] You could use [inlays](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inlay). [![silver inlay shield](https://i.stack.imgur.com/gbpvL.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/gbpvL.jpg) <https://www.terapeak.com/worth/indo-persian-islamic-ottoman-mughal-silver-inlay-koftgari-work-armor-shield-dhal/252327924127/> > > Inlay covers a range of techniques in sculpture and the decorative > arts for inserting pieces of contrasting, often coloured materials > into depressions in a base object to form ornament or pictures that > normally are flush with the matrix. A great range of materials have > been used both for the base or matrix and for the inlays inserted into > it. Inlay is commonly used in the production of decorative furniture, > where pieces of coloured wood, precious metals or even diamonds are > inserted into the surface of the carcass using various matrices > including clearcoats and varnishes. > > > For your creatures, they would scratch or engrave a depression in their chitin armor. Then a piece of metal or shell cut to fit exactly would be pressed in / glued in and lacquered over. Humans have been decorating their hard teeth this way for a long time. [![teeth with jewel inlays](https://i.stack.imgur.com/trEyO.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/trEyO.jpg) <https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/05/090518-jeweled-teeth-picture.html> [Answer] I'm promoting the Chitin version of wood burning. I'm thinking about the beautiful [Maori tatoos](https://www.google.com/search?q=maori+tattoos&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj1rJGMxcLZAhVP3mMKHUJzBDoQsAQIKQ&biw=1600&bih=1058) which, anciently and usually during modern times, does not apply color. It's all about the pattern, and the burn can be almost vanishingly thin, protecting the Chitin, and remarkably precise for crisp, clean lines. Wood burning would be more like our tatoos that are near the surface of the skin. *Besides, Maori tatoos would look smokin' on crabs.* [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/pM1gh.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/pM1gh.jpg) [Answer] ## [Mosaics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic) These are artworks made from assembling small, colourful pieces of stone or glass (known as tesserae) into a beautiful whole. The other required items are a surface (the chitin) and strong gum or glue (which the modern tech specified in question can definitely provide). This artform was known to the ancients and was widely used to decorate religious structures. [![Golden Mosaics of Great Mosque in Corduba](https://i.stack.imgur.com/lk2na.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/lk2na.jpg) [Answer] With their fancy tech and the desire to decorate themselves without cutting their chitin they have indelible ink which doesn't wash off. Alternatively another technique we use is to paint or draw a picture on a medium and then varnish over it for protection. If they spent as much resources as we do on makeup invention etc,. they'd have it sorted. In fact varnishing adds depth and texture to drawings so would be great. Lastly and most impressive would be along the lines of resin carving or lacquer where layers are built up, then carved fancifully and artistically into low relief or full round works of art. [Answer] > > ...an advanced race... > > > By advanced, I understanding at least matching our technology level, right? They could [use lasers to mark a very thin layer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_engraving) of their chitin, forming patterns or images. This is used in our own world to draw on wood, denim, plastics and other things. It wouldn't be a stretch for a chitinous creature to use this for a "laser tattoo". This is different from wood burning in a few ways: * It uses coherent light rather than a hot object to cause color changes; * Due to that, it is possible to burn layers of chitin that are beneath the most external one, by using wavelengths for which the chitin is transparent; * Lasers can also cause color changes through ablation or photolysis, which means more visual effects are available with them; * Lasers also allow for more precision, so more detailed images or patterns may be printed on the target surface. [Answer] No, you're not going to get tattoos as we currently (kind of) understand them, but since you opened it up to other forms of advanced technology, I'd suggest cells or protein nano-machines. The first thing to understand is how tattoos work in mammals: 1. We have skin cells that produce melanin in response to UV exposure. This prevents UV radiation from penetrating deeper into our skin. 2. Over time, most of the melanin fades, but some of it is absorbed by specialized immune cells. 3. These immune cells hang out in the skin with their melanin, providing some protection from UV's. 4. When they die, another immune cell of the same type absorbs the melanin to keep doing the job of protecting from UV's, usually in roughly the same place as the previous cell. Tattoos are a hack of this system. They introduce tattoo ink under the skin, and the immune cells think it's melanin and absorb it. (The life and death cycle of these cells could explain why tattoos fade and migrate over time, but that's an answer for a different question.) You can watch more about this here: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6I9tenSb-Zg> In contrast to self-contained cells in the sin, chitin is more like a biologically-produced mineral. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chitin> Like many minerals, it has a specific porosity. It's used as a cell wall by some fungi, and this is how microbiologists discovered that they could stain it. The stain enters the "pores" of the chitin and binds to specific molecular points. This is similar to writing on your hand with a permanent marker. The problems with microbiological stains are that they can be dissolved in the appropriate solvent, or, in living creatures, wear off over time as biological material is replaced. So what if your crab-men reverse engineered the cells that contain the tattoo ink? So instead of needles injecting ink, the needles inject the cells or other proteins that contain the ink. This could be done while the chitin is soft, just after a molt. The cultural questions I can imagine this leading to are, how did your crab-men discover the immune cells, and why did they adopt the practice of tattooing themselves with it? [Answer] They could apply some sort of durable (plastic?) film on the chitin, with the image printed on it beforehand. This film could have some sort of glue layer to make it stick. ]
[Question] [ In my story, all the fauna in the planet (basically Earth) has been instantly killed, leaving only flora and fungi. How long will it take before the effects start to show, and how long until all the CO2 disappears, (which would freeze up the planet)? [Answer] # Billions of years The death of the [kingdom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_(biology)) [Animalia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal), while tragic, isn't anything new. Life managed to muddle along for some three billion years without any animals, and I imagine it would do fine again. A variety of plants will go extinct immediately, of course, in particular, the currently dominant flowering plants will lose their evolutionary advantage of having evolved alongside the animals that pollinate them. But there are plenty of primitive and otherwise plants that have never in their evolutionary history had any need for animal-driven pollination, such as conifers, cycads, and ferns. With plenty of plants, there will be plenty of food for the fungus to live on, so life will continue, and thrive. In another hundred million years, some other branch of life will colonize the niches vacated by the now-absent animals, and we will have swimming fish-like [foram protists](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foraminifera) or walking and flying fungus or something. In any case, life will continue quite happily until the sun bakes all the water off the Earth in some billion years, and that is plenty of time for some fungus civilization to raise up and surpass our intellectual achievements. [Answer] What you're describing may well not happen. The assumption here is that ALL CO2 in the atmosphere is caused by animal respiration and that's simply not the case. One additional source of CO2 that hasn't been considered is plants, for instance. They produce CO2 when they respire and use the O2 and Carbohydrates they produce through photosynthesis to produce their own life energy. Granted, they generate less than they produce, but it's a factor. Secondly, I'm going to assume that by 'animals' you're not including the microbial life in the soil that breaks down dead organic matter so that plants can then absorb it through their roots for nutrition. That also respires, producing CO2. Next, you have [volcanoes](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earthtalks-volcanoes-or-humans/). They produce a massive amount of CO2 and it's generally believed in the scientific community that the end of the 'snowball earth' era was caused by a fresh outbreak of volcanic activity around the earth. As such, that's the variable that would need to be accounted for in order to provide more precise estimates as to whether or not the earth would indeed enter another snowball earth epoch. Certainly animal respiration would reduce CO2 production, and getting rid of humans and industrial activity would also reduce it, but you've still got all the CO2 in the oceans to consider (Ocean-Atmosphere exchanges) and the impact of volcanoes to factor in to your equation. Take a look at this [XKCD temperature timeline](http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?t=119228) which shows over time how temperatures have changed, and then compare that against any estimates of animal biomass that you can find in literature, and I'm pretty sure you'll find that the correlation is not particularly tight. Bottom line is that the affect of removing animals could easily be countered by fluctuations (periodic increases in) volcanic activity before you see any appreciable effects in the environment, in my estimation. [Answer] If all the fauna on earth has been killed (vertebrates and invertebrates), there are no pollinators left. Which would kill off many plants. (That is, make them unable to reproduce, so once they die, there won't be any more of them.) The plants that are wind-pollinated will survive. There will still be CO2: from fungi, from zooplankton. Plants also produce CO2. The earth would survive indefinitely. New species will evolve to fill up the emptied ecological niches. ]
[Question] [ In this world, after Babbage designed his analytical engine, research lead to developpement of mechanical computers based on Babbage's model but with tinier and tinier metal pieces (going on the nanoscopic scale in the twenty-first century). Assuming that all computers in widespread use follow this mechanical model (more or less improved on during the centuries) would the field of theoretical computer science have developped differently and if so what areas would be different? [Answer] Computer Science would develop more or less in a similar way to ours. CS is more related to math, and theorical models (for example a Turing Machine, which is typically described as a mechanical device) but not necesarilly to specific implementations (for example: transistor based computing). In that sense, CS would have evolved to take as much computing power from their machines as possible, considering their constrains and advantages (in the same way that we do). In our case we don't invest too much resources thinking in algorithms or uses for those kinds of machines (because electronic machines are good enough for us), but we know some actually cool algorithms what are only viable on such kind of machine, for example Bead Sort ( <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bead_sort> ), which could implement sorting in $O(1)$ or $O(\sqrt{n})$. Also, for cryptography it may be somewhat useful, as ther would be random sources everywhere. Also, probably an architecture that would be worth exploring could be an analog of FPGA: such kind of machines could reconfigure themselves easily, they even could transport logic parts between places in the machine. I think that ther the uses of computers would focus on batched, not interactive, computing loads, where big machines compute large loads of data, slowly but with a high throughput. Probably similar to what we know as MIMD, in contrast to what we usually use (SIMD, SISD). And as a final comment: most of our computers are Turing equivalent, and there are Turing Machines built using mechanical components, so they would capable of computing exactly the same algorithms as us (given enough time). Here is a mechanical Turing Machine for your delight: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vo8izCKHiF0> [Answer] Mechanical computers would never become as advanced as electronic ones. Because of limitations that moving mechanical parts impose on design, mechanical computers can never reach speeds and memory volumes that even 1980s PCs were displaying. A large scale, multicore design may approach this level, but mechanical units would be failing at 1000s times faster rate than computer chips. Probably, the most advanced mechanical computer will be at the level of 1962 [Atlas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_(computer)), with multiple blocks needed to be replaced and repaired on continuous basis. Given those limiting factors, computer science will be severely hampered. It would still excel at creating and implementing efficient algorithms, but large scale programs would be above its reach. Basically, human time would be cheaper than computer time, so the focus would be on developing bug-free programs before they see their first execution. Putting mechanical computers on rockets experiencing high-g acceleration would also be out of question. [Answer] I think there might be some advances, but they wouldn't be in the hardware. It would be in Algorithms. I feel pretty sure that the limits of a purely mechanical system would be realized very quickly and a transition to electrical computers would happen in fairly short order. Algorithms, however, are a different story. With your Babbage mechanical thinking engines you are putting the ability to perform complex mathematical functions reliably and quickly in to the public consciousness several decades before it happened in the real world. It's kind of hard to put words clearly around the concept, but If you have ever known a computer science student at a University, you can almost see how their thought processes change from year to year, class to class. A simple sort program for a freshman may be fifty lines long, but the senior does the same thing in four lines. This is because they are conditioning themselves to think about problems in a certain way, to use algorithms. The ideas of what can be done sometimes runs ahead of the machinery that can do it. Now imagine what elegant solutions would be coming out today if the training to think in Algorithms had an extra 50 years to develop. I would guess that any given program would be more efficient than our worlds equivalent, on equivalent hardware. Moore's law might still apply, but it's effects wouldn't be felt as much until the transition to electric machines. I'm guessing the end result would be that If you take a machine from our world vs. one from your world with equivalent clock speeds and such, you world's machine would act like it's a faster machine because of more elegant and efficient software. (Apologies if I'm not being really clear, I can see the answer, but am having a hard time expressing it well) [Answer] Assuming that you mean mechanical computers were pretty much all there was in your world by the 21st century, then everything runs a lot slower than we're used to. Modern transistor based computers have billions of circuits that run almost as fast as the speed of light. A mechanical computer will never get anywhere close to that. I don't think a binary mechanical computer would ever ge much faster than the valve based machines we saw soon after WW2. Then there's the physical aspect. A mechanical computer will always be a lot bigger and heavier than its digital counterpart. Good luck getting one of them inside an Apollo era space capsule, so your space program will be very primitive if it even exists at all. This would also have a big impact on military technology which I don't think would progress much beyond our level in the 1950s. Missiles, combat aircraft, tanks, subs all make extensive use of *small* but powerful computers. Power demands would be much higher too, in fact it'd probably be prohibitively expensive for anyone but corporations and very rich individuals to run and maintain them. A more subtle change would be the lack of any sort of GUI. The computers themselves wouldn't have the computational power to run anything but text based menus. If you've played the Fallout games think of their Pip-Boy interface. There'd be no WWW and without that then the Internet wouldn't have gone mainstream. It'd exist but the userbase and use cases would be like 1970s IRL. There's a lot of knock on affects. No space program and a relatively primitive military would mean that technological progress in general would've slowed to a crawl. So if the kids aren't playing video games (coz there aren't any), there's no Faceborg, no smartphones and no endless march of CGI assisted "blockbusters" in theatres every couple of weeks, then what are they doing ? They're probably more culturally inclined than in our world, probably more outdoorsy too. [Answer] Ironically enough, high performance computing (HPC). Mechanical computers would be millions of times slower than electronic ones, and HPC is the field of trying to get the most out of ANY kind of computer, from the 20 cent processors to the \$5000 processors. It is finding the algorithms and code organization to use the hardware at its peak efficiency to get the most work done per second. Other fields would be the death of Compilers; nobody would write anything except in the assembly language of the computer, because that is one way to get the most out of it. Mid level languages like C or Fortran typically run at around 10% of peak; the same computation written in assembler (with some knowledge of how the computer processes instructions) can achieve 75%, and with tuning, sometimes 95% of theoretical peak. High level languages (Javascript, python, Swift, C++, C#) and object oriented languages would simply not exist, they often achieve less than 1% of peak. The whole field of Compiler theory and optimization would likely not exist. Likewise for AI, we would have few if any games (or only simplistic games like Pong). No cell phones. Communications would still exist, but Internet entertainment would not. Realistic physics simulations for fluid flow, weather, etc would probably not exist or would be quite simplistic (and therefore of very rough precision). I am talking about literally a million times slower, perhaps more, with the very best possible mechanical computers. They would not be for the public; they would be now what they were for in the 1950's and 1960's, big business accounting and record keeping, glorified calculators for solving physics and math problems. [Answer] The computer hardware side would be vastly different, but that doesn't necessarily mean the code would be different at all. Theoretically if it were possible to make fast mechanical computers they would likely also work by preforming vast strings of binary calculations. Unless they were to design a computer where each switch had more than an on/off state, instead having three or more states. [Answer] Computer science would be the same because the field is more about math than computers or science. Mechanical computers would eventually have to go digital anyways as analogue systems are just not easy to manipulate and design logic around. Eventually digital mechanical computers would get ousted by electronic digital computers we have today because they are just simply less efficient. [Answer] Unfortunately we will never get to the level of speed that we are now, and things will be incredibly complicated to do. Now, once any known programming language and (by some miracle) a monitor is implemented to work with a mechanical computer that runs exactly one program at a time on it written in that language we are essentially at a level relative to (I believe) that mid-60's early 70's in terms of computer science. The reason for this is that computer science does not care about hardware. It only cares about what basic operations the hardware performs, which make up its machine code. The core problem here is one that plagued early computers that were mechanical rather than digital, which is that you cannot have binary. Now don't get me wrong, you could compute the binary representation of some number or vice versa. The issue is that memory was encoded via gears. Have you ever seen a 2 sided gear? It's a bad idea. This means that things like adding circuits and other basic operations have to be done for several cases. However, when we do it in binary we can think of everything as a series of component wise boolean operations on vectors of true/false values. This is essentially the great benefit of electrical computing and it's great hurdle. When people thought to make the switch they were forced to do binary because of there were only two wavelengths that the hardware could produce. That led to a somewhat better way of thinking about such things. Ironically most routers use 32 or sometimes 64 different waves to compress the data down since it is now feasible to do that sort of thing. Now turing machines, automata, algorithms, programming languages and a lot of the other more design oriented concepts might advance the same. They are still concepts interesting to study and they lie more on the end of computational theory rather than actually implementing concepts or testing them on a machine. Unfortunately regardless of mechanical speed or durability you have a fatal flaw in your mechanical machines which mean that computers will never develop to where they are now without a switch to electrical or some augmentation. Light consists of photons which can be produced/released by a release of energy. Light is how computers communicate (wi-fi, cellular signals, radio waves, etc.). It also how we are able to see the monitor. The fundamental flaw is that machines without electricity will not be able to produce light waves like this. It just doesn't happen. Otherwise ordinary fires and humans walking around could create interference. You need electricity to do that. Therefore your mechanical computer world will not develop computer science to the strength it is today. The reason why that will happen is because there will be no monitors. There will be no personal computers. There will be no *internet*. Taking this out of the picture will reduce your world's level of advancement in every field drastically. Plus, without people taking an interest in computer science that are not in government positions or in large research facilities... you've heavily limited the number of people who might advance the field by a large number. It might even be considered nothing more than what it was meant for, which was a tool for performing mathematical computation. Nothing more, and nothing less. There will also be no sophisticated flying machines to speak of. Without the advanced systems there are now, passenger jets would be off the table. This also heavily drops the level of advancement in your world. There would be no word processors, no hand calculators to speak of, and no databases. Even if the latter two existed, the former would be limited to complex series of operations being entered into a typewriter to be read back through and print a document. Ultimately, anything can be made with your mechanical computers that anyone else can make with an electrical computer assuming the former is turing-complete. However, the issue isn't one of capability. It's an issue of it being unfeasible and uninterpretable. Imagine computing a number and a series of pegs raising into the air to represent the binary version of the number. It would be a very strange calculator. Without monitors, editing documents of any form would be challenging. Interesting enough though, the only issue for blind users would be the lack of a sound interface. However, I could see such people adapting quite well to a mechanical interface that uses raised and lowered portions to form a "monitor". In fact, I will correct myself from earlier. We can have *monochrome screens*, but that is it. Essentially we can raise and lower portions of a flat plane to make an image. Ultimately though without the invention of the internet, this site wouldn't exist. And therefore there it [one thing that your mechanical computers will never have](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/93656/what-fields-of-computer-science-would-change-in-a-world-with-mechanical-computer "What if electronic computers developed?"). [Answer] Babbage's 'computer' was basically a programmable calculator, that used base ten, not binary. We would probably not have formulated our concepts of digital logic and binary. Some early, powerful computers (the PDP line) were analogue, base ten. They would be great for arithmetic, but a lot of our AI is based on binary concepts (true/false, yes/no) and truth tables, which Babbage's calculator did not handle. The first programmer is recognized as Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace, who worked with Babbage to write program code algorithms for a programmable calculator that was never built, and therefore the code was never used. > > ***Ada Lovelace's notes were labelled alphabetically from A to G. In note G, she describes an algorithm for the Analytical Engine to > compute Bernoulli numbers. It is considered the first published > algorithm ever specifically tailored for implementation on a computer, > and Ada Lovelace has often been cited as the first computer programmer > for this reason.[66][67] The engine was never completed so her program > was never tested.[68]*** > > > [link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace) For insight into the potential for mathematicians that such a programmable calculator as Babbage's could ascribe to, follow the link. They would be great for engineering, for example, or financial applications, or for creating tables (artillery tables, for example). ]
[Question] [ I love the game [Inside](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_(video_game)). Like its predecessor, Limbo, it is a game where you cannot fight; only running and hiding are allowed. The game ends however, with you coming across a large ball of meat strewn with arms, legs, heads, even whole torso's. Below is the description from the game's wikipedia > > The Huddle, the amalgam of body parts that the player controls at the > end of the game, had been an idea for the game since 2010, when > animator Andreas Normand Grøntved had been brought aboard Playdead to > do preliminary animations for it based on a drawing by artist Morten > Bramsen. Bramsen's drawing of the Huddle served to guide much of the > visual nature and art style for the rest of the game. To animate it, > Grøntved took inspiration of the motion of Nago the demon form of the > boar god from Princess Mononoke, the squishiness of the main character > of the game Gish, and human behavior during crowd surfing. > > > And later; > > This model uses a 26-body simulation of the > core of the Huddle, driven by a network of impulses based on the > direction of the player and the local environment, which allowed the > Huddle to reconfigure itself as it needed in certain situations, such > as fitting into tight spaces. They then added six arms and six legs > with some pre-set animations that would also help to drive the impulse > in the main body simulation. The skin of the huddle was a mix of art > styles borrowed from the sculptures of John Isaacs, and the art of > Jenny Saville and Rembrandt. > > > [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Dp05n.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Dp05n.png) Now, it is never explained exactly how this creature came to be, whether it was born or made, but could the option even exist? Is is possible for such an amalgamation of limbs to exist and evolve in nature? If so, what evolutionary pressure would drive it to reach this form? --- A list of all of the Anatomically Correct questions can be found here [Anatomically Correct Series](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series/2798#2798) [Answer] Your question didn't limit the origin to natural evolution, so at least one possible explanation remains... The Huddle is the result of a programming bug in the hive conscious of a swarm of medical nanobots. They were programmed to build functional life support structures within the bodies of battle-damaged soldiers. They were the high-tech equivalents of front line field medics whose responsibility is to keep the wounded alive and stabilize them for evacuation. But some programmer forgot to teach them the difference between a whole living soldier and the sum of its parts. So when a bomb exploded in the middle of the squad and all but one of the soldiers were blown into scattered body parts, the swarm decided to fuse everything that was still alive onto the still functional life support structure of the survivor's body. The Huddle was born because a nearly magical swarm of nanobots didn't know that Corporal Thomas's arm and Captain Jones liver were not to be considered survivors on their own. The swarm did it's best with the body parts it was given and even got some of the legs working so that the Huddle could march to the nearest M.A.S.H unit for further assistence. [Answer] Something that occurred to me is the [Bristlecone Pine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinus_longaeva). The oldest non-clonal living thing on earth, in order to adapt to its extreme environment the tree is mostly dead but keeps one strip of bark alive to connect some of its roots to its leaves. Perhaps the Huddle similarly exists in an extreme environment, with most of its body dead or desiccated, just one spine working. It would have to be somewhere mobility was irrelevant. Somewhere with food and water within reach. Perhaps the body is inevitably the target of damage, so the living part would have to "hide inside" it. Then, at some moment that it could anticipate well in advance, it starts eating more and hydrating more of its larger body/bodies in preparation for a surge of motion leading to... freedom? Not a lot of specifics there, but I hope the structure is somewhat helpful. [Answer] In Synthetic Men of Mars, there is a malfunction in one of the vats used to grow synthetic warriors (hormads). What it produces is initially much like the Huddle. But it continues to grow... From Edgar Rice Burroughs: [Synthetic Men of Mars.](http://www.telelib.com/authors/B/BurroughsEdgarRice/prose/syntheticmenofmars/syntheticmen_chap13.html) > > “Something has gone wrong in No. 4 vat room,” he said. “Perhaps you > had better have a look in there.” > > > When I reached No. 4 the sight that met my eyes was one of the most > horrible I have ever looked upon. Something had evidently gone wrong > with the culture medium, and instead of individual hormads being > formed, there was a single huge mass of animal tissue emerging from > the vat and rolling out over the floor. > > > Various internal and external human parts and organs grew out of it > without any relation to other parts, a leg here, a hand there, a head > somewhere else; and the heads were mouthing and screaming, which only > added to the horror of the scene. > > > “We tried to do something about it,” said the officer, “but when we > tried to kill the mess, the hands clutched us and the heads bit us. > Even our hormads were afraid to go near it, and if anything is too > horrible for them you can’t expect human beings to stomach it.” > > > I quite agreed with him. Frankly, I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t > get near the vat to drain off the culture medium and stop the growth; > and with the hormads afraid to approach it, it would be impossible to > destroy it. > > > Another way to produce the Huddle is described in this short fiction. <http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/06/04/monstro> ]
[Question] [ In the media myth of King Kong, there exists a gorilla; 50 feet tall. The largest great apes ever to exist were [Gigantopithecus Blacki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigantopithecus#Gigantopithecus_blacki) which, stood up to 9.8 ft, and weighed up to 1,190 lb. While this is good, it is much shorter than the 50 foot goal we want to achieve. How tall (or heavy) can I make a great ape? Is the legendary 50 foot ape possible? What would the evolution of a massive ape look like? A list of all of the Anatomically Correct questions can be found here <http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series/2798#2798> [Answer] No, it is not possible. Not even remotely. At least not with Earth mammalian biology being what it is. Bones can only get so big / strong. But hey, we had some pretty tall dinosaurs walking around, so why not a giant ape? Well, it comes down to joints, blood circulation, and a bunch of other fun stuff like that. Basically, once you reach a certain size our basic biology just can't keep up anymore. That thing would swing an arm, and snap its bones in half, as the muscle power required to move its limbs would be greater than the strength of its bones (for that muscle to bone mass ratio). If we were devising a different creature, with multiple hearts, a different circulatory system, etc. it might work out, however. > > **Fun Fact:** some of the earlier, massive dinosaurs are believed to have had 2 hearts in order to circulate the blood throughout their massive bodies. > > > If you look at the history of our world in fossils you will notice that even the dinosaurs got progressively smaller as we get closer to modern times. Same with the megafauna that dominated our planet a few hundred thousand years ago. The more complex our biology became, the smaller we evolved to be. This is not a coincidence. Even blue whales, whose weight is suspended by the oceans they live in suffer from diseases related to their size by the time they die. [Answer] I know this question is a few weeks old however I'm not fully satisfied with the answers given and I feel more information could be added. If we take the 25 foot figure as standing height, a 1.8m tall Gorilla scaled up to 7.62m (25 foot) should weigh around 12 tonnes. [Kleiber's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleiber%27s_law) states that metabolic rate scale to the power of 3/4 to the creature's mass (M^(3/4)). Using the formula 70(M^0.75) you can work out that a 14 tonne mammal has a [BMR](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basal_metabolic_rate) of 80,000 Kcals/day. multiplying by a further 1.4 gives you a very accurate figure of the actual calorie intake for Humans and [Elephants](http://animals.sandiegozoo.org/animals/elephant). Using this method gave me a figure of aproximately 110,000 kcals a day needed to sustain King Kong. For simplicity, that works out at between 480kg-650kg of bamboo shoots. In comparison to a regular Gorilla which eats 18-20kg of food per day. Whilst biologically, it could be possible, Apes do not have a trend of growing very large. Even the G. Blacki size estimate is commonly scrutinised as being inaccurately scaled. Additionally, as has been mentioned, the ability to jump does not seem possible and running is also unlikely. Note: Whilst the square-Cube law doesn't account for [Allometric Scaling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allometry), by comparing a Shire Horse to various Elephants and various Elephants to each other, I found that on every occasion the actual weight was slightly lower than the predicated weight using the Square-Cube law. It should be noted that 14 tonne mammals have existed in the past. Whether Skull Island could support a population of these animals is another question. Perhaps kong lived in an [unexplored rainforest](https://www.theguardian.com/science/grrlscientist/2013/nov/08/mount-mabu-google-earth-maps-video). [Answer] 50 feet - probably not. Scaling from a 6 foot, 400 lb gorilla by the square cube law, the 50 foot gorilla will be 8.33 times taller and thus: $8.33^3 = 578$ times heavier $578\*400 = 231204$ lb or ~116 tons That is at or beyond the largest sauropod dinosaurs - a recent estimate published in PLOS One (<https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3864407/>) suggests 83 metric tons (= about 91 US tons) for Argentinosaurus, which is often considered the largest (in terms of mass) dinosaur. (The introduction to that paper also has some very relevant general information and cites about biomechanics at very large sizes.) However... the sauropod dinosaurs had pillar-like legs, unlike Kong, and also had a suite of helpful adaptations no mammal has (heavily pneumatized and thus lightened skeleton, egg-laying and reproductive maturity far below maximum size which avoids the problem of very low reproductive rates faced by huge mammals, non-chewing-intensive feeding style). But the smaller end of Kong portrayals - say ~20 feet and ~7 tons - is well in the mammal range. And while elephants have pillar-like legs, Tyrannosaurus was a biped with much more 'athletic' leg type in the ~8 ton size range. With the right evolutionary pressures, I'd expect apes to at least be able to reach the 2-3 ton range many mammal groups have broken into, including some very improbable ones (glyptodonts - basically giant armadillos - were >2 tons at max, and Megatherium, a sloth, was 4-5 tons!). The therizinosaurs were also 'grasping' browsers in this kind of size range, up to 5 tons. [Answer] This [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLc47Bs3pt8) sets out the basic problems with a 25 foot tall King Kong. This suggests a fifty foot tall King Kong will have even more obstacles. On the plus side, the video is amusing, informative, and mercifully brief. Of course, YMMV. A 25 foot tall Gorilla would weigh 60 tons and while his skeletal structure, his bones, and circulatory system could support this, his ability to move around would be severely limited. Let alone his ability to fight or jump around. Also, being a herbivore Kong would be spending most of his time simply eating plants. In fact, if he was eating the same proportion of his body weight that a normal gorilla does, this is one-eighth of its body weight per day, Kong would be eating 7.5 tons per day. It is easy to suspect Skull Island would have been stripped bare of its plant resources Because Kong is an island dweller, and because the ecology of the habitat affects the size of animals this will influence his size, in fact, the smaller habitat the smaller the animal. The dinosaurs, for example, which were huge, lived on very large continents. The remains of Pigmy Mammoths were on the islands where they had lived. So if Kong is giant gorilla and an island dweller, he must be a pigmy giant gorilla. [Answer] By our genes we are supposed to grow as much as 2.28 meters(7'4 feet) if met good environmental conditions like: * Balanced diet * Lack of environmental stress * More oxygen So by our genes we are all supposed to be 25-30% bigger. Given some particular diseases you can surpass the genetic limit by 2%-3% at the cost of 3/4 of your lifespan. So a human 33%-35% taller than the average will live less than 25 years, but would still be bigger. I believe you could use the same disease on similar animals. Indricotherium as example was 8 meters tall (26 feet) and 30 weighted tons. With this disease it could grow up to 12.8 meters (41'9 feet) That's quite close right? So terrain mammals can technically get close to 50 feet tall.... However shape also matters, and a giant gorilla doesn't have the shape of Indricotherium. Given this giant gorilla also grows bigger muscles and bones and a bigger heart to survive long enough to reach it's maximum size then it could probably grow just 6-7 meters tall... maybe maybe even up to 8 meters (26'2 feet) if this animal was breed perfectly for a bigger size. Those conditions to reach 8 meters instead of the 6 meters theoretical limit would be: * Half the earth gravity * Lifespan longer than human,the life of a primate won't be enough to grow this much. * Eat 30% of it's weight daily, mostly fat. Fat is hard to obtain from herbivore diets and becoming carnivore is impossible for such a big animal as carnivores have to be small and fast.... ]
[Question] [ [Gravel mines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravel_mines) were tiny explosives the US scattered on the [McNamara Line](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_Line) during the Vietnam War. [Bernard C. Nalty's *Air Power and the Fight for Khe Sanh*](https://permanent.fdlp.gov/lps48251/fight_for_khe_sanh.pdf) claims (pg. 105) the Viet Cong cleared them by using oxen to drag logs over the fields of gravel mines ("though at some cost in oxen if [they were] dealing with the casualty-producing kind") and states certain sub-variants were powerful enough to mutilate feet or pop truck tires. However, some folks aren't the Viet Cong, and don't even have oxen to their name, let alone any they can afford to sacrifice as living deminers. Unfortunately, there are a whole lot of gravel mines in the environment around said people, originally intended to notify people when zombies were nearby by the sound of their detonations (long and irrelevant-to-this-question story). They've cut sole-shaped sections from steel road plates [like these](https://s3.amazonaws.com/protec-assets/product-images/Renatl/_1075x600_fit_center-center_none/2009-Job-Site-Photos-005.jpg) and plan to attach them to the bottoms of their shoes as armor plate, allowing them to ignore the pebble-sized landmines as they go about their post-apocalyptic days. **If attached to the bottom of shoes, would a slab of steel thick enough to protect from such explosives be light enough those wearing them could walk normally/semi-normally?** Obviously this would be almost completely ineffective against normal landmines but these ones are tiny and contain at most a the equivalent of a couple tens of grams of TNT. [Answer] There is not an effective way for an armored shoe to protect someone against gravel mines. The state of the art for "mine-proof" boots are at best harm reduction tools, reducing the likelihood of fatal or permanent injury. They aren't a required or even recommended by International Mine Action Standards [standards for PPE](https://www.mineactionstandards.org/standards/10-30/#4_Personal_protective_equipment_(PPE)_requirements). When the boots are mentioned in mine clearing incident reports the victim is still in need of medical attention. In this [2006 incident report](https://www.ddasonline.com/PDF_files/DDASaccident424.pdf) the victim slipped and stepped onto a mine with similar explosive power than the larger gravel mine. He was wearing a blast boot, and survived with the following injuries. > > a) laceration of the distal part of the sole of the right foot and multiple lacerations at the roots > of the toes. > > b) Fractures of bodies of all the metatarsals of the right foot. > > c) Fractures of the proximal phalanges of the 1st to the 4th toes of the right foot. > > d) Dislocation of the ankle with talus slipping forwards. > > > The report concluded that the boot may have contributed to the unexpectedly reduced injuries, but also that wearing a heavy raised boot may have lead the victim to slip in the first place. [Answer] > > ...originally intended to notify people when zombies were nearby by the sound of their detonations... > > > Taking your statement at its word, those mines are little more powerful than firecrackers. Thick steel is overkill for your purposes and would be very difficult to use under "normal" everyday circumstances. Shoes are designed to bend and flex with the foot. If you want to know what such a sole would be like, take a chunk of 1x4 lumber about 10" long and strap it to the bottom of your shoes... then try to live your day like that. Frankly, normal shoes would be more than enough for mines like these. If you wanted something more, adhere two layers of good, thick leather to the bottom of the shoe. They'd be uncomfortable to wear, but they'd work. *If the mines are powerful enough to harm someone walking on them, first, you should have said so. Those mines are completely germane to the question and a list of details was warranted. I couldn't tell if the Vietnam-era Real World description was there only as a point of reference or if was intended to factually describe your mines.* *Second, it isn't just the foot that's exposed to a mine. @Sphennings answer is excellent in that it points out that the force of the detonation harms both feet, damages the legs and joints, and can lead to ancillary injury due to being forced out of balance — not the least of which would be detonating more mines when you landed on them after falling over.* *What people without oxen might do instead is replace the ox with a 10" or 12" diameter tree trunk or branch about 3 feet long. Carve the center thinner than the rest so that a forked rod can be placed in it, allowing the object to be pushed along in front of you. They would take the time to meticulously clear paths only as wide as necessary to live life and then go out of their way to train their children to stay on the paths, which isn't far from what people today do living next to legacy mine fields or mined areas.* [Answer] I've worn many different weights of Boots, from Motorcycle boots (which I'm able to walk quite comfortably in) all the way to proper hiking boots (which feel like a Feather compared to my Motorcycle boots) - Given enough time, one will adapt to the extra weight/strain if needed. Granted, you might have to train up-to-it - a good comparison would be look at the Neck strength of professional racing drivers (especially F1 drivers) vs regular humans - but on that aspect - I would say 'Sure, feasible'. Where I think the issue occurs though, is Spalling. Sidney Alford (RIP) - did a great bit of TV on this years ago - [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsTMWxiRyMA) to demonstrate why a projectile doesn't necessarily need to penetrate a solid piece of steel armor to cause damage, due to the effects of Spalling. In case the video goes dead - he places a small amount of Plastic Explosive against a solid sheet of Steel, with a Watermelon behind it. Fires the explosive, confirms that no penetration has occurred, yet the watermelon is shredded because a piece of Spall flew off from the other side of the steel plate. This is what I'd be far more worried about than weight - I'm not sure the Steel would be thick enough or there would be enough space for a Spall liner to catch/stop this from being an issue. Unless of course your Anti-Mine boots looked like something Gene Simmons of the Kiss fame would wear in the 80s. [Answer] Let's just talk about the large ones, since the small ones are just noisemakers. The shrapnel in gravel mines was basically broken glass. Have you ever watched the [glass bullet](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-n4bxxn9gA) demos on Youtube? I think a quarter-inch of hammered steel could handle it. The problem would be that, if you stepped right on it, the shock wave would still shatter your bones. If it went off because you stepped next to it, you'd want a full set of armor pants or you'd be picking glass out of your junk. What you really want is a herd of oxen -- no, wait -- [a strand beast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LewVEF2B_pM) -- no, wait, too complicated -- [a bunch of plungers on a cylinder](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPFNtGAXTpo) that you push in front of you, like fifteen feet in front of you, like a wheelbarrow. You could have fun with what the "feet" look like to maximize disturbed area and minimize the cost of running into one. [Answer] > > ...some folks aren't the Viet Cong, and don't even have oxen to their name... > > > You don't need oxen. The oxen were used by the viet congs for convenience. What you need is something that emulates a man-powered plough. Metal and wood are cheaper than cattle. Make it so that it shields you, and ask a friend to help you push the demining plough. You can even make a drinking game out of it: for every pop, a sip. [Answer] You would be able to walk with these plates on the soles of your feet. You'd get used to them over time just as you do to heavy steel capped gumboots and other protective footwear. You wouldn't be able to run as fast, but heavy footwear has many benefits. This is thick, heavy steel so expect some getting used to. [Answer] You could use stilts, with the ability to "ratchet" down to the ground in emergencies and ratchet up by walking a few paces. ]
[Question] [ Let's say a rogue physicist wanted to make a fortune allowing criminals to use time tech to avoid the time when statute of limitations would allow them to be arrested. But how could someone prove to a criminal that this system would work? I suppose making something from another time appear might work, but is that really the only way? [Answer] There's a number of problems with this. One, if the government(s) find out about the practice, either all statutes of limitation will be repealed or time travel exceptions will be put into the laws. A bigger problem is that travelling far into the future is a drastic thing. Let's say a mafia boss wants to avoid imprisonment by going 30 years into the future when their crimes will be subject to statute of limitations. Thirty years is a very long time. Their wife will be dead, their mistresses middle aged and married to other crime bosses, their children now grown up and with children of their own. Their most trusted henchmen will be dead, in prison or serving the new crime boss who is now the head of mafia. After the old boss just disappeared for thirty years, will the new boss just step aside and let them take over? Not likely. The whole criminal enterprise may well become obsolete. Let's say that the old boss made most profits from dealing marijuana. However, now marijuana has been legalised for fifteen years and everyone now buys their weed from licensed shops. More than that, everything has changed, people all dress funny, the young have no respect anymore and there is all this weird new technology that you're expected to use. Faced with all that, the crime boss may well prefer to flee to a non-extradition country or to just take their chances and hope they can continue to evade the law enforcement. [Answer] **Wouldn't work.** If the criminals left behind evidence, they could still be convicted despite not recovering the stolen property. **Frame Challenge** Instead of the statute of limitations, focus upon double jeopardy. Criminals go back in time and steal stuff while their younger self has a bulletproof alibi. Light fingered Larry wants to steal the Mona Lisa. Has an almost foolproof plan. Larry goes back in time to when his younger self was in jail and steals it. Larry leaves plenty of evidence, DNA, fingerprints, video evidence. Younger Larry is charged and appears in court. The prosecution charges ahead with a bulletproof case until Larry drops the bombshell that he can't have done it as he was in jail at the time. The case falls apart and Larry is found not guilty. Due to Double Jeopardy laws, he can't be charged again for the same crime. Older Larry can't be found guilty of the crime anymore. [Answer] If the effect can be finetuned to make someone disappear for only a short amount of time, then you could offer clients a "free sample". They can jump forward one day/week/month, verify themselves that the time has passed, and then require payment for the full multi-decade jump. On the other hand, if the Winklenator can only do 20-year leaps (as in the namesake story), then those first couple clients will be tricky to convince. After the first test subjects re-emerge, you could rely on word of mouth advertising. But if you're not willing to wait 20 years, you could just use the tech on yourself. If you are willing to use the tech on yourself, then you might be able to arrange some proof ahead of time. Take out strange advertisements in the newspaper, and show clients the microfilm decades later. Hide ciphered messages in the town's time capsule. Take a sequence of videos showing your unaging face next to an aging collaborator... ]
[Question] [ **Closed**. This question needs [details or clarity](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers. --- **Want to improve this question?** Add details and clarify the problem by [editing this post](/posts/230730/edit). Closed 1 year ago. The community reviewed whether to reopen this question 1 year ago and left it closed: > > Original close reason(s) were not resolved > > > [Improve this question](/posts/230730/edit) In my fantasy world, the countries eventually industrialize. However, some of it is not capitalistic, but rather mercantilist, and the governments are absolute monarchs. Fortunately, the feudal system has been abolished, so people are not tied to a lord and his/her land. How would an Industrial Revolution occur without capitalism, or at least for it go evolve without it? Things to mention: * They have a successful agricultural revolution * People are tinkering with mechanical systems * Metallurgy is advanced and strong * There are enough diverse resources to help the civilizations * These kingdoms are based on 17th century European kingdoms, and one of them is based on the Ottoman Empire Note: There are no socialist or communist states at this point in time, and this question is not about industry in non-capitalist societies, but how they would start the first one. [Answer] **In the style of the Pharaohs.** The people are not tied to the land. They do not need to work for the local feudal lords. In dissolving feudalism, the absolute ruler took control of all of that. Now everyone works for the Pharaoh. <https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/egyptians/pyramid_builders_01.shtml> > > At Giza the workforce was divided into crews of approximately 2,000 > and then sub-divided into named gangs of 1,000: graffiti show that the > builders of the third Giza pyramid named themselves the 'Friends of > Menkaure' and the 'Drunkards of Menkaure'. These gangs were divided > into phyles of roughly 200. Finally the phyles were split into > divisions of maybe 20 workers, who were allocated their own specific > task and their own project leader. Thus 20,000 could be separated into > efficient, easily monitored, units and a seemingly impossible project, > the raising of a huge pyramid, became an achievable ambition. > > > As bureaucracy responded to the challenges of pyramid building, the > builders took full advantage of an efficient administration, which > allowed them to summon workers, order supplies and allocate tasks > > > Instead of building a pyramid, your Pharaoh oversees industrial works. The workforce must work for the Pharaoh and in return the workers and their families are supported by the Pharaoh with food produced by farmers who are also working for the Pharaoh. There are some real positive aspects to this system, chief among which is that there is not an aristocracy to concentrate wealth. No-one is going to be setting themselves up as a mini Pharaoh. Instead wealth can be distributed more equitably. Administrators are paid well and have a culture of honesty. Consumer goods produced by the workers are exported but also sold to the workers because the workers have disposable income because they are not being exploited by some mini Pharaoh. Work hard and earn your pay. Fill your belly and raise your family. Dress and worship as you choose. Challenge the authority of the Pharaoh and be crushed. ALL HAIL THE IMMORTAL PHARAOH! [Answer] **Incentives Still Exist Without Capitalism** For instance, the Industrial Revolution was great, but it couldn't have existed with the Age of Enlightenment paving the way with scientific advancements, and those were all made fine within the existing non-capitalistic structure. Capitalism is a system by which to maximize individual profits, but industrialization doesn't require the profits of every individual to be maximize. Just *specific* individuals. The easiest way to start one would be to create a new class within the system, the class of inventors, and to make sure the Crown fully funds and supports industrialization. I would imagine it would function similar to the way of knights, people could apprentice under existing inventors and innovators, peasants might get rewarded by one for an exceptional invention, etc. The important thing to remember is that as long as you place the incentives in the right area, you can induce your desired behaviors. Reward inventing and even if the rest of your society doesn't look like capitalism, than you'll still get the industrial revolution. [Answer] Fundamentally, capitalism is about private ownership of the means of production, to use the first line of the [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism) definition. Two or three important things happened during the industrial revolution: * The most important means of production changed from being [real estate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_estate) (used to farming) to being factories (and the [working capital](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_capital) to maintain them). * The most important means of production were owned not by the traditional landholding classes (be they feudal nobles or yeoman farmers), but by a new class of investors. This process went hand in hand with the change of what was important. * Rules for trading the most important means of production were significantly relaxed. (Again in part because the nature of the most important means changed. To this day, it many countries it is more complex to buy a garage than a car.) So what you need is to get the first bullet point, without the others. Basically, the ownership and sale of factories should be about as complex and regulated as the ownership and sale of land. * Assume that commercial and manufacturing activity requires a [royal charter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_charter), and that those are personalized. They can be inherited, but not sold. Ownership of such a charter is more important than either a factory site or tools (or the money to buy them) in your setting. In a way, they become the means of production. * Holders of such a charter might need to find 'silent partners' or 'investors' to provide capital, but the laws are biased towards the charter holders. Also, the "supply" of charters is managed so that there are always more investors than charter holders, giving them the upper hand in negotiations. * Members of the royal household and high nobility find it much easier to get charters. Using them is socially accepted, they are not 'sullied' by such industrial endeavours. [Answer] The Soviet Russians managed this (at least in a follow-on sense) very much without capitalism. They might have done it poorly but they very much managed to take an agrarian country into a world power in just a couple generations. [Answer] The Industrial Revolution never needed Capitalism; it needed the Enlightenment, which coincidentally also produced Capitalism. Once enough some clever people begin to question the traditional (artisanal) ways of doing things, they will eventually invent steam engines and mass production, and then combine those to create factories. The rest will mostly take care of itself, though the details may vary a bit depending on your exact economic and political system. [Answer] Simple: There are limited number of kinds of good to be produced in this world, and all the ways producing them are suddenly given to people without more reasons. Actually it's assumed true in many fantasy worlds, such as games that the only assumed mass produced things are standardized weapons. You just observe how normal people do their job and how much they get in a capitalism world, implement exactly the same things in your world, and just say they are all designed by a monarch. The "revolution" could be a monarch suddenly got the list of technologies, decided to invest on them, and ordered everyone to work on it. As long as the structures above the normal people level hardly change, for the reason that nobody is able to find new demand, the people controlling it or working behind it don't matter much, because it doesn't require wisdom power to maintain. Actually I don't think it's any unnatural if you just handwave this, for the reason that a reader generally only remember a limited number of kinds of good anyway, and won't just discover new demands themselves. Even "diverse resources" in a story are very limited compared to real life. ]
[Question] [ **Closed**. This question needs [details or clarity](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers. --- **Want to improve this question?** Add details and clarify the problem by [editing this post](/posts/223077/edit). Closed 1 year ago. [Improve this question](/posts/223077/edit) In a parallel universe people born with high affinity can apply magic directly on the material world, you can use magic to harm others at the expanse of risking magical feedback similar to the amplification of sound through microphone. For example, when you hurl a fireball at a subject, there is some uncertainty that the fireball will detonate before leaving your hand and the explosion gets worse when you attempt more potent magical spell. Suppose magic don't care about cause and effect, and it has infinite range then why there is no instant death spell which includes magical feedback despite numerous attempts? Magical feedback explained: To manipulate magic, one has to siphon the magical energy from the surrounding and usually the amount depends on the user's affinity, then to materialize the magic energy into a hot plasma such as a fireball one need to make a hand sign which serves as a catalyst to strengthen and contain the plasma. But be cautious as there is an uncertainty for catalyst to produce magical feedback without warning, levitation do not requires catalyst so there is no feedback but people still get killed from falling at height also note that catalyst only apply when user is applying magic beyond oneself aka action at a distance ;D [Answer] **The spell hits a germ.** If you walk into a phonebox, then you account for less than 0.000001% of the living beings inside the phonebox. There are bacteria in your stomach as part of your digestive system; there are mites living inside your follicles; and various other ittybitties all over the place. That means an instant death spell cast at a person tends to work and kill SOMETHING. But usually it works on a micro-organism with no visible consequence. Modern scholars have no conception of micro-organisms being on every surface, and the Instant Death Paradox has confounded them for centuries. **Note:** The question never says what an "Instant Death spell" is. In the answer I consider it to be a spell which kills a living being without any other physical effect like turning the body into mush, chopping off the head or liquefying the brain. [Answer] **Instant death spells are common, so actual instant death spells are bad** There are plenty of instant death spells. Shooting you in the brain with a bullet kills you instantly. Setting your whole body on fire effectively kills you instantly. Cutting your head cut off kills you instantly. However all of these are relatively low power in relation to what a instant kill spell would be. An instant kill spell feels like it should kill the person without any exterior effect, unlike a bullet or a fireball. So you need to create a high power, localized spell, that possibly targets individual cells, that applies small amounts of heat and force intelligently. This is extremely potent magic. As a result, the chance of it backfiring is basically 100%. Because of this, no one uses or attempts this kind of high level magic. It is easier to use a less powerful spell that has a chance of actually going off, instead of using a spell that basically is a suicide spell. [Answer] ## There probably is **After all, mages turn up dead all the time don't they?** The trouble with any spell is that it takes practice to cast it right. And then there's the feedback. If the spell is instant death, then the feedback is likely to be instant death. Since instant death is a binary effect, dead or not dead, there's no way to build up the power gradually like there is with e.g. a fireball. So while the spell theoretically exists, somewhere in the ether for research mages to discover, anyone attempting it is likely to end up dead themselves before ever successfully casting it. *Does a spell exist if nobody can cast it?* [Answer] # Misfired Spells Actually Happen a Millisecond Before the Casting is Done: Magic is inherently unstable, but it must follow its own internally consistent rules. For a spell to happen, there must be a chance that it malfunctions by activating during casting. The magic warps time (but only by the slightest fraction of a second). Magic disrupts causality, so a fireball that detonates at the hand of the spellcaster actually occurs while the caster is finishing the spell. Therefore, it detonates IN the caster (or at least their hand). But in that tiny increment of time before the fireball blasts the wizard, the spell is still completed. For a death spell, the spell causing the death of the caster is instantaneous. Therefor, if the spell misfires, the caster dies before he actually finishes casting the spell. At that point, the spell never happens. If the spell can't misfire, it similarly can't be cast. The paradox of the misfire cancelling itself out precludes the spell being able to function, since there must always be the chance of misfire. [Answer] ### Newton's Third Law To any action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. A hypothetical 'instant death' spell to directly snuff the life of another out, without a physical mechanism (such as your levitation example), can only be working by directly attacking the soul of the person. The problem, of course, is feedback. The spell's feedback would affect their own soul, wrecking them. More importantly, it's not possible to *complete* casting such soul-affecting magic before feedback disrupts the ability to finish whatever you were trying to cast. Anyone trying burns him/herself out. [Answer] # The spell is successful People don't understand the spell well enough. They use it to effect, but only kill off one cell of the body. # The difficulty of other spells at a distance You might see a fireball generated at the location of the enemy as an instant death spell. Humans rely on their senses to get a feeling if the space. With spells this goes quickly beyond our senses. If you stand outside a house, how can you reliably target a single person somewhere in the house? What about an exact kilometer away from you? Or maybe just beyond the horizon? You'll need to extend your own consciousness to this place magically and then cast the spell. This has the same problem, as you can't just project your consciousness to the right place. So you need to move your consciousness to the place before you can do the spell. This takes time, requires multiple spells, skill and gives opportunity to disrupt these spells. That is easily a too high requirement. Humans are too flawed to instant kill at a distance. ]
[Question] [ I am writing the end of a scene, but I have some trouble making the set up believable. My character is looking for a way to stop a machine that will explode to destroy life on (the) earth. She is helped by a scientist that study the plans of the machine in order to defuse it. He discovers that this machine uses a chain reaction, that can trigger [a gamma-ray burst] that will destroy all life on earth. One solution to stop the reaction is to [heat it], in order to [change the phase state of the water (one of the components of the reaction) from liquid to gas]. She only has the possibility to produce [heat] with her weapon. When trying to [heat] the component in the machine, she is stopped by the antagonist, then uses another piece of technology to teleport the machine instantly into orbit (little beyond the orbit of the ISS). Once into space, the water presented to the temperature and pressure of space [change its state from liquid to gas] instantly All the parts in [ ] can be changed to improve the quality of the resolution of the scene. My problem is that water is not exotic enough (I mean, for a chemical reaction capable of such destruction), and when put straight into space, some of the water turn into gas and the rest turn into ice, which might seem a little odd for a non scientific spectator. Maybe with another liquid, that would go from liquid in [ambient] temperature, to solid into space, that might be a better fit. [Answer] # Nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion bombs can produce massive amounts of energy. The public knows about these sort of things from the MCU with the STARK reactor, and Dr Otto's tritium powered fusion reaction. To complete your scene- My character is looking for a way to stop a machine that will explode to destroy life on (the) earth. She is helped by a scientist that study the plans of the machine in order to defuse it. He discovers that this machine uses a chain reaction, that can trigger nuclear fusion bomb that will destroy all life on earth. One solution to stop the reaction is to heat the deuterium or tritium water fuel tanks, in order to change the mater state of the water (one of the components of the reaction) from liquid to gas. She only has the possibility to produce heat with her weapon, which can bypass the bullet hardened but transparent tanks of the machine. When trying to heat the component in the machine, she is stopped by the antagonist, then uses another piece of technology to teleport the machine instantly into orbit (little beyond the orbit of the ISS). Once into space, the deuterium and tritium water presented to the temperature and pressure of space change its state from liquid to gas instantly, stopping the flow of fuel into the fusion engine. Tritium and Deuterium are just isotopes of hydrogen, so you can still have water tanks. Say whatever machine processes the raw Tritium Dioxide and Deuterium Dioxide water tanks into Tritium and Deuterium for fusion. [Answer] # The death machine is using coolant: Your supervillain has a giant machine that will trigger (insert physics effect here). But the machine itself needs coolant or the whole thing shuts down. They tried to overheat the machine by heating the coolant with their attack, but the villain stopped them. So instead, they teleported the coolant into space, where it can't cool the machine. The machine on the planet overheats and shuts down. World saved ( or can the machine be restarted with more coolant? Sounds like a sequel) [Answer] One approach being taken (tried) is that of [positronium in liquid helium](https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a30173041/gamma-ray-laser/). Firstly, positronium is a very light form of matter, a little like hydrogen, but instead of a proton/electron pair that the atom would usually be made of, it consists of an electron/positron pair, effectively making it a tiny matter/antimatter bomb. Normally this would self-annihilate pretty quickly, but when placed in super-cooled liquid helium it can form "bubbles" of a condensate-like matter which is stable for extended periods. The interactions of these positronium atoms in the condensate state produces gamma rays and can (it is hoped) be induced to [LASE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_laser). Whilst not strictly a chemical reaction, more of a set of properties of an exotic form of matter in the way it changes energy states, it would if "beamed into space" disperse harmlessly. (Sadly not turn solid as per the hope of your question). [Answer] **It doesn't matter, the world is saved** You are teleporting an object into space. As some people know, space isn't about going high up, its about going fast. And the newly high-up death machine isn't fast, its just up there. It's not orbiting, it's just falling down, at high speed. So as long as there is no radioactive or poisonous material in it, the world is saved, the death ray will disintegrate on the way down [Answer] **Gamma radiation is just radiation, not a magic beam** Dream on, this "death machine" of yours emitting gamma radiation is not going to work. You'll need to launch *a lot* of them to be disabled in space, not a single device. On the planet surface, oxygen and nitrogen atoms will absorb x-rays and gamma rays. Deployed on the surface (or even in flight) the gamma weapon would have a rather small range. A single source will not be able to cover the earth. To get an idea of the range: when coming from outer space, even the most energetic gamma rays penetrate only 40km (about half) of Earth's atmosphere. Below that, the radiation has been absorbed in the thermosphere. On the planet surface, you would need 10,000's of gamma lasers scanning around, to destroy all life on the planet.. <https://www.nap.edu/html/oneuniverse/energy_130-131.html> <https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/cgro/epo/vu/overview/whatare/whatare.html> [Answer] For something small to threaten the entire world, you need something that would initiate an open-ended chain reaction or phase change. A great example would be Vonnegut's ice-nine (which is, in fact, water!) A common sci-fi trope that would fit the bill is homogenizing nanomachines ("grey-goo"). You just need something similar; since you're already making up new physics with your teleportation, you've got quite a bit of latitude. [Answer] A device which produces and stores stranglets would answer your need, either as a weapon or a research device. Stranglets are hypothetical particles consisting of Up, Down and Strange quarks in equal numbers. They would have the unfortunate property of converting any other matter they encounter into copies of themselves, releasing huge amounts of radiation in the process. Strangelets, if they exist, will be highly unstable (there are caveats to this) meaning that the chain reaction caused by strangelets converting matter to yet more strangelets will end in the absence of sufficiently dense matter; i.e, space. So, a great weapon for destroying even the largest planet without the inconvenience of destroying the universe as well. This would require a bit of a re-write and I would recommend some decent research, but this is a credible Doomsday scenario (one that was considered by Cern, which might produce some) which would be averted by your transporter. ]
[Question] [ **Closed**. This question needs [details or clarity](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers. --- **Want to improve this question?** Add details and clarify the problem by [editing this post](/posts/213602/edit). Closed 2 years ago. [Improve this question](/posts/213602/edit) In this world, miltary technology has developed roughly along the same lanes as our own. However, while the main faction, the United Commonwealth, has access to modern aircraft as advanced as ours on Earth, they have kept that air power within the structure of the Army, as the Army Air service, and treat it like any other combat arm,like the artillery or infantry. Now, my question is , would this arrangement have any disadvantages when compared to the real life organisation of having an independent Air Force Other Contexts * Nuclear deterrent is a concept here, but is mostly handled by the incention of large missiles at roughly the same time as the nukes themselves * The UC already has a considerable lead in airpower over anyone else in the setting, but it is split unevenly among many fronts and planets * The UC is mainly geared towards near-peer threats, as opposed to asymmetrical warfare * There exists a parallel Naval Air Service [Answer] ## Actually yes - many. The **configuration and interaction between forces are as important as the force itself** - mainly due to the varied overall 'missions' each has. Most **forces today have separation due to 'mission' rather than function**. In general, most missions are a variation or combination of the following: * '**Defence**' - a force trained and equipped to respond to direct attacks on a nations territory * '**Expeditionary**' - a force intended to project or protect interests far from the nations territory * '**Intelligence**' - a force to supply intelligence and reconnaissance to decision makers * '**National**' - a force intended to apply policy locally, within a nation, either to citizens or not, amongst many other smaller roles. So, you could have an Army that is Expeditionary, or one that is only Defence. As an example, in WWII, the US Army was mainly Expeditionary, however in the years since it has changed to a Defence force, with bases mainly located locally, to respond to threats directly on the mainland. The **US Navy is now the Expeditionary force** used to project interests to locations far from home, hence they need the US Marines (being ground forces attached to the Navy) for expeditionary 'army' functions far afield. Similarly, the Navy has its own Fleet Air Arm, for the purposes of being Expeditionary and perform missions. So that's why you see F14s on Aircraft Carriers with 'NAVY', and not Air force, written on them, and why you can actually have 'NAVY' Air bases on land. The **US Air Force is actually a Defence and Reconnaissance force**, with nuclear and ballistic missile control purely Defence, and airbases for USAF mainly on the mainland. This protects attack directly against the US. So your setup would have disadvantages if there is no defensive 'Air Force': * Your intelligence, expeditionary, national and defence missions would need to be allocated to separate units, or if to combined force you need to 'split' on-demand your force into separate missions - **not an efficient or responsive arrangement** For instance, in your case, if your Army is expeditionary how can it protect against a sudden incoming air attack within your home nation? * **Communication between roles is harder between forces than within a force**. Your Army can use planes readily if it's out in the field, but what if your overall leaders need reconnaissance to advise on a separate threat? It needs to separately request this assistance. What if your Navy needs some air support? This may not be forthcoming by your Army commanders. * **Training is more difficult**. For instance your nuclear deterrent is now under your expeditionary army - how do you recruit, train and setup command protocols for such disparate functions? * **Procurement is very complex**. As an example, your Army may want planes to suite a Close Air Support role, but what about a bomber for strategic defence, or a satellite to detect ballistic missiles? How do you reconcile budgets and procurement of equipment with such different missions? * **Your commanders may now have conflicting obligations**. It is generally accepted a 'single-minded' purpose is better than trying to accomplish many disparate things. For instance, if a commander of an expeditionary Army is now suddenly also dealing with defensive Air Force functions, it is distracting and he now needs to allocate resources as a part of his role, something that should be dealt with at a higher level. It is said one of the main reasons why in WWII Kriegsmarine was at a severe disadvantage in the sea against allies was the absence of a Fleet Air Arm. Its planes were a separate force, requiring coordination and command separately and always requested by the Kriegsmarine to the Luftwaffe 'cap-in-hand' (often refused), and as such its primary expeditionary force in the sea was without air support, relegating the Kriegsmarine to attacks on shipping only. This was opposed to the Allies, which had dedicated expeditionary combined forces, allowing coordinated aircraft and navy functions. The basic message is, you should **organise your armed forces not in terms of jurisdiction (air, water or land), but in terms of mission.** [Answer] **At a certain level, it becomes an accounting fiction.** Naval, ground and air units are reporting to the same supreme command. That could be an elected individual, a small elected group, an unelected group or individual, but they cannot fight their wars separately. So the question if you have an *Air Force* as a distinct service, reporting to a *Secretary of the Air Force*, or an *Air Force* as a distinct service, reporting to an overall *Secretary of Defense*, or an *Army Air Force* as a component of the *Army*, reporting to a *Secretary of the Army*, is just a bureaucratic detail at the highest levels of government. Especially if all secretaries serve at the whim of the *President* who actively sets policy. At some point, you need a **joint defense establishment** and not just a **joint operational command**. Where that point is can be adjusted up or down, there is no perfect answer. **But culture matters.** Having a *separate* air force, with distinct service schools and career tracks, ensures that you won't get a ground-pounder in command of your air wing. You won't have valuable pilots diverted to push papers in army staffs. It means that **close air support and tactical reconnaissance** won't overshadow **strategic bombing and reconnaissance** (arguably a failing of the Nazi war machine in WWII). But it also means that the flyboys can ignore the need for boots on the ground, and the needs of those boots on the ground. "[Not a pound for air to ground](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F-15E_Strike_Eagle#Origins)" might make the air force happy, but does it win wars? [Answer] In addition to flox's excellent answers, there is a disadvantage to an army air force that arises from the sociology of institutions. Institutions can often develop biases within the range of solutions they will seek to practical problems. These biases grow out of the institutional reward system for managers within the system. A classic military example would be an army where the road to advancement for officers had traditionally passed through the cavalry arm - such an army would be biased towards the use of cavalry to achieve operational goals, because the officers involved in making decisions would do so at least partially in ways that would favor their own advancement. This could also lead to the other arms of the service being neglected, starved of resources, etc. One easily discerned example of this would be the way in which modern armies treated logistics changed as the prestige of staff officers increased. Although the importance of logistics to overall success has literally always been known, the logistics service historically was treated shabbily relative to the combat arms, because the combat arms had much more prestige and only officers who distinguished themselves in the combat arms were able to advance. As armies began to add more staff officers, and as distinction as a staff officer became a route to advancement and to overall command, resources re-oriented to the logistics arm more and more - because the coordination of logistics was one way in which staff officers could distinguish themselves. When air forces are a subordinate part of land forces, the role of air assets will tend to be seen primarily, or even only, as a complement to those land forces. Land commanders will inherently be biased to favor air assets that make it easier to achieve existing land missions, and will naturally show less favor to air assets that can achieve strategic goals all on their own. When allocating scarce resources, land commanders will also naturally be biased in favor of land assets. In situations where air assets could achieve tactical success on their own, land commanders might not allow that to happen, because land assets have to take part in an operation if their officers are to gain any prestige from it. Etc. [Answer] Even in today's US military, each branch has their own set of pilots. Army: > > All branches of the United States Military have an aviation program. > > > Army pilots assist with both offensive and defensive operations. > > > They perform air assault in addition to transporting both cargo and personnel. > > > The majority of aircraft in the Army are helicopters, but there are a limited number of fixed-wing and unmanned aircraft pilots as well. > > > <https://www.operationmilitarykids.org/army-helicopter-pilot-requirements/> National Guard: > > Joining the warrant officer aviation program as a helicopter pilot means you’ll be controlling some of the most advanced aircraft in the sky. National Guard aviators are among the best in the world. > > > <https://www.nationalguard.com/helicopter-pilot> Marines: > > All branches of the military service have aviation units. The Marine Corps has a variety of air assets it uses to help their fellow Marines on the ground. > > > <https://www.thebalancecareers.com/becoming-a-marine-corps-pilot-3354348> Coast Guard: > > The Coast Guard aviation community consists of approximately 800 pilots and an enlisted workforce of approximately 2,500. Together, these pilots and aircrews fly 5 types of aircraft in the Coast Guard’s inventory, representing 200 airframes dispersed among 24 Air Stations. > > > <https://www.gocoastguard.com/active-duty-careers/officer-opportunities/programs/direct-commission-aviator-dca> Navy: > > As a Navy Fighter Pilot, the sky is your domain. You’ll be part of an elite group of aviators who fly and fight in the world’s most lethal jets—all from the deck of an aircraft carrier. > > > <https://www.navy.com/flynavy> They all work defense and offense roles, but the primary goal of the Branch isn't air based. Each Branch has their specialty and focus mostly on it, with aircraft supporting those specialties. With an air force, the Branch can focus on the specific requirements and training necessary for regular flying missions as a priority, rather than a support role. Yes, the Air Force supports other Branches, but they have their own missions separate from them, too. Breaking out a Branch into it's own Air Force means it gets it's own budgets, Chain of Command (set of leaders), training requirements, bases, and a whole lot of other things that can be tailored to pilots and flying missions that could be overlooked (accidentally or purposefully) by another Branch. Also, the military is about redundancy to make sure that critical part of the system can't fail, or if they do fail don't completely block the ability to get a mission completed. Each Branch does a little (or a lot) of what the other Branches do, but that's not their specialty. And if a critical resource gets taken out, there's plenty of other resources to step in and nearly seamlessly take over for a minimum of chaos to get systems back running correctly again. If you only have one system or Branch, you have a [single point of failure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_point_of_failure) that can cause complete havoc. There are times when a SPOF is a good thing, but not in the military. [Answer] Having read some of the answers the answer I come up with: it completely depends on the military organizational structure&culture and the political environment they have. A specialized branch in the army will focus on its own tasks and goals. That is why the navy can employ aircraft suited to its needs even though its the navy. However if you place the airforce as part of the (land) army you do not have to suffer disadvantages, as long as the officers in charge are able to make their own goals and requisitions. Just like the army already has seperate leadership for certain sub-branches within the army. A great example is the logistical core. The mantra of "good leaders study tactics, great leaders study logistics" has been known for a long time but the change in American army culture to truly value the work done by their officers is fairly recent. This opened up an easier time acquiring their budget and setting their own goals. Your airforce would need to follow a similar recipy. ]
[Question] [ EMP has wiped out every electrical circuit on the planet (Carrington event level). At the same time some unspecified non-persistent major disaster has wiped out everyone on Earth except her. There's no major threats to her, she's just living her life in solitude raiding supermarkets for canned foods, toiletries, and casks of water. And raiding other stores for anything else she needs to survive. She is a survivalist, street smart, and she's managed to salvage some solar panels, a small wind turbine, and some car batteries. **How likely is it that**, after some setup, **she is able to come home to the luxury of modern appliances?** Is there any way she can have lights in the evening? Light switches in the wall? Washing machine and dryer? Microwave? Fridge? Freezer? Hot water? Air conditioning? I understand petrol won't last so generators are out of the question, and all high tech appliances with ICs will be fried, including solar inverters, charge controllers, and wind inverters, so I can't see her generating 110V wall power. But is there any way to get some familiar luxuries in this environment? [Answer] ### It's plausible to get a nice life. **First: Wind Turbine** Don't bother, unless you can raid an electrical parts store and know how to build the complex circuit from memory. You'll need a [bridge rectifier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diode_bridge) and a [boost converter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boost_converter) minimum. And that doesn't have the electrical safety brakes to stop the thing blowing away in strong winds. I have a half an electrical engineering degree and even I'd put it off till last. **Solar panels - the tyranny of MPPT** First - try to find a solar inverter in a box somewhere that survived the EMP. They may survive depending on packaging or orientation. That will make your life so much easier, basically this becomes plug and play. If you can't You're not going to be able to get the most efficient use of your panels, but you can still use them. **Manually calibrating solar panels to run without an inverter** Try to get an [analogue voltmeter](https://www.jaycar.com.au/0-30v-mu45-panel-meter-moving-coil-type/p/QP5022) from an electronics store. A multimeter in packaging and turned off and packed on the shelf will probably survive an EMP and is preferred, but analogue will do. You need to take some precise voltage readings from your solar panels at different orientations at different times of the day. The panels on your roof are probably wired in series, trying to get as high a voltage as possible for an inverter, which is now completely fried. My 15 panels would put out ~300V DC / 0 amps open circuit, ~150V DC / ~8 amps if short circuited, and have an optimum max wattage somewhere in between, depending on the exact time of day and cloud levels. Your solar inverter will do a non-trivial thing called MPPT to find that optimal level. In battery systems the inverter will have a charger, which detects the battery condition and converts the power to the optimal required for charging. My battery system needs 14.6V for the bulk of the day, and 13.7 when the battery charge level gets above about 80%. The battery charger will also cut the connection to the solar cells at night, as solar cells connected to batteries at night will drain power. Without any clever electronics, you need to make sure that your solar system puts out these optimal levels for your battery. So by re-arranging your solar panels from serial to parallel wiring you can tweak those power curves. 15 cells put out say 300V in series, 15 in parallel will put out about 20V at a higher amperage. If you raid an electronics store for a big diode, or just have a switch you flick at night, you can stop the panels leaching power overnight, or during clouds. You'll need to make the wiring beefier too. If you're getting close to the right voltage but are just a little over then changing the angle of the panels to the midday sun will change the power point. You're better off being under the optimal voltage (so it wont charge or charge slower than expected), than over (which will evaporate the acid in the batteries). But before you rewire your panels, you need to think about your battery configuration. I'd suggest go for existing 12V camping stuff rather than try to drive your washing machine with a DC motor at 80V kinda thing, but you may need to think outside the box here. **Batteries** You're better off raiding an auto-parts store for fresh batteries than salvaging from cars. SLA batteries are ideal as they wont need topping up with demineralised water. Get as many 12V batteries of the same kinds as possible and wire them in parallel. **Lights** Incandescent bulbs will run on DC just fine, just if the voltage is lower they'll be a lot dimmer. Compact Fluros need a non-trivial circuit to run on DC, so wont work. This style of [modern LED bulbs](https://www.kmart.com.au/product/mirabella-led-warm-white-5w-round-globe/2407311) are amazing - they run from 250V down to about 60V at a constant brightness, AC or DC. If you have these bulbs (or take them from the shop), your bulbs can run on as low as about 60V DC. However this may be a bit too high - [these bulbs](https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/12V-B22-and-E27-8W-Standard-Globe/193135695257) will fit in existing wiring and sockets and run on 12V. What voltage you run on depends on your most power-hungry appliances, your white goods. Light switches will work if the power flows through them. **White goods** I've seen a washing machine with a DC motor, so you could theoretically hack that to work, however you're better off raiding a caravan manufacturer or camping supply store for these. Some caravans have built in 12V washing machines. Big, family-sized heat pumps (fridge, freezer, air con) are almost always AC and wont work. However DC models for caravans do exist and can be salvaged. You can also get [camping fridges and freezers](https://www.4wdsupacentre.com.au/60l-camping-fridge-88-can-capacity-secop-compressor-12v-240v.html) that can run on varying DC voltages. Often these camping fridges can run between 9V and 30V fine. You can get a [12V plumbed in water heater](https://www.keoghsmarine.com.au/HOT-WATER-HEATERS-Duoetto-12Volt-240Volt-10Litre-Hot-Water-Heater?product_id=7745) from camping stores, and a 12V constant pressure pump to pump from your tank to your existing plumping. **Electrical safety** You need to connect the battery into your lights and through your house. I'd suggest through the existing power box, although there are other ways. Your existing fusebox (at least the Australian standard one I'm familiar with) is not going to like DC at all. The RCD wont be reliable, and the circuit breakers wont trip when overloaded. You'll need to rip this all out, and replace it with 12V circuit breakers. I've seen replacement ones that fit in existing fuseboxes for 12V, however you probably wont be able to find these at every electrical store, just [any old 12V DC circuit breaker](https://www.jaycar.com.au/10-amp-circuit-breaker/p/SF2258) will do - basically a car electrical fuse box will do the job. **Connecting it all** * Cut your houses power main with pruning sheers or the like (you don't want to start a fire somewhere far away) * Disconnect every electrical device and light bulb from your place. * Obtain 12V fridge, freezer, lightbulbs, aircon, washing machine, hot water system from camping stores or caravan manufacturers. * Set up your solar panels such that they provide, say 14.8V in the midday sun. * Set up your batteries in a ventilated area. * Put a night switch or a diode between the panels and the batteries. * Run wires from the batteries to the power in in your fuse box. * Connect it all. * Measure voltage at light socket outlet. 14.8 into battery should be about 13.5V though house wiring at the socket. Turn light switch off. Insert 12V bulb. Turn on, tada! light. * Install other 12V devices over time. [Answer] First of all, generators are not out of question. Running some lights, a wash machine, a fridge and a boiler to have hot water doesn't require that much power, and doesn't requires it continuously, apart maybe for the fridge. So, a tank station can supply fuel for quite sometime when it comes to run a small power generator. More importantly, having grown up spending the summer in a farm with no electricity, I can ensure you that one quickly adapts to living without those "luxuries": one can get warm water by letting a bucket under the sun, using a fire or even using some black paint and a hose, a fridge is not needed if you don't have leftovers to store (and with no supermarket around I doubt there will be leftovers), and a candle or a petrol lamp is enough for the night, much more easy to turn on than a power generator. [Answer] Even a massive EMP won't fry everything - electronics in Faraday cages will survive. That is everything with metal covering. I am not sure about microwave ovens, but they seem to be fairly well covered. Anyway, hunt for older equipment (without electronics), and some aspects have been covered already. However, there are quite comfortable alternatives without electricity, and they are even better suited for gridless operation than trying to run a generator: * [Gas operated refrigerator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_refrigerator) (patented by A. Einstein) - a bottle of propane gas can operate it for years. Used mostly in camping scenarios. Find one without IC controller. * [Carbide lamp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbide_lamp) is safe, needs just water and carbide (and that stores well). * Gas camping stove can be used for cooking (maybe even using the same bottles as the refrigerator). Slightly less comfortable than a microwave, but not by much. * [Gas operated portable water heater](https://plumbinglab.com/portable-camping-hot-water-heater/) for showering. Or just do not shower that often during winter, it is not like you are going to meet anyone soon... * Gas operated air conditioning [exists](https://www.yanmarenergy.com.au/gas-powered-air-conditioning.html), but likely uses IC controller. Might be difficult to set up. But instead of air conditioning, I'd suggest moving to a climate zone with mild summers and mild winters. [Answer] ***Camper Time!*** Your heroine might want to consider investing in a nice recreational vehicle or camper. All this assumes you are able to obtain working [motor vehicles](https://www.futurescience.com/emp/vehicles.html) after the events of your story. The heroine in the book [Emergence](https://www.fantasticfiction.com/p/david-r-palmer/emergence.htm) found herself in a similar situation, and got herself a camper to tow behind her vehicle. These self-contained, almost-always off-line portable luxury homes allow a body to travel in the lap of luxury, with a wide range of built-in conveniences that are usually designed to work either with or without a power grid and a gasoline supply. The RV is almost universally a gasoline-powered vehicle, so if you are worried, go with a camper and make obtaining an alternative-fuel truck a priority. Fuel can include tapping into natural gas supplies and propane tanks, so "fuel" can be applied pretty broadly. If you've ever done much camping, there are many kinds of stoves and refrigerators that use "gas" directly, most have built-in toilets, and certainly campers can be very luxurious and have solar panels, battery systems, etc. Plus, campers are portable, so your nomad will be able to wander around when the local stores are looted out to get more supplies. Why abandon all the luxuries of home when you're on the road? All the appliances in these things are off-grid type equipment, if you pick the right one. Do a search for campers and you'll be blown away by these luxurious monsters. [Answer] You have to look at the timeframe and the required power. * I find it hard to imagine an EMP that kills **all** technology yet leaves even one human alive. What about components in metal shipping containers (Faraday cages)? Components in military storage bunkers? So assume that any desired parts can be found, they are just not assembled yet. Anything that was plugged into a power grid at the time of the event can be fried if you want that. * You are correct that gasoline does not last very long. But gasoline is not the only fuel for internal combustion engines. Vegetable oil. Wood gasifiers. * For that matter, break into a museum and get a steam engine. * It will be a challenge to generate a predictable voltage which does not fry the appliances. Batteries as intermediate step might help here. * For the really long term she will have to think about where she lives, and that affects available power sources. Hydropower? Wind? Cutting and burning wood? If you worry about gasoline going bad, remember that canned food won't last forever, either. [Answer] I believe others have answered sufficiently that yes, electricity is possible - and also have given conditions. Your story's premise is of course very interesting in the sense that a lot of the conventions, limitations, values, laws, taboos, etc. of our current world fall away (which gives a lot of room to explore assumptions that we take for granted in our current world). So a lot of what we consider luxuries or necessities will probably also follow that route... The character has almost infinite resources both natural and manufactured, almost limitless access to housing, land, climate, geography, ... and freedom from all social constraints. One of the things that may fall away is electricity. Agreed, today it is cheap, energy-dense, easily distributed, and a lot less polluting than e.g. wood fires. But in a world where you are the only human, have access to all the forests you could wish for and your hearth's smoke output is a drop in the bucket compared to natural processes, wood would make a much easier to use energy source (on the individual scale). Remember that in less population-dense, technologically less-advanced ages humans also liked to live in comfort and in fact developed a lot of techniques for doing so. * heating/cooling/AC: apart from the wood-burning fire place, people lived in caves or other structures that made use of the temperature-leveling properties of massed earth, see e.g. wofati, Earth shelters and Earthships for modern incarnations. People in desert climates used evaporative cooling, and developed solar chimneys and other techniques to use convection to draw in cool air and expel warm air. Your heroine also has all the freedom of movement in the world and can move (permanently or seasonally) to almost any climate she fancies. * lights: why any need to stay up late and not go to sleep as soon as the melatonin kicks in naturally? There's no deadlines or rush hour to beat, no TV shows to watch. What's wrong with fires and candles or watching the moon and stars? * laundry: no need for clean or wrinkle-free clothing, who you're gonna impress? If you want something new or clean, why, there's probably some stores close enough by that have more than you'll ever need in a lifetime. Come to that, why not move to a suitable climate and forego clothing altogether (or for the most part)? * Fridge/freezer: again why? One can get all the dry and canned goods one desires from the supermarket, hunt whenever the need arises, or just go out to the veggie patch and harvest what you need. Leftovers are simply returned to nature for recycling. That said, previous humans had to contend with seasonal changes, droughts, expensive energy expenditure. They developed techniques to dehydrate and ferment foods to preserve them (apart from vegetables and fruit, also meat (think jerky or pemmican) and dairy (cheese etc.).) They hauled in ice in winter and stored it in cellars or ice-houses for months. They used primitive evaporative cooling fridges. And yes, my grandma had a fridge that burned paraffin to cool (we converted it to electricity by replacing the flame with an incandescent bulb, I think it may still be in use somewhere). * cooking: barbecue every day :-) (Well, cast iron skillets and dutch ovens also work well.) * water heating: can also be done on a wood fire, or a simple solar setup. Or move close to a geothermal well. Or stop washing so much, as some people have done in modern times. One resource that might give you a lot more ideas is [permies.com](https://permies.com/) ("Permaculture and Homesteading Goofballs"), which cover a lot of off-grid living necessities and luxuries. It is online, but I think Paul Wheaton and some of the other names behind it have also published paper books, which may come in handy once the internet is fried by your EMP. Come to think of it, once the EMP fries everything, public water supply and sewerage treatment will cease to exist too, and that combined with all the dead people will be a real health hazard for a time. So an off-grid, self-sufficient homesteading lifestyle will probably look very close to what your protagonist will be doing. [Answer] **You can't 'salvage' complex electrons after a major EMP event** Modern electrical appliances (anything with a chip) wont survive such an event anymore than they'd survive a flood or house fire. To begin with any devices you want to save would have to be off line (disconnected from the power grid) at the time of the event. And, depending on how powerful the event was that would only save simpler devices like electric motors and/or basic household appliances like heaters and toasters etc. Virtually any modern electrical device not hardened to military standards would fail unless insulated from the event i.e. it needs to be placed in a Faraday cage - for civilians being wrapped in multiple layers of heavy duty aluminum foil should suffice. The thing is retrieving devices like solar cells after the event wont do you any good. You need converters and batteries as well. Unless the devices your character finds have been off line at the time of the event and stored in a location that somehow shielded them from the worst effects they probably would have been damaged. Your best bet is to make her/him/it either a 'Prepper' who as a precaution has stored equipment and supplies away in the event of emergencies, part of a military unit that had access to such equipment or a competent electrical engineer who can build basic devices from spare parts. ]
[Question] [ Fairly straightforward question. If you can build power armor for the purpose of enabling infantry to carry bigger weapons, heavier loads and thicker armor with more mobility (and for some reason haven't replaced human soldiers with robots), how large could this armor get before it starts being more trouble than it's worth? I see two major issues: The first is visibility. A larger soldier is going to need a larger foxhole to hide in, and going to be easier to spot, and therefore easier to shoot at. The second issue is urban combat. A guy in armor that makes him as broad as an ordinary man is tall just ain't going to fit through most doors. Naturally, if you see more problems, feel free to point them out. We all like our Starcraft Terran Marines or 40k Space Marines, but something tells me that they just aren't practical. [Answer] # It Depends As with any military/weaponry question, the question is application. [The current broadly-deployed powered armour](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1_Abrams) definitely has trouble fitting through doors, but it is pretty efficacious at helping soldiers carry heavy weapons into combat, and allows a soldier to put enough armour between themselves and the enemy that foxholes aren't really necessary. So if you're willing to go big (and power constraints don't become a problem), then the only limit may be your ability to build actuators to move your power armour. In straight-up combat engagements, size may never be a liability. If, however, you want to deploy your powered armour in situations where current infantry barely fit (breaking into houses and whatnot), then that is your limit right there. It can't be much bigger than a soldier, it can't weigh much more than they do. Powered exoskeletons with light armour, maybe. It's actually the middle-ground powered armour that seems to have very little application. Not small enough to allow the wearer to do tasks that require them to be human-sized, not big enough to play with the big boys in terms of armament, speed, or armour. Looks cool, though! [Answer] Don't do the same error the Germans did with their wunderwaffen: * if your soldiers are going to need a reinforced concrete floor to be able to go anywhere, you have basically made just really thick office workers. A sunken in the ground soldier is just an easy target and an obstacle for the rest of your army. * if your armor will take a lot of resources to be made, you are impoverishing your army, because you won't be able to make something else * if your armor needs a lot of fuel to be powered, you are hampering your army with an exceedly complex supply chain [Answer] At some size your power armor is arguably not 'power armor' anymore - it becomes some kind of mech or vehicle instead. I don't know exactly where you'd put that cut off - something like Fallout power armor is recognisable as a person in a suit of armor, while a Pacific Rim Jaeger is clearly a robot, but what about something like the [AMP suits in Avatar](https://james-camerons-avatar.fandom.com/wiki/Amplified_Mobility_Platform)? I'd think that in a world where they can design and build large suits of power armor (to the point of being as wide as a person is tall), they'd create different models for different uses to avoid running into the issues you've raised. * Light-weight exo-suit style power armor that focuses on mobility. It provides limited protection in combat, but allows you to carry more weight and travel longer distances faster without tiring out. Used mainly for recon missions or moving forces to a forward base, and sometimes by support personnel working in secured locations. * 'Standard' power armor that provides good protection against small-arms fire and allows you to effectively use larger weapons that would normally not be used hand-held or on the move - high-calibre sniper rifles, Light Machine Guns - but not too large or unwieldy. Soldiers in this armor can work indoors and are only slightly larger than a regular person. Useful for standard operations like patrols and small-scale skirmishes, and used by standard infantry in most battles. * 'Assault' power armor that provides extreme protection against high calibre weaponry and explosives. Able to survive direct impacts from artillery fire, these are used by specially trained solders for assaulting fortified locations. Large, slower moving except in bursts of speed and unwieldy in enclosed locations, these suits usually require the support of other soldiers in standard armor to be most effective. * 'Support/Artillery' power armor that provides the best weight-bearing capabilities at the expense of protection. These suits definitely can not fit into buildings, they're used in place of jeeps or small trucks to transport artillery and large quantities of munitions - blurring the line between 'armor' and 'vehicle'. They could even have integrated artillery, like mortar devices, to provide support from long range. By equipping soldiers with only the armor that is relevant for their missions, you can avoid the armor becoming more trouble than it's worth. Of course you have to manage maintenance and repairs, and the supply of suit power, but I'd assume that's built into the supply chains of a military that uses power armor often. Maybe the bigger suits are used to lug additional small suits and suit parts to the front line. [Answer] How do you define 'Power Armour'? The **mechs in Battle Tech** are meant be varying sizes up to about 12 meters tall (plus), carrying weapons that would easily demolish multiple main battle tanks, large buildings and whole companies of 'mere' infantry at a time. Not excepting nuclear weapons. Tactics? Storm the battlefield and let someone else clean up the mess afterwards. All the time being walking buildings/targets for anyone with anti-armor weapons. The power armor of Robert Heinlein's **mobile infantry** (MIs)? Probably less than 3 meters tall. One tank at a time (perhaps up to low double digits in total) and perhaps a squad of 'meat bag' infantry at once, while being able to 'jump/fly short distances. Tactics? shoot - jump - shoot multiplied by however many MI's are involved in the assault. Hard to hit but also bordering on the scientifically impossible, too much power and weaponry in too small a package to be realistic. **Heavy Gear Mechs**? By and large pure anti-vehicle weapons. Perhaps 4 meters tall. Some limited anti-infantry capacity in the form of light Mg's but basically walking AT platforms with limited payload and endurance. Needing combined armed support, infantry, artillery etc to succeed in a mission. IMO right smack bang in the Goldilocks zone, not to big, not to small not to unbelievably powerful or maneuverable for their size. The first 2 can (more or less) go it alone if they have to and win. The last? They *always* have to be closely integrated with other arms in order to win major battles. So in terms of believably realistic battles I'd go with something something on the scale of the Heavy Gear Mechs. Not to big to be walking targets, not to small to carry believable heavy weapons and still be impossibly mobile at the same time. Note; this doesn't mean you couldn't have lighter, power amplified armor for infantry use. That's being worked on now. It just means the troops equipped with it would carry a magnified load of gear gear and be slightly better protected than your average infantry soldier is now. But this (I assume) is meant to be a technologically driven scenario not a magically driven one. If so, given currently envisaged material science and power chains etc you are probably not looking at more than a X 2 increase in speed and load without turning your soldiers into something to big to hide and hug ground easily. It would also be cheaper/easier to give a squad of soldiers with 'light' amour' a pumped up AFV to travel in to the battle than it would be than to give them all 'super' armor. So I would suggest a combo of vehicle mounted troops and 'light' Heavy Gear style mechs with heavy support (tanks artillery etc as needed) e.g a combined arms approach. [Answer] Tanks are used because they are relatively cheap, relatively fast and relatively strong. Relatively in comparison with their playing field, compared to infantry. They don't play well with aircraft nor with boats nor with weapons that can propel themselves over long distances. But those three are so crazy expensive in comparison that they open a gap for tanks. Also, tanks are just there with the soldiers, the other three have to be called in first, which means waiting time, which means eternities if you're under fire. Build a cheap wearable self propelled weapon (armed KI drone) and the tanks will die out in a matter of months. The full armor medieval knight disappeared from Europe in less than 30 years when the British introduced their cheap armor piercing long bow and somewhere else the Crossbow came up. Both were invented just for those knights. In your case, Space Marines have to have a size fitting into a "building" or maybe a space station really. No tank there, no aircraft, no boat. But little flying drones with KI yes why not. Imagine an unarmored soldier, that guy certainly is easy food for the small drone. If that guy wears a shield and armor made of modern materials, you up the game: In order to shoot you, the other side has to use weapons which could pierce the space station walls. Oops. That weapon will hopefully be rare aboard a space station, so you gain back the advantage of a medieval knight. Yes, I guess it has to be small and strong. Yes I think my paragraph above is a weak excuse. But Space Marines are cool. :-) [Answer] 1. A Problem with Big armor would be heat, as an object grows it's volume is cubic x^3 where as its surface are is squared x^2. This is why big animals like elephants have additional surface area, like the ears to cool more, it's also why they use water and mud to cool. Tanks have relatively large vents to cool their engines and these are very vulnerable (In WW2 Molotovs were used to break the engines). If you have power armor you might use batteries and electrometers, this presents it's own unique challenges for cooling. Big armor might require massive heat sinks to keep it at operational temperature, this would be a unique vulnerability and if sufficiently damaged might render the armor inspirational within minutes. On the other hand you could make this video gamy, as in no big heat sinks required, but whilst using the armor the wearer has to monitor their thermals, to ensure that their armor doesn't overheat. Firing a rifle too long with recoil reduction? The motors in the arm and shoulder get too hot and you need to take a break, meaning you can't fight back for a while. Running too fast for too long? Now you need to wait and if you need to scram in that time you can't. I think you get the Idea. 2. Deformation. When a large round impacts close to a joint the material moved out of the way may be in the joints path and lock up the armor, In big armor the amount of material in the way may make it impossible to get this unstuck in combat, making them glass-cannons, that instead of dying become sitting ducks. 3. Joints Joints are extremely hard to armor and real life power armor would require something like an armored skirt. This may be in the form of a literal skirt out of kevlar, to catch incoming rounds and stop them from penetrating an deforming the joint. A complex joint like the back of the knee or the inside of the elbow is almost impossible to armor properly, so at some point kevlar armor skirts are no longer powerful enough to stop incoming tank rounds. P.S. My definition for power armor would be: as long as the wearers limbs are in the armors limbs it is power armor and not a mech. This would turn the "Robots" in Avatar into Mechs. Fallouts power armor would remain power armor under this definition. To answer the question I'd say that everything that is intended to do more than stop high caliber rifle fire, across the entire body, & assist in movement and firing weapons or act like a [weapons platform](https://www.fxguide.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Edge_featured.jpg) (btw great movie : *Edge of tomorrow* you should watch it) is probably to large. If you can't enter a building or vehicle with it you more or less loose your worth as infantry. Creating powerful weapons platform that tear through armor is very easy and cheap. This would completely invalidate large power armor (if you want additional info please write a comment and I'll add it). Smaller power armor, as I described would enable vastly more powerful infantry, where as the other (assuming near current levels of tech) would just be vastly more expensive and less capable than modern tracked or wheeled vehicles. [Answer] ## Let's Start with the Most Primitive Power Armor and Work Our Way Up [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8FI3dm.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8FI3dm.jpg) Medieval plate armor was the original iron man. Very carefully engineered, you could run in it at [full speed in it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzTwBQniLSc), fight all day long in it, and do [some gymnastics in it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-bnM5SuQkI). It was [1.5 millimeters](https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/25500/how-thick-was-late-medieval-horse-armor) thick, weighed between 15 and 22 kilograms, and could stop up to a shot from a modern [0.44 magnum](https://www.quora.com/Could-a-bulletproof-late-medieval-plate-armor-suit-be-made-with-todays-technology?share=1). **Benefits:** The basic armor, then, is protective against almost all small arms fire. **Liabilities:** as recorded in multiple battles where armored knights attempted amphibious assault, if you could sink the boats before the knights made landfall, they would drown. You could not swim in the armor. ## Scaling Up [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/t9ZU0m.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/t9ZU0m.jpg) With the aid of an exoskeleton, you could increase the thickness of the skin 10x from 1.5 millimeters to 15 millimeters. This would increase the weight of the armor from 15 - 22 kg, now it would weigh as much as an adult human 150 - 220 kg. For a sense of scale, the plate is ${6 \over {10}}^{th}$ an inch thick, barely adding to the dimensions of the wearer. The [muzzle energy of a .44 magnum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.44_Magnum) varies between 1 kJ and 2kJ. Ballistics isn't as simple as muzzle energies and armor thickness, but for a ballpark estimate a suit of plate 10x times as thick will be able to withstand ten times as much energy ~ 10kJ to 20kJ. **Benefits:** This armor thickness is protected against up to the M1A1's auxiliary [0.50 BMG machine gun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.50_BMG), whose muzzle energies are around 18kJ to 20kJ. But an A-10 primary gun GAU-8 round, at 100 kJ, will still penetrate the armor. **Liabilities:** you weigh as much as two adults combined. This is probably fine in most buildings, but I think shaky rope ladders in the jungle, dodgy unsafe structures, or unstable hillsides might all be perilous. ## And Further... [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Rd76Mm.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Rd76Mm.jpg) An additional 10x increase in the thickness of the skin produces a layer that almost as thick as a computer is wide. At [44 inches wide, and weighing nearly one ton](http://www.phnx-international.com/phnx/phoenix-equipment/specifications/ads-hardsuit-specifications/) for a typical hard suit, you can still fit under a roof, but no longer fit through doors (although you could tear a hole in the wall to enter an exit a building). Compared to a human profile of 36 inches, there's still not much increase in the target profile. A suit designed with as much mobility as medieval armor could still go prone, crouch behind obstacles, and otherwise take cover. **Benefits:** with another 10x increase in the thickness of the protective material, the armor should be able to tolerate all small and heavy arms, even up to a direct hit from a [GAU-8](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAU-8_Avenger) (200 kJ). Like the sterotypical sci-fi soldier in super-heavy power armor, this level of protection requires anti-tank weaponry to engage it. **Liabilities:** At one ton weight, some wooden structures might not be able to support the soldier. Modern buildings should be tall enough to allow passage, but pedestrian doors will be too small (but they could just break a hole in a wall allowing them to enter and exit). The soldier is about 22% larger in each dimension: width, height, depth. ]
[Question] [ So I was watching a somewhat recent video from the Leftist Youtuber Renegade Cut about [why Star Trek has appeal among conservatives](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69Tm5KxkM8A). Among other points, he notes that while Star Trek eliminates inequality caused by capitalism, it still has the inequality caused by having a powerful military organization as one of the most important elements of Federation society. So this leads to a question, how could one build a military with a much weaker hierarchical and more democratic structure? EDIT: To contradict what I'd originally said, here I'm going to assume an economic system loosely similar to Star Trek in which it is socialist, that individuals get paid regardless of whether they serve in the military or not, which avoids some of the problems suggested below. I'm also not really suggesting that this is a good idea, but that I think it is potentially interesting. [Answer] In the real world, this experiment has been disastrous for the Anarchists, such as the POUM (*[Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POUM)*), militias during the Spanish Civil War. The need for speed of action and unity of effort was constantly undercut by the desire of the members to debate every single decision. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/eEPsr.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/eEPsr.jpg) *POUM propaganda poster* OF course POUM had the additional issue of fighting not only against the Francoists, but fellow Communist groups which were under the control of the Third International. However, even without that additional complication, POUM simply could not function on the battlefield as a debating society. The more modern idea of non hierarchical warfare isn't anarchy at all, but various forms of networks, such as the cellular structure of guerilla armies and insurgencies. In this case, the forces may be animated by a central idea or ideology, but each individual cell is largely independent of any other one, preventing the adversary from crippling the entire organization by striking a headquarters or logistics node. This principle has been applied to Revolutionary Warfare theory and now to "4GW" (Fourth Generation Warfare) thinking, which covers more spatial and temporal domains in attempts to ride out military force applied against it and apply pressure against the adversarial leadership and society to convince them their goals are not achievable, or not achievable at a price they are willing to pay. Wether this is a viable social structure for a society is another issue altogether. [Answer] **Not Possible** for several reasons: A well-run hierarchy ensures proper stewardship of resources, good morale, and *unity of effort*. A lack of hierarchy (or a poorly-run hierarchy) is likely to result in squandered or stolen resources, low morale (and consequent desertions), uncoordinated (and less-effective or wasted) efforts, and ultimately loss of the war effort to an otherwise-inferior foe. First, [Von Clausewitz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_von_Clausewitz) identified that war is, essentially, an extension of politics. For a war effort to lack hierarchy, your politics must also lack hierarchy...but that turns into a big problem: The most respected political authority might be the local dog-catcher, but does that person have enough *influence* over the rest of society to provide the political leadership needed to win a war? And the political tools to wield their power wisely? Doubtful. Second is simply the fact that war is *phenomenally expensive*. Wealth is a tool that can overcome strategic obstacles -- like hiring ships to project power overseas, or buying tanks to cut through stalemated trenches. A hierarchy is needed to raise the funds, to order the ships and tanks, to train the *skilled staff* needed to buy the *right kinds* of ships and tanks (or warp-powered starships), and to operate that equipment to best use toward the war effort. Finally, a hierarchy is needed to define who is in charge of what, who is responsible for what, how much latitude each of those leaders has, and who takes charge when a key leader is unavailable. And it does so *quickly*, without the need to do much negotiating. Let's take Port Operations for an example: A hierarchy is needed to standardize (and promulgate the standards) for who is in charge of loading/unloading the trucks and trains and ships, who pays for the labor to do the unloading and marshaling and re-configuring and final loading, who plans the overall activities, who supervises execution of that plan, who provides security and how much, and who fixes the equipment that invariably breaks down. The hierarchy also (importantly) decides on the latitude of disciplinary or corrective actions that supervisors have available to use on folks who aren't doing their job. [Answer] **Ad hoc militia.** > > The means of defence against foreign danger, have been always the > instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing > maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout > all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have > enslaved the people. - James Madison. > > > In your scenario where people fear standing armies, your central government owns the machinery and weapons of war. The soldiers, however, are part time volunteers; militia who take time from their civilian jobs to train and practice together, and who come together when there is a need for a fighting force. In the US this is how the National Guard works. The force needed is assembled in an ad hoc manner, according to need. As opposed to professional military men whose raison d'être is to fight, these citizen soldiers have regular jobs to go back to. They do not have an insular military culture. They are less likely to be used as weapons against the citizenry because they are the citizenry. [Answer] **STOCK** This may not be as democratic as you want but in companies the more stock you have the more voting power in the company you have. If the world is a mega corporation the company's military and tactics could be bought per se. Example the military is a sub company or a branch and its stock is sold. The people with the most stock has the power. **Purely democratic way** Well you could have a system where there is hierarchy but promotions are based off of your squads opinion/ forces opinions. The general is elected due to him being liked by most of the military and the way to get promoted is to essentially be a well liked politician. **Mercenaries** Pretty self explanatory Mercs Have whatever structure they want and who ever hires them doesn't care as long the job gets done. In this system there would be chaos as multiple groups hired by the same people may fight each other for whatever reason. The people hiring have no real control. [Answer] the thing about a lack of hierarchy is that the moment two people disagree about what to do, your army grinds to a halt. > > "Okay the enemy is coming, let's ambush and flank them." > > > "No let's concentrate at the top of the hill and turtle this battle out." > > > "Flank" > > > "Turtle" > > > "Flank" > > > "Screw you I'm outta this" > > > With a hierarchy, the same situation as above would result in the following dialogue: > > "Hostile forces are inbound. Prepare to ambush and flank them." > > > "Yes sir!" > > > The only way armies without hierarchy work is if you have cells of volunteers doing guerrilla warfare. Those guys will need some motivation other than a proper military career, something leaning more towards "die for your country". They will either be defending their home land from invasion or doing terrorist attacks. The former may sometimes lead a conflict to a war of attrition and may make things harder for the attacking side. The latter does not win wars. [Answer] ## This is pretty much how medieval armies worked When a medieval (by which I mean the typical feudal European) nation went to war, the king would call on his vassals to fulfill their military obligations. This typically involved showing up with some number of soldiers (depending on the exact details of the vassal agreement, as well as how invested the vassal is in the conflict) and then following the Marshall (this may be the King, or whomever the King decides to appoint in his stead) around as they all did army things. There was a hierarchy, but it was about as clear as in civilian life. Ie, not particularly, once you got close in rank. The only clear heirarchy was as follows: The King > The Marshall > The Vassal Commanders > The Troops Within these groups was a lot of jockeying for position, and a fair bit of blurring happened at the borders as people's social rank started interfering. Such examples included: The lord of some backwater province (who thus can't afford the latest equipment) vs an unlanded knight within another lords household. Technically, the landed lord had superiority, but if the unlanded knight's liege was particularly wealthy and prestigious, he could get away with a lot more than his apparent social position. The wealthy landowner vs any poor noble. At this point the differences are almost impossible to tell just by looking at them, so whislt the noble is technically of a higher rank, if the commoner acquits himself well he could have far more clout than expected. The Marshall vs the King's favoured lords. Typically, the Marshall is also a favourite, but if he isn't, or just if he doesn't get on with them, the King's favourites could use their personal connection to form their own factions within the army and do their own thing. A commanding lord vs a designated stand-in. For one reason or another, a lord may not attend the army personally (health, prior commitments, just not caring enough) and so will send a stand in, such as a son or trusted Captain. As this individual will be acting under borrowed power much of the time, they will naturally be in a weaker position compared to a Lord who attended personally. One commander vs another. The man who brought more soldiers with him on campaign typically took higher precedence as well. This typically meant the richer lords had another fact in their favour, but a local, poor lord could probably scrape together more soldiers than a rich one on the other side of the kingdom could be bothered to send, which muddied the waters yet further. Thus compared to a structured, professional army, the ranks of the people in charge are much less clear and can shift depending on providence, favour and power. The Marshall may have to offer concessions to powerful factions within the army to entice them to support his plans, and a particularly poor showing on his behalf combined with a united opposition could see him stripped of his title by the King. [Answer] Insect swarms do this pretty well, being able to carry out highly coordinate operations without any hierarchy. It may require members of your society to be more like social insects than current humans, but this is Sci-Fi and anything goes. [Answer] ## Athenian Military Structure While ancient Athens wasn't anarchist, its military organisation definitely offers some insight into a more democratic military. The Athenians would elect ten generals each year. If the assembly decided to launch military expedition, the generals and the Athenians would debate about who would be in command of the expedition. Once the general had been sent, he would run the expedition like a normal general and decide how to do things. He would however usually have to stay in line with the will of the assembly. If the gerneral did something outrageous or upset the people he could be accused and would be juged. A general could be sued once every month. Don't think that this was an empty threat. Both Cimon and Pericles, two great and successful generals and leaders, where exiled after their performance had dissatisfied the Athenians. TLDR: The Athenians where successful in electing their generals each year and in giving them absolute command for a spicific mission. However they could usually be sued if they performed badly/inappropriately. [Answer] If a society placed a very high value on both independence and community, then you could conceivably get this kind of weakly hierarchical military. The commitment to the community above themselves means they would be willing to fight, and the strong independence would likely result in small independent units. Issac Asimov's Foundation Series had a period of time under the ‘Merchant Princes’ were small independent traders effectively went to war with remnants of the Empire. And in the Probability Broach, by L. Neil Smith, the author explores a libertarian army in the USA invading Nazi Germany, all the while maintaining a near anarchical military force in ways that only the most committed Libertarian could imagine. In both these stories, the military forces were voluntarily associated and self-funded. They fought because they thought it was right, and they fought together to increase their chances of prevailing. [Answer] Possibly the best examples I can find of anarchist military would be some of the Indian tribes in the west of the USA. They had many different social structures and many of them had very weak forms of government compared to European societies. Participation in war was largely voluntary, and warriors were largely self directed in battle. Such anarchist warriors were often quite effective in raiding other societies, especially raiding civilian sources of loot, but tended to usually be defeated more or less badly by disciplined armies of European cultures. The best performance of such anarchist warriors was probably in the Modoc War of 1872-73 and in the Nez Perce War of 1877. ]
[Question] [ **Closed**. This question needs to be more [focused](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers. --- **Want to improve this question?** Update the question so it focuses on one problem only by [editing this post](/posts/157765/edit). Closed 4 years ago. [Improve this question](/posts/157765/edit) For a fantasy, I need to know how a world similar to Earth would exist in a geocentric model. 1) I would assume the sun would have to be a lot smaller. I'm okay with artificial stars (hand-wave that stuff away with magic). But I would like to know if that makes an Earth-similar planet impossible. (I don't need other planets in this model.) For example, how would it effect... * seasons and climate * length of day, month, or year * sunrises and sunsets * gravity * constellations and/or navigation * any huge effect I don't have enough science to anticipate 2) How would I manipulate my universe's model to make it more Earth similar if those things are completely off? It doesn't have to be exact, but I need a temperate climate with pretty normal seasons and climate zones. [Answer] The first thing we must understand is that from a purely *kinematic* point of view, the heliocentric and geocentric models are both equally correct within the accuracy limits of astronomical instruments available before the, say, 16th century. There was no way for an astronomer who lived before [Tycho Brahe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tycho_Brahe) to bring serious arguments in favor of one or the other. (That's why Galileo Galilei had such trouble with the astronomical establishment of the day -- he simply did not have any good arguments to bring in favor of his pet theory.) The problem is that from a *dynamic* point of view, for a geocentric model to be correct it is necessary to abolish the law of universal gravitation: and this means, of course, that the universe in which a geocentric model is correct from a physical point of view has vastly different physics from ours. Whether *"a world similar to Earth would exist"* in an universe with vastly different physics than ours is not something that anybody but you can answer. How would it effect... * Seasons and climate: We don't know. The law of universal gravity doesn't work in your world, so we have no idea how wind works, how the water cycle works, the lot. By the way, how does *fire* work in a world where the law of universal gravity does not operate? * Length of day, month, or year: Those are purely kinematic phenomena, and from a purely kinematic point of view the heliocentric and geocentric models are both equally correct within the accuracy limits of astronomical instruments available before the Renaissance. * Sunrises and sunsets: The sun will rise and the sun will set. We have no idea how the atmosphere works, or how thick it is, because the law of universal gravitation doesn't work in that world. So we don't know if, for example, the sun will appear red at sunset. * Gravity: *Our* kind of gravity doesn't work in an universe where the geocentric model is correct. It must be some different force which is called gravity. How it works nobody but you, the author, can say. * Constellations and/or navigation: No effect whatsoever. The funny thing is that *up to this day* celestial navigation, as an application of practical astronomy, is done assuming a geocentric model. See [celestial sphere](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_sphere) for how this works. Of course, satellite-based navigation systems won't work, because the law of universal gravitation doesn't work. * Any huge effect I don't have enough science to anticipate: The main huge effect is that only the author can say how that world works, because it most definitely it doesn't work like ours. What keeps water in the ocean, what keeps people on the ground? Does hot air rise? Why? Are there tides? Why? Note that you *do not* have to make Sun any smaller or bigger -- whether we adopt a heliocentric or geocentric system has no impact on the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Everything also applies for the Moon. A Moon may or may not exist; if it exists, it is not universal gravitation which makes it orbit. What is it that keeps the Moon in orbit only the author can decide. [Answer] It would be perfectly possible for an extremely advanced civilization, perhaps humans of the future, to create a geocentric solar system. They could take a rogue Earth-sized planet in interstellar space and create a giant sun satellite orbiting the planet with gigantic fusion power generators generating power for thousands of giant lamps aimed at the planet to heat it and warm it. If they want the sidereal day of the Earth-sized planet to be similar to that of Earth (23 hours, 56 minutes, 4.0905 seconds) they will have to select an Earth-sized planet in interstellar space that rotates with a similar period and/or slow down or spreed up the rotation of the planet. If they do that the stars at night will seem to circle with the same speed as on Earth. The giant artificial sun satellite will have to orbit at such a distance that the solar day (the time between two successive noons or midnights at the same location) will equal 24 hours. So that means that the time it takes for the giant artificial sun satellite to make one orbit combined with the time it takes for the planet to rotate once (the sidereal day) will equal 24 hours, a solar day on Earth. I'm certain there are some users at this site who can easily calculate the distance for you. Of course there is the problem that the "moon" should orbit the Earth-sized planet at the same distance that the Moon orbits the Earth in order to have a month of the same length and similar tides. > > In Aristotle's (384–322 BC) description of the universe, the Moon marked the boundary between the spheres of the mutable elements (earth, water, air and fire), and the imperishable stars of aether, an influential philosophy that would dominate for centuries.[183] However, in the 2nd century BC, Seleucus of Seleucia correctly theorized that tides were due to the attraction of the Moon, and that their height depends on the Moon's position relative to the Sun.[184] In the same century, Aristarchus computed the size and distance of the Moon from Earth, obtaining a value of about twenty times the radius of Earth for the distance. These figures were greatly improved by Ptolemy (90–168 AD): his values of a mean distance of 59 times Earth's radius and a diameter of 0.292 Earth diameters were close to the correct values of about 60 and 0.273 respectively.[185] Archimedes (287–212 BC) designed a planetarium that could calculate the motions of the Moon and other objects in the Solar System.[186] > > > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon#Before_spaceflight>[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon#Before_spaceflight) So the size and distance of the Moon was measured reasonably accurately about 2,000 years ago. And a fake moon orbiting a fake earth in an artificial geocentric solar system would have to orbit the fake earth at a similar distance to that of the real Moon. Which could be a farther distance than than the proper distance for the giant artificial sun satellite to orbit. Which would be bad because on Earth eclipses are caused by the nearer Moon passing in front of the farther Sun. There are many other things to consider when designing a possible artificial geocentric solar system. But presumably some users on this board can do it for you. A possibly simpler way to create an artificial geocentric solar system would be to find an Earth-sized rogue planet in interstellar space and build a gigantic artificial geodesic spherical structure around it and fit the inner surface of that spherical structure with countless gazillions of lamps. The lamps would be programmed to turn on and off in patterns to simulate the movements of the Sun, the Moon, the visible planets in the Solar System, and the stars. So if it is scientifically possible for an advanced civilization to create an artificial geocentric solar system, a possibly artificial or natural geocentric solar system might exist in a science fiction story set in some parallel universe where the laws of science are different. And of course a natural geocentric solar system might exist in a fantasy story filled with magic. As I remember, in J.R.R. Tolkien's legendarium the world was originally not only geocentric but flat, until a great cataclysm where the God of the story changed the Earth into a sphere and made the solar system heliocentric. [Answer] # Not much ... The three key bodies for life on Earth are Earth, Sun, and Moon. The Moon orbits Earth. The difference between the Earth orbiting the Sun and the Sun orbiting the Earth is one of reference frames, which are somewhat arbitrary. *The only real difference is explaining the other planets and their moons.* * In a heliocentric view, Earth is a planet like the others, orbiting the Sun. No special cases are necessary. * In a pure geocentric view, Earth is unlike the other other planets, and you need *complicated* explanations for their paths. Seasons, days, months, etc. are unchanged. Celestial navigation is greatly complicated on a global scale by the *weird* apparent paths of the stars. [Answer] You don't have to change much at all, if you don't force yourself to follow Newtonian mechanics to explain planetary motions. For one, universal gravitation was not mainstream until Newton built his system around it. Until then, it seemed possible that other heavenly bodies might not exert any kind of gravity at all. If you use this approach, then you don't have to worry about the size of these other bodies, or what they might do to your Earth (Although you might want to give the moon gravitational pull if you want tides). People also once theorized that the other heavenly bodies moved in fixed tracks around the Earth; if you are willing to assert that some divine being fixed a track (perfect circles, for instance), then you can make them go wherever you want, as fast as you want, and you don't have to give a scientific justification for it. If you're doing fantasy, there's no reason you should feel committed to being Newtonian about everything. Heavenly bodies were once thought to follow different laws than earthly ones; you could make that a reality in your world. This would also give you a lot of freedom to shape them as you like. [Answer] Assuming that Newtonian mechanics still apply the factor that determines whether the Earth goes around the Sun or the Sun around the Earth is the mass of the sun. If the sun radiates equally in all directions then its total power output must be proportional to its distance from the Earth. Assuming that the mass of the Sun is small compared to that of the Earth, an orbital period of 30Ms (about 1 year) gives a radius of about 2Gm corresponding to a sphere with a surface area of about 5.5E19 m^2. For a power density of 1.361 W/m^2 the Sun must produce 7.4E22 W. If it burns at this rate for about one billion years then it will consume about 2.5E22 kg of matter. For comparison, the mass of the Earth is about 6E24 kg, so if you postulate a light-weight machine with a store of fuel which it converts to energy and radiates in all directions then this arrangement could be plausible. However, if you have a machine converting fuel to sunlight then why assume that it will waste most of it? If it could focus its entire output on the Earth then it could reduce its power consumption by a factor of about 430,000 and at the same time make the mechanism more easily accessible for the maintenance crew. Unfortunately the radiation pressure would push the Sun away from the Earth, so perhaps it should radiate an equal amount in the opposite direction. This would produce as a biproduct an interesting galactic lighthouse. From the perspective of a fairly primitive civilisation this should be almost indistinguishable from a heliocentric system. Weather would be similar, although I am not sure what effect the absence of the Sun's magnetic field would have. If you want a moon like Earth's then you must make arrangements to illuminate it. Maybe spread the beam in the plane of the Moon's orbit, or even provide a separately focused beam. Comets would be interesting, as they would now be orbiting the Earth rather than the sun, and they would abruptly disappear as the passed out of the beam. [Answer] You have to limit the solar system to the planets visible by naked eye - or else starting from neptune they would need to rotate around your fantasy earth with more than the speed of light - which is impossible. Stars even increase this dilemma. Your true problem lies in "epi-cycles" ... the visible paths that planets take on our nightsky. Even Ptolomaeus wrote 14 books to show and explain those epi-cycles: every planet has its own set, except for the inner planets Venus and Mercury. Seasons are a problem because the geocentrist model needs the sun to actually move "up and down" between the tropics of cancer and capricorn to give the same path over the sky as can be viewed. And finally what forces would govern the movement of those bodies? ]
[Question] [ Gods in this universe inhabit a higher plane of existence. Their spirits inhabit large, humanoid forms upwards of 30ft, and watch over humanity by protecting it from outside threats. On occasion, a god must enter the mortal plane for various reasons. However, there are certain conditions that must be met. A god cannot simply possess a human, for their divine essence would destroy it not long after. Therefore, special human bodies must be constructed from scratch to contain the godly essence within and allow gods to walk among mortals. These bodies are made using Godtech, highly advanced technology that only gods have access to. These bodies are 8ft tall and look human on the outside, but inward they are heavily modified, possessing advanced organs that humans do not. Inside these bodies is an organ called the core, which contains the soul of a god. These cores operate similar to a miniature nuclear reactor that powers the body and contains the divine essence inside it, preventing it from leaking out into the environment. These bodies are powerful and highly durable, and provide for almost instant regeneration. However, gods can still be killed if they have taken enough damage, which leads to a problem. When a god dies, the core containing its spirit ceases to function and becomes unstable, causing a rupture. The explosion alone would destroy a significant part of the surrounding environment. The true danger, however, is the divine radiation which would spread to a larger area due to factors such as wind currents. This radiation would spread further and further, causing damage to lesser creatures unable to withstand the power, killing hundreds or even thousands of people. Lesser still would be the rampant mutations of those touched by divine power, which can lead to disastrous consequences for them. I need a way to limit the effects of a failed nuclear reactor from blowing up a huge area so that only the body is destroyed, while prevent the spread of divine radiation from turning the surrounding environment from becoming holy Chernobyl. How can I make this happen? [Answer] So this is difficult to answer, because these are your nuclear reactors and your rules so you may handwave as you see fit. That out of the way, you're effectively talking about a nuclear *bomb*, not a nuclear *reactor*: > > The explosion alone would destroy a significant part of the surrounding environment. > > > This more or less implies that any attempts to confine or limit the spread of, uh, "theoactive" debris are doomed to failure because shielding and confinement devices in the original reactor will likely be shattered and flung far and wide. In a civil nuclear disaster, major explosions are pretty rare... even the chernobyl explosion wasn't really destructive to the surroundings (and it was a *steam* explosion, not a *nuclear* one), but rather was a problem because it damaged the containment structure. The issue is radioactive dust and ash and smoke caused by fires, minor explosions and structural collapses in and around the failing reactor being lofted high into the altiude and forming a fallout plume. There are all sorts of theories about how you might make civil reactors safer, many of them dubious, most of them probably won't get field-tested, but none of them apply here because you're following the classic sci-fi trope of nuclear-reactor-go-boom. So, to answer: > > I need a way to limit the effects of a failed nuclear reactor from blowing up a huge area > > > A reactor won't. A bomb will. You need to choose which one you're dealing with here. *Edit*: I can think of one radiation-releasing nuclear reactor which might go bang when it failed: an antimatter reactor. That, however, will cause almost no fallout because the radiation it releases is prompt EM and light unstable particles that rapidly decay. [Answer] Make the core a divine power receiver, like a radio receiver but receiving the energy needed for the god-tech bodies. Tesla was working on something like this at the [Wardenclyffe Tower](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardenclyffe_Tower). Such a core would allow you to keep the divine soul (and the majority of its power) at a safe distance, in a heavenly or on an infernal plane. When the body falls, only the power that it is currently receiving gets unleashed. This is enough to incinerate the body, but is not enough to decimate/contaminate the area or mutate the indigenous life. [Answer] For a fission reactor, you can mitigate their damage by cooling them, moderate or absorb the neutron flow, and reducing their mass below criticality. Cooling: Pour water or chemical salts to conduct heat away from the critical mass. Water keeps the temperature ~100 C on the surface in contact with water. But, Water boils to steam, but as long as the water is replaced this prevents a full-blown meltdown from burning its way down in the Earth. Moderating the Neutron Flow: Flood reactor with neutron absorbers like boron, water(again), titanium, molybdenum, or other more rare elements that absorb neutrons. This can starve the reactor and shut down the chain reaction. This works best while the nuclear core is still intact. If the fuel rods have melted down and are a puddle at the bottom of the reactor vessel this is harder to deal with. But, since you are likely cooling it, adding boric acid to the cooling water can reduce neutron flow. Reducing their mass: Separate the fissionable material into small pieces below its critical mass and the reaction will shut down. For a fusion reactor: Conceptually, adding iron or high atomic number atoms to the reactor would squelch the reactor, if one existed. Atoms like Iron and above are endothermic when they fuse, requiring more energy to fuse then they produce. Atoms below Iron on the periodic table are exothermic, producing more energy than required to fuse them. [Answer] So the way I see things is that you could basically have some Godtech that prevents the spreading of the radiation after the body explodes. Let's say for instance that when the body is created, some tech is included in the body such that when it is destroyed, molecules in the body, maybe an extra organ that contains a substance, binds to the God particles and renders them dormant. This could add a few extra layers to your world where non-God creatures could try to harness God particles in dormant form and make themselves Gods, etc. Another option could be a celestial force that is specialized and tasked with recapturing the God particles. You could make it such that the particles are more like large gems that a creature could consume to mutate and each God "body" releases X number of them upon explosion that must be tracked down. Really the world is your oyster here because there is no limit to how things can work for you. I personally like the idea of there being crystal like objects that are expelled on release because it introduces the chance for a black market that trades them, a task force to recover them, even a limit to the amount that exist that makes it so there are a finite number of God "bodies" that can be created at any one time. [Answer] **Put them underground.** We can employ the same technique used in the P[lumbob Rainier underground nuclear weapons test](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_nuclear_weapons_testing#Early_history_of_underground_testing), which was the first nuclear. Tunnel into a mountain in a special path and add a hook shaped structure at the end. The hook shape structure seals off the non curved part in the explosion[![ Plumbob Rainier tunnels](https://i.stack.imgur.com/KVsr3.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/KVsr3.jpg) Of course, we might be able to choose other similarly circuitous paths for aesthetic or ritual purposes which are also capable of containing the explosion. In which case we have a **dungeon** If said god doesn't explode like a nuclear bomb, we can put said god into a large stone, concrete, or steel containment vessel. For extra safety we should probably locate our god and said containment vessel in the middle of nowhere. This way even if some theoactives leak out they won't cause much of a problem. [Answer] Can "divine essence" be destroyed? If so, one answer would be the same one that Special Circumstances(\*) agents have available to themselves. They have a tiny antimatter-based power generator embedded in their heads. In extremis, they can drop the containment, and a matter-antimatter reaction turns them into a significant bomb. It's less than true suicide, because they have backed themselves up before setting out on a mission, and will be restored from that backup. But it's a sort of suicide, because their personal experience of that mission is gone forever, and a journal or a reconstruction from other viewpoints is not the same as personal experience thereof. Minds, which are effectively technological gods, can also back themselves up to another Mind, and self-destruct. Anyway, if "divine essence" is a form of matter, anti-matter would destroy it. And if a God can back him/her/itself up, then losing a short chunk of an immortal? life might be a small price to pay. (\*) Iain M Banks' "Culture" series, of course. [Answer] ### Fusion reactors As written, you seem to be using fission reactors, which can have a runaway process that produces heat and radioactive waste. But why? We use fission reactors because we haven't figured out how to make fusion reactors that produce more power than they use. However, your gods have advanced technology. Why wouldn't they use fusion instead? Fission reactors work with unstable isotopes at the high end of the periodic table and bombard them with alpha particles to make them even more unstable. Fission can continue to happen without outside intervention. The dangerous part with fusion is not the result but the fuel. So have the fuel consumed in an explosion. This will neutralize the Chernobyl-like radiation danger and make a boom. This is essentially taking the normal fusion process and accelerating it so that all the fuel burns at once. This would be undesirable as a way to produce energy but makes sense as a way to get rid of the fuel. This won't happen naturally, so they will have to build the reactors to fail this way deliberately. You could even write a story about when this fails and what happens. [Answer] I think the easiest conclusion, while multiple perspectives and possibilities have been given, it would appear that Godtech bodies do not possess any inhumane abilities. As such, a very simple way: put them in a space craft and launch them toward the sun. The alpha/beta/gama rays alone would destory everything. **But**, a more complete way would be perhaps by implementing a Rosen Bridge(<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole>) within a micro dimension parallel to the cellular count of the Godtech body, such that within fractions of a second the transport method is able to shoot said Godtech body far away across the universe, to another point in space time. **However**, if you want a permanent solution that will yield no damage; than we should place in a very particular order a series of gravitational blackholes that account for the circumference of said Godtech body in relation to the gravitational strength, such that it is only exerted on the Godtech Body. This will create a controlled spectrum of gravitational dialiation that will result in said Godtech bodies decomposition being handled in a way that not even light can escape. **Nevertheless**, the real question we should be asking ourselves: What did we do to merit the likes of God's within our realm? ]
[Question] [ **Closed**. This question needs to be more [focused](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers. --- **Want to improve this question?** Update the question so it focuses on one problem only by [editing this post](/posts/126703/edit). Closed 5 years ago. [Improve this question](/posts/126703/edit) As you've probably guessed, I have no idea how multiverses and parallel universes, or space-time travel, etc work. I don't know how Physics or Mathematics explains alternate universes. But, they are pretty much a driving plot point in my WIP. **Is it possible to accidentally travel from one universe to another, without intentionally trying to access the other universe?** [Answer] First off, the required disclaimer: There is zero scientific evidence to support parallel universes. Zip. Nada. In fact, if there was evidence, we'd typically choose to re-define the universe to include everything that we can interact with, so the idea of going to a parallel universe is almost silly when viewed that way. Everything we talk about when it comes to multiverses is *pure* speculation, without a shred of evidence. Second, when you look at multiverses, it helps to look at what sort of parallel universes you might go to. Max Tegmark put forth the most popular [classification of parallel universes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse#Classification_schemes): * Level 1: The same physics as our universe in every way. These universes just differ by the layout of the matter inside the universe, and are typically separated by far enough that they don't interact in any way. * Level 2: Same physical laws, but different constants. In these universes, $E$ still equals $mc^2$, but $c$ may be a very different number due to symmetry breaking events that change the nature of reality. Universes where these constants differ could be *dramatically* different than ours, so much so that few writers even think about talking about them. And it's going to get more alien from there * Level 3: Many Worlds. One interpretation of quantum mechanics is that there are many universes, such that every possible thing that could happen, happens. A level 3 multiverse covers that. * Level 4: The Ultimate Ensemble. Basically, if it has laws of physics that can be described in the language of abstract mathematics, it fits in level 4. This is such a wide classification that it has received criticism that it isn't even sufficiently defined. So that gives you a sense of just how far and wide cosmologists have gone with this parallel universe thing. They have *literally* gone everywhere. There isn't an answer to your question which isn't a valid one. In my opinion, the biggest question is whether the symmetries between these universes are continuous or discrete. If you have one universe where Wayne Gretzky scores a winning shot, and a universe where he misses, is there necessarily a universe where the pick glances off the goalpost? If so, you're building a world with continuous symmetry. Do you have two universes which are mirrors of eachother, and nothing else? Or one world where Abraham Lincoln is assassinated and one where he isn't, with no in-between case? Then you have a discrete symmetry. The two systems behave radically differently when you try to flesh them out into a consistent worldview, so its a good idea to get them straight ahead of time. As an example, consider Heinlein's Future History multiverse. This was a world he wrote several books in and its defining trait is the "Time Corp," which is a group that does time travel in a multiverse setting. Heinlein, like many authors, had to keep it interesting. So the first symmetry between his multiverses is a common prefix. The time travelers can go back *y* years in the past, and find themselves in a universe where everything happened exactly the same as in their universe, but events after that point may be different. This is a continuous symmetry in that if you can travel back 2 hours in to the past, or 3 hours into the past, that implies you can also travel back to 2 hours, 43 minutes, 12 seconds, and some arbitrary fraction of a second. By Heinlein's rules, the act of traveling back through time creates a fork in his timelines (they don't have to do that, it's simply what he chose). There'd be too many timelines to count if he went with this, so he simplified. He decided that some events were "cusp" events, where history would go one way or the other. For example, the landing on the moon was one of these events. Humans always managed to land on the moon, no matter what timeline you visited. However, the person who landed on the moon might be different. This is a discrete symmetry. Two timelines may have Neil Armstrong landing on the moon, and one my have Vladimir Komarov land on the moon first, but it's impossible to have a timeline where Armstrong half landed first and Komarov landed half first. As Heinlein chose it, many timelines played out *almost* the same, except for these events. So the timelines labeled "23 Neil Armstrong" all played out roughly the same, dominated by the fact that Armstrong landed on the moon first. None of that was forced by physics, but it was forced by writing. He needed something to untangle the infinite variations that multiverses tend to permit. Heinlein also took a stab at a Level 4 multiverse that contained the Future History series. He called this wider series the "World as Myth." His logic for this was "any world which has been imagined exists." Main characters were trained not to imagine particularly dark horrid universes, so they couldn't exist and try to reach out across the multiverse. This includes the literal devil and hell, though we find in the Book of Job (subtite: A Comedy of Errors), the devil isn't always who he appears to be. Personally, I found the books fun, but this World as Myth series was *much, much* harder to follow than the Future History series. It lost a lot of readers because that multiverse is just too wide. It's too hard to write about. The restrictions you place on yourself are essential for writing good multiverse fiction. [Answer] In terms of understanding the science and math, [this is a good starting point](https://phys.org/news/2015-09-theory-parallel-universes-maths-science.html) for the layman. (I'm expanding this answer on request, to make a more complete answer that addresses the different concepts in parallel universes.) Let's start by pointing out that this essay is far from a complete resource on the topic of parallel universes and I'd encourage all who read it to supplement with their own research on the matter. I'll also point out that the very concept of whether or not a multiverse is possible or not is hotly contested between physicists across the world, even today. Finally, I'm going to point out that we don't even know all there is to know about *this* universe yet and it may never be possible to do so; scientists today often refer to the 'observable universe' as a concept that defines the radius of the universe (with Earth at the centre), the length of which is the distance that light can travel between the big bang and now. As such, we can never hope to know the 'complete' universe now, let alone the nature of a multiverse, but we do have a number of mathematical models and resultant theories we can explore. Let's look at two of them; the many-worlds scenario and string theory. The Many-Worlds Scenario is based on an idea from quantum physics that maybe really small sub-atomic particles *don't* work on a concept of waveform collapse, or put more simply, don't resolve into a final state from their 'superposition' before they're observed. This concept of waveform collapse was explored by Erwin Schrodinger in his famous thought experiment about the cat that sits in the box, neither alive nor dead until 'observed', or interacted with. In the many-worlds model, the universe splits at the point that the cat is observed. In one, the cat is alive and in the other the cat is dead, leading to a virtually infinite number of universes that represent every possible 'state' of matter (and energy). If we use this definition of the universe, then yes, we enter parallel universes all the time without even trying. On the other hand, getting to the spirit of your question; can one accidentally move between these parallel universes so that one version of ourselves is in a universe 'intended' for a different version? No. Again, starting with the many worlds scenario. What is not clear from my own research is where all these universes reside by comparison to each other, but let's assume for the moment that each of the many universes is in itself a fully formed 4 dimensional spacetime construct. Let's further assume that these universes are all finite in nature and exist side by side, with the closest one being the one that matches our existing situation most closely, the changes that differentiate them appearing only at the end of the spacetime construct. To get to a universe in which you'd notice any substantial change between the two, you'd essentially have to instantly travel an (almost) virtually infinite number of universe lengths in an instant to get to the 'new' earth. This is prohibited by relativity of course, which means you need a wormhole. The energy requirements alone for these phenomena would be prohibitive. They require *negative energy* to maintain, but that is likely going to require an equal amount of positive energy to establish, at the very least. To maintain a 1 cubic metre opening on one end of a wormhole, you need an energy mass of around the size of Jupiter. Passing through something that needs that much energy to maintain will be noticed, and very dangerous. It's probably not surviveable. As for accidental, well the probability of landing on a parallel earth in another 'dimension', with each dimension containing an observable universe the size of ours? Well, it's as close to mathematically impossible as makes no odds. But, what about string theory? Well, the parallel universes that arise from string theory math are even *more* exotic. Here we come across a concept called 'branes', short for membranes, of lower dimensionality that are tied to the 9-dimensionality of strings. I won't go into explaining this in detail because it's not relevant to my answer, other than to say that this theory states that the complete mulitverse can be made up of many different branes of differing dimenionality, all comprised within a 9-dimensional construct of which quantum strings are a primary component. In this model, the parallel universes are far fewer, far more exotic by comparison to each other, and can only be traversed via extremely localised points at which the branes intersect. Again, you're looking at wormholes, with all the energy baggage they carry. BUT, this time there are more problems. Your wormhole may not lead to a universe that has the same number of dimensions, may not have environments in them (and not be capable of supporting them either) that are conducive to human life, and their location in our universe would dictate that you can only have fixed wormholes, in fixed places, connecting to fixed alternate universes. This is actually far better for your chances of the wormhole travel being accidental, but far worse for your chances of surviving the travel or ending up somewhere surviveable. In short, regardless of whether your multiverse is the many-worlds or string theory model, if you were to (even accidentally) travel between universes; 1) You'd notice the transit 2) You probably wouldn't survive it 3) the probability of 'landing' in a safe, surviveable place on the other side alone would make the journey so implausible as to be impossible in every practical sense. That said, yours would not be the first story to do it anyway. :) [Answer] Maths and Science isn't going to help you much with something that we ourselves have never experienced, encountered or observed. At best you have ideas and theories that might work and might not. Since you yourself don't have much experience in it, the best way to address it is with magic. I'm going to address it the way I remember the did in the Golden Compass book series. You have a knife, a knife thats incredibly sharp. One side of the knife can cut through any material in the world like it was butter. The other side of the knife can cut through the fabric of the universe, allowing you to travel into parallel dimensions (or other worlds). The only issue is that you can only cut through the fabric of the universe when two worlds happen to align (in terms of the ground and environment. No sense cutting open a doorway into a pool of lava, or 100m in the air) and the fact that you need to close these portals ( by pinching the edges together ). In your world, you have a similar device that someone else has used to travel through the many worlds in existence. Your main character simply falls through one of these open doorways which haven't been properly closed. This puts them in a new world with no idea how they go there and gives you a mystery character who can be a enigma or a driving force for plot developments. [Answer] Depending on how you want your multiverse to work, there could be many ways your protagonist could move between universes without meaning to. If your protagonist is unknowingly some kind of super-being, then simply going about their daily lives may cause them to shift between universes. Consider an Amberite from Roger Zelazny's universe who has never walked the pattern, or had it's nature explained, but who nevertheless has an innate ability to traverse shadow without realising it. Every step they take makes a unconscious, infinitesimal changes to their universe, so it could take years before they start to notice inconsistencies between the world they are in now, and the world they remember being in previously. Alternately, if your protagonist is a drug user, they might find themselves transported to a parallel universe when they use a particular drug in a certain state of mind. Again, they may have no concious control over this travel, as it is their unconcious mind making the changes. Possibly your protagonist has access to technology or magic they don't understand. They have discovered by trial and error that when they type their wishes into a strange computer they found, or speak their desires into this glowing amulet, that those desires come true, but they have no idea that this works by transporting them into a parallel universe. The possibilities are endless, you just need to find one which works for your story. [Answer] Let phrase it like this **When it is possible to travel multiverses, then it can happen by accident**. In your world travelling multiverses is possible. So one might enter a vehicle for multiverse travel by accident, step through a gate accidentally, or being hit a a magic spell that transports to another universe by accident. Take your pick. And, of course, you can *intend* to make a multiverse travel, but accidentally come out at the wrong place (some mistake in the preparations, some malfuncitioning part of the vehicle, some unexpected condition between the multiverses, whatever you want). [Answer] If you are interested in the fictional side of things: This has already been done. Two cases I know of: **Cascade Point** (short story by Timothy Zahn) - Due to the specific manner in which FTL works, an unaccounted-for piece of equipment, not properly stored in the ship's shielded compartment during a 'jump', causes the ship to transition differently than expected. Several 'jumps' later, they arrive at their destination colony planet, only to find no evidence that it had ever been colonized. They manage to work out that they have accidentally slipped into an alternate universe. *[then they have to work out how to get back!]* **Mostly Harmless** (Douglas Adams) - Beings who originate from one of the galaxy's 'plural' sectors are known to be liable to slip from one universe to another while travelling through hyperspace, and are explicitly warned against such travel by the star liners' brochures. Arthur Dent has already done this, which is why instead of arriving at Earth he arrives at a particularly dismal alternate Earth called 'NowWhat'. This is also how he got separated from his girlfriend Fenchurch (she slipped, he didn't). [Answer] As others have said, we really know nothing about parallel universes, so you are free to invent anything you want here. As for the accident part, I think the best way would be teleportation gone wrong. In a magic setting you set up a spell to take you to another city. You arrive in a city that looks exactly like what you had in mind when casting the spell, but all the things you *didn't* think about are ... *different*. In a sci-fi setting we have finally learned how to travel Faster Than Light. Hurray! We send an expedition to a remote exo-planet. Everything looks fine until they travel back home and arrive at a *different* Earth. Either way, the effect can be distance related, so everything looks fine during testing. No *noticeable* effect, at least not noticeable before people start looking for these things. ]
[Question] [ Did research on map-building to get an idea of how to make a good fictional area, and get an idea of travel times. I consistently found it said that Towns are roughly a days walk apart, and villages only a few miles apart. The reason being that farmers would need to be able to walk to town, do business, and get home before sunset. Is it realistic for travelers to regularly sleep outdoors, even if they likely pass through a town each day? [Answer] 1. Not enough money to pay for a tavern. 2. Be of a group of Others (say, Roma) that is not liked by the majority of the populace. 3. You *like* living in your caravan, going to town only for necessary supplies. [Answer] Well, historically people didn't really camp outside unless they had too. It was risky, cold and uncomfortable. As you pointed out, with towns and villages about a day apart, there wasn't really a need. That said, if you couldn't go into town for some reason: * Being a fugitive * Afraid of someone tracking you * Bringing down some curse / unwanted attention on innocent townsfolk If you go off the beaten track, into uncharted territory, there may be more than a day's travel between villages. In a fantasy land there may be other considerations which caused people to concentrate more, leading to bigger towns further apart. If there's a threat of invasion or attack, people are going to want walls and defences, not piddly villages. [Answer] Money. Towns are expensive propositions prior to McDonald’s/Wal-Mart supply distribution magic. Hunting your own food would be way cheaper than paying for a restaurant. Bedding down in a tent is way cheaper than rented lodging. Even in modern era, on long drives back in college, I frequently packed food and slept in my pickup at truck stops. [Answer] # Reasons * Due to a steep ridge/impenetrable forest/mountain range/swampy river floodplain, two villages are more than one day apart. * The village sees a lot of raiders/pirates/Vikings, and is thus built off the main road and fortified. They won't open the gates and night for any reason. Its easier just to sleep on the road. * Due to excessive drinking and a rockin' hangover, you left the last town at like 2 pm, and you won't make it to the next town. * The last time you were in a town, you may have deflowered the mayor's daughter, and it might be wise to detour around this town. * This town is entirely populated by werewolves, and the moon will be full tonight. * This town is peopled by [Big-Endian Blefuscuans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilliput_and_Blefuscu#Early_history), who crack their eggs on the big side. This is, of course, heresy, and you could not stoop to consort with such people. In fact, you would rather risk rain and robbery to sleep in the woods. On a more practical note, language wasn't very standardized in the Middle Ages, and it could be that this village speaks a rare dialect or a weird language, and you simply don't want to deal with communicating. [Answer] I've heard the same thing here a bit as well, but there are a few extra considerations some people have mentioned and often don't seem to mention. From what I can gather, a village should be atmost 1 day away from another village, but that doesn't mean that the other village is in your direction of travel or that there will be a road of villages all 1 day away from each other all connecting all the major cities together. Firstly, you still need the resources available to form the town in the first place. Otherwise, it would be heavily dependent on trade, but that's for the next point. You would need a source of fresh water and land to grow food as well as wood/stone to be able to build buildings. If a place doesn't fulfill these conditions, chances are a village won't form. If a location isn't able to provide food and shelter, chances are people won't settle down there. Now if you don't have your necessary resources, the only way to get them, is by trading. To build a village dependent on trading means you have one of two things. Either a very valuable good, e.g. Gold, which other people really want and hence they will be willing to trade or invest in the village to gain access to the resource. The next option is there is very large amounts of traffic that have to travel a far distance, and hence you can rely on a constant flow of incoming an outgoing people/traders to keep your village well supplied and stocked up. So if you have 2 villages that are both in ideal locations, but say there is a mountain, desert or forest between them, it is plausible that there would be no village/town between them, because the location between them would be very hard to settle and not provide much benefits to those who do. Also if your villages are on the frontier, or the kingdom is currently expanding and settling new villages, its plausible for them to be spread out and placed in perfect locations, rather than only 1 day away. This way, the earlier settlers get better resources, and later on, once they are more developed the areas between will be settled and safer travel paths will be opened up. [Answer] I realize this isn't a very sustainable answer, but you could incorporate foul weather to slow down your characters. Heavy snows during winter could slow travel to a crawl while the plot forces the characters to press onward. Less direly, maybe the location experiences [mud season](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mud_season), which stops most efficient forms of travel and leads to an interesting atmosphere. A weird work-around could be a lack of horses. After they were sold to a war effort or died of a species specific disease, the animals that used to aid in travel have vanished. Now towns are further apart due to slower means of travel. Other than that, having a lot of terrain that doesn't make good farmland (large woodlands, rocky hills, marshes, arid ground) could justify towns being much farther apart that would be ideal for travelers. [Answer] also i would consider this a topological reason even more. I would say potentially a straight line (according to what useless map/guide you are using) to your destination would be mostly best. Use the euclidean algorithim to determine distance between points a to c, vs going from point a to b to c and you will see to preserve expenditures in moving large parties, or maximizing time will hardly ever place you in civilizations much. Now previoulsy we only considered speed times as a constant. They fluctuate dependent upon terrain type and most unpredictably weather variations. So to say its one day away (which actually means traveling 5 mph with cart) takes 8 hrs for the farmer simply living their life. But being an adventurer you could easily (and out of necessity) scale this distance traveled by some amount (say a factor of 1.4 to 2.5, dependent on what is allowed in your story) which puts you into no village. Then your mode of transportation becomes faulty or obstacles are found that were not considered. Also one presumes story lines are linear and not multi-focal in action. You have to travel 200 miles to get to a destination and part of the band departs. The other portion has to go to a neighboring location 5 miles nearby. Both destinations are not habitable. The main camp is built between the two to maximize communication and collection of resources. Actually one should ask "what do towns have to offer that make you need them?", or "Do these towns have open border policies?" what are the functions of towns in your story? Also what constitutes a town? 10 people or 1000 people? Does the function of the town allow for commerce or is the town simply a logging/mining/educational/ceremonial community. Finally just a note, I don't believe that all towns/villages would have been only a day away from one another. That seems unlikely. Maybe there are certain areas where the majority of villages are but not all. I agree with the previous post about the requirements to provide long term solutions to construction needs, and habitation needs. [Answer] Terrain. Towns would be a day apart in areas that are good at supporting towns. However, once you get into terrain that doesn't make good farmland things change. You're not going to find the towns a day apart in desert, swamp or mountain terrain. [Answer] In the UK there are old paths called [drover roads](http://www.scotlandmag.com/magazine/issue38/12008544.html) that were used used to bring cattle from more rural areas to central market towns. As the point was to sell the animals the drovers were entrusted with not only looking after the animals but also to ensure they didn't lose weight, thus they planned routes based around good grazing and averaged around 18km a day on journeys that averaged 200-300 kms. The animals themselves would sometimes travel more than [1,000 km](http://www.walkingworld.com/Articles/Pathways/Pathways/Drovers--roads.aspx) from their point of origin as they would be sold on to other drovers who would walk them elsewhere. ]
[Question] [ **Closed**. This question needs [details or clarity](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers. --- **Want to improve this question?** Add details and clarify the problem by [editing this post](/posts/99262/edit). Closed 6 years ago. [Improve this question](/posts/99262/edit) Is it realistic to think that, given the inefficiency of conveying information to another human through verbal or written language, it may one day be possible to "download" knowledge directly into a human brain? Basically, human A wants human B to *know* something, some complicated state of affairs that may be misunderstood if communicated through the ambiguity of language, or maybe it's a simple packet of information, but human A wants human B to absorb it as quickly as biologically possible. It would also have the benefit of being completely unambiguous. The new knowledge human B has is identical to that of human A. Note that I don't necessarily mean Matrix style "I know Kung-Fu" learning. Nothing that requires muscle memory, just the transmission of semantic knowledge, or facts about the world, that one human wants to transfer to another. The information also doesn't need to be "true," it's up to the receiving human to verify it, but the receiver will be under no uncertainty as to what the sender means. Edit: I really don't know how much more specific I can make this question. [Answer] There are really two questions in one: 1. Is is plausible to have a high-speed data interface to the brain, and 2. Is there a method to convey information unambiguously. ## A high-speed data interface to the brain... ... is probably not possible. Or is probably possible. Take your pick. I believe it is not possible, because the brain does work that way. The brain is a very slow, very asynchronous, very highly distributed data processing machine. There is simply no *one* data connection in the brain through which all memories pass; in computer terms, there is no system bus. But. Maybe we really cannot make a high-speed data interface to the brain, but most likely we *can* make a *slow speed* data interface. That is, although we most likely cannot pour knowledge into the brain, maybe its not necessary. Maybe we can make a suitable digital device with a suitable biological interface which works as if it were part of the brain, retrieving information at the low speed at which the brain can process it. At our current technological level we already have something very very close to this, in the form of keyboards and the world-wide web, and Google, and Wikipedia. Anybody can find out just about any little fact in mathematics, physics, chemistry, or history quickly, by using the brain to formulate a query, typing that query on a keyboard, using Google's vast computing power to search Wikipedia's vast data repository. It is perfectly possible to bypass the keyboard by [capturing motor neural impulses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosthesis#Myoelectric), and it is perfectly possible to dispense with the screen by [feeding neural impulses directly into the optical nerve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_prosthesis). ## Conveying information unambiguously... ... is perfectly possible. We do it routinely in mathematics, in physics, in chemistry, in engineering, and in information technology. For this purpose we use special-purpose languages (such as mathematical notation, chemical notation, technical drawings, and programming languages) and well-specified databases. We can specify colors unambiguously using either well-defined [color spaces](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_space), or the [Pantone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantone) Matching System. We can specify shapes unambiguously using technical drawings or computerised [3D models](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_modeling) represented in well-defined formats such as [AMF](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Additive_Manufacturing_File_Format). For more complicated uses there are special-purpose subsets of natural languages using controlled vocabularies, such as [Simplified Technical English](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Technical_English). On the other hand, ambiguity does not necessarily arise from the imperfection of language; quite often, ambiguity is inherent in the information. For example, Julius Caesar (*the* Julius Caesar) was born on 13 July 100 BCE, and that's a fact. It's also a very ambiguous fact; that nice specific date is misleading: for it was Julius Caesar himself who, in the fullness of time, would regularize the calendar so that all years had 365 or 366 days, and so that 1 January would invariably fall about 10 days after the [hibernal solstice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_solstice). All we know is that he was born on a day which *in that specific year* the Romans counted as 13th of [Quintilis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quintilis) (as the month was called then, the name "July" being given to it much later and in his honor); we don't know to what day *in our calendar* corresponds that specific 13th of Quintilis 100 BCE; we can say that it was most likely during the summer, and that's about all. [Answer] First: can we know what part of a brain is performing which task? **Yes.** from <https://www.mayfieldclinic.com/PE-fMRI_DTI.HTM> [![functional mri image](https://i.stack.imgur.com/yhMAe.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/yhMAe.jpg) This is now routinely done. MRI can tell which parts of the brain are more active when performing a given task. Interestingly (and something I just learned) the patients do not actually perform the tasks, because they move around too much when they do. They just think about performing the task. As the technology improves, fMRI has become able to detect and discriminate between different word recognition / generation activities, and different activities with a given body part. 2: Can one reverse this, and use magnetic stimulation to provoke activities within the brain? **Yes.** [Transcranial magnetic stimulation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulation) is as yet a pretty blunt instrument, but it is being used clinically to stimulate learning, ameliorate pain and other more global brain activities. <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3532848/> > > Recent studies have suggested that exogenous manipulation of cortical > activity with repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) may > improve naming in persons with chronic left hemisphere stroke and > nonfluent aphasia.... The specific mechanisms by which rTMS > administered to this region produces beneficial changes in language > ability are debated. > > > Transcranial magnetic stimulation can produce the sensation of movement and block the ability to speak (but leave the ability to sing), among other things. This is not future speculation but established and in clinical use. Could this sort of thing evolve to placing memories in a mind as the OP proposes? I see no reason why not. A 19th century surgeon would scoff at the thought that one could reconnect severed nerves or reroute a blood supply from one part of the body to another but these things are now routine. If the electromagnetic nature of memory as stored in the brain is better understood, one could replicate the generation of memory with extrinsic magnetic stimulations - directly implanting knowledge into the brain. [Answer] **Technically yes, but today no.** We know barely how a humans brain work and therefore we know information is beeing stored using electric impulses. These electric impulses can be triggerd from outside as well, but the point is, that (today) we just don't know exactly enough, which points to trigger to get a specific information saved, and also we (today) can not exactly know, what information the brain is actually processing, when we see, where the information (voltage) flows. We already know, which areas do which things, but that is definitifely not enough. Its like a computer. You know the brain is the RAM and you also know, that something between 0x0000001 and 0x0000007 to something between 0x00006F0 and0x000B71A is somehow connencted to language and speaking and you even know some other vague areas and a part of what they do. BUT even if you capture "ahh this does language" you don't know "this is working on the word "pineapple" at the moment" Saving information to a RAM/brain where you already know that much and nothing more ist just not possible. Also Reverse Engineering is somewhat difficult as we are talking about a living brain inside a human. You can not rewire this for try and error, because of moral aspects in as far as I know every country of the world. But even if someone says "hey, take my brain and do what you want even if i'm still living" this doesn't help you that much as you have to exactly know, which information in this RAM does what and how to access it. Also every RAM can be accessed the same way and can be called the same way (mostly) as you have standards like DDR2 and the given size of the RAM (eg 2 GB) and input voltage and so on, but a brain doesn't follow some ISOsor even vague standards and therefore every brain is diffrent. Also there are tumors etc, so even if you could access a brain it, the way of how to do that would be different from human to human. Also the brain is not entirely RAM and it is not entirely a processor. It works like a mixture of both of them. I'm not very into this, so ask a doctor for details, but a brain does (in my oppinion) not have a processing unit and a saving unit, but both things can be done somehow simultaneously from different regions in the brain. Given that you can not easily save information as you have to follow the brains "workflow" as the brain needs to get input to a specific time at a specific location based on what else is processed at this time and shot before as this most probably affects the way the brain stores this information correctly or not. So putting together all this: Yes, one can possibly do this in the future, but nowadays this is somewhat impossible due to the reasons above. Additionally: Also if you successfully manage to enter some information into the brain (let's say 0011101100001011 at some place) you can definitifely not know, how exaclty this affects the brain. Sure if you reversed the brain enough and you know that memory address of the word "banana" and you manage to change it to "apple" this does not mean the person is from now on saying apple to every banana it sees for as I said above the brain is also a processor and not just memory, so maybe this throws an exception (apoplexy in worst case), because the brain expected a different word or abstract datatype. -> good point. Abstract datatypes - those are things the brain uses to store information in and it does this, because it defined those datatypes based on its experience/knowledge influenced by the very personal perception, which means that every human saves his/her information in a slightly or heavily different way. We know the brains error handling in some aspects. If we stay outside in the cold for a few days for example the brain may respond in shaking your body and felling pain or we know that getting a virus may lead to overheat the head, but we don't know yet, what the brain does (to us) if we manipulate thinking. Back to the areas: Even if we know, which areas are responsible for doing things like speech, listening, seeing etc. we dont know, whether this covers the brains ability to save/store information or whether this is processing those information. So we know a brain acts as RAM and processor and we know some areas and their job, but we can't tell if the job is of the type RAM or procesor. An additional thought on this: If humans think about bungling things in our brains - what do you expect from an AI? I think an AI would try to do similar things if it is bored. Before the AI does this you don't know if is good or not. Good means for us humans. The same applies to your question. We don't know what humans will do with the ability to change other humans (and their own) thoughts. It could be either good or bad. Using this feature beeing bad is probably more likely to happen as most humans are assholes and they would try to use this opportunity for whatever, but that is not part of the answer. Coming back to your question: You wrote > > it's up to the receiving human to verify it > > > I disagree. The verification of information stored in the brain does also have to be stored. Think about `An apple can be eaten`, which you KNOW is true and `an apple is the same as a banana`, which you KNOW is false and an information `an apple is Gk(g5sP`, wich you cant answer. Then there is `an apple is red`, wich you don't KNOW - you have to say "possible". But then there are information like "cousin Anna is 42 Years old", wich you probably just think might be correct as you didn't saw her for a few years. So if you just enter raandom information into a brain I would expect the brain to say something like "nope, that is false" or "don't know - might be fake news". Think about it: If you know, that in the past you never heared the word "Gwabbrügtz", but now you know it is a city with 81234 inmates and [...], but you cant combine this with experience, then you'll most likely say, that this information is not true as it might be a part of a dream last night you can't remember. So if you place information into the brain you have to ensure yourself the brain is 1. thinking the new information is true and 2. dealing with the new information in a healthy and good way. So no, it's not on the person to decide, whether the information in the brain is true - this is always determined previously by experience. You dont decide every time your asked, whether an appöle equals a banana -> you know this for sure to be false. So the knowledge whether this information is true is already in your brain. Therefore if someone manipulates the brain with information the validity of this information mus be transmitted as well as otherwise the brain would never think the new information is true. > > Matrix style "I know Kung-Fu" learning > > > If it is already possible to make a brain believe things you entered into it, then there is absolutely no problem to apply this for muscle navigation as well. I wrote about those abstract datatypes and that every brain has to be accessed different, so the information, what to do with muscles is not one of the hard problems. It in fact should be really easy in caomparison to what it needs to successfully change a single bit on purpose (with knowing previously what this will change). Also: Nowadays it is possible to make a brain do things with muscles. This has beend tested on animals (mice) and it works, but i dn'ß think it would be that easy with a human brain (without causing damage in any way / while this feature is under development) [Update] I called the brains memory RAM as all unsaved changes will be lost if it is shut down. Nevertheless this can be changed. If one manages to change the brains memorys content the brains memory capacity can be extended as well so you can for example connect somehow the brain with some SSDs to make the brain store its information in there. Also this could result in "sharing memories" in a different manner we usually do. Instead of using speech the brains memories could be saved onto physical devices such as SSDs. To do this you have to implement sort of a driver to let the brain have read/write acces to this storage and then you can define how the information have to be saved on this external storage. This would make it easy to build a knowledge database for every (connected) human to make use of. Also you could stream information from this storage or from another brain directly into a "new sense" (a few of them we know as touch, smell, taste etc.). This would allow direct communication between two brains, so you could for example use the left arm of another person as you do it with your existing two ones. To enable this feature you have to write a driver for this into the target brain. This driver should be different from human to human, but the data inside the storage can have a standardisized format to reuse this fpr other brains. To take those thoughts a bit further: If we think Matrix style leaarning a huge amount of things in a few seconds this could be possible - or not, because if you hear someone speaking you're fine, but if you hear his/her voice 20 times faster it gets confusing and you will most likely dont get all the information. I think it should be worth a thought if that could apply on the brain as well. As the brain is not just RAM, but also a processor it could be happening, that entering information triggers some kind of thinking (which is very likely) at least in the way of "what information I already have can I connect this with?" as we usually try to do this with normal learned things. So as a processor we have to ensure the brain does not overheat on the amount of things it is confronted with, so maybe it would be very slow to enter information and maybe not. I don't know and I don't think there is evidence for any answer to this as there is no such experience yet. It's just very likely, that in addition to the other circumstances the speeed will also be kind of bad for things humans would like to do. Also it would be difficult to get a save place to enter information as the brain can't be shut down without having exceptions thrown a lot after a reboot. Save place means, that the brain does not try to use the involved neurons at the same time as we modify them, because that would probably cause the brain to do some weired things. So you should make the area you want to edit not available for the brain for the time youre modifying information, which could be done by cuttin some synapses and "rewire" them after modification. To make the brain work properly in the meantime you could mak an exact copy of the area to modify, build a temporary storage, which the brain accesses as it was the space it would normally be and then you have to "rewire" the synapses. This is just an optional step, but for a good working solution this is a must-have. So if you want to know, whether such a thing can be done SAFELY the answer will be no for a few hundred years. Nevertheless it is possible, but it will take very long to be able to avoid errors and it will be very expensive as well and at least the beta will still cause some mental deseases and deaths. [/Update] ## To sum it up: Yes. To change a brains memory or adding new information should be technically be possible (magnetic stimulation or you're really using wires^^) but given the problems I mentioned above it is much too hard to do. Especially that what programmers understand as "abstract datatypes" may be a real hard problem for people trying to manipulate brains as their declarations/definitions will (most likely) vary from human to human significantly. \*I didn't read the other answers entirely before posting, so maybe there are some acpects already coverd by some other answers [Answer] **Not a practical proposition** One of the big problems here is assumptions of prior knowledge. For example there would be no point in trying to transfer the knowledge of what diastereoisomers are without explaining what chirality is and no point in explaining chirality without explaining broader concepts in organic chemistry and three dimensional geometry and so on. The problem is that some of the required underlying knowledge is not at all obvious and it may not be obvious who has it or what is needed. Another problem is the storage of knowledge. It might well be that the same knowledge is stored differently by different people depending on their lifetime experiences making the whole idea exceedingly challenging to say the least. On top of all them there are the physical problems associated with reprogramming synapsis at a distance in a safe reliable and specific way. So whilst theoretically such a transfer might be imagined I suggest that in practice it would be very difficult if not impossible to achieve. [Answer] There is an decades-old Sci-Fi classics for this. # Sleep-learning Also called [hypnopedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep-learning). The basic (reasonably hard Sci-Fi) idea is that human brain registers some information even when asleep. Through hearing repeating the messages in their sleep an individuum may learn this information. It is *less* efficient than "normal" learning, but uses the time when people normally do nothing, so any additional amount of learned information is a plus. You wanted uploading of a helicopter pilot skill as in Matrix? Sorry, that's much, much "softer" Sci-Fi. [Answer] It is virtually impossible to do without a complete map of every neuron (100 billion of them) and synapse connecting neurons (up to 1000 trillion of them). See [Here](http://www.human-memory.net/brain_neurons.html) for a description of the biology of human memory. Then you must have the ability to ***rewrite*** all of those, physically breaking and reforming synaptic connections in the brain. The brain is not a computer with a blank slate of hardware that can contain data, knowledge, programming or instructions. What we are in personality or knowledge or skill is 100% encoded in the physical arrangement of cells, the precise way neurons fire and activate other neurons due to **physical** wiring from one to the next; those physical wires connect through synapses where one neuron 'touches' another (with a small gap for atoms of chemicals to flow between them). To know something new requires a rewiring of this tangled mess, a literal growing process like growing vines. There is no PLACE in the brain to "download" anything, even when you hear a sound it is converted into electrical stimulation of cells, that fire if they recognize the pattern to stimulate other cells, and eventually stimulate cells to reconfigure their connections (synapses) so you know something new. Worse than that, HOW you know something is unique to you and your experiences. What you think of when I say "car" is unique to you and your lifetime of experiences with cars. For non-English speakers it may mean **nothing**, for a car designer or mechanic it may mean far more. This is because in your lifetime your brain has developed a "model", encoded in neurons and synapses, of what a "car" is, how they differ, the appearances, how they work, and so on. Any new thing for you to learn about cars has to fit into your existing model and modify your existing tens of thousands of neurons and millions of synapses devoted to your current understanding of cars, AND how cars link to everything else in your life. Even if we had the tech to map the neurons and synapses (we don't), that is just analogous to a microscope, seeing them is not enough. We don't have anything remotely close to being able to *manipulate* the brain or create a new synapse, certainly not without surgery. There will never be a high speed download of data, or skills, or knowledge to the brain. Thinking and learning will not get faster than the biological limits. That said, you CAN train your brain, through exercises, to remember far more than most people do naturally, learn faster, read far faster, and so on. Speed reading is a real thing, people really can train their brain to read and recite a book, and so on. [Answer] For starters, "muscle memory" is a misnomer. It all happens in the brain. In the 1980s (I think) I read a study where the researchers trained mice to perform a task. Afterwards they harvested rna from the brains of the trained mice and injected it into untrained mice. The untrained mice exhibited the "trained" behaviors very shortly thereafter. Of course, this meant that the trained mice were sacrificed in the process. [Answer] In a [related question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/46882/how-much-memory-is-needed-to-record-a-human-thought/46913#46913) I go over some details. In conclusion, > > So *if* you numbered them, and noted the activation particulars, that would represent the thought. It's only meaningful in the context of the brain it was read from, and that changes over time: you can’t play it back later because the specific pattern matchers have changed their topology and detailed weightings, so the “same” pattern matching unit has a slightly different meaning if stimulated again in the same way. > > > Recording thoughts means using *language*, which is something the brain is already wired for. Only consider a language that is far more precise than any normal human language, and a custom system to decode it into the context of the current brain receiving it. This system would need to be more powerful and hold more data than a human brain! And the result would still be imperfect. > > > In general, it’s not a simple thing. The complete details of the wiring is specific to a single brain, and even representing this abstractly is a significant problem. (see [chapter 12 in GEB](http://www.egodeath.com/geb.htm)). ]
[Question] [ I've read [this question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/8556/26180), but most of its answers don't seem to apply to my question directly other than possibly [this one](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/8578/26180), which suggests that in order to change a planet's orbit, you would have to change its rotational energy. There's also [this question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/1402/26180), but the answers are more cataclysmic than anything. What I'm imagining is the entire current population of earth (roughly 7.5 billion) being moved to the moon, with new buildings and roads to house and transport every individual both above and as far below the surface as possible. The moving of every person to the moon would be a *steady and smooth* stream until everyone has been transferred (let's say 100M/week). So in the event of mass-colonization of our moon, at what point, if any, would it start moving out of its usual orbit? Would it fall or raise? I know there's no drag in space, but would the added height/weight/energy from the billions of bustling people cause its rotation to slow down/speed up at all? **Assume all warning signs are ignored and people keep piling on.** [Answer] **No.** Mass of all of humanity: 4 x 10^11 kg Mass of the moon: 7 × 10^22 kg It's like asking if you could be knocked over by a bacterium (roughly a 11 order of magnitude mass difference too) [Answer] **No.** But let’s work it out: The force of gravity will change if the product of the masses changes. Shifting the people of total mass p from Earth to Moon gives you a new product (E−p)(M+p) = EM + p(E−M) − p² Since E = 5.97237×1024 kg M = 7.342×1022 kg and p is about 7.5 × 1011 So you can see that (E+p) and (E−p) can’t even be handled by a regular calculator, since p is *insignificant*. But the expanded form shows that the product will increase by a part that’s 13 orders of magnitude smaller than the original product. The difference between old and new will be like 1 vs 1.0000000000001. It won’t make any difference. [Answer] Two important points to consider. First, orbital velocity is a function of the body being orbited, not the body doing the orbiting. That is, the mass of the moon makes no real difference to its orbit; all that matters is the mass of the Earth. This is an extension of the famous principle that the speed of a falling object will be the same regardless of its mass - a feather and a hammer dropped in a vacuum from the same height will hit the ground at the same time. Second, moving all of humanity and all of our infrastructure to the moon would increase the moon's mass (by a tiny fraction) - but it was also *decrease* the Earth's mass (by a tiny fraction). The mass of the Earth-Moon system will not change, just the barycentre (centre of mass) of the overall system - and that by only the tiniest amount. ]
[Question] [ **Closed**. This question is [opinion-based](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers. --- **Want to improve this question?** Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by [editing this post](/posts/59962/edit). Closed 7 years ago. [Improve this question](/posts/59962/edit) In an alternate history I am designing, France wins the Seven Years War and does not lose their land claims in America. A problem I have reached though is explaining why land east of the Mississippi winds up in American control. How can I explain why the land east of the Mississippi (represented by the red line) would come into American control? [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/OqHCV.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/OqHCV.png) [Answer] ## The American Revolution Happened Earlier The reason that the French won the 7 Years War is that the America Revolution happened in the midst of it, and France recognized the territory of the newly independent USA in exchange for a cessation of hostilities on that front. [Answer] # No explanation needed These were claims, not territory. There were no permanent French inhabitants, just a few soldiers, traders, and trappers. There were no settlers and families like there was in English North America. If American settlers just moved in an occupied the land, the ownership would resolve itself quickly. Even if the French won the 7 Years war, there was not a mass emigration from France to settle new lands as there was Irish and Scottish settlement in the 13 colonies. The US would have quickly outnumbered the French, with the only remaining dense French settlements around Montreal and New Orleans. It seems almost pre-ordained that American settlement would overtake most of the Ohio Valley, and probably the rest of the Great Plains as well. [Answer] If I understand your question correctly, the Americans have advanced west across the Appalachians and are now firmly in control of the east bank of the Mississippi River. This would also suggest they are in control of the southern shores of the Great lakes as well, and have an outlet on the Gulf of Mexico, sandwiched between the remainder of New France and Spanish Florida. How the Americans come into control of this is relatively straightforward, the population of the American colonies was vastly greater than New France, and they were also concentrated along the coastal region rather than spread over a vast swath of North America. Sheer weight of numbers would overwhelm the peoples of New France, and the thinly settled wilderness would be filled with small freeholds, villages and eventually towns as American colonists struck west seeking land and opportunities. These settlers would probably be led by current and former "Rangers", skilled in scouting and wilderness warfare, and capable of protecting the settlers against French, Quebecois and Indian forces. Indeed what you seem to be describing isn't a clear cut victory by the French at all, but rather a stalemate, where the French may be rapidly fortifying the west bank of the Mississippi and the northern shores of the Great Lakes in anticipation of another push by the Americans into the rich lands of the Great Plains. The French are also at a great disadvantage in that their social and political structure is actually more Feudal in nature than the structures erected by the colonies. Much of the French nobility, and presumably much of the regular French Regiments and [Troupes de la marine](http://infogalactic.com/info/Troupes_de_la_marine) would be in the core of New France itself, along the St Lawrence river. Their agriculture and economy in general is far less productive than their American rivals, and Metropolitan France most likely considers New France to be "*quelques arpents de neige*", and not worth expending extra resources on (especially compared to money making ventures like the Caribbean sugar trade, African slaves or their possessions in India, assuming the British haven't prevailed in these areas either). The ultimate question will be settled by a combination of population, logistics and social dynamics. The Americans have the advantages in all three areas, and the New French simply do not have the population or resources to hold the Mississippi river line against the Americans flooding across looking for new lands and opportunities. ]
[Question] [ I am designing armour for an adventurer and I want to give him something unique compared to the normal soldiers of this world. My first idea is that this guy has found a method of finishing an iron surface that gives that surface an ultra-low coefficient of friction. It has identical properties to iron except the outer surface is entirely frictionless. The adventurer decided to make a suit of plate armour out of it because he thought it would be cool. I want to know whether this armour will have any benefits or drawbacks compared to steel plate armour. For context the adventurer will face enemies carrying bladed weapons, mainly swords, and also longbowmen. Also, the palms of the hands and soles of the feet have grip, so that he can move and hold weapons. [Answer] # Benefits with normal armor, you have pretty wide angle that still delivers full force. With your, enemy's weapon always slides. This has two benefits: * Less impact on your hero. 25 degrees in one way or another would still deliver 90% of force, give or take, so that's not that great. * Throwing enemy off-balance. That's your armor's greatest power. After one hit, when sword that's supposed to hit slides instead, enemy would lose his balance, and get confused. Both things makes him make mistakes, and allow your guy to win. Or at least give him chance to. # Drawbacks * Hard to put on. Extremely hard, as you only can hold straps etc. Or you need some handles on the inside, and these can't be comfortable. * Poor quality. Because blacksmith can't really hold it in any way when working on it, mere fact it is recognizable armor shows he was master of his craft, at near miraculous level. But it would take a miracle to make it better than "crap" manufacturing quality. * It's iron. It has all iron's drawbacks when compared with steel. * Can't grapple. Pretty obvious. * Can't stop sliding. Not without risking his palms and soles. --- I would rather have it sold to mages, and bought good set of full plate, and donate to temple to get me resurrected if it fails. [Answer] I think he's going to be in for an interesting time if he ever falls or gets knocked over - frictionless armor means he's going to be sliding downhill at an increasing speed until he reches the lowest point, then up the other side slowing down, then back and repeat until he manages to slow himself down with the grippy bits. You may want to extend the grippy bits round a bit more - otherwise, if he gets onto his toes while trying to get up, whoops, frictionless again. Interesting question as to whether it's going to be better or worse than normal armour for protection. For bashing weapons, while they'll slide somewhat, you've still got the straight in component of the blow to worry about - so you're probably still going to get dents. And once you have a dent, any blows in that area are going to slide to the deepest bit - so instead of nearby blows being distributed as normal, they're going to get funnelled to the deepest bit and make it worse. For cutting weapons (assuming they don't cut in) they're going to slide. Might be disconcerting for the attacker and could put them out of position, or slide to a joint in the armor - which might be bad. Piercing weapons (like a pickaxe) might be a problem because of the sliding down a dent effect - once you have a dent, further blows slide to the same place, so that's probably worse than normal armour. Getting the armour on and off may be a problem if it's frictionless on the inside of the armour as well - and I'm not sure how good a grip you'd get with only one side frictionless. While you can probably hammer holes into it for fixing straps (though you may need to build a jig to stop your tool and the armour sliding out of position), it may be fun putting things on / pulling things off if the strats re the only place you can get a grip. [Answer] European-style combat would need some changes. Plate armour with this low-friction surface would be of limited value. Full sets of steel plate were extremely difficult to breach; typically, in hand combat, an attacker would have two options. First, they could be conservative with committing their weapon, using footwork, finesse, and constant probing attacks until their opponent made a mistake and revealed a chink in their armour. Your low-friction finish wouldn't help much against this sort of thing, as the only significant attacks would be against unarmored spots or the weapon. Skilled opponents might not even notice. Secondly, they could use the enormous mass of their weapon, aimed at spots from which their weapon could not deflect, to shove their armoured opponent around until a gap was revealed in their opponent's armour. Since this suit doesn't give your adventurer more coverage, and will only moderately affect mass weapons that aren't really intended to pierce plate armour anyways, your adventurer will only gain a moderate benefit by deflecting a certain small percentage of blows that might otherwise have bitten in and gone through the plate. Some opponents would be greatly surprised, but most would probably find the difference noticeable, but ineffective. For this sort of combat, having your *shield's* surface be near-frictionless would be amazing. Many tactics used against "sword and board" opponents involve trying to shove the shield aside somehow, forcing them to commit large amounts of momentum to their weapon on questionable shots. But a skilled shield user often controls the angle of contact between weapon and shield, and most often the shield user's objective is deflection, not absorption. Deflected weapons in these circumstances will really drag the wielder off balance, and a full-bodied shield press will be almost impossible. For my money, just coat the shield, make yourself a medieval Captain America. For point weapons like lances, pikes, longbow arrows and such, this sort of surface would also be extremely effective. Low-friction surfaces would deflect these almost effortlessly. Luck, as in finding the visor slit etc., would likely be the only way these weapons would do any damage. All of this is predicated on steel plate. Using iron would present a number of issues that the low-friction surface would likely not mitigate. If you have not already, you should read up on iron vs steel for armour before committing to iron for your adventurer. [Answer] if it's say a frictionless foil cloth it is still unable to hold any pierce coz dent effect.When spike will be trapped in a dent frictionless will become ineffective.This goes for any other mat too. Second one is say hammer strikes when slide direction is in oppose to one in which it will be pushed by handle. All other shall be hold. but if you wanna have to model any impact you have one force against another one on scene.And at begin of impact it's equal. something like that (friction power is vanishingly small at this moment,but it will grow very fast if you deal with common materials. Power will also have a flank component) [![z](https://i.stack.imgur.com/24yrX.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/24yrX.jpg) I guess you can think selfstate what that means in case of real frictionless surface. Answer is:there is no impact at all in this case. You'll have this picture frame by frame in different points till blade slides away completely There are also powers that're absent in this model,but it's insignificant. ]
[Question] [ Assuming that horses went extinct early in history, what would replace the horse, and how would the change in domesticated animal affect the development of the first civilizations? [Info on horse extinction in Americas](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication_of_the_horse#Methods_of_domestication) (OTL) Note that this question will be followed up with another one based around extrapolating further human development from the situation in the accepted answer. [Answer] Well on one hand, many of the animals which aren't horses that have been domesticated over the years for a similar purpose of transportation would be used far more often. Donkeys would likely be the popular choice because although they are stubborn, they will still take you to where you need to go, and they can also carry quite a bit. Camels too would be more commonly used as well, especially around areas with water drinking areas far and inbetween. While elephants would certainly exist, for various reasons they are not practical for general transportation. They would perhaps be better suited for manual labor as they are used today in some countries. However in war, you are likely not going to see a donkey or a camel being ridden by cavalry, not because it would look silly (that mostly comes from our idea that cavalry ride horses), but rather because horses tend to be very strong and fast runners, which is what you'd look for in a charged attack. Camels may be strong, but they aren't going to want to run fast and donkeys are somewhat low to the ground and so perhaps not ideal for the charge. So my idea is that you would see bulls used. Yes, you heard correctly. Bulls are notoriously hot-headed, but then they are also not used to being ridden. If you raised one from a calf, treated him properly and gave him proper training, you'd have yourself a very strong and very fast war horse with horns. Consider also that horses have had centuries of domestication. If bulls had been domesticated over centuries, I don't doubt that they would be no more difficult to ride than stallion horses are now (which is to say, difficult, but not impossible). And while bulls would make a solid pick for charging into battle, if we're going to try to make this interesting, then [this is relevant](http://images.cryhavok.org/d/3192-2/Bear+Cavalry.jpg). [Answer] You have a few options. * **Bovins [[sic, of tribe Bovini]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovini):** As Neil said, these could be a good choice, potentially. Though more used to a heavier fighting build than a cursorial one ideal for riding, bovins nonetheless have plenty of stamina themselves and lankier, energetic breeds can definitely form. The importance of cattle rivals that of horses in terms of transport value. They've definitely shown their worth in the ability to carry goods, pull loads and power farm or siege equipment. As for riding, Longhorns are becoming popular riding animals in Texas: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/UrfAQ.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/UrfAQ.jpg) In a combat situation, I'd do away with the horns. A war steer could benefit from some kind of helmet, but horns can get stuck and become lassoed. They're cool, but a liability. Breed them out or poll them. Being ruminants, they can also more efficiently process their food. Very economical. I think this would be the default. * **Large antelope:** Elands, kudus, etc. You can get the 'battle readiness' and ruminant ability of a bovin with the stamina and agility of a horse. Good mix. Elands and other antelope are often bred in captivity, and elands are even farmed in some places. Quite amenable to taming in real life, though I'm not sure how much leeway we're allowed. * **Large deer:** Elk, reindeer, *Megaloceros* etc. Similar advantages to the bovids above. Something about deer makes them incredibly strong; even whitetail are said by the people who physically caught them to be almost as strong as a horse, though that's anecdotal. Reindeer are nowhere near the size of horses but are capable of carrying riders and pulling sleds at up to 50 mph for great distances. Though their wild forms are often skittish, they seem to be very quick to acclamate to humans from the amount of deer parks throughout the world, not to mention pet deer. Elk are farmed today. They also have a different interspecies combat style: whereas bovids charge and back away, deer continually press forward and lock antlers until the other gives up. This can be an advantage or disadvantage depending on what you want, but many combat riders may be using females anyway to limit liability. * **Camelids:** Camelids are incredibly valuable transport animals. Their sure-footedness over some crazy terrain and carrying strength actually negates the benefits of the wheel in some places, where old Persian roads began to fall in disrepair after the adoption of the camel. They are *insanely* adaptable, especially Bactrian camels which are very close to being all-weather animals. Though camels are immensely strong and efficient travelers, they lag behind ever so slightly on the war front. Camels are slightly slower overall, slower to accelerate and are less agile. Their higher center of gravity won't make for fun turns, and it's less convenient for mowing down ground troops on account of their size. The biggest advantage of the war camel was its negative effect on horses, which is a moot point in this world. There are probably some smaller camel species, but I only know of two llamas that may fit the bill. *Hemiauchenia* and *Palaeolama* reached 400 and 300 kg respectively, and the latter is just under the minimum weight range of ancestral horses but still workable. * **Extinct Giraffids:** Unfortunately, the problem with extinct animals is it's very hard to gauge how prolific they may have been or what their social structure was. Extant giraffes take four years to mature and have small, loose herds; okapi have essentially no social structure to speak of but take between 1.5 and 2 years (faster for females) to mature. Both rates are relatively impressive for their size, so we may not need to worry about slow growth rates. Domestic giraffids would, in my opinion, make a great addition to anyone's world - depending on how hard you want this science, you can probably handwave a herd structure in to make them suitable horse substitutes (though they seem to compete with cattle and camels just as well on their own as draft animals). Most of these went extinct in the Miocene (save for *Sivatherium* which died out in the late Pleistocene), but that too can be handwaved if the author is willing. Of these, *Helladotherium*, *Palaeotragus*, *Samotherium*, *Shansitherium* and *Bramatherium* have sizes and weights comparable to riding horses (organized from the lightest, 250 kg, to the heaviest, 450 kg for the smaller *B. perimense*). *Paleotragus* seems to be the most well-rounded for the 'horse' niche, but any of these could have horse-built breeds when domesticated. The first three are all more or less common throughout the Old World and *Bramatherium* ranged from Turkey to India, so in this hypothetical timeline where one of them survives there's a chance they may find it into human captivity. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/JlN7m.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/JlN7m.jpg) And should you decide to create a world where no transport animals exist, there's always the potential for more exotic alternatives... [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8J7et.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8J7et.jpg) [Answer] Some ancient civilizations used **elephants** like [Carthage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthage). If there had not been horses, Carthage would have extended the use of North African Elephants to others areas or countries like the Roman Empire. Elephants may be only used for war because the maintenance of one of them would be very expensive for a regular farmer. In medieval age, they may have easily ground up hundred of soldiers. And after the discovery of gunpowder, elephants may have a carried cannons on their backs. More information [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_elephant) [Answer] As a personal mount, Camel seems a good choice. Maybe people would simply focus more on running as in ancient Greece. As a reminder, they were using runners as courier because, on long distance and uneven ground, men are faster than horses. On more leveled ground, you could imagine that bicycles or scooters were invented earlier. After all, if you ignore snobism, a scooter is a rather efficient thing. As an animal to tow a car, it would be big dogs, bulls or elephants (from the more docile to the wilder). Or men. If you want to focus on the surprising substitution, Elephants, Camel or giant kites are good ideas. But the reality as analysed by an economist would simply be that human have to work more. [Answer] SHEEP, not necessarily a baaaad option. Yes, a large domestic sheep can carry a person. I had the unenviable task of firmly gripping a sheep's collar while straddling it just behind the front legs. Another person was giving vaccinations further aft. The ram was the largest. My feet barely touched the ground. He was quite docile, since he'd been raised in a petting zoo. Evidently, he didn't like the injection and I was taken for a sheep ride. Thankfully he gave up after about 10 meters. Start with a bigger varity of sheep, put in a few dozen generations of selective breeding, and then we'll all be able to join the sheep cavalry. :-) ]
[Question] [ **Closed**. This question needs to be more [focused](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers. --- **Want to improve this question?** Update the question so it focuses on one problem only by [editing this post](/posts/12754/edit). Closed 6 years ago. [Improve this question](/posts/12754/edit) What would today's world be like if dinosaurs had somehow survived? To give you a better grasp, if human society had grown up among dinosaurs what might be the effects on our scientific and religious customs as well as our technological development assuming all known major dinosaur species still somehow walked the earth? [Answer] If dinosaurs were still around today, I suspect they would look far different than what our current image of them is. The atmosphere has changed heavily and it's no longer possible to get quite the level of giantism that more classical forms of dinosaurs eventually reached. I suspect they'd be considerably smaller, and probably much more agile. Other note here is that the dinosaurs wouldn't have had to overcome a single extinction event...that would have had to overcome several and each one of these events would shape their evolution. The Pleistocene era had several ice age related extinctions that saw several large mammalian species go extinct (repeat occurences, most recent may have only been 10k years ago). There are also several volcanic events such as the toba catastrophe 70k years ago that almost finished off humanity and brought the Earth into a 1000 year cooling period. There is very little chance of a large dinosaur surviving this event. 640k years ago, the yellowstone super volcano would have impacted them as well This likely means the classical dino that we know would never have made it to current day even if the asteroid impact that claimed them never occured. Most likely we would see a similiar trend with dino's as we saw with mammals as smaller more versatile creatures become more dominant as the large ones die off. This is probably a good time to point out birds are exactly this...an evolution of the dinosaurai clade. Humans are quite likely responsible for a few extinctions early in our history...the Cave bear and the sort found themselves in direct competition for caves and other natural shelters, and we won that battle. Any large dinosaur that saw itself in competition with humans would have died off pretty early in our human history. With all that said..."scientific and religious customs as well as our technological development" is the question, and I think the answer is no more than the wooly mammoth did. The old tribes that depended on them would have them at the core of our beleifs, but as they died off we'd forget them to history. [Answer] Theropods are still with us. You just don't recognise them as being related to T-Rex because we grew up with reconstructions that look like lizards and walk like godzilla. A T-Rex hatchling actually looks like a chicken. Had the similarity been known up front, you'd say that the world was filled with huge scary birds. The period of gigantism resulted from the needs of herbavoirs grazing on low-quality food, predators growing to match, and a resulting arms race. They were over-specialized and the iconic dinosaurs were in decline due to habitat change, and obsolecence due to the continued evolution of *plants*. Today we have cows that graze on grass because grass is available, and eating pine trees is just unnecessary work. They would be out-competed by new waves of smaller beasts. The K-T impact event cleared things out to allow *adaptive radiation* to fill the niches with new more advanced species. All birds today are decended from a small population of wading shore birds. If that didn't happen, replacement would be more gradual with less extreme changes over a short time. We would still have more kinds of birds, but decended from those that were wiped out in the K-T impact, instead of huge differences newly minted from recent ancestors: I'm thinking of ["opposite birds"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enantiornithes) and other deeper skellital differences, more kinds of lung anatomy, flightless birds with teeth, etc. *more different* from having longer separate history, *less different* from having to repopulate all niches with the first-arrived having free reign to establish the niche rather than compete with what's already there. What about Saurapods? Obsolete metabolism in light of new plants, so they might still be around as wood-eating fermenting vats since they have a food source the new guys ignore. They might evolve into the kind of digestive system used by cows, and take that niche with no opening for mammals which need more changing to get there. I expect that sauropods and therapods would fill the niches that mammals do today. Today we have lions and gazelle having a common ancestor 65 million years back, and are very similar with differences bolted on to a common plan. In the alternate history, preditor and prey would be rather different kinds of animals, that diverged hundreds of millions of years ago and before establishing separarely the underlying plans; e.g. warm-bloodedness would work differently in each, the skin coverings (feathers vs ??) different, the way joints are arranged could be more different than among all mammals. The sauropods, turning into cows and goats, would become a type not known to us, just as birds are different from mammals. They may evolve away from their herbavouious ancesstory to become widely varied; after all little shrews became all mammal varieties in our timeline. However in becoming more compact and warm blooded they would evolve a *different* skin covering just as feathers are different from hair. What might that be, that can serve initially as insulation and protection and (like down turning into rigid light structures) turn into something we never imagined for uses we never dreamed about. Look at how "weird" the population of Australia's ecological niches are. Mammals that are different from dominant placentals, but still mammels and not *that* different. Think anout forms that are really more different, converging on the same ideas to fill a niche but vastly different in detail as penguins are from dolphins. Even without an impact event clearing the slate, there was agency for diversity to appear as contenants pulled apart. In the heyday of dinos, all land was one place, and mostly desert in the interior. Like Australia is different due to isolated development, the raising of barriers to separate the contenents was already starting to cause differences to appear between newly separated land masses. The oft-repeated idea of a lizard-man (in place of homonids) is wrong. They would be bird-men, not green-skinned bare-skinned lizards. Or, the new liniage that came from sauropods might take that form, and instead of hair or feathers it would be *something*. (Aside: bird-men would not necessarily come from what we thknk of birds today, with forelimbs modified into wings that have prooven dead-ends for returning to grasping and reaching. Therapods that did not become modern birds would have more variety and a different line, with velociraptor arms, could continue as well). Considering that he complete evolution of feathers is seen in therapods *before* the available light rigid planks were used for wings, we might see such structural feathers used for other things, and evolve further in other directions that are not stressing lightness. I hope that's food for thought. I'd love to see what undreamedof forms might be thought up by modern writers. [Answer] Not much different from today. During prehistory, mankind has exterminated or almost exterminated many threatening species -- mammoth and plenty of predators. If there was a T-Rex around in 50,000 B.C., mankind would have done something about it by 5,000 B.C. The only alternative is that those dinos managed to exterminate the early primates. On the long run, tools and language beat sharp teeth and tiny brains. [Answer] I would say that the dinosaurs would be ruling the planet. They were becoming more intelligent near the end and another 63 million years, would have given them one heck of a head start on intelligent mammals. I suspect that mammals would be pets of intelligent space faring dinosaurs, though with that much time, they could have left the Earth and we could have evolved after that... ]
[Question] [ Lets just assume I want a Hollow earth, similar to movies like the Monsterverse, etc, but without the plant/animal life. what changes does earth's structure or physics require for that? Around the core is preferred, but a hollow pocket works too Clarifying the details * 100 million cubic meters, like triple the largest cave on earth, at least 10 miles tall [Answer] ## A little adamantium and you're fine Planets are not hollow because of gravity. You can't mess with gravity without causing major problems (1). Therefore you need a nearly infinitely strong material that can resist earth's gravity at earthlike size. Just as a hollow steel ball does not collapse from gravity, nor does your planet. I believe Larry Niven had the main structure of the Ringworld made out of such a material. As in many things, he anticipated my great ideas and shamelessly stole them from the future, the cad. (1) Maybe someone can figure out if it could be suspended just at one distance range in a semicoherent manner?. [Answer] Honestly this requires so much hadwavium, that you could probably make it more plausible by having an anti-singularity inside your planet. A "white hole" in the relativistic sense, that bends space-time outwards rather than inwards. You could then have the crust of your planet of arbitrary thickness, of any (including earth-like) material. If you want to scify technobabble: A sphere of [Dark fluid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_fluid) smashed at high speed into a still forming giant rocky planet, blowing some of it away but stopping at an approximate center of now expanding cloud of hot mass. While some of the mass had an escape velocity, the remainder of the spinning cloud began to collapse towards there center where the sphere of negative mass was locked due to approximate uniformity of the surrounding mass. at certain distance the gravity of the cloud and the anti gravity of the white hole matched, forming a "hollow" sphere that contained the dark fluid in the center. I used dark fluid, because of its theoretical association with negative mass, feel free to replace it with any other exotic material. [Answer] ## unobtanium shell [As AncientGiantPottedPlant correctly observed,](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/246968/25822) you need a shell form some strane material that prevents the hollow earth from collapsing and forming an ordinary planet. The material properties are impossible with normal matter, but as a writer you can call it "unobtanium" or something similar. ## *some* kind of magic downforce Let me give you a classic example of Physics 101: Calculate the gravitational pull inside a hollow sphere. The result will shock you: [**it's 0**](https://phys.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/University_Physics/Book%3A_Physics_(Boundless)/5%3A_Uniform_Circular_Motion_and_Gravitation/5.5%3A_Newtons_Law_of_Universal_Gravitation#:%7E:text=The%20gravitational%20force%20on%20an,center%20of%20mass%20(COM).). Inside a hollow sphere there *is no gravity* that keeps you on the outside. To be even on the surface, you need some *strange thing* that in the center pushes away any matter against the inner surface of the sphere-shell. ## Alteration: Cylinder World spinning! To stay on the outside there is a physics solution that works within the confines of normal physics: a cylinder that is spinning along its axis can create the *appearance* of gravity. Note that it is actually the effective force from you changing the vector all the time, often summarized as the [Centrifugal Force](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/centrifugal-force#:%7E:text=Centrifugal%20force%20is%20the%20apparent,the%20system%20is%20not%20rotating.). Also, note that the edges of Cylinderworld do experience a gravitational effect to the plane that halves the cylinder, so only a distinct area around the central plane will be habitable at all with no gravitation. The cylinder spinning *also* helps with stabilizing the structure. If you use a tube on the cylinder, you create a spinning torus, aka [Ringworld](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld) [Answer] **Negative gravity** What you need is a negative gravity generator. Put one in the middle of your planet. it creates a negative gravity field that prevents the planet collapsing under its own weight. Of course, conservation of gravity requires the removed gravity to go somewhere. The result is that the planet appears heavier from outside. So people on the surface feel heavier, and the moon gets closer. Oh, and everyone inside is weightless. Don't forget the weightlessness. ]
[Question] [ Sometimes, a person might wish to know the touch scale of a map, whether made by another person or you, in order to better understand the world a story is taking place. How might one go about deducing the size and scale of a map from the map itself and any information provided by the author or source material? To be clear, I'm asking if there is any known set of "rules" or general advice for doing this. Common sense sort of stuff and where I should look. For example, I am currently taking study of the map of the Southern Kingdoms from the book series Guardians of Ga'Hoole by Kathryn Lasky. The scale seems built-in, but I am unsure of where to begin the figure that at, such as knowing what in the real world it can be compared to. (I'm not trying to make anyone do it for me, just trying to gather information on how I can do it as well as more maps in the future). [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/yiSsh.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/yiSsh.png) [Answer] Travel time. Mostly maps for the books are made because position and size of various regions matters to the story. Let's say a hero travels by foot from town A to town B following specific path on the map. There is a description of the journey, so you may know how fast he traveled and how long it took. Make the estimates, it will give you an upper and lower bound for map scale. If here are multiple travels, you can adjust the scale accordingly. Sometimes the book just says something like "town X is 3 days from the capital by coach" or "troops from Y will arrive to Z in a week". Guardians of Ga'Hoole is about owls. They fly. Same logic applies, except you don't have to worry about the roads. Read about owls, find out their speed range, multiply it by travel time - you have an approximate map distance between A and B. It is rough, but it's not like precision matters much. Consistency is not the main priority in world building for fantasy books, it's more about story and characters. [Answer] Look for the market towns in populated agricultural areas. Since everyone needs to be within a day’s travel of market, those towns should be around 15 to 20 miles apart, as they are in Europe. This method will show that many fantasy maps, e.g. Westeros, are far smaller than measurements derived from other methods, but that’s because the author has created an inconsistent world. [Answer] Without an explicit scale length or descriptions from the text, you're limited to comparison with real-world topography and extremely rough estimates. These will vary substantially dependent on: * The details of the world being described, including technological level and climate. * How familiar the author / mapmaker is with real-world geography and whether they felt the need to make their world consistent. It's entirely possible, even *likely* that the "hard-science" tag you've placed implies more research & consistency than was intended when the map was made. * Whether the map is intended to be an accurate 2D projection of the world, or whether it's more intended to be a notional / somewhat abstract guide like [many real-world pre-15th-century maps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_world_maps). For instance, in this map: * you have an inland sea / lake in the north with rivers at both the inflow- and outflow-. There are also several lakes / inland seas with outflowing rivers. Look up the dimensions and [total surface area of the Great Lakes in North America](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes). Those have rivers at both inflow and outflow, rather than having extended bays or gulfs, so might be good analogs for what's depicted. Larger bodies of water will presumably be connected by channels or will be entirely separate (like the Dead Sea). Smaller bodies of water would presumably not be drawn at all, or be subsumed into the single-pixel-width rivers. * This map has no obvious polar regions or distortions due to a curved spherical surface, so either the world is very different from ours, or you're looking at a region with dimensions much less than that of the Earth. Comparison with real-world continents should set some upper limits on the scale. (Well, the "Ice Narrows" sounds like it might be at a similar latitude to Scandinavia, and the "Desert of Kuneer" sounds like a notional reference to Arabia, so the north-south distance on this map *might* be comparable to Europe.) * The rivers are as narrow as the map-maker could make them, but have definite lengths. Compare the length and width of the Mississippi or other major continent-scale rivers (the Nile, the Rhine, the Ganges, the Amazon, etc.) and measure the distribution of lengths as best you can in the map. At some point, depending on rainfall and drainage area, rivers would turn into finite-width bays / sounds. Getting an idea of how large rivers tend to be before it's necessary to worry about their width on maps will set a minimum resolution. One pixel on that map is likely a mile or two across, possibly more. If it was significantly less, I'd expect the rivers to have finite width. * Assuming medieval-ish technology, most countries are probably only a few days' or weeks' travel across by horse. Any larger and merchants & soldiers & messengers can't keep the different parts of the kingdom in touch. Loose confederations and empires that take tribute from their subsidiaries but don't directly manage them can be larger. Compare the sizes of your nations with those of real-world countries from a similar technological level. * All of the cities marked on the map seem to be points or fairly small dots, and many countries don't appear to have any at all. Compare the scale of the largest cities from the real-world at a similar time period / tech level. If the people living inside cities have to get fresh vegetables from the countryside via a local market, then the city radius is going to be limited to perhaps a day's travel on foot or by horse-drawn wagon... probably half that or less. Larger regions will require gardens / farms in the middle of the city, making them more like clusters of towns than "cities". Analogous constraints will apply for fresh water supply, drainage of rain, removal of sewage & trash, etc. Cities that are more than a few dozen miles across require significant infrastructure not available before about the 20th century. * You've got several regions marked as "forest" or "desert" or similar. Compare those regions with similarly-uniform concepts in the real world. "Barrens" and "badlands" tend not to be huge. Mountain ranges tend to be dozens- to hundreds- of miles wide and hundreds- to thousands- of miles long. "Forests" and "Deserts" may range from perhaps 50 miles across to continent-scale affairs, but you don't often see rapid transitions *between* forest & desert without a natural barrier (e.g. mountain ranges). Look for such transitions in your map. If the "Desert of Kuneer" and "Forest Kingdom of Tyto" don't have obvious regions for the differences in climate, then the distances between their centers *might* be something on the scale of Texas or larger, with deserts in the west and forests in the east. All this is going to give you an array of estimates, upper limits, and lower limits on the map scale. They may not be consistent. My guess for the given map is that you're looking at something comparable to Europe, but I haven't run any of the numbers, and the original author might've intended something different. [Answer] ## [Trigonometry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigonometry) If the map is accurate at al for overland navigation, it needs to be *somewhat* consistent in two directions, and thus is often some kind of projection that is somewhat good for angles. Now we need exactly **one** length, and everything else can be solved using Tigonometry: $$\sin \alpha = \frac a c\ ;\ \cos \alpha = \frac b c\ ;\ \tan \alpha = \frac a b$$ That's easy to solve for b and c, we just need the angle of one tip and everything starts to solve, and you will learn how long the distance between two more points is, and in the end you can map out the distance between **any two points** by trigonometry. The quality of your calculations is based on three factors though: * your initial length measurement * your ability to measure angles correctly * the quality of the map when it comes to the angles being represented correctly ## The initial length Now, we need to know the initial lenth. How can you estimate that? In general, you can do so from the accompanying text. For example, the rulebooks for the game Legend of the five Rings describe the distance between Kakita Castle and the capital as "a day's ride". That is not very precise, but can be a good starting point. Assuming that is a distance without a horse swap, we're faced with about 10 hours of riding (including a break in the middle), and a horse travels at roughly 3 miles per hour, so the distance is *roughly* 30 miles along roads. If the distance however is meant to be rapidly with horse swaps (like how postal service did!) [a day worth in post riders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_riders) is much further and for example the [Pony Express](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pony_Express) traveled at an average of 12.5 miles per hour for 10 hours, so the two places would be about 120 miles apart, if that is *a day's ride of the pony express*. Similarly, you might know how long it takes a military unit to march from one town to another. The typical, normal marching distance per day for an army that starts day with breaking camp and ends the day with setting up camp can be estimated quite differently. Estimates for the Roman Army swing widely, but typically are claimed between 30 and 40 kilometers, the *typical* average being about 35 km a day - or *about* 21 miles. That measurement can be taken *generally* as a good estimate to calculate distances between towns for any group that is not making extreme haste and is bound to the speed of a marching human. If your predominant species is flying, measurements get much better by the way: they don't need to curve around terrain quite as much and thus the quality of the initial length is **much** better than with any ground based species. You just need to figure out how far they *march* in an average day. For example, the average Stork migrates in average 300 kilometers (~210 miles) per day during migratory season. ]
[Question] [ Now I recently had an idea for a setting and villain backstory and thought might as well get it vetted. Once, there was a mighty Empire that had conquered its home system and converted most of the planets into a habitable Dyson Ring. The other species that shared their system were reduced to slaves and those in charge were planning to expand to other systems. Fortunately, they got the attention of an interstellar species that subscribes to a similar philosophy as the aliens from the original Day The Earth Stood Still. If you want to war, destroy, pillage and do other horrible nasty stuff to fellow sentient beings, you're free to do so, so long as you keep it to your home star system. Try to take it to other star systems, and then we’re gonna have words. So they sent one ship to the Dyson Ring and basically offered a warning: do not expand beyond your star system and there won’t be any problems. Of course, the evil Empire being evil, they just laughed in the emissary's face wondering what the hell such a puny little ship could do to their impressive Dyson Ring. The only response that they received was a solemn, “It didn’t have to be this way.” Then the ship fired a single shot right into the sun. The lucky ones died when atmospheric containment failed and they were exposed to space, others were incinerated by coronal mass ejections that ripped the Dyson Ring apart, others slowly suffocated as life support systems were fried by flares. Some found habitable pockets to cling to life within as the world literally crumbled around them. They thought they could claim the stars as gods, and the true masters of the stars sent a single ship to punish them for their sinful pride. So here is the setting, a shattered Dyson Ring with shards ranging in size from as small as a square mile to as large as a couple of Earths, with the remnants of an evil species ready to attack any space traveler who is unfortunate enough to check out these interstellar ruins. But here is the thing I want to know. As the Expanse demonstrated any artificial ecosystem can be prone to cascade failures that can lead to complete and utter collapse, so once those dominoes start falling there is no stopping it. So once the Ring is shattered, complete and total collapse of the system and the utter extinction of any lifeforms still on board is pretty much guaranteed. But I want to know how long can that inevitable collapse be put off? So my question is this: **After being shattered, how long can a Dyson Ring support the life on it?** [Answer] I'm going to answer your question with a question: "How quickly after hitting an object does a ship sink?" Could be seconds, could be minutes, could be hours, could even stay afloat. The question really is in two parts: 1: How long do I need the Dyson shard to remain habitable for the purposes of my story? and 2: What technologies/design do I need to achieve that? The first thing you need to consider is the design of the Ring - a single continuous Ring wouldn't last long, but a Ring that had a degree of compartmentalization (like a battleship has watertight bulkheads) - now we have the basis for some *degree* of survivability. Next up is redundancy of critical systems - what are the backup systems for our backup system? We need, initially, atmosphere and (potentially) gravity, then heat, water, and food. Let's assume, therefore, that there is a big enough fragment that has within its compartment structure maintained all of those systems, but it's been blasted away from its star. [Here's the estimate of what would happen if our Sun disappeared](https://www.discovery.com/science/What-Would-Happen-If-the-Sun-Disappeared) - which gives an estimate of 2 months for the removal of the atmosphere and radiation from space to kill us all - but we are assuming those still work as above they are artificially created. With enough reserves of power and resources, it's possible a small group on a large fragment could survive for a long time (months to years) - however the longer it goes on, the more the resources dwindle and with no star to replenish them - any small issue is magnified. [Answer] ## Indefinitely, provided there was a prepared place A Dyson ring is quite a complicated device with quite a huge span, all sorts of smaller installations could happen on its surface. In fact, to support life for an indefinite amount of time three things are needed: energy, sealed volume and equipment. Let's assume there is an emergency hideout located on the (inner) side of the Ring, supplied with some solar batteries together with a standalone backup fission or fusion reactor, some adequate shielding from all sides, with abundant resources within, up to a *Biosphere* ready to accommodate inhabitants. When the Sun decided to misbehave (by the way, what level of misbehavior? It's not a supernova, or else everything would get disintegrated, and also not a black hole collapse. Perhaps that ship just caused major disturbance in their sun's upper layers that caused "just" destruction and not eradication, therefore the sun should still shine), the device was armed, some local folks got covered inside, then BAM and a significant piece of the Ring with a probably damaged but functional habitat is torn off. Then after external normalization of the solar activity the habitat's solar panels unfold or get fixed with spare parts, and start providing energy into the sealed environment. This, given the Evil Empire's tech level, could just do for the inner community to eventually raise a Super-Villain, in the meantime they could scavenge other parts of the Ring that might contain deactivated machinery, survivors, minerals, electronics, lost data, etc, that would help that community to eventually rebuild. [Answer] As others have pointed out, a Dyson ring would be built with lots of redundancy. Perhaps like a chain, with every "link" being mostly independent - except for needing the other links to keep the chain intact, in orbit, and properly oriented. So the chain broke. Some links were destroyed then and there. Many survived the explosion, but some parts drifted off to useless orbits. Mass death over hours, days and weeks, as broken or de-obited pieces runs out of air, energy or survivable temperatures. Remaining people live on some twisted piece(s) of "broken chain" in a survivable orbit. But the links are no longer properly facing the star; they have to deal with unusual temperatures and perhaps even migrate seasonally to links with useable orientation. Population may have dropped to a very small fraction of what it once was, but is now stable. Repairing the ring itself may be too much for the survivors, but they might be able to keep what's left working indefinitely. And they would surely remember what they once had, and hate outsiders a lot. [Answer] Frame challenge: It doesn't matter how long people on the individual pieces can survive, they will be killed when the pieces are sucked into the gravity well of the sun/star. This isn't a planet that cracks open, yet the pieces still hang around each other because there's not really any other place to go. It's not even a moon that has a stable orbit and the pieces don't have enough change in direction to impact the plant they orbit. This is something that can't be roughly assumed to be a point mass, because it acts completely different. It would act more like a rubber band around a ball being cut, rather than the rubber ball having a section cut from it. But even the rubber band around a ball isn't a good analogy. A Dyson ring may have some angular momentum if it was rotating around the star, due to it needing some way to help maintain a stable position. With this motion, some pieces may be flung away from the star and some pieces may be flung directly into it (or near enough) so that it melts and is destroyed. A Dyson ring may not need to be rotating around the sun, so now you have pieces of debris that are relatively stationary to the star. Even if pieces were flung away from the star, they will still be drawn back into the star because it's a huge mass and pulls things into it. The only reason planets, comets, and other natural debris isn't pulled into it is because they are moving at the correct speed and angle to avoid the star. Going the wrong speed or at the wrong angle, and the star adds more mass to itself. The likelihood of a piece being ejected from a destroyed Dyson ring at the correct speed and angle to achieve orbit is nil. The likelihood of a piece being ejected from a destroyed Dyson ring at the correct speed and angle to achieve escape velocity is even less. The best you can do is to send a rescue to each section/piece in order of how desperate and how likely they are to die soon. So this isn't just about individual sections supporting life, it's also about [triage](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/triage) of who can survive to be rescued and what order they need to be rescued in. Some of these pieces may not be pulled into the star for days, weeks, months, or possibly years, so yes, you still need to decide if those pieces remain habitable and for how long. But they will all be destroyed by the atomic fires of the star they once surrounded. I realize this significantly changes your story, because now you have to decide if there's a civilization that wants to do the rescue, if this civilization has the ability to perform it's own rescue, if the interstellar community watches this evil civilization disappear with a sigh of "good riddance", or some other outcome. **Edit:** I didn't explicitly say it before, but I'm making the assumption that simply getting near the star is enough for the debris to burn up to a point on inhabitability. I will admit that I didn't realize that the "no-go" volume around a star was so large, but it kind of makes this answer a little more on point. Current human technology lets us get within about [3.83 million miles](https://science.howstuffworks.com/how-close-can-get-to-sun.htm) to the surface of our sun before it gets too hot. I'm assuming that a civilization capable of creating a Dyson ring isn't making one ~12 million miles in circumference. That said, whatever material they are making the skin of the ring out of, I'm assuming they aren't making the interior in that same material, so any broken ends not protected by bulkhead doors will be incinerated. Also, only a fairly sizeable section (FSS) of ring debris could be assumed to have enough self-sustainment equipment to maintain a livable atmosphere in the extreme conditions around a star. (What "fairly sizeable section" means is definitely subject to interpretation.) One issue with these FSS is that they will have enough mass that maintaining the current orbit or finding a different stable orbit will be next to impossible being that close to the star. I'd have to assume that maintaining orbit of even a moving ring would be considerably different than maintaining orbit of an individual piece. So it would also have to be assumed that this FSS would also have maneuvering thruster(s) to even have a chance of not being pulled into the star. Not only that, but the thrusters would have to be in the correct position and orientation to be able to put thrust in the correct direction to push the FSS into a stable orbit. And now we finally have to worry if there's enough reaction mass for the thrusters to even matter. Given all that, we still have to worry if the thrusters are capable of producing enough thrust, producing that thrust long enough while not going beyond expected usage, and if the FSS is structurally sound enough to survive the firing procedures. Another issue is that we can safely assume that even these FSS aren't 100% self-sufficient in that they will eventually have to bring in more air, food, repair parts, etc. Granted, they may be able to harvest some of this from the plasma around the star and use the energy from the star to extend their lifetime, but they will still likely run out of something they need, eventually. So, if the FSS doesn't also include some sort of ship, manufacturing center, facilities to harvest plasma, and more, survivors of the initial disaster will not be able to survive indefinitely. Granted, this isn't part of the issue of falling into the star, but it's still a significant issue of survivability. ]
[Question] [ Being 'scooped up' for military research - or being a creation of military research - has been a common trope of movies and TV for many years. However, in most western nations, if not most nations around the world, undertaking research on unwilling human subjects is illegal. In my world, around nineteen years ago, [humantaurs](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/241051/75) began to appear at a rate of 1 in 100,000 births. Eighteen years ago, an entire mountain appeared in Port Philip Bay off Melbourne at dawn and disappeared again the following midnight, and began appearing in other places around the world on a semi-regular basis. It was filled with all sorts of strange people alongside normal humans. The modern world began to become aware of magical realms in which other different humans and maybe-not-humans lived. There were satyrs and fauns seemingly from classical mythology, unicorns, lamias with serpentine tails, water-breathing merfolk. Elves, gnomes, pixies and faeries that range down from four feet to four inches tall, and the faeries have wings and can fly. Fire-breathing flying wyrms. Dryads, oreads and nereids. Flying lilim with wings... they're all apparently just varieties of humans whom we didn't know existed, and all are able to interbreed and produce viable offspring. There are even centaurs, bostaurs (cattle centaurs), cervitaurs (deer centaurs), dverge and svart-alfar, who might not be human at all. All of these peoples have human levels of intelligence, and the ability to communicate and insist upon their human rights. So, considering that we start off with our modern-day society here on Earth, just how likely is it that some of these people might be 'scooped up for military research' when they begin to appear, i.e. kidnapped off the street or someplace else, tossed in a van and carted off to a secret research facility to be experimented upon against their will by some corporation or government, or some similar non-consensual variation thereof, how likely would it be to be revealed to the general public, and what might the legal, social and political consequences of such non-consensual research be if it happened at all? I do *not* count researchers advertising for volunteer test subjects, paying them for their time, and allowing them to leave if they wish to mean that the subjects were 'scooped up for military research'. The relationship between test subject and researcher *must* be non-consensual to be the subject of this question. [Answer] 100% realistic. There is little doubt that it actually happens. Example: James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen ran a company being paid $81 million by the CIA for pseudoscience/torture. Example: [Prisoners being used to test weapons on them in 2010](http://www.democracynow.org/2010/8/23/headlines/california_jail_to_test_ray_gun_on_prisoners) And that's just the stuff we've heard about. God knows what goes on in black sites, Guantanamo, Xinjiang, etc. The crux of your doubt seems to be that it's "illegal". But it's not unrealistic that illegal things are done. [Answer] **'Scooped up' sounds so sinister ...** Think of them as *undocumented immigrants* who are *obviously* suffering from some serious *medical conditions.* If they can speak English, their answers indicate that they are *in denial* about their strange condition. A country might decide that, for their own good, these people need to get into medical care. Which starts with determining the underlying cause of the strange condition. The louder they protest, the more obvious that they are not sane. Meanwhile ACLU stands on one side and files briefs that Fauns *totally are people, too,* while on the other side the MAGA gang thinks that illegal *inhuman* immigrants have even fewer human rights than illegal *human* immigrants. Think back to the early days of the Corona pandemic. Governments in the West were dusting off little-used emergency laws and regulations, and citizens who were ignorant of what is on the books became indignant at these restrictions of their personal self-fulfillment. It took months or years for courts to decide if a specific mask mandate, a vaccination mandate, a lockdown was appropriate at that time and place. Meanwhile the debate *also* became a stand-in for general pro- and anti-government stances. Over the years, things would hopefully regularize. Perhaps there is some UN resolution that **human** rights apply to ***almost* human** people, too. But UN resolutions are not binding law. There might have to be a constitutional amendment in the US if hold-out states bicker, like the [14th amendment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution) to clarify that skin color does not preclude citizenship. Or there are supreme court decisions. If the EU is true to form, there would be sweeping announcements followed by interminable wrangling over the details. More autocratic regimes would be worse. Can you imagine what [North Korea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbun) would do to one of your centaurs? The consequences of the revelation would differ from country to country and depending on the intrusiveness/destructiveness of the research. Consider how the US and the world reacted [CIA black detention program](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_black_sites). Loud protests from people who deeply care about human rights, but many shrugged it off as 'they're terrorists, they had it coming.' Even if a few individuals were innocent, and many cases could not be proven to the standards of US law. One thing where I'm unsure is the religious angle. A faun, in particular, looks rather like a *devil*. Significant parts of Western society are religious in name only (going to the Christmas services with the little children, but not true believers). Others have a very non-literal interpretation of the Bible, with Noah's flood or the Garden of Eden as metaphors to convey moral teachings. Yet there are those who hold the Bible to be **literal truth**. And magical creatues might run afoul of Exodus 22:18. [Answer] **At this point? It's unlikely.** Because they've already been among us for *18 years*. That's about the length of the heroic age of any new scientific endeavor, really, the period in which it's the *big new thing* that everyone has to get into. And yes, in those early years, it was quite hazardous to show your face as a centaur or a faun or whatever, with everyone and their dog(-person) hopping on the bandwagon to study the new arrivals. Even among legitimate organizations, there was tremendous pressure to produce test subjects by whatever means were expedient. But now, they're a known factor. The literature has been written. You don't need to test a pixie's lifting strength or a centaur's anatomy, or whether svartalves have the same type of pain reflexes as humans, or how hot a wyrm's fire gets if it *really* tries. The major research has been done, and redone, and collated into books that are sitting on your lab shelf gathering dust. Not only that, they've figured out the degree to which you can use ordinary humans as proxies for supernaturals, the same way we use animals as proxies for humans now. Maybe an elven immune system isn't *exactly* the same as a human one, but you know that if you're looking for a booster shot against a disease it's close enough. Maybe if it passes human trials, you'll have the budget to try it on a couple elves, if it's worth the bother. For most ongoing research, given the rarity of this supernatural life on the one hand, and the extreme commonness of plain ordinary humans on the other, there's a strong incentive to use the latter if you can. If you can't, you're going to have to talk to your *very skeptical* director and explain what exactly needs such a huge expense. (That goes doubly if you have to get them illegally, of course. It should go without saying that deniable mercenary teams aren't cheap!) There just aren't that many questions that are still unanswered *and* are important enough to demand answers *and* can't be adequately explored by human (or animal) models to make it worthwhile. [Answer] I guarantee that they'd be scooped up and studied. Starting with the idea of illegal immigration, invasive species, and a possible invasion, the military would apply a high level "need to know" priority on all things involved. The problem is that the world currently has a pretty impressive surveillance state. Anything that's even vaguely interesting looking can be found somewhere on the internet. The military might get lucky and be in the right place to scoop something up before anyone else notices, but if these appearances are widespread, it's only time before some of them go viral. Would the military do a snatch and grab? I think that a lot of people would want to get their hands on a sample. Pharmaceutical company owners would probably kill for one if they were in short supply. It would be quite the bull market until the market got glutted. Some people would definitely be in a fury to eliminate them, because that kind of conviction and certainty feels really good with a side of abject panic. [Answer] So, as a different answer to those already provided: Who says they have to be scooped up? Think of both the Cosmetic and Medical fields that partake in Student testing. Find someone who could benefit from a lump-sum of $$$, offer to pay them - do experiments - job done. There's many ways to 'legally' do something 'immoral', so long as you can (mostly) claim it was done with prior consent and it was done without coercion. And so long as the deception isn't obvious enough to be proved in court, the entity doing the tests walks away without conviction and the cycle keeps happening. [Answer] > > In my world, around nineteen years ago, humantaurs began to appear at a rate of 1 in 100,000 births. > > > That's fairly common, really. There would be thousands in my country by now. I think it would depend how society interprets it. Is this a weird, naturally occurring mutation or something? Or could we come to believe that for a while? Do the parents of the first few born this way, get all sorts of tests done at the hospital and a public discussion happens? If yes, we may come to view them like regular people, and in some places they would probably have legal rights to not be experimented on. Though that doesn't always stop governments. > > Eighteen years ago, an entire mountain appeared in Port Philip Bay off Melbourne at dawn and disappeared again the following midnight > > > Now, that's different. It would probably be interpreted as an unknowable threat. Aliens arriving silently arriving in orbit and hovering there might be an analogy. I would imagine that the various [three-letter agencies](https://wiki.c2.com/?ThreeLetterAgencies) would totally flip out. Even if the law prohibits them, at least some of them would go rogue. Just about anything that would potentially let them learn more about it, could be justified in their eyes. If the existence of the state and society itself is thought to be under threat, sometimes even polite and usually rights-respecting governments will make people disappear. There are many real historical examples of human experimentation, as well as secret kidnappings and disappearances to extract information. ]
[Question] [ I'm working on a setting in which exists this cabbal of forgers that can work metal with the power of their mind in secret rituals that no man outside their circle can even imagine. They are known for creating strong and marvellous metals, like bronze and steel, and other much more misterious and expensive, like the *selenite*, a strong metal of a beautiful pale blue color. Now, these guys embelish and create these legends about their work so they can appear as powerful mages able to create super-metals, but in reality they are just good at creating high quality alloys and add some nice color to them so it can look more miche and unique. My question is, what metals should they use to obtain a metal like the *selenite*? Such metal should be: * As strong, tough and flexible as high-quality steel (even more so, although I believe that's not really feasable). * It needs to have a pale blue color, and it can't be added as a coating. * It needs to be fit for sword crafting. * In a perfect world this metal would be also pretty light, but I guess I'm starting to ask for too much, so I'm willing to sacrifice this point and even accept it being slightly heavier than steel. Maybe an alloy of iron, carbon and some cobalt could do the trick? Is it even possible to have such metal? [Answer] ## Blue steel is a real thing Blue Steel is a steel alloy containing Iron, Carbon, Tungsten, and Chromium sometimes used in specialty knife and sword manufacturing. When properly tempered, it has a superior toughness, spring, and edge retention to carbon steels of similar hardness. [T10 steel](https://www.theworldmaterial.com/t10-tool-steel/) is an example that's well known for making premium sword blades. The blueness of blue steel is only slight in most cases. The causal observer may not notice the color difference at a glance, but it is pretty apparent when you see the two alloys next to each other. That said, just like a jeweler knows right away if he's looking at a diamond or a cubic zirconium, sword experts in your setting will immediately recognize the faint blue tint of a blue steel blade without needing a reference point. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/3ncTJ.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/3ncTJ.jpg). **Side Notes:** * Blue steel is distinctly different from Blued steel. Blued steel is a surface process to color the steel blue. Blue steel is an actual bluish alloy. * Blue steel may not be an ideal steel for every type of sword. Every example of blue steel that I can find has a relatively high hardness. This may make it too hard to be a good choice for something long and skinny like a longsword or rapier, and would likely chip on a hard impact. Such swords are best made out of softer medium carbon steels. But for a shorter, broader, or more curved style of sword like a Katana, Gladius, Cutlass, Scimitar, etc. it should perform extraordinarily well. [Answer] Cobalt won't do it: metallic cobalt is silver-grey and cobalt blue is CoAl2O4, which is non-metallic. There aren't any naturally blue metals or alloys that I can find which are remotely suitable for swords. "[Blue gold](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colored_gold#Blue_gold)" can be made as an alloy of gold with either gallium or indium. It will be far too heavy and soft for swords. You seem to be stuck with surface treatments or coatings. Ordinary [blued steel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluing_(steel)) is far too ordinary. If your secret craftsmen have access to titanium and electricity, then it's possible to produce some very nice blues with [anodised titanium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anodizing#Titanium). [Answer] [Case hardening](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case-hardening) hardens the surface of steel and leaves the inner parts softer, and more importantly discolours the surface of the metal. In real world the the result is rainbow colours in unpredictable patterns. The cabal's secret methods give them perfect control of the temperature and chemistry of the process, which makes their swords both stronger and gives them one solid colour. [Answer] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempering_(metallurgy)> [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0eBL8.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0eBL8.jpg) Depending on the temperature steel was heated it gets a different coloration. If steel has been freshly ground, sanded, or polished, it will form an oxide layer on its surface when heated. As the temperature of the steel is increased, the thickness of the iron oxide will also increase. Although iron oxide is not normally transparent, such thin layers do allow light to pass through, reflecting off both the upper and lower surfaces of the layer. This causes a phenomenon called thin-film interference, which produces colors on the surface. As the thickness of this layer increases with temperature, it causes the colors to change from a very light yellow, to brown, then purple, then blue. These colors appear at very precise temperatures, and provide the blacksmith with a very accurate gauge for measuring the temperature. The various colors, their corresponding temperatures, and some of their uses are: ``` Faint-yellow – 176 °C (349 °F) – gravers, razors, scrapers Light-straw – 205 °C (401 °F) – rock drills, reamers, metal-cutting saws Dark-straw – 226 °C (439 °F) – scribers, planer blades Brown – 260 °C (500 °F) – taps, dies, drill bits, hammers, cold chisels Purple – 282 °C (540 °F) – surgical tools, punches, stone carving tools Dark blue – 310 °C (590 °F) – screwdrivers, wrenches Light blue – 337 °C (639 °F) – springs, wood-cutting saws Grey-blue – 371 °C (700 °F) and higher – structural steel ``` Beyond the grey-blue color, the iron oxide loses its transparency, and the temperature can no longer be judged in this way. The layer will also increase in thickness as time passes, which is another reason overheating and immediate cooling is used. Steel in a tempering oven, held at 205 °C (401 °F) for a long time, will begin to turn brown, purple or blue, even though the temperature did not exceed that needed to produce a light-straw color. Oxidizing or carburizing heat sources may also affect the final result. The iron oxide layer, unlike rust, also protects the steel from corrosion through passivation. ]
[Question] [ Fiction is filled with examples of tanks with multiple main weapons, from Command and Conquer's [Mammoth](https://cnc.fandom.com/wiki/Mammoth_Tank_(Tiberian_Dawn)) to Warhammer 40,000's [Baneblade](https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Baneblade) to World of Tanks's [IS-2-II](https://wiki.wargaming.net/en/Tank:R170_IS_2_II) (although the IS-2-II was based on a set of real-life designs, it ultimately only took to the battlefield in a video game). Ultimately, the closest we got to this in real life was the Nazi Germany-built [Maus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panzer_VIII_Maus) superheavy tank, whose primary armament was a 128-millimeter anti-tank gun and whose secondary armament was a 75-millimeter infantry support cannon. But why? Other than for the sake of the fact that they look cool, why would somebody design a tank with either multiple main weapons a main weapon with multiple barrels? Are there tactical or technological reasons for why such a thing would be designed? [Answer] **It might no longer be a tank as we know it. Or perhaps it would ...** Look at the [M2 Bradley IFV](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M2_Bradley). It is armed with TOW missiles against tanks, an autocannon against light armored vehicles, a coaxial MG against troops, and originally firing ports for small arms against troops. Critics complained that it was a jack of all trades and master of none. By comparison, the [M1 Abrams MBT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1_Abrams) has a main gun against enemy tanks *and other distant, relatively large targets*, a coaxial MG against troops, and a pintle-mounted MG against troops and some air targets. (Modernization added/changed the secondaries.) The [Merkava](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkava) has more MGs and a smallish mortar. For the IFV, the different target characteristics caused two different "main guns" -- the TOW against a few very hard targets, the autocannon against medium-hard, more numerous targets. The MBT added different main gun ammunition instead of a different main gun. Historically, tanks were **anti-infantry and anti-artillery** weapons, not anti-tank weapons, while anti-tank was left to other systems (tank destroyers, towed anti-tank guns ...). They all retain this role to various degrees. So you would need a situation where the two roles -- fighting tanks and fighting less hard targets -- are better served by different weapons systems on the tank, not by different ammunition for one weapon or by different, complementary vehicle families. * Railguns become viable. They are optimized for firing hypervelocity, low-caliber, high-density penetrators (like [APFSDS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armour-piercing_fin-stabilized_discarding_sabot) without the sabot). In addition to those, the tanks mount something howitzer-like for explosive shells, smoke, WP, etc. * Lasers become viable. They are suitable for relatively soft targets like troops in the open or trucks, and for that job they are better than explosive shells from a traditional tank gun. So they are mounted in addition to the main gun. [Answer] [Its been done before.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M50_Ontos) [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/OcFpl.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/OcFpl.jpg) The Ontos was an *interesting* beast - but essentially its useful when you want a high volume of fire, but can skimp on either the *size* of the round or the ability to reload. Essentially, you're unloading large volumes of fire at once (and 105mm is *roughly* the size of a light tank gun) - and the ability to load beehive rounds is a bonus. In this case you had the potential for a knock out punch of 6 rounds, or 6 shots before you needed to reload. Another alternative to look at is SPAAG - like the famous [ZSU](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZSU-23-4_Shilka) - lots of smaller autocannon, designed for high volumes of fire. Fundamentally you're not designing tanks to fight tanks the same class. You're either building a glass cannon that has one chance to take out an enemy tank with overwheming firepower, or something designed to kill 'softer' targets. [Answer] The number of weapons mounted on a fighting vehicle depends on multiple, conflicting needs. * You want to be able to kill the enemy. Your weapon must be capable of defeating the enemy's armor, or capable of spewing enough bullets to defeat their combined evasion + ability to absorb damage. * You want your vehicle to be as light, fast and maneuverable as possible. Mobility is defense. It's no good having a vehicle that can destroy anything, and the enemy can just stroll away from it. For example, the A-10 Warthog airplane has *enormous* firepower, but makes for a very poor air-to-air interceptor. * You don't want to apply humongous overkill. It's no good being able to 100% certain kill that infantryman, if you need to use a $5million super selfguiding missile for each one. Aside from busting your bank, you will be unable to carry enough ammunition along. So, each fighting vehicle's weaponry load must match the technical and financial means of its owner, and must also be matched to its operational role and target. **So finally, to answer the question: Why would a tank, specifically, have multiple primary weapons, or a multi-barrel primary weapon?** If the tank's enemy is weak enough to remove the need to mount the ultimate best cannon portable, and the enemy is numerous or evasive enough to require multiple shots to defeat, then multiple similar barrels would be appropriate. In real life however, the mass and cost and engineering difficulty of mounting two or more of the same weapon is usually more than the **preferred alternative: upgrading the firing speed of the single weapon**. Again with the A-10 Warthog as example: Does it have one primary cannon, or 7? And lastly, just what is considered to be the primary weapon? Consider the Abrams tank: Its "primary weapon" is the 120mm smoothbore cannon. Yet this weapon caries only 40 rounds of ammo, and is rarely used. Its 50cal machinegun carries a lot of ammo (900 rounds), and is used a **lot** more often. And it also has two .308 machineguns, that are supplied with a staggering 10400 rounds of ammunition!!! [Answer] Based on the examples you give, I'm assuming you mean a tank that mounts multiple cannon caliber (generally 20mm or greater) guns, which is quite rare, not multiple guns of any size, which is almost universal, or multiple weapon systems (cannon + missiles for example) which is less common but not unusual. ## Single Shot Weapons One possible reason is because it uses something like a "recoilless" gun to increase the firepower it can mount, at the cost of making each gun a single shot weapon. The vehicle below is the M-50 Ontos, which weighed about 9.5 tons (when a contemporary MBT weighed about 50 tons) that nevertheless mounted 6 105mm recoilless cannons (same caliber as a contemporary MBT). Each cannon could only be reloaded from the outside of the vehicle, hence the multiple barrels. [![M50 Ontos](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Fc2cs.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Fc2cs.png) ## Manufacturing Limitations Another reason a tank might mount multiple main guns is that you want to mount a larger or more powerful gun than you can fit in a turret, but you still want a turreted gun. In the case of the M3 Grant/Lee as seen below, US manufacturing at the start of WWII was not capable of building a turret large enough for the 75mm gun that was needed to deal with contemporary tanks. Initially, the plan was just to mount the gun in a centrally located casemate like a StuG III/IV. However infantry commanders demanded a turreted gun, so the design was revised to mount a 37mm cannon in a turret, and the 75mm gun was moved to a side sponson. The limitations of this design were obvious even before it saw action, but it was deployed anyway as a stopgap while the US built up its arms industry. [![M3 with extra turret on the turret](https://i.stack.imgur.com/h1Phj.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/h1Phj.png) ## Heat Dissipation Another possibility is that electromagnetically launched weapons like railguns or coilguns become viable for a vehicle as small as a tank. Almost all the waste heat generated by a railgun or coilgun winds up heating the weapon itself. In a conventional gun a lot of that heat is carried away by the exhaust gas or the casing of the projectile, so the limiting factor on rate of fire tends to be the loader/autoloader. For railguns/coilguns loading could be at least as fast as for a cannon, and will likely be much faster (you only need to load the projectile, without propellant), but the armatures/coils will be experiencing greater heating than a gun barrel and may even be less heat tolerant. As such, heat dissipation will probably be the limiting factor in rate of fire. If heat build up is so significant that it impairs performance a second barrel might be a worthwhile improvement, as long as the guns themselves are not too large. [Answer] # Opener and followup This is probably dumb, but what if you develop a system pairing an armor-penetrating tungsten or depleted uranium shell fired from one barrel and a high explosive shell fired from the other? You would want them to fire at *almost* the same time, offset by some small fraction of a second, so that the HE shell hits the same point as the AP shell, where the armor is most compromised. You could imagine needing to do something like this if your adversary has developed extremely well-armored tanks, such that the weight of a combined sabot+HE shell capable of penetrating the armor becomes impractical. Or maybe in addition to thick armor, they have an active defense system capable of destroying the HE shells, but wouldn't be able to affect the trajectory of the AP shells. If the active defenses trigger harmlessly on the AP shell then take some time to re-arm, the HE shell could then sneak past. [Answer] As many answers have shown, having multiple **primary** weapons on a **tank** is normally not done. There are lots of examples of secondary weapons and one multi-barrel primary weapon but that vehicle shouldn't be called a tank. You'll have to leave the realm of modern tanks to come up with a good use case. I can see two concepts that lead to multi-barrel primary weapons: 1. Your primary weapon isn't really the barrel in the first place. You have a prime source that can cycle a lot faster than what does the shooting--probably a matter of cooling. You have a fairly simple barrel that absorbs so much energy in firing that you have to cool it for a while before you can use it again. Perhaps you're hitting a lithium deutride pellet with enough laser power and have some way of directing the energy downrange. The lasers are down in the body of the tank and can be directed to one of a group of barrels. 2. Your tank is big enough it can mount multiple weapons of the largest feasible size. You'll find a good example of this in history, albeit not of a tank: battleships. BOLOs aren't exactly practical without some technological breakthrough that favors the defense. Battleships had many guns because there was little reason to make bigger guns and the square-cube law made big platforms a good idea. [Answer] Ultimately one designs tanks not to reach the mall down the road and buy the latest one foot with ham, but with the intent of achieving supremacy on the battlefield and win the battles and the war in which those tanks are used. Sadly, enemies have this nasty tendency to research countermeasures to the weapon you use to attack them: they hide in trenches when you shot at them with bullets, they use thick concrete walls when you cannon them, they go in underground bunkers when you nuke them. What's a well meant warlord supposed to do to win a battle? Of course equipping multiple types of weapons on a single attack vehicle will increase the possibility for it to win the engagement thanks to its versatility, and will encumber the enemy with having to use multiple countermeasures at the same time. [Answer] Depends on your definition of "Main Weapon". I'm going to assume you mean weapons of larger than 12.7mm/.50 calibre. The short answer would be flexibility. The modern 120mm gun is very good at destroying other tanks. When loaded with High Explosive (HE) rounds it is also quite good against hardened static targets like bunkers. However, it is quite useless against aircraft for example. A cannon in 20 or 30mm with a higher rate of fire is suitable for this role. It would also be good for destroying light vehicles that do not require the main gun. The AMX 32 had such an arrangement. The Israeli Merkava mounts a 60mm mortar to supply close infantry indirect fire support. In the future, if the Main Battle Tank's primary armament became a rail gun, then a coaxial conventional gun in 50 to 75mm with a decent rate of fire and multipurpose HE projectiles could fulfil a wide range of battle field roles that the main gun's high velocity projectile could not. The main reasons these things are not commonly done today are space and weight. If something happened that allowed tanks to be larger but no heavier reducing the penalty of a second weapon system and its ammunition (much lighter armour for instance) then designers would probably fit them. [Answer] **A difference in Doctrine** A tank with multiple primary weapons would be equipped to target multiple enemies and destroy them simultaneously. Essentially a brawler to the modern MBT's Spear or the IFV's short-sword. The Brawler-Tank fits a doctrine which doesn't care about losses and wants to bring maximum firepower in as small a package as possible. Alternately, it fits a doctrine that entails fighting wildly varied enemies without requiring the tank to be supported by more specialised vehicles/infantry. Both of these are portrayed in the Warhammer 40,000 franchise by the Imperial Guard, which field a wide range of tanks, most of which mount a variety of turrets, sponsons and hull-mounted weaponry. [![Leman Russ Tank](https://i.stack.imgur.com/los8E.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/los8E.png) The principle tank of the Imperial guard is a Leman Russ Battle Tank, which has a large-calibre turret for anti-armour work, a forward-mounted machine-gun (technically more of an automatic grenade-launcher, but lets not get bogged down) and two manned sponsons on the sides which mount anything from flamethrowers all the way up to anti-tank lasers. The result is a vehicle which can face *virtually anything* and have a weapon to deal with it. Which is important for an army which routinely fights armies with tech-capabilities ranging from scrap-metal cars out to haunted living-metal hoverships, passing through swarms of space-locusts and flying powered-armour.. Even if the tank is outclassed or its main cannon is useless against a given target, one of its secondary weapons is probably going to do *something*, so a tank-battalion should bring enough of those secondaries to get the job done. That might result in heavy losses, but the imperial guard always has reserves... ]
[Question] [ Why would a modern, well funded military use mainly technical and motorcycle based units? They would be used alongside normal units. They are mostly intended to fight conventional warfare against well equipped opponents, but are often deployed in Counter Insurgency warfare. (Although, if it's not at least somewhat useful in conventional warfare, this military wont put money into it.) They have integral light tank & motorised infantry support like the [soviet motorcycle units of WW2](https://youtu.be/AnfPlgajZc0). Strategic airlift isn't of concern as common use of large [ekranoplans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-effect_vehicle) making it relatively easy to get heavy forces around the world quickly; but tactical airlift is still difficult enough to be relevant. The technology level is near future but warfare hasn't changed that much. (Note: no "drones make everything else obsolete" comments, the swarm is everywhere on the internet & its wrong due to reasons i can't explain without making this question twice as long) [Answer] ## Because they live in a location with poor quality roads or no roads, and lots of hills, mountains, and swamps. Heavy vehicles like tanks can go through a lot of rough terrain, but they have a real problem with damp areas, and steep hills. This military mostly operates in areas like that where tanks can't get around and sink into the mud a lot. Light motorcycles and vehicles find it a lot easier to move around in the few roads and poor quality paths. [Answer] First of all, "technicals" are any non-standard vehicles, most often civilian vehicles, that are converted to light fighting vehicles. This can be anything from a car that carries infantry to battle to trucks with artillery or anti-tank canons mounted on top. So while the Toyota war has given us the idea that a technical is a weaponized pickup truck it is actually broader than that. Technicals are in use in Russia for example as support squads. I'll be using "technical" for a variety of civilian vehicles repurposed for warfare, from ordinary cars to trucks. Lets put some things in a row: * technicals are relatively cheap to buy compared to armored vehicles. * depending on how much armor you strap on they can be very fuel efficient * technicals use similar skills to operate and maintain that is already found in much of the population. Similar to how half-tracks were a solution in WWII to reduce the training time required for skilled drivers and maintenance personell of their military vehicles. * the production capacity for such vehicles is much much higher than other armored vehicles. Like in WWII, any current factory can be repurposed to build such vehicles while modern armored vehicle production is highly specialized and not easy to shift to civilian production facilities. * it is easy to supply and maintain such vehicles. No specialized fuels or equipment is necessary. A pickup with a crane pulling a cart with supplies could be used to maintain several vehicles at a time, and when necessary any cardealer and workshop garage can repair the vehicles as well, assuming parts are available. * a russian manual mentioned in an ascending list that small-arms proof armor is deemed heavier than protection against shrapnel, although I assume shrapnel of "small" explosives is meant rather than a large artillery shell. That means they can be lightly armored. * technicals have the best use in maneuver warfare, where they can be effective even against tanks. They also have roles as infantry support platforms where having one with you is superior to not having one, especially when it comes mounted with heavy machine guns, mortars or other powerful support weapons. With that in mind such vehicles could be used in an extended war of attrition similar to WWII. After most costly and hard to produce cruise missiles, JDAM's and other munitions are depleted while access to the wide variety of required resources are cut or limited, you are going to need cheap and easier to produce vehicles. The French for example had great success with an armored car mounted with a variety if weapons including a 90mm canon (the Panhard series). Which due to it being purposefully produced no longer counts as a technical but it is an indication of the potential that technicals can have. While your (remaining) main forces create frontlines and area's that can't be easily penetrated your army of technicals and motorcycles will engage in maneuver warfare. They use their speed and mobility to pass through any opening in the frontline, such as after your forces have attacked the enemy frontlines. Then they seek out the vitals of an army: supply lines, command and control centers, communication equipment, radars, anti-aircraft sites, depots, specialist personell such as those that maintain tanks and perhaps even daring raids at production facilities before returning, possibly destroying their own vehicles when they run out of ammo and gas before receiving new sets of vehicles. Otherwise such vehicles could simply create mechanized infantry regiments from regular infantry. The added mobility and firepower is useful at most points in time, especially if your armies are restricted by resources in the amount of advanced vehicles and weapons they can create. [Answer] **Motorcycle troops do not intend to fight.** The electric motorcycles they ride are whisper quiet and the special forces that ride them use night vision. The motorcycle troops infiltrate deeply into enemy territory, riding cross country and zipping unseen up the roads. They are individuals with special skills who cross enemy territory to perform specific functions. These are saboteurs who come in, plant bombs and leave. They are assassins and snipers who take out high value targets either personally or via traps and devices. They are scouts who reconnoiter and return, or receive intelligence from spies, or install themselves to mark targets with invisible lasers. [Answer] **Not plausible** The majority of casualties suffered in modern warfare are as a result of fragmentation / blast weapons. * In counter-insurgency warfare the majority of casualties are typically a result of the use of Improvised Explosive Devices (IED), sometimes as a result of scoot-and-shoot tactics with a light mortar. This is the preferred attack method as it does not expose the insurgents to immediate retaliation by the typically better-armed and trained army they are opposing. * In conventional warfare the majority of casualties are inflicted as a result of artillery or airstrikes. The vehicles described provide zero protection against these types of attack compared to armoured personnel carriers (APCs) or even more lightly armoured vehicles such as the Humvee and Bushmaster. Yes, a direct hit from a 105 mm howitzer will destroy an APC as easily as a technical, but the more likely scenario is a 105 mm shell impacting or airbursting some tens of metres away - the APC will protect its troops from the fragmentation but troops in technicals or on motorbikes are unlikely to survive. Another reason for using conventional armoured vehicles is their capacity to evacuate casualties and allow them to be laid prone and effectively treated with some protection. This is very difficult at best with a technical and impossible with a motorbike. There are some uses for technical / motorbike-mounted patrols, such as long range strategic patrols conducted in desert areas. However, this only requires a relatively small number of troops from an army. In short, without the specifically excluded constraints of financial limits, military production limits or strategic shipping limits there is no reason to equip the majority of infantry units with these vehicles in a universe where fragmentation weapons are the primary threat. [Answer] **Structural Non-Attack Capability** Let me explain: * The (often tracked) mechanized infantry fighting vehicle carries infantry and weapons to support the infantry. The troops might be able to fight mounted, through firing ports and hatches, while the main weapons are *only* used mounted. These vehicles are almost as heavy as a main battle tank, and they use similar amounts of fuel and maintenance. * The (tracked or often wheeled) armored personnel carrier transports infantry and their supplies to the fight, but it is not really supposed to engage in direct fire. There may be supporting weapons like HMGs or ATGMs, but they can often be dismounted for use by the infantry. The M113 APC carried a tripod for the .50 HMG, as opposed to the Bradley cannon which could not be dismounted. Wheeled or tracked, most APCs are considerably lighter than a main battle tank. * Then there is infantry on conventional trucks. It is risky for the infantry to ride these vehicles in a battle area, and they have to fight almost exclusively dismounted. (The trucks could have AA MGs, however.) This has been going out of fashion in well-equipped forces, but it might be used for missions requiring better strategic mobility. When it comes to traveling a few hundred miles, trucks beat both APCs and IFVs. * And finally, there is troops in something like an **unarmored** HMMWV. Combat vehicles like this have been used e.g. in US Army cavalry squadrons and Army and USMC anti-tank units. They are lighter than APCs or IFVs, faster, quieter, with a lower profile -- important in the scout role. But as anti-tank vehicles, they are mostly **ambush hunters.** They fight from defensive positions and wait for the enemy tanks to come. They are unsuited for attacks against dug-in enemy positions. During the Cold War, some military writers in West Germany worried about WWIII starting by a misunderstanding with conventional forces. So one proposal (that never went beyond professional journals, to my knowledge) was to put **structurally defensive** forces on the frontline, with heavy mechanized counterattack forces further back. Those defensive forces would have a high proportion of ATGMs, light MRLs, and some infanty to fight a delaying action. The [Unimog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unimog#Military) would have been used to carry various systems. It was acknowledged that these forces are somewhat less efficient than heavy mechanized forces in a general war, but more suitable for a stable deterrence. [Answer] **Infiltration of non-military targets.** In remote areas (as Nepene Nep points out) large millitary vehicles would perhaps not be practical. They would also be a rather conspicuous sign of an attack being imminent. If some, with the right language, accents clothing and papers, can make their way to intended targets under cover of looking for work or attending a funeral of some long lost friend or other excuse. Motorcycles have the virtue of being easier to hide than larger ones and thus escape detection. Rural areas with targets (electric power-lines, gas, water supplies, food reserves) can be interfered with. Water supplies can be cut or tainted with disease/hallucinogens for extra effect. This can be done as a coordinated effort to destabilize the civilian population in areas surrounding military targets, to put a greater strain on military resources in an effort to repair/prevent such things happening again and to create a burden on their healthcare and food resources. Or if you get lucky or plan well, cut the resource supply chain to the military-base itself - they're sure to have backups, but those will be limited. In an occupied country, they might be of use to any resistance that you might wish to offer support to. [Answer] Because, it can be so much fun (until the shooting starts). Trailer with extra munitions optional. France, paratroop use, Algiers :-( [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/jWNc7.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/jWNc7.jpg) ]
[Question] [ I'm working on a story set in the early 2000's and an integral part of the story is a large telescope array in Nevada, that uses both passive radio observation and active RADAR transmissions to observe objects in space. It is owned by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which subsidizes the nearby town. I wanted the array to close enough to the main town so that characters can go to-and-from the array relatively fast and if possible visible from several locations around the town. Since civillian radio and tv broadcasts would interfere with the telescope array, I was wondering if the array could be built either with-in or very close to the town. The town is no bigger then a few thousand people and is in a pretty flat barren expanse of land. So how close could you realistically build the telescope array to the town? [Answer] I work in radio astronomy, and our preferred distance to a town is honestly as far as possible! There are plenty of devices that can interfere with observations, from dog collars to toasters to electric blankets. There's an amusing story from the 1990s about a mysterious class of radio sources called [perytons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peryton_(astronomy)), which were eventually found to emanate from the open door of an observatory microwave! Other folks have mentioned the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, which lies on the edge of the town of Green Bank. It's within the roughly 10,000 square mile [National Radio Quiet Zone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio_Quiet_Zone), but on the observatory grounds, there are additional zones, designated [Zone 1 and Zone 2](https://greenbankobservatory.org/about/radio-interference/). In Zone 1, there are some extreme restrictions; for example, all vehicles must be diesel, as non-diesel vehicles can be strong sources of broadband emission. In Zone 2, the measures are laxer for logistical reasons - the observatory does need things like microwaves and servers, though some are shielded where possible. That said, things like cell phones and Bluetooth devices are prohibited, and there is no Wi-Fi service (make sure your laptop has an ethernet port!). If you want to take pictures, you'll need to use a disposable camera. Some of these bans extend in [a ten-mile radius of the observatory](https://greenbankobservatory.org/growing-up-in-green-bank/). At the GBO, the primary 100-meter telescope is located ~1 mile from the closest edge of the observatory grounds, and a little further from the center of town - which, by the way, houses only a couple hundred people. This works fairly well, but that's partly because Green Bank is small and isolated, folks typically obey restrictions, and the RFI team at the observatory knows what they're doing (they do chase down violators if they can identify rogue sources). I think that a town of a few thousand people - tens of times the size of the town of Green Bank - should at minimum be several miles away from the telescope. They would need to be okay without cell phones, with using ethernet connections and diesel vehicles, and minimizing the use of devices like heated blankets . . . and microwaves. Enforcing even normal NRQZ restrictions on folks who don't want to abide by them might be difficult, *particularly* if there are many out-of-towners who aren't used to the regulations. [Answer] ### Walking distance. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/kdQ3y.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/kdQ3y.jpg) Mobile phones and wifi devices [are banned in GreenBank](https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2015/07/us/quiet-town-american-story/), but the observatory is a few minutes walk from the town centre. That link goes through a lot of the story of the towns radio ban - from enforcement by a van with sensors looking for rogue wifi, to those who swear by the health benefits of living in a community free of high intensity RF. [Answer] MIT's [Haystack Observatory](https://www.haystack.mit.edu/about/haystack-telescopes-and-facilities/haystack-37m-radio-antenna-radome/) is only about 8 miles from downtown Lowell, MA. Lowell is a fairly big city, with a population of over 100,000. Suburban towns in the area are also relatively populous. Haystack performs both radio astronomy observations and radar space surveillance. The "to-and-from relatively fast" between the observatory, MIT main campus, and Lincoln Lab is an important consideration that outweighs the disadvantages of a not very quiet site. [Answer] [Jodrell Bank](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodrell_Bank_Observatory), one of the first radio telescopes in the world, is located 13KM from the nearest large town of Macclesfield and about 27KM from the city centre of Manchester in the UK. There are also small settlements like villages and farms within 1KM of the dish, as well as a major railway. [![Google Maps screenshot with a 1KM radius overlay](https://i.stack.imgur.com/T85RM.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/T85RM.jpg) ]
[Question] [ I'm interested to know what is the maximum realistic muzzle velocity of a coilgun with a 100m barrel length. Round is a solid KE penetrator. I'm asking from a viewpoint using known physics and materials, but pushing those limits to a realistic maximum even if such a design is not yet practical. [Answer] For a rough idea, you can use Luke Campbell's approximation for coilgun performance, which basically imagines the gun as a tube of energy in the form of the magnetic field, which is swept out by a projectile that turns it into kinetic energy. You can assume that any figures this gives are over-optimistic, but it isn't a bad upper-bound for coilgun performance. **There were some errors in the barrel length calculation for the earlier draft of this answer, which have since been corrected.** --- The first thing we care about is **efficiency**... our coilgun will inevitably cause the projectile to heat up as a result of induced currents, and if we heat it up to melting point the projectile will disintegrate making it much less useful as a weapon or worse: it'll explode, taking a chunk of your ship with it. Lets say that our coilgun is 99% efficient, and of the 1% of the energy that it wastes, half of it goes into the projectile. If we have a 200g projectile with the specific heat capacity of steel (500J/KgK) and the melting point of steel (say, 1800K) we can see that the projectile's temperature will raise by 1K for every 100J of wasted energy. If we magically start it off at 0K, we can see that it can absorb no more than 180kJ. Working backwards, this gives us a maximum kinetic energy of ~35MJ and so a maximum muzzle velocity of **18km/s**, *regardless of anything else about our gun*. This is obviously bad for your hopes and dreams. A bigger projectile won't help you; you need one with a higher melting point, a larger heat capacity, *and* a more efficient coilgun to get the speeds you want. (Note that there will be other limits to projectile temperature... superconducting projectiles musn't be heated above their critical temperature, for example, and that'll be a lot lower than their melting point: ~300K for a scifi "room temperature" superconductor, for example. Non-superconducting projectiles will be subject to more heating!) Lets imagine your projectile now has a SHC of more like 1kJ/KgK, and a melting point of 3000K. You can now heat it up by more like 3MJ/kg instead of 900kJ/kg. We'll give your coilgun an efficiency of 99.9%, and half the wastage goes to heating up the projectile again. We can now have a maximum muzzle energy of more like 1.2GJ, which for a 200g round gives us a muzzle velocity of nearly **110km/s**. That's a bit better, but remember: **this is a maximum**, regardless of anything else like barrel length, or field strength, or projectile weight. You cannot get anything better unless you use magical materials, or magical ultra-efficient coilguns (and this example is already quite magical). Obviously, your story, your hands to wave, but this stuff is important to remember if you want a hard-ish scifi setting. There are possibly other things you might be able to do, like packing your projectile in some kind of coolant that is melted and evaporated to cool the projectile as it is accelerated. This may help a bit, but does impose some parasitic mass that will limit the muzzle velocity of the projectile (and makes calculation of the final velocity into some kind of horrid differential equation which I won't be solving for you). --- The strength of the magnetic field is limited by a bunch of inconvenient things. You could work out the require currents for a given size of superconductor, limited by the material's critical current, but lets instead go for 200 Tesla. That's a nice round number, and doesn't rule out superconducting projectiles, as it should be below the critical field strength of futuristic high-temperature superconductors ([see here for some analysis of YBCO](https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms4280), one of the best practical real-world superconductors). The magic number of interest here is the energy density that the swept volume can have... this is $\frac{1}{2\mu\_o}$ (where μ0 is the permeability of free space) or about 400kJ/m3/T2, multiplied by the square of the magnetic field strength. In the case of our hypothetical 200T coilgun, that gives us a maximum energy density of 16GJ/m3. If your projectile is 20mm across and your barrel is 100m long, the amount of energy is the swept volume will be a reasonable 0.5GJ, for a muzzle velocity of **70km/s**. To get the 1.2GJ we want for our 100km/s super-coilgun, we'd need the projectile to sweep out ~0.074m3, which for a 20mm projectile works out as a barrel that's 236m long. A 30mm projectile would let you fit your 100km/s gun into the original 100m length limit, but: * your coils are now bigger, and higher power, and need more current to reach the same strength. * your projectile now has a worse length-to-width ratio, which makes it less effective at penetrating the target's defences. You could use a fat, low-density sabot which drives a thin dense projectile, but the sabot represents parasitic weight that eats into the kinetic-energy budget of the narrow penetrator. There's no free lunch to be had here! --- Finally, you should see that I've been looking at coilguns, not railguns here. Railguns give you much more oomph for the same length barrel, but unfortunately shooting them causes damage to the rails as a result of the super-hot plasma arc that forms behind the projectile. This means that railguns have scaling problems... you can't shoot them too much before the rails need replacing, and the rail damage goes up with muzzle velocity so you may find a railgun that works just fine at 3km/s (at least for a little while) will be wrecked at 10km/s and explode violently at 30km/s. Coilguns don't have wear issues, as the projectile can be levitated in the barrel and be entirely non-contact and no arcing need occur. They do still have scaling issues: you have to turn off a coil the *instant* the projectile is in the middle, and it is hard to simply vanish the field of a very powerful magnet! One way to do this would be by using superconducting coils and heat them to drop the superconductivity (sometimes known as a [quench gun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coilgun#Non-ferromagnetic_projectiles)) but that'll turn the field energy into heat, and lots of it. Fire rate will therefore be limited, and ultimate velocity will also be limited by your ability to a) quench your coils fast enough and b) cool them fast enough afterwards to fire the gun again. There is, however, no theoretical limit to barrel length or muzzle velocity, so if you want >10km/s you almost certainly want a coilgun. [Answer] Based on current proposed weapons, we can estimate the rough acceleration we can achieve with a rail gun and scale that up. <http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNUS_Rail_Gun.php> With a 10 meter barrel, we get about 2500 meters per second. But the muzzle velocity is sqrt(2 \* barrelLength \* acceleration). So a 100 meter barrel would have a speed of about 7900 meters per second. It is worth noting that at that speed the projectile exceeds orbital velocity at Low Earth Orbit. That said, this would require a much bigger power source, that would sustain for a longer acceleration. This set up is not feasible with current technology, as most railgun power sources can only operate barely long enough to fire the projectile. If technology was developed to fix this it might affect the acceleration speed. [Answer] Existing ground-based inertial confinement fusion pellets implode at ~300km/s, and are accelerated over a distance of a few mm (and this is far from the lab speed record). These are laser powered, and the shock waves due to the sudden acceleration heat the pellet substantially before it hits the center. Gentle acceleration up to 100km/s over 100m doesn't have to liquidize your bullet. Z-pinches also magnetically accelerate plasma up to similar velocities. The relevant principle is: use a plasma to push on your bullet. Plasma gets more electrically conductive as it heats up, and your bullet stays in the barrel so little time, the plasma won't conduct much heat to the bullet. It will just ablate a thin layer of it. The plasma is confined between the bullet and the magnetic field pushing on it. Similar principles apply for plasma railguns. At these magnetic field strengths (100T is currently achievable on the relevant timescale), you can exert enough force to crush most solid objects. Ultimately, the limit is going to be keeping the bullet solid as you push on it. The maximum force you can exert is the yield strength, which might be 1GPa; with this pressure over 100m, you get 100GJ/m^2 of energy transfer, and with a low-areal-density 1kg/m^2 bullet, about 400km/s. A sabot round arrangement (or just crushing the plate into a pellet) will allow you to concentrate much of this energy in a penetrator. Of course, you could do much better than a puny 400km/s with a laser-pushed ablator because you can maintain the acceleration till you hit the target. [Answer] I really do not understand the purpose of the 100m barrel, unless you are projecting a VERY big bullet. Some references here about the American navy, but it is so far behind. The leader is undoubtedly the [Chinese army.](https://edition.cnn.com/2019/01/04/asia/china-pla-navy-railgun-intl/index.html) > > Railgun technology, which uses electromagnetic force to send > projectiles up to 125 miles at 7.5 times the speed of sound, is > cheaper and more accurate than traditional gunpowder-based methods. > "Using a massive electrical pulse rather than a chemical propellant, > the railgun can launch projectiles much farther than the > 13-nautical-mile range of the US Navy's standard 5-inch naval gun," > the US Office of Naval Research says. > > > That speed makes it about 2,394 m/s. or 8,654 km/hr. [Here](https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1134487.shtml) is a picture of the Chinese weapon, undergoing deployment shakedown trials. Notice that the barrel length is much shorter than the dreadnaughts of WW1 fame. However, it is rumored to be a coil gun, not a rail gun. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/cAmFM.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/cAmFM.png) ]
[Question] [ There is a huge dungeon that has been unexplored until recently it was opened up to the public by the authority, adventurers are encouraged to form party to ensure higher chance of survivability. There are 18 floors in total and each floor is consisted of a network of tunnels and caves infested with dangerous monsters, every floor will spawn a champion/boss acting as the ruler of that floor. Going deeper means that adventurers will be encountering even tougher rulers and monster swarms/waves, but why don't all the monster rulers gang up together against the adventurers just like the behavior of the monster swarms/waves? P.S: I've noticed that the monsters are not hostile to their kind but will attack anything foreign on sight! [Answer] > > the monsters are not hostile to their kind but will attack anything foreign on sight! > > > If anything foreign is hostile, than even the guy living upstairs is such. Cooperatively acting requires certain brain skills which not all beings have. Take a bee hive: if you are trying to move it so that it's not flooded by water, would the bees spare you from their sting? No, not really. Like in the fairy tale of the scorpion and the frog, it's their nature. [Answer] **The monsters are highly territorial and hate each other as much as the adventurers** You say the monsters won't attack each other, but it may be that the monster lords have merely partitioned up the dungeon to their liking and have a strict agreement for their own minions to not be on each other's turf. Being isolated from the rest of the world is the exact kind of situation that would produce a highly rigid social structure with little challenging the dominant powers, as there are no external forces to disrupt the politics of the dungeon. Like a city that has been divided up between various gangs but with no police. The monsters *would* fight each other if they were on the same floor, but they so religiously stick to their own territories to avoid fights with other monster lord factions that in practice they never see each other. [Answer] There's no way the inhabitants of this so lovely dungeon have hatred against their neighbour! But they can have a lot of motives to stay on their floor and not meet each other. Here's your plate of reasons you can sample as you wish! ## The dungeon finances are limited The dungeon lord, who's at the bottom floor, may have limited resources to spend, and so much employees to take care of! Hence, in the contract he has signed with them, their protection task includes only one floor. Then, why, as a truly evil employee, would you ever thinking of working more than what you're paid for? Also, since the dungeon lord is evil and very, very stingy, they want to "fire" the less efficient employees by putting them to the more "risk-inducing workplaces", which are obviously at the top level of the dungeon, where the "clients" are many and meanies. But the employees may be stupid but they're not fool and understood what their boss did. Therefore, why should you pick others' dangerous slack when you can have a peaceful nap just below instead? No, no. You're not paid enough innocent souls for that! ## They want to live in their favored environment Each floor has been carefully made to allow specific species to live in. 1st floor has woodland inhabitants, 2nd has cavernal creatures, and so on. The motive to go to another floor becomes basically void, since other floors offer nothing suitable to sustain their prefered lifestyle. While you don't hate your neighbours, you don't really care what happens to them, since you don't meet them on a regular basis. Here's a more flavorful bite of this sample with ice ogres and lava snakes : they won't even dare venturing in each other floors, since the first one will melt on the hot smokey fire caverns while the seconds will freeze to death in the cold, lifeless chasms. ## They don't want to step on their friends' traps Monsters are sneaky ones. And paranoid, on top of that. They have laid traps of their own design in everything that looks like a room, a door or a chest. And they have so much problems trusting each other they won't tell anyone but their floor's comrades. And because of that, monsters of other floors can't simply rush in to help without falling in them. After all, how can you prove you *won't* betray us as soon as things go awry in order to earn a getaway or a good place in the commandment? What tells us you won't change the traps so we fall in them, just to joke on us? And more importantly, aren't you actually working for the adventurers?! Pushed to the extreme, small groups of monsters may band up together in some rooms, and they wouldn't know anything of the traps their neighbours on the same floor laid! They wouldn't help them from fear of being tricked or simply because they can touch the wrong pressure plate! ## They follow strict caste rules Monsters can be ugly, nasty and love to have some human 'hors d'oeuvre' at dinner, but they do have a strong sense of order in their life. And this reflects back to how the monster society is organized. And it is organized in classes, where the beggars live on the cold, dangerous top floor, while the royalty live at the cozy and warm bottom. No beggar would ever think of getting near nobles, that's an offence to honour, and is a proof of disrespect against your leaders. At the same time and more importantly, most nobles don't really care about what happens to the lower blood, except for the rare few who care deeply for their people who look with sparkling eyes at them! Hope you enjoyed the samples! Know that you can easily mix in the ingredients I gave you to cook whole new flavors! [Answer] ### Because then they'd have the share the tasty adventurers Have you ever had this experience: You're seated at a nice restaurant, a neighbouring table has its meal served up, and they call you over and ask for help eating it? No, me neither. Your monsters don't think that their dinner can be that much of a challenge. Plus they'd like to get all those shiny things and if they call for help, they'd need to share the loot. ]
[Question] [ What theoretically workable weapons (they don't necessarily have to *exist*, they just have to be possible with a little bit of unobtainium) would be the most effective for ship-to-ship combat in space? The technology level in my universe is roughly Stargate / Honorverse level. Here's what this means: * **Energy shields exist, but they aren't Star Trek-level perfect.** They work by absorbing all the energy of anything that hits them from the outside, storing it in capacitors. Once the capacitors are full, the shield goes down until the capacitors can be emptied. The capacitors can be used to power the ship's systems, but don't have an especially high capacity. **As a result, offensive tactics in my universe center around hitting your opponents with large salvos.** Also, it's worth noting that they aren't very effective against missiles. + EDIT: While the shields aren't infinitely powerful, they do have quite a bit of durability. After all, they have to protect the ship against interstellar gas and micrometeorites while the ships are moving. * **Anti-missile countermeasures are effective, but not 100% effective.** For purposes of this question, let's set the optimum effectiveness at 98%, with a small decrease in effectiveness as the amount of incoming missiles increases. * **Power supply isn't a problem.** For purposes of this question, they have something along the lines of a [ZPM.](https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Zero_Point_Module) * **Most ships have some ablative armor and anti-rad measures.** As a result, while missiles do a lot of damage, a single missile / torpedo getting through isn't the end of the world. EDIT: "With a little bit of unobtainium" means "slightly better material sciences", not "do whatever the heck you want". In other words, answers must at least be theoretically plausible. For example: directed energy weapons and (small) antimatter warheads are okay, but de-mat guns aren't. [Answer] So I thought about adding this in a comment but it seems like it needs its own answer so here goes. Casaba howitzer Ok, so more info. So to explain this rather oddly named weapon, first we have to talk about shaped charges. A shaped charge is, very broadly speaking, an explosive that is formed in such a way as to direct the explosion in a particular direction instead of a spherical blast. We use these for mining, demolition, and military applications all the time. So one day, some one asked the question, what if we did a shaped charge, but on a nuke? See where I’m going with this? A Casaba howitzer is a nuclear shaped charge, often called a nuclear spear. Why? Because one exploding would look like a *massive* white hot spear of nuclear fire. This is a fantastic way to direct the massive power of a nuclear device over a long distance without wasting the majority of its energy. So you put this on a missile, it flies out to the edge of the ship’s missile defense system and detonates, sending a torrent of superheated plasma traveling at an appreciable fraction of light speed directly toward the target. Multiply this by, oh let’s say a couple thousand missiles or so.... it’s not exactly a pretty picture for the target ship in question. Finally, we can do this today, this is absolutely current technology. So if you’re talking far enough future that we have spaceships and shielding, this will be easy technology for your future societies to produce en masse. So imagine swarms of multiple thousands of Casaba howitzers flying at a ship and detonating all at once. To quote Phil Swift. > > Now that’s a lotta damage! > > > [Answer] ### A single railgun salvo will overwhelm any possible shield. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/bOszl.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/bOszl.png) Weapons like these can fire a 1200kg projectile at just under 3km/s. That's 360MJ of energy. Impacted into a shield, a single hit delivers ~100kwh of energy. Assuming a projectile length of 1m, impact is spread over about 400 microseconds. That's an instantaneous power transfer into your shield's capacitors of 900 GW - Just under the average power consumption for the entire USA. I'm assuming your shield capacitors is something [like this prototype 10,000 Farad SuperCapacitor](https://www.graphene-info.com/sunvault-energy-and-edison-power-present-10000-farad-graphene-supercapacitor), these capacitors need low voltage to function. 3 - 4 volts sort of range. This means the connection between your shield and the capacitor has to be able to sustain 300 giga-Amps for half a second. Even if you put 100,000 of them in series (which'd be a considerable percentage of your ships mass), you're still looking at mega amps. The conductor size required to connect the shield emitter to the capacitor is just extreme. Even superconductors stop being super conductors once they get beyond about 10,000 amps. Lets assume you can get cable resistance down to 10ohm. But that's not the biggest problem, the problem is capacitors take time to charge. Over the 400ms impact time, your 100,000 string of capacitors will [only absorb 40 kA / 16gw](http://mustcalculate.com/electronics/capacitorchargeanddischarge.php?vfrom=0&vto=400000&vs=400000&c=10000&r=10&time=0.0004). You'll need 56 banks in parallel (of 100,000 mega capacitors). This is one 10,000 Farad SuperCapacitor. You'll need 5,600,000 of these: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/yv5AZ.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/yv5AZ.png) ... for one hit! Now lets assume you have a massive ship that you can devote 111,765,360kg just for capacitors, (which is the weight of an Egyptian pyramid). You've successfully absorbed one hit! Now consider that this railgun can fire at 10rpm - there will probably be several of them firing in a salvo. You can even fine tune the speed of the projectile so multiple can be fired from the same gun at different times and impact at the same time. [Answer] **Railguns and nukes** I know both have been mentioned and @Ash 's one about the railguns is fairly complete. I think however the missiles shouldn't be iverlooked, so I'll go in debt here. The missiles can potentially ignore the shields. A nuke can be detonated before the target, generating heat, electronomagnatic waves (including light) and shockwave. Of course, generating this temporary fireball must be closer than you might think with all but the EM. Without a medium to travel through, the shockwave and heat will only move with the material provided by the bomb. This means if the material doesn't pass the shield, you're pretty safe. However, the EM is dangerous, as the light contains heat that passes through the shields and abother part of the EM is EMP (I know the whole EM range is technically EMP, but it gets the point across). WMP will severely interfere with electronic devices. The bigger the amount of conductive material, the more it can be affected as a charge builds inside. This can obviously be protected against, as even without solar storms our current sattelites require protection from EMP. Protection can still be overwhelmed, which nukes likely do. This way you might even disable ships and leave them open for capture. The light can heat up the surface very rapidly, which can lead to warping of the material as well. With 2% success a missile will reach a target it might seem not a good option to use nukes. However, in current nuke technology they also use fakes. Especially in ICBMs they put a group of fake nukes with 3 or 4 real ones. Believe it or not, there are all kinds of regulations how many fake nukes can be launched with a real one. Here you might just ignore that. Fire the missile(s), let it break apart in 20-50 fake ones per missile and 3-10 real ones in the mix. Likely nukes have a better chance, as they don't need to get that close. Now just overwhelm the enemies defencive system and detonate a nuke close enough to kill the other ship. [Answer] Kinetic weapons and missiles. Kinetic energy is just better at delivering energy than any other means while generating less heat on the ship than anything except missiles. Heat is the real killer in space. As a bonus anti-missile defenses are not that effective against dumb kinetic mass. in space you basically have two effective weapons missiles and kinetics (aka mass drivers) lasers don't actually make good weapons. Missiles work because they are the hardest to dodge or counter, you can't predict their path easily. Shrapnel based missiles are surprisingly effective in space, without air shrapnel travels far and fast. It is harder to hit with kinetics but if you do they are overpoweringly destructive. As a bonus their range is essentially infinite, since a slug will keep traveling in a straight line without loosing energy until it hits something. > > RICK ROBINSON'S FIRST LAW OF SPACE COMBAT An object impacting at 3 > km/sec delivers kinetic energy equal to its mass in TNT. > > > Or to put it another way a 2kg lump of mass traveling at 30 miles per second delivers the same destructive energy as a tomahawk missile. At [high enough speed](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunconvent.php) (~8o% C) they outperform antimatter weapons. As a bonus several of the problems with hypervelocity weapons just go away in space and the ones you have to solve are ones everything has, AKA heat. You even have the option of adding rockets to a projectile to make it steerable or with a weak explosive to fragment them just before impact. Both make it nearly impossible to predict and intercept. Most importantly if your shields still obey the laws of physics they [may not actually help against kinetic projectiles](http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Tech/Shields/Impact.html), just trade one set of a problems for a completely different and equally bad set of problems. I suggest the [Atomic rockets site](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunconvent.php) for a detailed breakdown of how effective different weapons are in space. [Answer] **Pencil Beams** A paper sponsored by NASA under its *Innovative Advanced Concepts* Program looked at a combination of a 'cold' coupled laser and particle beam for 'beamed' propulsion. In theory the idea vastly reduces 'spread' by the beam and vastly increases its range so more energy 'hits' the target. The **Tough SF** blog does a detailed analysis of the device form a weapons perspective and the results are potentially devastating a long range. Basically the laser beam surrounds and contains the particle beam (hence the 'pencil' analogy, while the particle beam 'attracts' photons in the laser beam preventing them from disbursing as distance increases. According to the Tough SF the result as a weapon would be a beam fired from a ship near earth being able to hit and damage a target on the opposite side of the solar system! The details of his breakdown are in the Feb 19 chapter of the blog. [Answer] **Ramships.** Nice shield you got. How about I climb through it? And when I get over there I'm going to sit in your chair and read your books! Your shields are great against meteorites and really good against smaller stuff folks are hucking around. But my ship has got a big point in front. Once it is up against your shield I can push it on thru with my engines. It will make sparks, and probably a lot of weird noises you will hear on your side; it stays quiet over here except for us singing. And then once it is thru the shield, a little bit farther through your hull. Now don't make that face. This is not Ben Hur! I don't want to rip your ship in half! Your books would fall out into space! No, your ship is pretty nice and your books too, so we are going to march thru the point of our ship and come over there. Once you all figure out who you are working for, we will issue the new uniforms, then back the ram ship out and patch that hole up. [Answer] * Missiles with antimatter warheads should be the most efficient way to deliver destructive energy to the enemy ship. Bonus points if you have "shaped antimatter charges" that deliver most of the energy in the direction of impact, instead of spreading in in all directions. And unless your armor is several orders of magnitute stronger than anything we have today, as single missille hit ***will*** be a serious problem. Energy weapons cannot keep up with that amount of energy: Even if your ZPM is literally able to produce as much energy as a shipload of antimatter within the course of a single battle, no weapon could handle this amount of energy without evaporating, even if you have materials at hand that can withstand a million degrees.There is only one way to have energy weapons that are on par with AM warheads: * One- shot kill vehicles that utilize an antimatter explosion to power a laser, or otherwise create a directed high-energy beam that is directed at the target. Such a vehicle would be started from the mothership, and once it is at a safe distance, aim itself at the target and go boom ( Similar to [Project Excalibur](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Excalibur)). ]
[Question] [ The ISS uses port and starboard to differentiate between the two sides of the station. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6bDno.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6bDno.png) (The Harmony node photographed after it was attached to its temporary location on the International Space Station) Would forward always be in the direction the ship is rotating, and from there port and starboard would be determined? [Image source.](https://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/shuttle/sts-120/html/iss016e006834.html) [Answer] Consider the Earth. Right now we're all on the outside of a rotating spherical object, which is essentially the inverse of your scenario, and yet people don't require massively complicated 3D navigational systems to get from place to place or to give directions. East is the direction in which the planet is rotating, and the other directions derive from that. Using cardinal directions works for planets or fixed structures on those planets, but people will likely have a psychologically hard time using it for a space station. The easiest way I can see it working is as follows: Spinward/forward: toward the direction you're moving tangentially. Antispinward/backward: the opposite direction. Port: facing spinward, the side to your left. Starboard: facing spinward, the side to your right. Up: Toward the axis of rotation. Down: Away from the axis of rotation. Simple, and straightforward. Because the spin direction is fixed, it's something everyone can agree on, and because you've got simulated gravity, everyone has the same understanding of "up" and "down", just as we do on Earth, albeit with "up" and "down" reversed relative to the spin axis. Everything else derives from that. Note that from the outside, the system still works. Assuming the docking is carried out somewhere near the axis, the only thing that's important is from which direction the docking ship is approaching, and that's trivial to figure out: if you're approaching the space station along the rotational axis and it's spinning clockwise from you're point of view, you're on the port side. If it's spinning counterclockwise, you're on the starboard side. And that concludes your navigational difficulties. Something like a pair of counter-rotating O'Neill cylinders represent something of a different issue, as their movement is symmetrical from the outside (internally, easy: each cylinder would have its local directions based on its individual rotation). In that case, you need to arbitrarily define the ends of the cylinder: there's no "natural" way to do it. You can call them what you want, and then simply broadcast (and display by strobes/lights) which end is which. ***ADDENDUM*** There is another way to consider direction in a rotating station (and a spaceship with a rotating section). Consider the following diagram: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/sbyTX.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/sbyTX.jpg) On the left is a spacecraft with two counter-rotating sections to minimize torque when maneuvering. On the right, a classic fully rotating wheeled space station. On both, "in" is toward the rotational axis, "out" is away. The blue arrows indicate the direction of rotation of each torus. On the station, as mentioned before, if you're looking in the direction of rotation, that's forward, and thus the port and starboard are automatically designated. On the ship, forward and aft is trivially designated. Assuming the stationary (middle) section isn't rotating, our ship has a bridge in the little box on the front. If it's on the "top", then that designates the dorsal side, and port and starboard (the latter not labeled) are also trivially identified. But what about direction on the rings? Forward and aft is trivial, because that matches the ship. The forward sides of the rings looks to where you're going, the aft sides look where you've been. But what about direction going around the rings? There's two ways to do it. You could state that if you look forward, right and left are automatic, regardless of the ring's rotation, and would be identical in both. This provides justification for differentiating "port" from "left". If you say "go to port", you know it means the left side of the entire ship. If you say "go to the left", you know it means in the rings turning toward the left and moving that way. Instead of turning left and right, you'd turn forward or aft. Still possibly confusing however. The second way is more interesting. Imagine yourself standing inside the ring as it rotates, and you're facing the direction of rotation. If you through a ball forward, because of the rotation, it will always hit the floor, no matter how fast you throw it. But if you throw it backwards, in the anti-spinward direction, it will travel further and you could, theoretically get it into "orbit" so it never hits the floor. In other words, for a throw with a set launch angle and a set velocity, it will go further anti-spinward than it will go spinward. Almost as if you were standing on the side of a hill and throwing the ball. If you throw down the hill, you're going to get more distance than throwing it up the hill. Which means, that if you're looking in the spinward direction, you're looking "up". So there's our cardinal directions in the rings on the spaceship around the circumference. It could be used on the station (and I labelled them as such), but it's more useful on the spaceship. If you're on the front ring and told to go "down" the ring, looking down the long axis of the ship means you're walking counterclockwise. If you're in the aft ring, you're walking clockwise. [Answer] There's really no reason to assume they would use port and starbord. However, if we start from the assumption that the nautical orientations (port, starbord, fore, aft, deck, overhead) will be used, the only practical direction "fore" could be is along the direction of movement. That would pin port and starboard down. However, there are plenty of other systems out there that might be used. You might leverage the right hand rule and define them as "along rotation" and "against rotation." The right hand rule is almost universally agreed upon to be the correct way to assign direction (which really means that physics majors get violent really quickly if you try to shove a left handed coordinate system on them, and we don't like to seem them violent!) The port/starboard directions will always be either in the same direction as this rotation vector, or opposed. Other cultures might also have their own opinions. From the reading I have done, the Chinese often deal with directions using cardinal directions. While we might say "walk down this street, take a right, and then take the next left," they might say "walk north, then turn east, and keep walking until the next chance to turn north." More interestingly, I have heard of these directions being malleable. Some martial arts schools teach that "south" is always the side that the teacher is on, regardless of the cardinal direction. This is very convenient because it makes the instructions the same, no matter what direction, while retaining the absoluteness of the direction giving they are used to. A Chinese station might choose to label the directions north, south, east, and west, based on the position that the captain of the station is facing when he is at his post. Depending on what orientation the spinning satellite is in, constellations might be used. We often specify coordinate systems that point towards particular zodiacs during the vernal equinox to disambiguate like this. We might talk of a rotation towards Libra or Gemini. If the spin is not in a convenient direction for this, we might pick major stars [Answer] Space is 3D, so simply differentiating front and back isn't good enough. You need a plane that port and starboard are normal to. So you need something non-rotating down the middle; something ventral or dorsal. Internal to the rotating section, port and starboard are meaningless. I would split it into hemicircles, much like the Earth's hemispheres. And I would refer to directions as fore and aft, or upspin and downspin. [Answer] The origins of the words "port" and "starboard" may be useful to consider here. Early ships did not have a rudder built into the hull, but instead used a modified oar - or later, a larger and more sophisticated steering-board - positioned at the helmsman's right hand. To prevent damage to these devices, the opposite side of the ship had to be moored to the wharf, hence "port side" and "steer board side". A certain amount of lexical drift resulted in "starboard" for the latter. The practical upshot is that *port* and *starboard* are synonyms for *left* and *right* respectively in the direction of travel. So they only make sense for a vessel which has reasonably consistent "forward" and "up" vectors. The ISS, even though it is a space station existing in microgravity, *is* such a vessel: > > Nominally, the ISS flies in an LVLH (Local Vertical Local Horizontal) attitude. That means that the vehicle pitches at four-degrees-per-minute in order to keep its belly pointed towards the Earth. So, nominally, the orientation of the ISS appears rather consistent with respect to the Earth. > > > This is desired because the vehicle was designed to be in an attitude in which the comm antennae pointed up at the TDRSS, the GPS antennae point up at the GPS satellites, the thickest shielding is in the direction of greatest debris damage risk, the windows point towards Earth for Earth observation science, and other external payloads can point at their desired topic, consistently. > > > *Robert Frost, NASA* > > > However, this would *not* be true of a wheel-type or cylinder-type rotating space station, whose gyroscopic properties would keep it pointed along a consistent axis instead of in "local attitude" - *unless* the axis of rotation happened to be aligned with the plane of orbit. That would actually be a reasonable orientation for a wheel-type station, but not for an O'Neill cylinder which must keep its axis pointed towards the local sun. A far more reasonable organisation for both types would be compass directions. As seen from above the North Pole, the Earth rotates anticlockwise, resulting in the Sun appearing to rise in the East. Analogous definitions result in natural N/S/E/W directions in a rotating wheel or cylinder. Up and down would be reversed relative to a rotating planet (ie. up is inwards), due to the direction of apparent gravity. Note however that a common design for O'Neill cylinders is as a pair, rotating in opposite directions, so that the common axis can be precessed to follow the sun through its orbit. In such a design, north and south would be at opposite ends in each cylinder, so would not be useful for locating external non-rotating parts of the station (though residents probably wouldn't care). In such cases, an additional set of directions based on the "hot" and "cold" ends may prove helpful. [Answer] Do it like the Right Ascension of the Ascending Node (RAAN) in orbital mechanics. Chose a reference frame and link your starboard and port to that. [Answer] A rotating wheel space station should usually have some non-rotating parts attached to the center (probably bigger than the rotating part, maybe even enveloping it). On that non-rotating part, the designations can be done as on the ISS. On the rotating part, they could then use the same designations depending on the hour of the day (or minutes, if it spins once or twice every hour). People would just have to look at their watch to know on which side they are, similar to us knowing on a cloudy day where the sun is if we know the time and where south is. On a very large wheel, the day and night cycles could help. At noon, starboard could be determined to be right, at sunset it would be up, at midnight left and at sunrise down. Or the other way around. ]
[Question] [ Enchanting is a form of study for the eldar race that involves ascribing runes to a particular object in order to give it certain properties it would not have normally. Through this method, the human body can be enhanced beyond its normal capabilities. People can increase its strength, speed, endurance, and defense. An individual can make their skin as hard as steel, outrun the fastest land animal, or rapidly heal themselves at a heightened rate. These runes are specific to certain abilities, preventing them from being used together. There are two sets of runes which are used by society. One is specifically meant for biological enhancement, with runes being placed on the skin directly and covering the entire body. The other is geared toward armor, with runes covering the material itself. There are a number of rules to this system. While they are capable of the same things, these sets of runes cannot be used together. Trying to wear both sets in order to increase their effect causes them to reject each other, canceling out their abilities. Wraithbone is the primary construction material used by the eldar. This material is activated by the individual user, who it is psychically linked to. Armor built with this method is made specifically for one user, and will only respond to them from then on. Biological runes seem to have the advantage over material runes. They are cheaper to use, eliminating the need for expensive materials by being placed directly on the person. They are also capable of giving the same properties and abilities to an individual. This seems to make armor somewhat redundant, as it is no longer needed to protect people. I need for armor to be able to compete with biological runes in order to justify their expenditure and make them cost effective. How can I make this happen? [Answer] **Some runes don’t make sense to have *always on*** Having a rune of disintegration tattooed on your fingertips is going to put a serious crimp in your love life. Etching the same thing on armour? Not so much. **Armour can be bought and applied post-hoc** Imagine you’re the lord of the manor, and you have occasional need of a militia. You buy a hundred Helms of Not Dying Instantly to give to your militiamen as and when they join up. That gives you quite a lot of freedom to pick and choose who to and when you give power. **Some runes don’t make sense to leave in the world** In the same example: you don’t want the peasantry walking around with Runes of Murdering etched on their chests (lest they get any funny ideas about the nature of feudalism), but if you can hold the Breastplates of Murdering in your armoury then you can dole out power when needed. **Armour gives flexibility** Facing invisible foes? Wear the goggles of Seeing Better. Trying to kill Ents? Perhaps the Flaming Helmet Of Flammability is a better bet. You can’t swap tattoos anywhere near as easily. **Armour can take more runes** This depends on your exact processes, but generally speaking you can etch more finely than you can tattoo. That lets you put more runes on the same space on a piece of armour. Not only that, but armour has both an outside (that you can cover in Runes of Beartrap) and an inside (for runes of Touchy-Feely-Keeping-You-Alive). On top of *that* you can add lots of cool spikes and swoosh detailing that would just be impractical and get you killed in the real world, but provide more space for additional Runes of Badassitude. **Armour can be mass produced** Your standard dwarven production line can’t churn out a hundred tattoos in a day. It can churn out a hundred enchanted boots though. ***Addendum thanks to Starfish Prime*** **Armour can be upgraded easily** Suddenly realised you need an extra boost? You can get someone to file a rune off your greaves and re-etch, or even just add an extra rune. Unlike with tattoos it won’t hurt or even require you to be there! You can just pay the enchanter, leave your gear and come back later (or wait and have a goblin shine your shoes). Hell, if you really want to you can just buy a new set of whatever bit of armour you need to replace and trade the old in for scrap. It’s hard to do that with your own skin. With some combo of these reasons I can certainly see armour sticking around, though sadly the psychic requirement means that armour being inheritable would just leave you with sad mementoes instead of your Grandad’s Armour of Kicking Ass. Oh well. [Answer] There are places where rune bearing things are not allowed. For some real world examples, think of how in Japanese onsen normally is forbidden for tattooed people to enter. Or how in some places one can enter only after leaving out weapons. well, if you are wearing an armor and you want to access such place in your world, an armor comes off pretty quickly. If you have an enchanted body, taking it off will be extremely painful, to say the least. [Answer] Rock-Paper-Scissors. I'm not entirely clear on how the system works, but as you put it: > > People can increase its strength, speed, endurance, and defense. An individual can make their skin as hard as steel, outrun the fastest land animal, or rapidly heal themselves at a heightened rate. These runes are specific to certain abilities, preventing them from being used together. > > > which implies that these abilities *cannot* be used together, i.e. you can only have one at a time (strength *or* speed *or* endurance *or* healing). And that means that there are weaknesses to exploit. If you know your opponent is, for instance, someone who has boosted their strength, than all you have to do is slip on a set of speed armor and run circles around them. If you know they've boosted their speed, pick a set of endurance armor, trap them in close quarters and let them wear themselves out trying to hurt you. If you know they've picked endurance, than pick your biggest warhammer, grab some strength armor, and turn him / his insides to paste. In other words, versatility. By inscribing a rune, you let your opponent know what hand you've got to play, while they can swap out to an entirely different one if they're using armor. [Answer] **Being Disarmed** If captured by the enemy, they take your runed armour and you are powerless. If your tattooed, they grab a flaying knife.... **Swiss Army Knife** Enchanted armour can be removed and replaced with something different to suit the situation. Tattoos prevent you from doing that. **Status** Tattooing runes on your skin shows you don't have the wealth to afford enchanted armour so you needed to choose the cheap inferior option. **Inheritance** When a father dies, he leaves his son his enchanted armour as he is now the head of his house. Since the runes can last several lifetimes, the runes whilst more expensive will also be more powerful because it's worth spending the money early on because your offspring will save the expense. Tattoos are are once off and worthless after you die. [Answer] An important way the question is phrased is "runes placed on the skin". This could mean that runes do not have to be permanent tatoo's, but could be temporary skin paint or similar. To answer the question, so far you've only considered the material cost and not the cost of expertise required to get the runes on the object of your desire. An apprentice runesmith is capable of practicing on armor all day long, building and rebuilding it. If the runes fail or are of suboptimal performance it's not that big of a problem. A single greave failed just means you scrap and reforge what you can, throw the rest away. But if you fail on a human body with a permanent tatoo that is very hard to properly remove? The cost of hiring a highly skilled rune artist who will do it right the first time around is much higher! And while the potential of bodypaint that stays on for a week or two will severely reduce the costs and the consequences for a failure, the total cost of putting those runes on again and again will surely get more expensive than that of armor. Then there's the intricacies of the human body. Armor can be made flat, or in a predictable curve with special area's designed to easily put runes on. The human body on the other hand is malleable, curved everywhere and constantly changing. Just imagine a rune on your bicep, now flex your bicep and watch as the skin stretches and warps. Even worse when you grow old, fat, thin, get more or less muscle mass etc and your skin starts to degrade, causing the runes to degrade with it. The runes on a human body need to be either much simpler to prevent errors with detailed parts of the rune during movement and degredation, or much more intricate to keep functioning despite everything that can happen to skin. This makes runes on your body much more expensive and limiting in their effects than armor. An armor can be made as intricate as you like, with runes both on the inside and outside of the armor (so more surface area to put runes on!). Then there's the consequences of using runes in battles. If you get captured with rune armor they just take the armor. If you get captured with runes on your body they are likely going to cut your body everywhere to scar and interrupt the runes. ]
[Question] [ [This is an expanded/refined version of my old question: [How would animals adapt to darkness-made beasts?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/127837/how-would-animals-adapt-to-darkness-made-beasts) ] **Premise:** 'Beasts'/Seraphins are other-worldly intangible beings (you can't touch them, but they can touch you[edit]) that appear and reside within our world's dark places (caves, basements (if unlit) and the general wilderness at nighttime etc.) However, when exposed to *some* (depending on intensity) light, (only parts exposed to light, e.g., if only the arm is lit, only the arm is tangible.) They turn tangible and can be killed/harmed. However, it is very *very* unlikely that they will willingly stay tangible and so will avoid light as much as possible- they fear the light, in a way, as it makes them vulnerable and susceptible to harm. They seek our 'dark places' as their own dimension is always unbearably bright- so much so that not only does it disable their incorporeal abilities; but also puts them in constant agony. There is no single surface/crevice/area in their home dimension that doesn't emit said 'blinding light'. However, they can open dimensional 'slits' that allow them to slip into our dimension- where darkness is quite abundant. **Information on 'Seraphins'** **Appearance:** * Seraphins appear as semi-humanoid creatures that are invisible to the human eye save for infrared viewing devices, ie. infrared goggles, scopes, etc. as they do emit infrared radiation. Concept: [Credit to: Thomas Istepanyan @Artstation] [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZwqTB.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZwqTB.jpg) The main idea is that they look semi-humanoid ie. example/concept given above- but more on the colourful side. They also have human-ish features akin to 'Titans' from Attack on titan where they go into the realm of the 'uncanny valley'. **Consumption**- Seraphins *do* consume food- mainly animals and humans, if given the chance. Sea creatures or any creature submerged in water is an exception- they cannot enter water. (Though if a building was underwater and was unlit, they could 'slip' into it.) **Behaviour**-Their main behavioural patterns is akin to that of the previously mentioned 'Titans' (Attack on titan) where they wander aimlessly seeking food, though they will ignore prey if they are 'full'. The Seraphins are quite common- You might encounter 5-10 *if* you are in darkness. **Danger**- *Very dangerous* mainly due to their inherent intangibility, most animals (unless they emit light.) can't interact with them, and humans (without light.) Can't either. Because of this, if you are in the dark you are pretty much already dead if a Seraphin takes an interest into eating you. No creature really presents it any danger- excluding animals/humans who emit light and other Seraphin. However, even if you manage to make it corporeal, if it feels in danger in any way whatsoever- they're dastardly hard to kill. If, in their corporeal form, put into the food chain, they would definitely be the apex of apex predators- A dog, wolf, bear or even a couple of lions will have a *very* hard time killing it- *if* it doesn't kill you first. In danger, it can move surprisingly quickly- think maximum human capabilities. Their attacks consist of human-esc grabbing, hitting, biting and clawing. Guns and well-made melee weaponry eg. Spears or swords (if used with skill) can be enough to kill one, though more than one human taking it on would be advisable. **Weaknesses**- * **While Intangible-** Light. to be exact, if you can read in said light comfortably without straining your eyes, it should be enough to deter them (turn them tangible.). * Water- they cannot enter water, though they are not hurt by it. (throwing water on them when they *are* tangible wouldn't be effective.) * **While Tangible**- * Bullets * Fire (like many other creatures) * Starvation (if kept tangible 24/7 and not fed) * Mutilation/loss of blood (In this case, a golden ichor-like liquid) Basically anything that will kill humans and animals, though in some cases eg. pure blunt trauma, just on a higher scale. **Question**: How might Fauna (animals) adapt? Could organisms (excluding plants- though they may also evolve to form a symbiotic relationship with some animals) adapt to emit light or would they have to rely on lantern/torch/floodlight/electrical light produced by humans for survival? [edit] **More specifically**, evolution leaning towards bioluminescence/chemoluminescence in plants and animals, **Even more specifically** just animals in general, ie. Predators and Prey (by this I mean if you talk about bio-luminescent defences for prey, for example, 'prey' will be an umbrella term for *all* prey) - nothing too specific like a whole species/family. [Answer] I don't think bioluminescence would be the best adaptation to this scenario. A bioluminescent animal would need to emit a strong light to keep away such creatures. But other than being very hard (I don't think any known bioluminescent animal can emit so much light), it would render the animal quite vulnerable to "normal" predators. So my thoughts about adaptation: * become a not-so-desirable prey: selection would probably reward small animals with high fertility (like mice), since they would be too small to be a suitable food source and anyway they would be able to quickly recover from the losses of population (even because they would face no competition or danger from bigger animals, which would be the preferred preys of seraphins). Moreover, animals that have bad taste (for the palates of the seraphins) would gain a big advantage over other animals and would become dominant * become a nocturnal animal: animals that are awake in the night would gain some small advantage (maybe they could have a chance to flee from seraphins, even if it seems unlikely, given the description of their powers) * become a partially aquatic animal: some animals would learn that under water, in the night, they're safe, so they could adapt to sleep (or anyway pass the night) submerged under water: hippos, dolphins or otters could somehow protect themselves this way. Maybe even elephants could adapt (they would pass the nights under water, keeping the tip of their trunks a bit over water to breath) [Answer] You would see more species with [pit organs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_sensing_in_snakes) - these would allow the animals to "see" the Seraphins in the Infra Red spectrum. Depending on the nature of their "inability to enter water" (is it just an aversion, or does it act like a static solid object such as the floor in their intangible state?) you might find animals start living behind waterfalls, or otherwise surrounded by water [Answer] **I'd say everything we see today, *just more of it*.** The following just to mention a few. **Bioluminescence:** A glowing sheep is just an annoying meal to the Seraphin, so I'd imagine it's mainly useful for animals that can additionally deter the Seraphin once corporeal. As others mentioned, glowing in the dark would also make you very vulnerable to traditional predators. Additionally, if animals seek light to escape the Seraphins, it could be used by other predators for hunting purposes. **Poison and Venom:** Your monsters aren't immune to poison as far as you stated, so being poisonous is a means of adapting. Nor do they need to be very corporeal to be vulnerable to deadly venom. **Passive defences:** The Seraphins are incorporeal in the dark, but can touch you. How does it deal with spikes such as the porcupine, or a hard protective shell? **Camouflage:** Can't hunt what you can't see, smell, hear. **Escaping:** Any means of escape such as speed/endurance, swimming or flight. Nocturnal birds might be the majority of your fauna as such, other animals might gather around water as the Seraphins can't enter it. --- I'd imagine anything that's dangerous, and can be made both to emit light and stick to the Seraphins would be a massive problem for them. Imagine squirting glowing sticky acid at the Seraphin, or lighting them on fire with a bit of oil. [Answer] One idea, if these creatures evolved with other lifeforms, is other lifeforms use bioluminescence to deter them. Maybe a frog that spits or oozes it, that also has spikes. If this "beast" attempted to eat the frog, the bioluminescence would make them "tangible" causing damage or pain in the beasts mouth. However, this ability to become "intangible" isn't really possible with know evolutional processes, therefore, you can basically make up any defense or symbiotic forces you deem fit. I do have an issue with this though. If normal matter cannot interact with them while they are in the dark, how can they interact with normal matter to eat them? I would imagine they would need to use some kind of light to allow them to kill their target. [Answer] Spoki0 mentioned bioluminescence. Bioluminescence is an excellent defense because it allows creatures to damage the Seraphins even when in the dark, but more specifically I think a certain type of bioluminescence would be put to use. The [sea firefly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vargula_hilgendorfii) emits a short burst of glowing liquid that confuses predators. What you could see are animals that glow in the dark more brightly as a fear or anger response, or even just when they encounter the Seraphins. You could also see animals capable of spraying bioluminescent fluid like a bombardier beetle sprays its boiling caustic liquid. I have one question, they can eat animals from this dimension, but can animals from this dimension eat them? If so, you could see bioluminescent animals evolving that can produce very bright light from their body followed by the glowing spray. These animals would fill an important niche keeping these things in check, and would not have much competition with other predators. Perhaps the ichor blood could be drunk, and these creatures might gain the appearance of, say, giant ticks (I hate ticks and I am cringing as I write this), but with massive lashing claws. Despite their terrifying and unnatural appearance, humans keep these creatures as pets because they are crucial for protecting human settlements. In exchange, humans would provide shelter and take care of the young. Another thing humans can do is provide medical treatment to injured animals, so these unsettling creatures might appear perfectly normal in human society. Maybe even considered loveable, like protective dogs. It's just an idea, and it might not work if these creatures are chemically incompatible with life on earth, but it kind of sounds cool so I just wanted to present the idea. Life evolves to fill every niche, and if these beings are vulnerable to light than they could very well lose their role as apex predators. Instead, having to deal with something that is out for their blood. [Answer] Animals would tend to become more nocturne. Since your seraphins are freaked out by any light, daylight would be safe enough for fauna. By night, animals would use much the same defenses they already do to fight or flight. While it's true that sight does wonders by day, it is not the only sense available - most savannah animals for example are better than us humans at detecting threats through sound and smell. So, supposing moonlight makes seraphins corporeal, they would be dangerous in caves, or in the open but on new moons mostly. Caves might not have enough biomass to sustain seraphins; in the open, animals will sleep by day and keep moving at night to avoid predation. Remember that if seraphins are extremely good at hunting they might unbalance ecossystems by overhunting. If they decimate their prey in a season, they will starve on the next season and may go extinct due to hunger. Seraphins, like any other predator, will coevolve with their prey; So they might start developing handicaps to allow the ecossystem to rebalance itself. [Answer] The darkness beasts could lead to the evolution of sharp-edged internal cavities filled with water, which would be used as weapons. These structures would likely be contained in similarly shaped external structure, to prevent the beasts from grabbing on to the external structure of the weapon [Answer] In evolutionary terms they don't seem to have any real advantages; the light-aversion is a severe disadvantage. Unless they have a way of sneaking up on prey animals they are not much different to any other predator. (Could they catch a rabbit, or an antelope?) They look to be killable enough by causing them to materialise around physical objects and a specialist predator or parasite would probably evolve to trick them into doing this. I suspect they would be preyed on by something like a firefly/mosquito which makes them tangible by flashing and bites. They may also suffer from bioluminescent fungal infections. [Answer] These are aliens from another dimension. What happens to us depends on when they invade. If they show up after we have mastered fire, then we will do what we do best and *drive them to extinction!* We have fire. A constant source of light, if it's properly tended, and a weapon in it's own right. As social creatures, some of us will take the night shift and tend the fire, or else everyone dies. With a constant light source, they can't approach us unless they want to get stabbed or burned. So they'll leave us alone, if they know what's good for them. But that's not enough. We have big brains and big families that require a lot of food, and these seraphin things would eat too much of it if we let them. So every once in a while, we break out the torches and pitchforks, and go monster hunting! Huge mobs go into the forest in the dead of night and bring the fight to them! And then there's the fact that we are not afraid to fight dirty. Burn forests, blow up caves, kill nestlings, take what we can and destroy the rest. Pretty soon the poor things will have no choice but to go back whence they came, or at least find some other planet to invade. I hear Betelgeuse has some nice, calm herbivores and no one to eat them. ]
[Question] [ So, I have many of the infamous spider-mechs (such as in this [question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/112144/advantages-of-spider-mechs-over-tanks)) roaming about in my highly futuristic setting. My mechs are arguably huge: the main body is 7 meters tall, in a conical shape, the base facing up and the pointy end down. A main set of 8 long legs keeps it hovering 2 to 3 meters above ground; those legs are mainly used for walking around and surpass obstacles. Another set of smaller legs is towards the point of the cone, and is used for precision movements or for object manipulation. Those mechs are powered by an internal electric motor, and the power source are my top-notch sci-fi batteries. The whole thing weighs around 60 to 100 tons, depending on the model and the supplies carried. ## **Thus said, I need a plausible way to lift those spidermechs upwards.** Those mechs are used to transport material around in my gigantic, multi- layered world. Requirements: * The mechs must be carried up for at least 300 meters. Bonus points if the suggested method of lifting could carry them even further ahead. * The lifting method should be reliable (e.g., no mech falling to its death, at least not often). * No matter how cool, those mechs shall not fly, nor soar the sky as rockets. * Also, I'd keep the presence of flying machinery in my setting to a mininmum. * The mechs are used in construction, not in any battlefield. * Keep in mind that in my setting there is no limit to the resources or to the scale of buildings. Everything can be as big and expensive as needed. Given those needs, I'm currently thinking of employing sets of rails. Given 4 rails pointed upwards in a supporting structure, the mech could line up its legs in slots (2 legs per rail) and be carried up, either lifted from above by a far reaching crane (or a set of) or pushed upwards by *something else*. I'm considering a way to use magnetism to push the robots upwards, in a similar way we have magnetic levitation trains today, but I don't know if it would be feasible for the upward movement (as far as I get it, the mechs shouldn't be pushed away from the rains, like maglev trains are, but on the rails from below). [Answer] TL:DR cranes Often the simplest answer is the best, given this I would suggest that perhaps the best solution is merely the good old fashioned "Platform connected to steel (or other fictional strong metal) cable". As you can see here crane's exist able to lift fourteen of your largest spider-mechs. even for our civilisation <https://fieldlens.com/blog/building-better/biggest-cranes/> this isn't a feat that requires any overcomplicated system, just a big ass crane. > > Keep in mind that in my setting there is no limit to the resources or to the scale of buildings. Everything can be as big and expensive as needed. > > > Meaning that building hundreds of 100+kg lifting capacity, 300+ metre tall cranes shouldn't at all be a problem. For bonus points mount these cranes on a specialised spider-mech chassis, this would probably help with army logistics and would enable the cranes to move around and provide support wherever they are needed, such as where another crane has been destroyed. [Answer] They are spidermechs. Do it like spiders. Of the three methods spiders use I think these things might be too heavy for hauling up on a web, and probably to heavy to climb without damaging the substrate. That leaves **jump.** <https://exopetguides.com/jumping-spiders-features/> Your mechs would need to prepare to jump for a few minutes, storing energy in springs (or pneumatic reservoirs?). Then they would shoot up into the air, spider style. If you think 300 meters is too high for a single jump, have staging platforms along the way. Sort of like a cat castle. But a giant jumping spidermech castle. --- Maybe some of you are unfamiliar with cat castles. Here I have taken a cat castle and populated it with lemon juicer spider mechs. They only need to jump a few times their own height. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/TMqYA.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/TMqYA.png) [Answer] Build a spider mech 100 times bigger than the other spider mechs, with palps -- the smaller legs -- designed to grab a spider mech without damaging it. This method leverages existing technology without requiring research into railroad construction, cable rigging, funicular gearing, etc. The only new requirement is unprecedented capital investment, which you would probably need with any lifting method anyway. As Ummdustry indicates in his answer, an additional bonus of this method is that the lifting mechanisms are naturally relocatable and self-propelled. [Answer] Let it lift itself. Spider Mechs main purpose over tracked or wheeled vehicles would be crossing rough terrain. The legs are capable of carrying the Mech, so as long as a wall or even ceiling is capable of carrying the Mech's weight thr Mech can use it. Build "stairs", just reinforced area's the Mech can anchor its feet in, that allow the Mechs to climb upwards. The other option would be ummdustries crane answer with a bunch of attachments on top of the Mech that allow a crane to lift it, or you just pre-attach these cranes to a platform that the Mech walks on top and use this thing that elevates them... An Elevator I'll call it. Even better, you can use the Mech's own engine to power the elevator. [Answer] Why not a ladder? The main legs have a retractable hook which allows them to hook to the rungs so they can climb up and down as needed. It's simple and easy to bolt to the side of the building during construction. ]
[Question] [ So the climax of my urban fantasy story, long story short, involves a supernatural event taking place in the modern time sometime around March on a Saturday, 12:00 PM EST, that renders guns and anything running on electricity (except living things) totally useless — the electricity for a week, the guns forever. I’m trying to wrap my head around what just a week of this would do to the world, with a special focus on the story’s setting of America, and the main question I have would be how many people would likely die by the week’s end? I don’t want to complicate the question by introducing and explaining the myriad supernatural elements of my story (and I suspect hearing an explanation of what something like this would do to the real world would probably be more than enlightening enough for my purposes), but there are a handful of important things I want to point out about this scenario: * Nobody was on the roads or in the air, at least not in America and most of the rest of the western world. Supernatural events are something of a weekly occurrence that have happened at the same time every week like clockwork for the past half a year, though every one before this has granted humans some new ability. As such, to make sure that none of these events cause any major accidents, travel by road or air is banned for the hour before and after 12:00 EST. So the initial catastrophic traffic accidents this would normally cause are not a concern. To clarify, however, while they knew something would happen at that time, they didn’t have an idea it would be something this huge or negative, so most did not prepare. * Since these are a weekly thing the world is now familiar with, everyone knows that electricity will start working again in a week. * For supernatural reasons that I’ll spare you the details on, mass worldwide prison breakouts start happening at the exact same time. I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to visualize what the aftermath of this would look like, but I don’t think I can even begin to grasp how many people just a week of this would kill, and the answer to that question is crucial for working out how the book will end and the next book will begin. [Answer] [manassehkatz](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/113449/32987) provides an excellent answer that covers much of the problems people will face. Some other areas to consider: The internet is gone. While manassehkatz jokes that teens will die from boredom, the impact is actually far more severe. Much of today's media and knowledge is stored there and is now erased or at best inaccessible. What happens when someone needs to look up a thing, and now that ability is removed? Libraries don't spend near as much money on keeping up-to-date research materials on hand, so vast sums of knowledge are now gone as far as most people are concerned. Your cars are now useless chunks of metal, plastic, and glass. Without electric spark plugs, no gasoline engine can run. Period. Diesel engines might run, but I guess it depends on how reliant they are on computers nowadays? And of course, even they will require some means to crank, since the battery-powered starter motors are dead. *That last paragraph above just killed entire swaths of your people.* Anyone who lives in a city is dead. Period. There are no means to transport goods on a massive scale anymore. This means your city has no food. No food means starvation. You'll have riots before the week ends. And it will be months before order is restored. Ships at sea will suffer the same fate. Sure, maybe they were at anchor when the surge happened. But now they're dead at sea. All the food being shipped across the oceans is going to rot on board a stranded vessel. I suppose those shipping food can crack open their containers and feed the crew. Otherwise the crew may run out of food before they can reach shore. Your friendly neighborhood water treatment plant is dead. That's a bad thing. Your water now isn't being pumped from the wells or rivers up to the water towers and out to your citizens. So your citizens are forced to scavenge for whatever water they can find, regardless of how dirty it is. Your friendly neighborhood sewage treatment plant is dead. That's a bad thing. Now you have raw sewage backing up in pipes, not getting pumped out to the treatment systems or between treatment stages. So the bacteria in them will no longer maintain the balance necessary to survive and treat sewage. This will have long-term impacts for your environment. Your nuclear power plants are now in melt-down. Sure, they have all kinds of safety measures. But they all rely on various forms of command-and-control systems to maintain them. Those systems are dead, so your reactors are all going to go Fukoshima on you. All of them that weren't already shut down, at least. And there's no way to begin cleanup operations, so the impact will be worse for any such leaks than Fukoshima was/is. (Note, though, that if the world knows these events happen, then it is possible the plants go into a planned shutdown each week during the window. If so, then they're probably okay. Maybe. But it may be impossible to restart the reactors now...) No one can talk to anyone they aren't nearby. There are no long-range communications methods alive today that aren't electricity-dependent. So we're all in the dark as far as how bad things are at a distance. No one can manufacture anything. Either because they no lack the means (machines are all dead) or the knowledge (hey, go google how to make a pencil. Oh. Wait. Google is dead...). Entire industries are dead. Information Technology. Electricians. Electronics / robotics. Publishing. Shipping. Retail. Communications. Entertainment. News. They're all done. Other power generation facilities may be destroyed as well, or damaged beyond the means to repair without power... Catch-22. Nations with nuclear arsenals have just lost their control systems. And their electronic defenses. And the electric fences are off for a week. Or more. You've got a high probability that terrorists just walked out with at least some nuclear material from somewhere in the world. If explosions still work, dirty bombs are a high risk and rogue nuclear weapons are a credible risk, too. Your nuclear subs just sank. If they are in deep seas, then they imploded and probably released radioactive debris, so now your oceans have contamination which is going to cause ecological troubles. I don't know how much nuclear material will be released or how devastating the impact will be, but there's going to be some kind of impact. Your satellites are space debris. If power restores before they drift off course, control might be regained before they drift too far and eventually are lost. This means no communication, no weather, no spy satellite coverage. It might be a long time before GPS navigation is an option; how good are you at dead reckoning? Of no consequence to the world as a while, but the ISS is full of dead people now and, depending on how stable the orbits are, may be falling or may be at risk of collision with satellites? Either way, there were no survivors on board. You don't have any factories that are in production, basically. And some of them, if their production lines were running, probably destroyed or damaged their production machines when the power failed without a proper shut down. Food factories now have rotting food stuck in various stages of the line; once power is restored, they'll spend weeks sterilizing and cleaning everything. That means longer delays before food can get to market. Same for medicine factories. Systems that don't have automatic shut off systems (that don't require electricity to operate) may fail. This might impact production lines that involve gas furnaces. Your dairy farms are in trouble, since they use automated milking systems. A dairy cow that doesn't get milked twice a day, every day, has problems. So you *may* have collapsed the world's industrial-scale dairy market. Any farm crops that rely on automated sprinkler systems may have been ruined. Hopefully, chemical plants, oil refineries, oil well pumps and offshore drilling platforms, etc. all had the foresight to shut down in preparation for the magic day. Otherwise, they may all go boom. Again, hopefully, no miners were below ground in the mines when it happened. Because they're trapped, have no fresh air coming in, and won't get rescued. Fire departments, ambulances, and police cannot respond to problems. And, without phones, they don't know where the problems are. So the risk of catastrophic fire has gone up. WAY up. Ditto if any forest fires break out that threaten towns. You've lost all your tsunami warning systems throughout the Pacific Ocean's ring of fire. If an earthquake happens, there will be no notice to warn citizens that a tsunami is coming. Banks and stock markets are down for a week. There's no way to access the funds in those banks. There is no way to verify the funds exist or how much money is held. The entire stock market is zeroed out until power is back. That's a week where the entire global economy just... *STOPPED*. We see stock markets ripple over things like tweets or speeches. I cannot imagine what kind of insanity would ensue when power is finally restored and trading is allowed to resume. People would not be able to buy goods since there's no way for them to validate their bank accounts / credit card accounts to withdraw cash. Any attempt to do "old school paper" credit card slips will be horribly inefficient and ripe for abuse. What happens to people with bills that are due during or immediately after the outage? Auto-draft bills wouldn't pay. Electronic payment methods are down. This is global in scale. The economy would take months to correct from this kind of outage. Would there be a run on banks when power was restored? Would the stock market crash as people liquidated their stocks in favor of more tangible assets that can be traded during disasters? These last two paragraphs alone could trigger the kind of panics that were seen last seen in the US in 1929 when the Great Depression really got started. **You've triggered a Dark Age that will end modern, advanced, civilization.** *The Amish are your best hope for survival.* [Answer] This will cause disruption equivalent to a worldwide EMP event. Some likely results: * Plenty of car crashes. Despite the warnings, there **will** be people on the roads. Not very many plane crashes though because the government has much more control over flight. * A **LOT** of looting by people who know that there will be no burglar alarms, no calling the cops (unless your store is within a block of a police station) and no bullets to stop you. * Significant deaths of: + Hospital patients, especially anyone in the ICU dependent on medical oxygen, monitoring for serious problems, etc. + Depending on how extensive "no electricity" goes, anyone relying on a pacemaker, automatic defibrillator, etc. will die if they have a heart attack during the week. + Dialysis patients. The least severe cases will last a week. The ones dependent on dialysis every day or every other day might not. + Elderly or other frail people in extremely hot environments that depend on air conditioning for safe temperatures. I know people used to live without air conditioning - but they didn't live in some places they live now, or they would go to the mountains during the worst of the summer. (Cold is not a problem - you can build a fire in your fireplace when the furnace isn't working.) * Some younger people may die of boredom - no internet, no TV, no movies, no Facebook, no online chatting - oh my goodness! They might have to read a book or actually talk to someone. The horror! * Food will not be much of a problem. Peanut butter, crackers, BBQ "whatever is defrosting from the freezer" will work for most people. * But water could be a big problem in many areas. Most places are dependent on electrically pumped water. The water towers (in the areas that have them) will empty quickly and most people don't have enough bottled water on hand to get through the week. Some will have stockpiled water when they got the "no electricity warning", but many people will not. Some of those people will, inevitably, drink contaminated water without proper boiling or bleaching and get sick, though with this only lasting a week not many will die from that. * Fires will be a moderate problem. Many people will be cooking with fire (or heating with fire if the weather is cold) and some of them will not do so in a safe way. Unfortunately, even if they can notify the fire department (no phones), the fire department won't be able to do much because they can't drive the fire trucks and the hydrants in most areas won't have much, if any, water pressure. So there will be some deaths and a moderate amount of property damage due to fires. I actually don't think the long-term effects will be that bad. Many of the long-term effects theorized for an EMP - e.g., breakdown of society, harvesting and transport of food, medications, etc. simply won't apply with only a one-week lapse. [Answer] **It's the end of civilisation as we know it** Assuming that everyone knew that this event was coming *and* exactly what the effects would be *and* exactly how long it would last, civilisation might be able to pick itself up afterwards. I really doubt it though. The planet simply cannot afford to basically have all of its infrastructure go on strike for a week. Lots of factories, foundries etc *could not* be restarted if they were completely shut down for 24 hours, let alone a week. Most large powerplants could not be restarted for a prolonged period even if the shutdown was known to be coming, so it would be much more than a week without electricity for the large majority of the population. In mild weather the critical effect is loss of water supply - over 70% of the US population live in urban areas, with only a small number having access to "natural", potable fresh water close to their residence. In hot weather the water supply issue is even more critical and compounds with the lack of air conditioning. In cold weather the lack of heating will kill people - people living in apartment blocks cannot just "start a fire", even assuming anyone can start a fire (see below). While you have not explained what the previous weekly occurrences have been, they do not seem conducive to a stable economy. I would suggest that the current 13% of the US population who live in poverty would have increased over the six months of unexplained events. These people have a hard time feeding themselves when everything is working "normally". In uncertain times when everyone who can afford to is stocking up on canned food and shotgun shells (even if the latter turn out to be useless) the poor will be struggling even more, they certainly will not have a reserve. Within 48 hours they will be fighting the "haves" to get food to feed themselves and their children, and given that the loss of tech means that almost everyone is down to using knives and clubs (or their mysterious superpowers) they are on an even footing. A quick note on the psychology here - people do not deal well with uncertainty. If the government has all of the facts and was able to tell people in advance what was happening, how long it would last and how they would be looked after once it is over - most people still will not be making rational decisions after a few days without food. Neither will the people who feel threatened by them. In short, lack of water, climate effects, and fighting for remaining food will probably kill 30%-70 of the urban population after the week (or two plus) before electricity can be restored to some areas, depending on time of year and associated weather. Disease will probably kill another 10-30% of the urban population over the next few weeks. However, the situation is actually worse than this... **No combustion or chemical reactions** Your responses to comments regarding the "no guns" limit appear to read as "no combustion". If my understanding of this is correct - that is, fires, fuel-driven power plants and fuel-driven vehicles are permanently inoperable - then there is no more modern transport or industry. Ever. It also means that except for the few solar BBQs around, there is no more cooking until/if the electricity is restored - this renders lots of food staples inedible. At this point the nationwide casualty rate within 3-4 weeks is going to be well over 90% and the technological basis of our civilisation is gone. The small stocks of electric cars etc will be utilised by the survivors, but without energetic processes available for manufacture they will not be replaceable. I have deliberately omitted examining the neutralisation of firearms because their absence has no effect on the long term picture. For the short term, loss of communications is a far more critical problem for law enforcement. The loss of firearms may be psychologically traumatic to Americans on both sides of the law, but there are both historic and current examples of police forces, such as the British, *not* issuing firearms to most officers. **Edit** One additional point - if a major nuclear power knows exactly what is coming, they have a never-to-be-repeated chance for a pre-emptive strike. Let's say country X knows its missiles will take 15 minutes to reach their targets in country Y and vice versa. If country X launches at 11:44:30 then their missiles will have time to reach their targets and detonate, but unless country Y can detect the missiles, assess and confirm the threat, make a decision to launch and get their birds in the air within 30 seconds, their missiles will still be inbound when the magic takes out all electricity, including the detonation circuitry. Without a detonating mechanism, country Y's missiles will just slam into the ground, contaminating a tiny area with waste, whereas country X's missiles all detonated. [Answer] The result will honestly depend on how well prepared the country is to face any kind of disaster. @manassehkatz did a nice summary of everything that would happen if you weren't prepared, if electricity was to just disappear and I honestly don't have much to add onto that, but you mentioned that this was something of a weekly occurrence and that means there should be some preparations in place to help soften the blow. Firstly, assuming that these disasters have been happening every week and they have a wide range of different effects, people would have likely already stockpiled a week or more supply of food and water. If the disaster lasts a week then you only need to survive the week. You would likely have specialized services to help distribute necessities like food and water depending on the type of disaster. I don't live in America, but I just image a giant Costco that gives things out for free... The next thing would be the immediate result of all the electricity going away. Plenty of car crashes, dead people in the hospital, people stuck in elevators and people walking into glass doors that no longer magically open for them. Now it seems the main focus would be related to security and safety. With no guns for protection your police, army and any special services would be in a tough spot. Now based on your comments, I'll assume that explosions no longer work, as if they have been turned off, so things that rely on a combustion engine don't work even if they don't use electricity. This combined with some general areas tendencies towards crime and a prison break wouldn't actually be bad for your police/army. Firstly, they should have received hand to hand combat lessons as well as have access to a variety of powers (your people do have powers right?) that would be more balanced towards maintaining the peace than pure destruction. Secondly you would have higher co-ordination and teamwork with fellow officers, another important aspect. Thirdly and finally you've mentioned that there are powers which are able to disable chemical reactions and electricity. Due to this, your police force would have a large supply of weapons and vehicles that run off compressed air or other gases. While they wouldn't be as deadly, they would still pack quite a punch and be very effective at maintaining order. So now you've got a police force with guns and vehicles that work in the face of powers and supernatural disasters putting them at a clear advantage. You might have some disruption to normal activities in the first 2-3 days, but it stabilizes after that. People don't go crazy and start rioting and looting because events of these magnitudes occur each week and they should be prepared for it. Your police force will always react quickly over the weekend because they know something supernatural will occur, and with the presence of powers that make electricity and chemical reactions fail, they will have back up procedures in place to handle this. Also don't try to make air in-compressible... it wouldn't work well [Answer] **Just a week with warning?** In the time leading up to the world-wide power outage you would have a run on stores that make the [1977 New York blackout](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_blackout_of_1977) look like kids in a playground. There wouldn't be a thing on the shelf anywhere. Then the blackout hits. * Food distribution comes to a complete stop. There aren't enough horses in the world (even if you had the time to do this) to step in and take the place of trains and semi-trailers. But as inconvenient as this is, [humans can survive up to three weeks without food](http://www.businessinsider.com/how-many-days-can-you-survive-without-water-2014-5). So, no significant deaths due to starvation. * Water, on the other hand, is a problem. Most people can't survive without water for more than about [100 hours](https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/pulled-rubble-after-16-days-water-secret-survival-f1C9876099). All the pumps just shut off, but there's water still in the tanks and many secondary resevoirs are gravity-fed. So, if the power outage hit on Sunday, people are start dying of dehydration on Thursday — especially people living south of the [Mason-Dixon line](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mason%E2%80%93Dixon_line) were it extended alone its latitude coast-to-coast — but only those in the desert southwest are dying like flies. * Medical is affected, but most people (even in hospitals) would survive a week without electricity. It would reek (in almost every sense of the word), but they'd survive. And this is from a first-world perspective. Your second- and third-world countries would hardly be affected at all. But, to give basis to my number, bear in mind that the [estimated annual death rate](http://www.funtrivia.com/askft/Question69343.html) is just under 1%. Let's call it 1%. 0.01/365 = 0.0027% daily death rate. **Estimated losses world-wide in a week due to the outage: 1%** In most of the world almost nothing would happen. In your first-world countries, most deaths would occur due to panic and crime, with a more-than-their-fair-share occuring to the Mormons since we're known to ~~horde~~ store food. But, to be honest, most people would simply lock themselves at home and wait it out. *The real devestation would be economic because banks won't stop counting interest during those days but most companies would grind to a halt. No money in + money due out = bankruptcy.* [Answer] I'm going to go the other way and say that, given everyone knows the electricity will be back on in a week, 90% of people are going to come together and help others - call this the optimistic side of the coin. We are social creatures. If there was uncertainty then yes, personal and tribal tendencies will become prevalent. But for a week it should be fine - we can go 3 days without water - if we conserve and share there's no reason for mass hysteria and a complete breakdown of society. During most natural disasters, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc., neighbors pull together and help each other. As others have said though, those who are on life support or other medical assistance where electricity is required are likely going to die. Of course there will be small pockets of people causing trouble, looting, hoarding, etc., so there will be some violence (especially since in the comments you said prisons will be emptied.) So it is up to you to decide how your story will unfold. Do you want to highlight the compassionate (which I believe is more probable) side of humanity with a little violence thrown in, or do you want to say everyone simply freaks out, goes into survival mode, and there are a lot of people dying due to murderers? [Answer] Well for one thing, the Preppers are gonna be laughing their asses off. Indeed, if the occurrences are a regular thing, as you say, there may be a great deal MORE Preppers, and the various goods sold to them (MREs, water supplies, etc) might be a much more reasonable product. The fact that the timeframe of the event is well known MIGHT help keep society from going completely haywire - knowing something will end soon can make getting through it much easier. [Answer] The bit about shutting down cars killing people in cities is exaggerated. A healthy human can survive a week without food...I could wait out a week holed up in my apartment. And FYI, older diesel would work, and I believe some other older cars could be modified to work. (I know this from a similar thread on Usenet). As far as possibilities really cataclysmic disasters, water is one. Water is usually gravity fed from a high water tower (to avoid problems when electricity goes out) but usually pump get it to the top of that tower. And do the sewage systems use sump pumps? If yes, you could have water born disease epidemics. The other way this could go horribly wrong is if people panic. A lot depends on what time of year this happens. Spring and Fall wouldn't be so bad, but most heating systems rely on electricity for the thermostat and "spark plugs". Again, I think a smart tinkerer could improvise a way around that for oil and gas heat...but I know I couldn't. Naturally anyone on oxygen is toast... If things go well, it's in the Spring, and people don't panic, a week would leave you with a few hundred thousand dead in North America and a few billion in property damage. ]
[Question] [ Two intergalactic superpowers, the Western Republic and the Eastern Empire, are in a Cold War. The Eastern Empire is comprised of mostly aquatic species, while the Western Republic is mostly comprised of terrestrials, including humans. The Eastern Empire has assembled 33 million FTL nuclear missiles pointed at the Republics territory. The Western Federation needs to have a weapon that can be equally destructive. Most Imperial Cities are submerged under 500 ft of water or more, so my question is, would nuclear weapons work or should they use another kind of weapon? [Answer] I believe what you have here is good, but as someone in the comments had said, galactic empires do not fight over cities. They fight over planetary control and galactic strongpoints. I would advise doing something, and yes this may seem like a rip off of *Star Wars*, but some sort of weapon that destroys aquatic planets by draining the water. I have done some research on a nuclear weapon detonating underwater, and I am not sure if you are placing fleets on said planets, but here is what I found on nuclear weapons detonating underwater: <https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/70-years-ago-the-us-military-set-off-a-nuke-underwater-and-it-went-very-badly> Now granted, this is a past incident. I am sure that in the future a fleet would not be severely harmed by nuclear detonations off from the water, but many ships were harmed from nuclear attacks, and missiles launched from the air could be hard to reach their targets. So I would say construct some sort of super weapon that drains up water on planets, say something like a heat bomb or a way that it pollutes the water, like biological warfare to where the wildlife is destroyed. Or just simply make it to where underwater nuclear weapons are safer to be detonated. [Answer] Water transfers force more efficiently than air, so pretty much any sort of blast from a device configured to perform as a depth charge will do. [Answer] Underwater explosions have been studied by humanity for decades now. There is a short term for underwater explosion: *undex*. Since water is (for practical purposes) incompressible, the energy of a blast suffers less dispersion over distance. In other words, the blast radius is much larger than what it would be, should the detonation happen in air. About underwater nukes, you should read [Wikipedia's main article on it](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_explosion#Shallow_underwater_explosion), and then the one about [Operation Hardtack's Wahoo Blast](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Hardtack_I#Preparation): > > The nuclear device was positioned 500 feet deep in the Pacific Ocean (...) Within a second of detonation, a spray dome was created that reached a height of 840 feet [above the surface] after seven seconds (...) When the spray dome and base surge had dissipated, a foam patch could be seen spreading from the surface zero water to reach over 6,000 feet (...) The nuclear device had a blast that was calculated to be nine kilotons. All fallout stayed within the predicted fallout area with a maximum of 0.030 R/hr. The target ship at 5,900 yards was directly hit by the shockwave vibrating the entire ship and shaking it violently. The Moran, merchant marine ship moored at 2,346 feet away, was immobilized due to shock damage to its main and auxiliary equipment while also attaining minor hull damage. > > > That was a 9 kilotons blast, which is a relatively small yield. You can be sure that anything above the blast was obliterated. To the sides and further below, targets will take a hit from the blast wave. But what if a larger payload was used? [XKCD's What If number 15](https://what-if.xkcd.com/15/) was about detonating the Tsar Bomba (yield: 53 megatons, or 5,888.88 times the Wahoo test payload) underwater. > > The explosion at the bottom of the Mariana Trench will create a quickly-expanding spherical cavity of hot steam. To figure out how big it gets, we can try a formula from the 1971 paper [Evaluation of Various Theoretical Models For Underwater Explosion](http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/737271.pdf): > > > $$ Radius = (\frac{3}{4\pi})^{\frac{1}{3}} \times (\frac{40\% \times 53 \space megatons \space of \space TNT}{Mariana \space Trench \space pressure + 1\space atm})^{\frac{1}{3}} \approx 580 \space meters $$ > > > If we use the same equation for a smaller depth of 500 feet (approximately 152 meters): $$ Radius = (\frac{3}{4\pi})^{\frac{1}{3}} \times (\frac{40\% \times 53 \space megatons \space of \space TNT}{16 \space atm})^{\frac{1}{3}} \approx 2367 \space meters $$ I don't have any data to make further extrapolations, so from now on it's just pure speculation. I think the water column, fauna, flora and people within the blast would be vaporized, making for a big mushroom cloud reaching almost as high as the original Tsar Bomba test one (which peaked at 56 kilometers above sea level, nearly seven times the altitude of Everest's peak). The sheer pressure of the shockwaves will keep the surrounding water from caving in at first, but once that passes, water will rush in in a very catastrophic manner. Expect a whirlpool of biblical proportions. Both the initial blast and the later rush-in would cause tsunamis that would travel for dozens to hundreds of kilometers. If the sea in that area is around 150 feet deep, then the seafloor will become very hard, very plain glass, and the blast will be detected by sismographs multiple times as the shockwaves travel through the crust and mantle of the planet. Oh and once that settles you will see a [black rain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fallout). The water itself should not be much radioactive, but the salt in it should give you more problems than hypertension. [Answer] What you need is the equivalent of nuclear depth charges, which have already been developed. The [SUBROC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUM-44_SUBROC) is actually an anti-submarine device, which is lauched from a sub, goes ballistic, then reenters the water at its target location, descending like a depth charge. You only need the air-to-submarine section of the weapon to work in your world, which should make it simple to modify to increase the power to an underwater city-buster. [Answer] Since this is a cold war, the Western Empire needs a doomsday weapon. They attack the atmospheres of the ocean planets. An ocean cannot exist without an atmosphere, as it would quickly evaporate into space. There are a few methods that come to mind, depending on the empire's technical ability. 1. A Solar Wind beam. Mars' atmosphere was stripped away by solar wind, assisted by the composition of its atmosphere and loss of magnetic field, but a similar method could work to hit multiple planets with manufactured or redirected solar wind. 2. Bombarding the planet with magnesium pellets (if it has an oxygen atmosphere) triggering massive fires and burning of the atmosphere (more [here](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/74586/removing-an-atmosphere-from-a-previously-habitable-world)) 3. Gravity Gun - Reducing a planet's gravity would effectively dissipate its atmosphere, allowing the oceans to evaporate into space. These would be pretty apocalyptic events on a planet-wide scale, maybe even for whole systems depending on the width of the beams/attacks. [Answer] I am not sure about a galactic war using FTL missiles to hit targets probably thousands of light years away. There may be border defenses that can detect and stop approaching FTL missiles like the USA's "Star Wars" program might have been able to to stop ICBMs if completed. And once past the border defenses each important target planet might have a planetary defense system designed to detect incoming FTL missile and try to stop them. Thus FTL missiles might face lots of defenses on the way, often thousands of light years, to their targets, and might have a very hard time reaching those targets unassisted. instead I imagine a galactic war using fleets of space battleships, both manned and unmanned, to attack planetary defense systems. If planetary defense systems have the capability to detect and stop FTL missiles, the planetary defense systems must be disabled to give the FTL missiles clear shots. So if a fleet of space battleships is detected approaching, the defending side may send a fleet of space battleships to fight the attacking side's fleet of space battleships, and stop them from disabling planetary defense systems to give FTL missiles a clear shot. Thus it is possible that the decisive battles in any hot war between the two realms will be battles between fleets of millions of space battleships. What kind of a warhead will a FTL missile have? A tiny pebble at FTL speed would have enough kinetic energy to smash a planet. No atomic bombs would be needed. Except that it is impossible to take a slower than light (STL) object and accelerate that object to FTL speeds. It would take infinite energy to accelerate even a subatomic particle to even the speed of light. Therefore all possible FTL drives would somehow "cheat". They would get matter from star system A to star system B in less time than light takes to travel the distance without actually accelerating that matter to speeds faster than light. Therefore no possible FTL drive would give any matter impossible amounts of kinetic energy. So it's back to using atomic bombs as the warheads? Not necessarily. The extinction of the dinosaurs and many other life forms was probably caused by the Chicxulub asteroid impact. And even if other theories are correct and the Chicxulub impact wasn't the main cause of the extinctions, it would have wiped out all life in an area hundreds and even thousands of miles wide. The asteroid that struck Chicxulub was probably about 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) in diameter and struck at a speed of "only" a few tens of kilometers per second. The blast produced as much energy as ten billion Hiroshima A bombs. According to my rough calculations, a rock only 15 meters or 50 feet in diameter travelling at the speed of the Chicxulub asteroid, just a few tens of kilometers per second, would release the energy of a Hiroshima bomb on any land or underwater city it struck. The Tunguska event in 1904 produced a blast now estimated at 3 to 5 megatons, a few hundred times the blast of the Hiroshima bomb, and would devastate a large metropolis. It was probably produced by an asteroid or comet about 60 to 190 meters (196 to 620 feet) in diameter traveling at a few tens of miles per second. So to produce a FTL missile, just attach a slower than light (STL) drive and a FTL drive to an asteroid. Use the STL drive to accelerate the asteroid to a speed of a few tens of kilometers per second. Then turn on the FTL drive, zoom to the target solar system, get very close to the target planet and in the correct relative position, and then turn off the FTL drive. The asteroid will still have the relative motion of tens of kilometers per second, and will slam into the target planet with devastating effects. So you can use tiny asteroids to hit individual cities with nuclear bomb sized explosions, or asteroids a few kilometers in diameter to strike entire planets with devastating effects. In the *Lensman* series a pair of planets with opposite velocities would be selected and giant FTL space drives would be installed on the planets and used to move them to opposite sides of the target planet, and then they would turn off the FTL drives. The intrinsic STL velocities of the two planets would cause them to smash into the target planet from opposite sides. But unless the target planets in your stories have fantastically advanced defense systems that would be billions of times overkill, trillions of times more mass than needed to devastate a planet. Of course increasing the speed of the asteroid will increase the explosion it makes when it strikes. Since the speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792.458 kilometers per second, that is 29,979.245 times a speed of 10 kilometers per second. Clearly an asteroid could be accelerated to tens or hundreds of times the speed that asteroids usually hit planets at, thus making its explosion a lot bigger. It may be noted that neighboring stars often have high velocities relative to each other, so there might not be any need to artificially accelerate an asteroid to STL speeds to strike a planet in a neighboring star system, merely to use FTL speeds to get it near the target planet. Since stars mostly rotate around the centers of their galaxies in the same direction, stars on the opposite sides of their galaxies will be going in opposite directions with velocity differences on the order of hundreds of kilometers per second. And your Western Republic and Eastern Empire might be on different sides of your galaxy. So if you are going to have an galactic cold war between two space realms using FTL missiles to threaten each other - like in the Cold War on Earth - you really don't have to worry much about the nature of your warheads. Normal atomic bombs or simple space rocks will do. ]
[Question] [ **This question already has answers here**: [What would cause life forms to be water soluble (i.e. witches)?](/questions/57559/what-would-cause-life-forms-to-be-water-soluble-i-e-witches) (2 answers) Closed 5 years ago. > > This made Dorothy so very angry that she picked up the bucket of water that stood near and dashed it over the Witch, wetting her from head to foot. > > > Instantly the wicked woman gave a loud cry of fear, and then, as Dorothy looked at her in wonder, the Witch began to shrink and fall away. > > > "See what you have done!" she screamed. "In a minute I shall melt away." > > > "I'm very sorry, indeed," said Dorothy, who was truly frightened to see the Witch actually melting away like brown sugar before her very eyes. > > > "Didn't you know water would be the end of me?" asked the Witch, in a wailing, despairing voice. > > > "Of course not," answered Dorothy. "How should I?" > > > "Well, in a few minutes I shall be all melted, and you will have the castle to yourself. I have been wicked in my day, but I never thought a little girl like you would ever be able to melt me and end my wicked deeds. Look out--here I go!" > > > -[The Wonderful Wizard of Oz](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/55/55-h/55-h.htm), L. Frank Baum (1900). Imagine a race of humanoid, intelligent aliens who display the same characteristics as the Wicked Witch of the West, but aren't magical. **How could I explain why such aliens literally "melt" when splashed with a bucket of room-temperature pure water?** The ideal answer would provide a plausible reason for pure water to cause this effect based on known chemistry and biology with minimal handwaving. [Answer] Simple: they are ammonia-based lifeforms, and to them water is [a strong acid](http://www.xenology.info/Xeno/8.2.2.htm). > > In the ammonia system, water, which rests with liquid NH3 to yield NH4+ ion, would seem as a strong acid, quite hostile to life. Ammono-life astronomers, eyeing our planet from their chilly observatories, would doubtless view the beautiful, rolling blue oceans of Earth as little more than "vats of hot acid." -- **Table 8.3: Dissociation of the Vital Solvent** > > > (Or not so simple: such creatures would likely have evolved in atmospheric pressure 60+ times higher than our own and would immediately explode if exposed to our thin atmosphere.) [Answer] Similar to [rek's ammonia-based answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/102231/2800): Their bodily fluids are based on water-hydrogen peroxide eutectic. Such a creature would be optimize to live at lower temperatures than humans, but the top of the survivable range could have considerable overlap with the bottom of ours. Hydrogen peroxide is extremely hygroscopic, and that combined with regular osmotic pressure would cause rapid absorption of water when exposed to large concentrated quantities of the liquid, resulting in the rupture of cell membranes. They would be able to deal with exposure to water vapor in the atmosphere by expending metabolic energy to actively pump excess water out (rather like we regulate our salinity, pH, and other ion levels) and/or converting water to hydrogen peroxide. And in fact, addressing a need to extract as much water vapor as possible from the air in the absence of significant sources of abiotic liquid water would provide an incentive for such a creature to evolve. (In fact, water-hydrogen peroxide mixtures have been seriously studied as a possible solvent for native Martian life, which has implications for the sorts of experiments one would do to attempt to find such life.) In addition, peroxide-based organisms, if they have otherwise Earth-like biology, would require a lot of protective proteins to inhibit spontaneous oxidation. Rupturing cell membranes and messing up the concentrations of those proteins may result in the hydrogen peroxide component spontaneously and violently reacting with the creatures other biomolecules, meaning that there's a good chance it wouldn't merely *melt* when splashed with comparatively-hot room-temperature liquid water, but also start steaming and possibly even burst into flame! [Answer] The body inhabited by the witch is not her original body. It is a synthetic body, made by magic out of sugar or salt. Or pastry! Aside from melting like sugar, the witch has dust in her veins (sugar?) and does not bleed. > > Once the Witch struck Toto a blow with her umbrella and the brave > little dog flew at her and bit her leg in return. The Witch did not > bleed where she was bitten, for she was so wicked that the blood in > her had dried up many years before. > > > Synthetic bodies occur often in fantasy / scifi. Also in Wizard of Oz the Tin Man had a synthetic body. [Kroenen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Ruprecht_Kroenen) in the Hellboy movie has some sort of semisynthetic body with dust for blood. In Harry Potter, Voldemort does something similar with his [Rudimentary Body Potion](http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Rudimentary_Body_Potion): this makes for him a synthetic body. If the witch has made a golem-like synthetic body out of salt or sugar or pastry that would explain why she would melt. I was wondering what a woman made of sugar would look like. I found one. [![sugar woman](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fl4Ac.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fl4Ac.jpg) <http://cakesdecor.com/cakes/261063-sugar-skull-bakers-elizabeth> [Answer] Cytolysis would give you the effect but it just not going to work with such small amounts of water especially over a short period of exposure. basically its not enough water and there is no way to get it in the body. A person is already mostly water, and people are big so even under ideal conditions add bucket of water is not enough to cause run away cytolysis. Worse if you creature lives on earth it has to have a way of limiting permeability otherwise they would die within a few hours no matter where they live. So there is no way they would absorb a even a significant portion of the water from splash. Just a persons sheer mass will drastically slow absorption. ]
[Question] [ Inspired by [this post](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/59919/fighting-a-dragon-with-modern-military-units-or-smaug-vs-a-meu/59923) and [this post](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/84316/19th-century-army-standing-against-a-modern-army/84386) as well as an hour on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_expeditionary_unit), I'm now quite curious. Given how prepared a marine expeditionary unit seems to be, **What mythical being would actually be a match for an MEU?** Perhaps a wormlike, burrowing beastie? Or a marine leviathan? A pack of werewolves? Feel free to draw on any literature, but it'd be helpful to provide some background about what your creature is capable of. I'm thinking of "mythical" as something from pre-2000s literature, but exceptions are possible. **Terms of engagement:** [Monster] appears in the middle of the United States and a single MEU is dispatched to fight it, with the goal of subduing/killing/defeating it with minimal destruction. Further resources are occupied elsewhere, and the Avengers are not coming to help. EDIT: Here's a couple links that might give you some background on what the military is capable of: Against Godzilla: [1](http://www.businessinsider.com/how-the-military-would-fight-godzilla-2014-5), [2](https://www.airspacemag.com/articles/godzilla-vs-air-force-180951330/?no-ist), and [3](https://medium.com/war-is-boring/this-is-how-the-military-could-kill-godzilla-6d4e32f0e00e) Against apes: [1](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/59226/human-vs-apes-what-advantages-do-humans-have-over-apes), [2](https://www.quora.com/What-would-happen-if-a-real-global-ape-human-war-occurred) Against werewolves: [1](https://www.quora.com/If-an-army-of-werewolves-attacks-present-day-United-States-what-are-the-chances-of-US-military-winning) Some are slightly sketchy sources, but I think it's a good reference frame to have. [Answer] In reality any being that can change what a person sees or thinks would be a match for a MEU One example would be any of the fae. Through illusions the MEU would be shooting at nothing at best or even each other at worse. The Queen of the Unseelie could run over a MEU like a speedbump alone and she is never alone. Firepower means nothing when you can't see what you are shooting at. A siren could charm the MEU and use the soldiers to protect itself Any sort of possession demon would also be an issue. It can keep changing bodies and normal weapons won't worry it. See [Don't kill it](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Kill_It) as an example. A MEU has a lot of firepower but there are things out there that won't worry about conventional weapons. [Answer] # The Faerie Queen Soft power is the way to deal with an excess of hard power. The Faerie Queen is not one to meet them in open battle but rather to meet members of the unit after a couple of drinks and take them off to faerie land one at a time. These men may return to their families many years later with no memory of intervening time. # Scandinavian Trolls These are kidnap specialists, almost solely going after men who like a drink, these trolls tend to kidnap people and leave them lying face down in a ditch a couple of days later. It was a well known risk that a man going out for a drink may be kidnapped by trolls for a few days and return with, again, no memory of the intervening time. [Answer] **TL;DR -- No** This is going to be tough. *Real* tough. Here's a capture of some of the assets available to an MEU: [![meu](https://i.stack.imgur.com/CS82E.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/CS82E.png) I was tempted to stop reading after the first item... 4 M1A1 tanks! Here's a picture of *one* of them: [![mbt](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ek21c.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ek21c.png) But you know what the real problem is? **Range of Engagement.** Most of the creatures from mythology are *extreme* close-range fighters. Makes sense, given the milieu that produced them. If they are made of any material less tough than depleted uranium, no creature could make it through the lethality envelope to even engage the Marines. And no tricks like sneaking up at night ... the Marines have light-amplification and IR gear. A couple things you could *try*... * **Ghosts** -- Something incorporeal might be able to get close enough to actually fight the MEU. Problem is, if it's corporeal enough to do damage, it's corporeal enough to *take* damage. And our soldiers still have bayonets... * **Burrowing Creatures** -- Think of Dune-style sandworms. They could conceivably burrow up under part of the force and (technical term) "glomp" them. Problem is, even Shai-Hulud will feel the burn from those attack helicopters. * **The Balrog** -- this is the only guy I can see even making a decent go of it. If you go by the movie, it looks like he's essentially made of lava. Small-arms fire should be of little concern to him. But even he wouldn't enjoy those (infrared targeted!) Javelin missiles. And don't get me *started* on the howitzer... Honestly, I just don't see it happening. [Answer] ## There are loads of possibilities There are many creatures that have an even or better chance against the MEU, particularly since you allow any pre-2000s literature (I assume you include films, TV, plays and comic books in that). Below is just one example: **Vampires** Obviously there a loads of types of vampire so lets look at a vampire based on Dracula. Maybe it his American cousin. For those unfamiliar with Dracula here is a quick run down of his abilities. * Dracula has superhuman strength which (according to Van Helsing, it's equivalent to that of 20 strong men. * He does not cast a shadow or have a reflection from mirrors. * He is immune to conventional means of attack at night. * He can defy gravity to a certain extent and possesses superhuman agility, able to climb vertical surfaces upside down in a reptilian manner. * He can travel onto "unhallowed" ground such as the graves of suicides and those of his victims. * He has powerful hypnotic, telepathic and illusionary abilities. * He also has limited teleportation/ * He can enter and leave sealed spaces. * He is unable to die by the mere passing of time alone. * He has limited control over some animals (rats, bats, foxes, owls). * Dracula can also manipulate the weather and, within his range, is able to direct the elements, such as storms, fog and mist. * He can shapeshift at will into dogs, bats and mist. He can also turn into moonbeams and can change his size. * By biting someone he gains hypnotic power over them and with successive bites he slowly turn them into a vampire. His weaknesses are: * Loses his supernatural abilities during the day. * Loses his rational thought at the sight of blood. * Loses his powers if near a religious symbol usually a crucifix. * Has to sleep on his home soil, shouldn't be an issue for an American vampire in the USA. * Cannot cross running water unless carried. Based on the strengths above it seems like a standard MEU would stand little chance of stopping a vampire like Dracula. At night bullets and missiles would go straight through him. If he needed to approach unseen he could create mist to hide him or turn into a moonbeam. His ability to pass through cracks would get him into tanks and armoured vehicles with ease. Even helicopters would be unsafe as he could simply fly inside them. Any sailor the vampire bites would at best collapse and at worst turn on his fellows. The daytime would be the only safe time for the MEU. They could attempt to seek put and kill the vampire but if he is smart he will be hiding somewhere. Probably in a perfectly ordinary looking house in the middle of a city. At night the MEU's only chance would be to hide on an island somewhere surrounded by running water. [Answer] Oh the possibilities lets start: **Phoenix** [![Phoenix image](https://i.stack.imgur.com/FHCWM.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/FHCWM.jpg) Every time you kill it, it just comes back like napalm. Your MEU would likely die from attrition fighting this. **Classical Zombies** Contrary to the modern zombie mythology, classical zombies didn't have the convenient headshot kill rule. Instead there are no ways to kill a classical zombie except perhaps obliteration. There in lies the problem, no MEU has enough firepower to obliterate a hoard of classical zombies and their numbers just keep increasing. **Ghost/Demon** I don't think any MEU will have ordained priests in the rite of exorcism if that even works. **Angel** God's wrath..... **Dracula** This would be a more fair fight as maybe some of them may have crosses however most their weapons wont count for jack when he can travel at ridiculous speeds and turn into mist or bats (good luck using missile strikes on that). Good luck staking him with a branch from a judas tree. Not many soldiers carry silver with them either (except maybe wedding rings). **Then this is always this guy:** [![Grim Reaper](https://i.stack.imgur.com/hVo9e.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/hVo9e.jpg) [Answer] Ultimately, the real answer depends on how well aware the marines are of the creature's capabilities. If they go into battle in full knowledge of what they're up against, then virtually all of the mythical creatures you can think of will be pretty easy to deal with -- they all have their weaknesses. On the other hand, if you try to tackle a beast without knowing that it's invulnerable to your puny projectile weapons, then you're going to take heavy casualties before beating a hasty retreat. The other thing to take note of is collateral damage. Not just civilians, but also property. You stated that the monsters show up in the middle of a city; a major military assault in that kind of environment is going to destroy a lot of valuable real-estate, even if there aren't any actual people around to get injured or killed (and your troops may not be aware of that either). This could cause your guys to pull their punches; they're not going to just throw everything at it unless they feel they have to, which gives your monster time to fight back. That said, here are some of my thoughts of things that could stand up to a modern military assault. ## Transformers Yeah, I know, it's a modern franchise rather than a genuine mythical creature (they are pre-2000's though, so hopefully meets your requirements), but those guys certainly can take out major military hardware without any repercussions. ## Xenomorphs Yes. Those Aliens. Again, another modern franchise rather than mythical (but again pre-2000's), but they did pretty much exactly what you're asking for here: took on a full assault from a well-equipped military in an urban environment and totally dominated them. ## Demons Okay, I know there are plenty of different concepts of what these guys are and what they're capable of, but think about it: they're demonic beings, with authority from Hell itself to do *anything* and the capabilities to match. Oh, and no physical vulnerabilities at all. If you take it at face value, military might is just not going to stop them. You need an exorcist (and presumably a pretty good one at that, if things are bad enough to be sending in an entire combat unit). But if the army doesn't realise that, then they are going to get totally wiped out. ## Angels Kinda the other side of the coin to the above. I'm not sure what a bunch of angels would be doing that would cause humanity to want to launch a military assault against them though? Perhaps there is some evil that they've been sent to deal with? Perhaps that evil is secretly supported by major political groups or individuals who don't want to lose their power? [Answer] I can think of several possibilities. **Smaug** The dragon from The Hobbit, he would probably do fairly well, assuming he could resist bullets. He has some form of ranged attack since he can breathe fire, which would destroy most ground troops, but artillery might be a problem **Daleks** Even though they are not technically mythical, they are still very cool. Although a few of them could probably be taken out be artillery, any more might as well take over the planet. **Gods** Probably used less than other things, but they are still gods, and that is fairly self explanatory. **Orcs** Given there are enough of them, the military will probably be overrun. Orcs would have limited range, but are probably stronger than the average human, and might be able to survive a few gunshots. [Answer] The Nemean lion is a lion that has impenetrable skin and extremely sharp claws. It can only be killed by being crushed or strangled through the indestructible pelt. The cockatrice instantly kills anyone or anything (except for weasels) that it looks at, touches, or breathes on. It dies instantly if it hears a rooster or sees its own reflection. Medusa turns to stone anyone that looks at her face. The Lernaean hydra has poisonous breath and exceptional regenerative capabilities. ]
[Question] [ If an approximately Earth-sized planet had a greater ocean-to-landmass ratio than Earth, and the minimum distance between continents was at least the width of the Atlantic (i.e. >3000 km), how could prehistoric humans settle all the continents? What level of technological development would be necessary to make ocean crossings of that length? The largest landmass in this scenario is the size of Asia (~45 million sq km), and the other continents are no larger than North America (<25 million sq km). I'm assuming that there were no convenient land bridges such as Bering Strait or the Timor Sea, but there are scattered archipelagos no larger than the Arctic Archipelago throughout the oceans. **EDIT** I've started sketching out the map of this world, and shortest distances between adjacent continents looks to be about 3000 km, so I've revised the ocean crossings accordingly. [Answer] Definitely. The Polynesians get a lot of adulation for their ocean going Moana canoes. Yes, they got to Hawaii, Easter Island etc. But they were practically moderns. That was just a couple of thousand years ago. The Australian aborigines got to Australia 70,000 years ago. <https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/migration-to-australia/> This migration is amazing to consider because it implies that these ancients were seafarers on par with the Polynesians at an unimaginably distant time. To me this means considerable technological sophistication. I think that other populations in the Pacific and Indian ocean are thought to be relics of this particular diaspora: the Andaman Islanders, the Negritoes in the Phillipines, some of the peoples of New Guinea. In any case: stone age tech can get you across oceans. [Answer] I think it depends on how far are the land masses from each other, what trees are available for rafts, and if there is enough pressure from other humans or predators to force them to the sea. There is also a need for a seafaring culture, like that of the Vikings, or Greeks. Oceania was colonized by people who rode sea currents from South America (or so is the theory). To prove such theory, [someone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Heyerdahl) made a raft out of balsa wood and traveled for three months from Peru to Oceania islands. He also had 2 attempts to cross the Atlantic in a papyrus boat, the second being successful. The balsa raft in the first expedition was made with stone age technology. I don't remember where they were keeping their fresh water, though. [Answer] The prehistoric humans would have been locked to a single continent if it had not been for an unusual oceanic vegetation which evolved in the tropical regions. These human-edible plants grew out in vast floating fields like water hyacinth but thicker and closer knit together. Although they initially root in shallow water, they remain fixed to a specific location for only long enough to grow a few miles wide. Then the surface currents, which constantly push at the massive plant's sides, break its feeble roots free from the ocean shore, sending it out into deep water, where wind and wave can carry it to distant shores. It was only a matter of time until foraging humans journeyed out onto the surface of one of the water plant during its shore-locked youth, then found themselves castaway on its floating island when the currents broke it free. And like rats on the merchant ships of earth history, these prehistoric humans traveled to all the distant lands, leaving their prodigy everywhere in their wake. [Answer] It only depends on whether there are catchable fish in the ocean. There is plenty of evidence that very early humans (even non-humans, like Neandertal and Heidelbergensis (the predecessor of both Neandertal and Homo Sapiens)) knew how to tie nets and make flint knives and spears; and archaeologists have found carved animal bones that may have served as fish barbs (for spear points) and fish hooks from "prehistoric" (pre-technological) humans ten thousand years ago. Take a chunk of hard femur and use a rock or sharp flint to pare it into a shape you want. What else were you doing today anyway? Fish alone, even raw, can supply enough protein and nutrients (eat the brains, eyeballs and organs) to keep humans alive for many years; no vegetables needed. All you need next is seaworthy rafts and an ability to dive and swim; also in evidence from prehistoric times. See [Thor Heyerdahls's Voyage of the Kon-Tiki,](http://www.history.com/news/thor-heyerdahls-kon-tiki-voyage) for example. Also note that such rafts can be ***HUGE***, the size of several football fields; and with pitch (waterproof tar widely used in prehistoric construction) and strong hair rope (animal or human hair), many smaller rafts can be made (say 10 yards square) and lashed together, making a resilient, flexible surface that is nearly impossible to overturn or sink. Especially if the inner material (I say inner because I presume it is covered by pitch) is reeds and wood that naturally floats; the platform may be swamped by a wave but will rise to the surface again anyway. Such rafts can have shelter from the sun and precipitation built on board. Fresh water would be a distinct problem, but large skins full of fresh water are buoyant enough to be easily towed, and it is possible to capture rainfall in the ocean. Also water can be obtained through food metabolism ([see here](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-can-sea-mammals-drink/)), basically fish blood has the same salinity as terrestrial blood, so does not create a salt-elimination problem for us. Although I have never heard of any archaeological evidence of it, I think solar stills to distill seawater *might* be within the scope of prehistoric human technology, it isn't like they never saw water evaporate or condense. If nothing else, they could learn to follow the rain. The answer is: Sea faring cultures could abound and live on the sea for years at a time, plenty of time to find other lands and colonize them, without any need for a terrestrial path, or any technology more advanced than what we have evidence for actually existing in prehistory. ### Response to Comments about Raft Size See [The Benson Raft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benson_raft), as an example; circa 1906, a gigantic sea worthy cargo raft made of logs (tied together with chains not available to primitive people, but still, giant rafts of logs \*\*can be \*\* seaworthy). Here is an article on [Pre-Columbian Rafts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_rafts), made of bundled Reed and wood, often bamboo, these are tied together by hemp, and which mentions they were found as much as **36 feet long, with over 30 men, and 30 ton cargo capacity.** Spanish explorers in the 1500's encountered them, and reported the rafts were almost unsinkable; because the were constructed so water just washed through them. Note these particular rafts in South America only lasted six months to a year, but were not coated in pitch like early Egyptian rafts, which lasted for many years. In my commentary response I discuss using timbers to make rafts, which I consider viable. Bamboo is another very popular alternative and seaworthy. But rafts are not the only option: early sailing ships where constructed of timbers with pitch or tar for waterproofing, and iron or metal is never a necessity in wood-working. We have all heard of dove-tail joining; and woodworkers can create dozens of similar locking mechanisms to join wood by simple carving; I have seen an hourglass kind of join for joining boards edge to edge, for example. The question isn't necessarily about the materials or the shape of the ship, just whether primitive humans could build something to live on the ocean for years. All oceans, if heated by a sun, will have convection patterns that circulate between continents. An ocean-going tribe caught in a storm might well find themselves on something like our Gulf Stream and transported to another continent, which they might choose to colonize, especially if they are the first intelligent species to set foot there, and don't want to risk trying to find their way home (Ocean streams are one-way streets, the one that brought you to point B won't take you back to Point A.) [Answer] There are many animals (birds spring to mind, but you also have Turtles and Butterflies off the top of my mind) that use techniques to return to mating or birthing grounds for generations (the Monarch Butterfly is especially noted as the "flock" will never return to the same mating grounds in the life time of any individual). Humans being a pack hunting persistent predator relied on covering a lot of ground for a long time to wear down their prey (we're also the best animal for speed in an Ultra-marathon... a 100 mile race). Even among paleolithic man, a set of Wayfinding skills would quickly develop as we would be required to bring food back to feed the rest of the tribe. These same skills can easily be employed by humans on an ocean surface. Early man most likely quickly developed skills to identify the changes in the sky (shadows on the ground, in relation to a landmark of some kind can help determine direction... location of the stars at night might also be vital as night time hunting would be better for prey). ]
[Question] [ Let's say that in a fictional world (the world of *Heroes of Might and Magic IV* in my case) the square-cubic problem of insect respiration is somehow solved, so I have giant mantes roaming the area, and used in enemy ranks (let's say, they are controlled by magic). It is hard to judge the exact size (as miniatures on the battlefield are not as different from each other as some art shows), but the mantes are at least as large as a horse a typical humanoid could ride, and could be as big as the mighty Black Dragon in [this HoMM III intro](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUs28YlZvtw). I ask this question because I remember trying to kill or otherwise harm insects in my childhood, and they were by no means really fragile! Yes, if you throw it into a fire, it will burn, but I can't imagine any other way to kill a mantis except from evoking a fire big and hot enough. Chitin is very resistant to being cut, smashed, etc. Moreover, insects are dumb, and as far as I know, they don't feel pain at all, so even if it loses a limb, it is not stopped. **Is there any way to quickly dispatch a giant mantis without resorting to fire?** [Answer] Certainly. **With a chance to prepare** *Use traps.* A horse-sized or larger creature would be badly damaged if not killed by falling in a pitfall. As AlexP's comment above suggests, a large rock could then be used to crush it. Similarly, if the giant mantises are attacking a castle/fortress with high walls or towers, heavy objects could be thrown from the top of the walls/towers. *Feed it poisoned meat.* **In a fight** *Target the weak/unarmored points.* When plate armor was common, techniques were developed to fight men in armor - such as 'half-sword' techniques, knocking them down/wrestling them and using daggers through the joints, etc. The joints of a giant mantis would be unarmored, as would the (very large) eyes. Destroying the eyes wouldn't kill it outright, but would definitely make it much less effective in a fight. Now, this would be complicated because insects' anatomy makes a quickly-mortal wound harder without really massive trauma (such as a human squishing a normal-sized insect). So cutting off the head wouldn't keep it from flailing around and slashing up people with its claws. But enough people should be able to manage it without fire, though losses might be heavy. *Blunt trauma.* In addition, a large enough impact could kill by smashing the insides by force transmitted through the exoskeleton - and they'd probably be relatively vulnerable to this sort of thing, there wouldn't be the padding between armor and flesh that humans wearing metal armor used. [Answer] # Make (or find) some (a lot) of ruby dust Or other hard crystal. Glass might work, I just know ruby dust is actually used industrially as it's effectively a permanent solution to a cockroach problem (the ruby dust never goes away, it lingers and lingers). [Boric Acid](https://stoppestinfo.com/4-how-to-get-rid-of-cockroaches-html.html#naturally) would also work. Every grain has ridiculously sharp edges, is super tiny, sticks to literally anything, and is ultra durable. Sand-sized is probably sufficient for the scale we're working with. Dump a load of it on the mantis (and then run, hide, and wait). Eventually the hard edges will get into the giant insect's joints and cause tiny abrasions and cuts and it will [dehydrate the insect through lost body fluids](https://christiansmithjournalism.wordpress.com/2015/02/18/faqs-answered-by-a-umass-cockroach-expert/). Literal death from a thousand cuts. Its not going to be a fast way to kill these monstrosities, but it's a very *passive* solution that doesn't involve deadly toxins that might harm people, plants, or other animals. Still wouldn't want to breath any of it while you're in the process of applying it, but once it settles it's safe. [Answer] Chemical warfare. There are chemicals that are extremely toxic to insects, but far less toxic to mammals. Take [DDT](http://pmep.cce.cornell.edu/profiles/extoxnet/carbaryl-dicrotophos/ddt-ext.html), for example, if a human eats a spoonful of it, they are going to live (if humans are as susceptible as rats, the LD50 is about 50g); and DDT is almost non-toxic if applied to human skin. But it will kill many insects at extremely small doses (LD50 of a few μg). And DDT is old tech, there are newer insecticides which kill at even lower doses. If your mages can whip up a batch of DDT, the insects don't have much chance. If your tech level doesn't allow for organophosphate insecticides, you can hope to create some of your own from plants that are naturally insect resistant. [Chilli, Hemlock trees and other plants have insect-killing properties](http://www.amnh.org/learn-teach/young-naturalist-awards/winning-essays2/2011-winning-essays/plant-extracts-as-natural-insecticides/). While not nearly as effective as synthetic insecticides, they could deter, weaken or even kill mantids. DDT kills in seconds for real insects. Organophosphates are cruel chemicals that cause massive damage to the sodium ion channels in nerve cells, causing them to fire randomly. The insect spasms repeatedly and dies as the nervous system completely fails. DDT is related to nerve gas like Sarin. Natural insecticide like the Eastern Hemlock would be much slower. [Answer] **A directed fire weapon (hose, sprayer or bomb-thrower) using Nicotine solution (or dust) from tobacco.** Up until the invention of DDT, Nicotine derived from tobacco was used commercially as a crop insecticide. Either ethanol or various oils may be used to extract the Nicotine, which may be up to 7 -- 8 percent by weight in some varieties. (e.g. Burley.) It won't kill unless it gets absorbed, so a face shot is your best bet, and the head/thorax or thorax/abdomen joints as secondary targets. Proximal (nearest the body) leg joints as a last-ditch target. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco> --- "Full text of "Insecticidal uses of nicotine and tobacco: a condensed summary of the literature, 1690-1934" <https://archive.org/stream/idaluses00unit/idaluses00unit_djvu.txt> which tells us that: > > IV. HOW NICOTINE KILLS INSECTS > > > A little casual information on the physiological effect of nicotine > is to be found in numerous papers from 1895 to 1934, but only a few > studies were originally planned to determine how nicotine kills > insects. A few. other papers give additional information which is > probably correct but not supported by experiments. It was the > fundamental information on this point **that led to the preparation and > use of nicotine dust.** > > > The symptoms of nicotine poisoning in the experiments with bees in > 1916 were, divided into three stages. First, bees that had eaten > nicotine soon became abnormal in behavior, and the legs and wings > were partly paralyzed. Second, the paralysis progressed from partial. > to complete, the hind legs and hind wings usually being the first to > be completely paralyzed, then followed the middle legs and front > wings, and, finally the front legs. Third, the bees wore apparently > dead except for slight movements of the head appen- dages, legs, and > abdomen. **Regardless of how nicotine is applied, it seems to kill by > motor paralysis; that is, it first affects the nerve centers that > control muscular movement.** > > > Credit to James K.: Tobacco is in the Nightshade family, as are tomatoes, eggplant, potatoes, and chillies. But tobacco has orders of magnitude more Alkaloid per unit mass of dried plant matter than the ones we eat. [Answer] **Give it some coffee** No, seriously. Caffeine for some reason has a real adverse effect on insect and other invertebrates, and is often downright lethal to them. This best [known in spiders](https://www.sciencealert.com/spider-on-drugs), but also occurs in mosquitoes, butterflies, mealworms, milkweed bugs, snails, slugs, and more. There are some insects that are immune to caffeine (some species of beetles are, but in some of these cases they still show evidence of being negatively effected physiologically), but the vast majority are not. To the point that some research is looking into caffeine as an insecticide that won't be toxic to humans. [Answer] You put an arrow or bolt into each eye, and take out any other relevant sensory organs the same way, than dismantle it from safe range with poleaxes, limb by limb. It's not especially clever, and it takes several warriors, but it's brutally effective. [Answer] # Just give them a little push You say that > > (...) the square-cubic problem of insect respiration is somehow solved (...) > > > But that is not the only problem with scaling a mantis. A giant mantis probably wouldn't be able to walk, and here is why: [Would a humanoid insect species even lift?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/111965/21222) Such mantises would either move veeeeeeeeeery slowly, slower than turtles, and as such wouldn't be a threat to anyone. They would need to adapt to an herbivore lifestyle because they wouldn't be able t hunt anything. They might also need to spend a lot of their time in water to sustain their own weight. So all you need to do is to trip them, and their ligaments will tear apart (really, check the link above for a question on giant insect musculature). From there [you just need a mallet to gain access to their tasty insides](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/173343/21222). ]
[Question] [ Now let's say we want to create a hi-tech military quadrocopter (like in this video <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNPJMk2fgJU>). First question: would it even be possible today in the first place, considering it's body and ammo weight? Or maybe there any other reasons that makes this drone impossible (or almost impossible) to create? Please remember, that I'm talking about creating it in our times, not future. Second question: If it was possible, what kind of setbacks it would experience? Need of manual reloading? Wasting ammo too much? Noise? Third question: Considering that the answer to first question is positive, and considering all the flaws this thing can have, would it be practical and effective enough to be used by military? If not, why? [Answer] Possible yes, but it would need to be larger. Rotary aircraft utilize spinning blades to create lift. The more surface area available to "beat the air into submission" the more lift you can create. Conversely, the lighter the aircraft, the more effective the blades become. So the major problems you have to overcome with a weaponized version is weight and recoil. * Weapons are heavy due to the fuel, payload, and casings required to contain and control combustion. * Ammunition is heavy and the more you carry the heavier it becomes * Weapons fire payloads in a direction and experience recoil equally in the opposite direction Managing weight and recoil requires more power than a few small Li batteries can provide and sustain and the additional weight means the blades used for propulsion either need to increase in size or quantity. All of this is doable, but the drone will be 3x or 4x the size to house the resources required to manage lift and propulsion, namely larger batteries and additional blade surface area, most likely in the form of additional rotor heads making it more like an octacopter, with larger diameters to minimize noise. Weapons make noise when they are launched and if you want to make this stealthy, you'll need choose weapons systems carefully and be very mission specific. Suppressed sniper, laser guided missle, etc. You aren't going to load an automatic weapon on one of these, nor will you be mounting rocket pods. Payloads will need to be limited to reduce weight, yet effective for the mission. Which means, these will be modular and configurable depending on the mission parameters. Typically, this technology is used more for recon and observation due to its small and quiet footprint. The larger the footprint, the more noticeable it becomes. And weaponizing this tech would most definitely require it's footprint to grow, making it ideal at distance to increase its survivability. [Answer] Military quadcopter are not only possible, but various nations are already experimenting with variations of the idea. Current quadcopters, like the ones you buy at a hobby store, have fairly limited performance and weather restrictions, but would be useful to fly forward and provide realtime video or other sensor information to the controlling body. An infantry soldier can manpack one quite easily, and fly it over a hill, around the corner or into the window of a building to allow the sensors to see where he and his squad mates cannot. In many ways this is a very scaled down version of what a scout helicopter does for a gunship. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/KZivy.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/KZivy.jpg) Larger quadcoters with greater performance are only a matter of time. Having a quadcopter large enough to carry something like a machine-gun or anti tank missile only requires the perceived need to do so, and someone willing to do the R&D to make a machine with sufficient lifting power to carry a weapon and sensor, and to deal with the recoil or launch forces (the launching of a missile could drastically change the weight and centre of gravity of the machine, for example, and the exhaust of even a "soft launch" system might interfere with the aerodynamics of the rotors). [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/IxljG.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/IxljG.jpg) Very large systems are under development under the "Transformers TX" program by DARPA. The idea here is to essentially have a quadcopter like machine which can carry large payloads autonomously. Most depictions show cargo pods or sensor laden devices, but in principle there seems to be no reason to replace the cargo pod with a targeting pod and a brace of HELLFIRE ATGM's or 70mm HYDRA rockets, for example. Something like that would be an excellent fire support vehicle for platoons and companies deployed in complex environments. Ones big enough to carry 20' ISO containers could conceptually be used as troop carriers or air ambulances as well as logistics vehicles. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/urly9.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/urly9.jpg) [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/7CVzM.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/7CVzM.jpg) The main issues that need to be resolved for this to actually work is to minimize the amount of bandwidth needed to control and fly these things. There is already a massive desire to stream huge quantities of voice, data and video throughout the battlespace, so finding open frequencies and pushing enough data through the pipes will be challenging. Add the threat of interference, enemy jamming and EW or cyber attacks and you have the potential to have your systems disabled by not being able to communicate with them. Most military projects are working on making the drones much more autonomous, so they can carry out their missions on autopilot or even with onboard AI. [Answer] Right now, I guess they would be possible but not very effective, except for special situations when they become priceless. If the armed drone presents a marginally credible threat, an enemy would be forced to fire on it or to evade. Either way, a disadvantage for the enemy. * A sniper might be forced to fire on the drone when the drone approaches yet another enemy soldier. Afterwards the sniper has to move from a good position to a worse one, and he will not be available while he is moving. * A forward observer on a rooftop may have cover against ground fire. The quad copter has a clear line of fire. The observer has to fight the drone or run away. * A drone could fire into a suspected roadside bomb and see what happens. There are many problems: * It would have to be under remote control. Can the transmission be jammed to intercepted? Can the enemy attack the controller? * The recoil would shake the drone. Can the systems recover before it crashes into a wall or a tree? * If it does not crash, firing multiple rounds could shift the center of gravity. [Answer] First Answer: Yes. A full size quadracopter is only engineering effort away from an [Osprey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Boeing_V-22_Osprey), which is real and works. It isn't armed, but has the payload capacity to be. Second Answer: The only drawback that counts is that it is not combat survivable. Helicopters as they are are mostly good for hit and run tactics. That big spinning rotor is too easy of a target. A quadracopter is even worse since. In a helicopter, an armored body can give the blades above it a reasonable amount of protection from small arms fire (like in the [Apache](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_AH-64_Apache)). But a quadracopter will have a larger spinning blade area to armored body area ratio, and thus make a more inviting target. Third Answer: The Osprey is used, but not in combat and it isn't exactly [reliable](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_V-22_Osprey). Fun trivia fact: the leading cause of death for Marines in the line of duty between the [Beirut bombing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Beirut_barracks_bombings) and the [Battle of Fallujah](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Battle_of_Fallujah) (a period of 20 years!) was...the Osprey. The reason the Osprey is not used is that its two rotor configuration does not give it maneuverability like a single rotor helicopter. A single rotor helicopter can bank quickly by changing the aspect of the rotor blades, causing the lift force to tilt 45 degrees off the vertical in seconds. That is how you get helicopter acrobatics like in Blackhawk Down. A two rotor system can't do that, because a. the rotational moment of inertia is much higher with heavy engines at a distance from the center of mass and b. the two sources of lift have to be moved in a controlled manner at roughly the same speed. If one rotor drags the other through the air, you can lose lift on the second rotor ([vortex ring state](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex_ring_state), the cause of the two deadliest of the Osprey accidents, although due to rapid descent not rapid banking). A four rotor situation would probably be even worse for maneuverability, though I can't say that for sure. Anyways, a quadracopter would pretty much only be useful as a heavy lift bird, like a [Skycrane](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_CH-54_Tarhe). And since the military doesn't even use that platform any more, I'd say its not worth the development expense. [Answer] q1 Possible? Yes armed quadrocopter drones are possible. It would be difficult to make one large enough for serious weaponry without running into problems listed below. q2 Limits/restrictions? Speed, range and reliability. Quadrotors are inefficient when scaling up size and speed. They would eat up a lot of fuel for fairly low payloads. Carrying anything meaningful would mean switching to liquid fuels, and gas engines are less reliable than electric motors. q3 The problem with quad copters isn't what they can "possibly" do, but what areas they would be more effective that other platforms. For the large gunship or transport roles, I can't see them replacing single rotor helicopters. Why build an autonomous quadrocopter when you could just build an autonomous Apache? Quadrotors would only be competitive under a certain size/speed requirement. Small enough that they couldn't carry and stabilize guns effectively or act as hardpoints for missiles/rockets. The quadrocopter would have to be the weapon. A flying bomb. Something that fills the gap between a grenade and a rocket launcher in power, while being more accurate than both. [Answer] Possible, yes. But extremely easy to shoot down. And once shot down, they're pretty much useless. So, how many of these will you have to have in the back of a truck to achieve one mission? If they did have a practical military purpose, then they'd certainly be in active service right now. It might be possible that they're being used for surveillance, but that's about all. That's my take anyhow. ]
[Question] [ In my world there are ''angels'' which have 4ft long wings and can't fly. As of late, these 'angels' have been hunt down and they must hide. How can a winged human hide their wings? [Answer] I'm assuming you mean that each wing is four feet long as measured from shoulder to feather tip. Folded, a wing is slightly shorter - I'm mentally estimating based on my parrot - the tips of these wings could reach to the upper thighs (though wings you might sit on seems like a design flaw). In that case, a long coat or jacket is your best bet, and made of a fabric that's opaque and doesn't pill readily. There's also no need to keep the wings intact if the angels cannot fly - trim off the feathers and the weight and volume of the wings will be reduced, making them easier to conceal. If the feathers grow back, this would be a less objectionable solution compared to removing the wings entirely. And depending on how the wings are jointed, an angel might wrap their wings together with the equivalent of an Ace bandage to prevent accidental reflexive flapping, if they do that. However, if I assume you mean a four foot wingspan (from feather tip to feather tip), and if the wings were flexible in the right way, an angel could wrap their wings flat around their torso and cover them with a corset, allowing the wings to be hidden under ordinary clothing. Of course, any solution is going to be modified based on how much discomfort it causes the winged humans. If they're trying to escape genocide, the daily pain of binding their wings would likely hamper their success. [Answer] Let's see: * Magic * Big overcoats * Cut them off That just about covers it (pun intended) [Answer] Your species will need to either; * Hide the wings using a harness under clothing (like archangel in Xmen 3) * Where some some of large clothing piece like a trench coat or a cape * Suck up their pride and cut of the wings * Always wear a backpack with the inside cut out * Paint their wings in hand-wavium and magic Short story even shorter unless your angel is a holy angel and has magic on their side or they are will to cut off those limbs, clothing is your best bet [Answer] If you are looking for a way to have them be able to hide the wings, you might be able to make them collapsable. Where they can collapse the wings into their back most of the way and then fold any extra bits flat behind the back where a shirt can easily cover them. Since they can't fly they don't need to be that thick or support weight. You could have this species' biology basically have cavities for wing storage near the sholderblades, making some room by moving organs around and such. [Answer] One could fold them across the back and then wear clothes backwards such that the wings appeared to be a very well endowed bust. One would then turn one's head 90 degrees as if fascinated by something to the side. Probably other accoutrements should lend credence to the idea that you are the sort of person who might have such a magnificent bust, and have knees that bend the wrong way. ]
[Question] [ Say we have a rich, rich society, where due to scientific advances, a generous socialist-bent government willing to tax the rich at 75% and patriotic citizens mysteriously willing to pay said taxes, it becomes possible to genetically modify the entire next generation to predispose them towards being kind, good-looking and frighteningly intelligent. I'm not saying violence would be eradicated once the natural generations die out, but rather (**at least according to the pre-implementation vision of the planners**) it might be reduced to maybe 1% of its previous level; while most people would be able to eat ice-cream all day (if for some reason they wanted to) and yet maintain a slender, healthy figure; and in terms of intelligence, the average 10 year old would be able to pass our current university exams with ease (not that they would be interested in our silly quaint ways of trying to teach, of course). I'm trying to think of why such a world would actually be a **nightmarish dystopia**. Perhaps a society needs all sorts to work, and without mean people, or less-smart it would collapse into a crap-sack world in quick order? [Answer] The meat of your problem is this: You *assume* your approach on how to achieve a **Utopian** society will work and then ask why a Utopian society would be bad. The problem is not that Utopian societies are bad, it is in your assumptions that your prescriptions will achieve a **Utopian** society. In a manner you are saying assume my story has no problems, then what do I use as a problem? If you're looking for the dramatic tension in a story, then I'd look at approaching it like this: 1. Society is told that if they cooperate, Utopia (as you've described) can be achieved. 2. Society cooperates. 3. Nothing works as advertised. Alternatively (and as @Tim B. said), assume that your **Utopian** society delivers everything that it promised. What unsuspected problems arise from the situation you describe? What might the "enlightened" new generations do to the "barbaric" *natural* generations to accelerate the transition to the new society? What might the "enlightened" society do to individuals who do not wish to participate in your **Utopia**? Previous attempts to create **Utopian** societies have resorted to mass executions of tens of millions of their own citizens to purge their ranks of the unpure or those who did not wish to participate in their leader's ideas of **Utopia**. One of the biggest lessons of history shows that if it seems too good to be true, then it probably is. [Answer] You've set a very hard problem here, since as described it society will be rather Utopian. You're going to need to look for cracks or edge cases. For example perhaps people who are not enhanced might be looked down on, treated like pets or sub-human. Look at the film [Gattaca](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca) for an excellent treatment of this concept. Alternatively someone may decide that perfect happiness means that no-one is allowed to be hurt or sad ever. Any hint of unhappiness gets you dragged in for "a talk" with nice people with drugs and therapists who don't let you go until all the sadness is gone. You can see how that could be Dystopian, and could become very oppressive. There are all sorts of other takes on this theme you might tackle as well. Basically the "bad guys" are doing this for your own good, whether you want it or not! [Answer] A possible issue with this type of society could be apathy and boredom. A society where all problems are solved or easily solvable can result on the loss of some of the main driving forces in human behaviour, be it ambition, curiosity, etc. This could degenerate in a situation where many humans could gradually lose the will to live or act, living just by inertia, and producing a huge raise in the number of suicides. The Matrix universe explores this concept in the [paradise matrix](http://matrix.wikia.com/wiki/Paradise_Matrix). [Answer] **Kind, Intelligent, and Good looking people a Utopia does not make.** Whose definition of kindness, intelligence, and beauty do you go by? This can cause divisions. What if mildly obese people become the new ideal, such as in the european Renaissance? What if brown hair is more valued than red or blond? If [albinisim](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albinism) beautiful, or a defect to be engineered out? What about "the no-right-answer" situations? Consider some of the following: Is it kinder to make comfortable the terminally ill, or simply end their suffering now, especially if the sufferer wants to die? Are liberal arts or sciences better than the other, and therefore more important to invest resources in? Do we invest in nuclear or renewable energies? If we did invade Syria, which rebel group would you place as the head of the government? Do you give the homeless man some money now, presumably for food, or do you merely point him to a shelter where he can be "reformed" or convalesce? (You may be surprised about the controversies in these, so even if you stand firmly on one side, you will easily find people to oppose you!) What about specialization? If an office worker is as smart as a doctor, but the doctor gets paid more, why would you not be a doctor? Okay, kindness may make someone initially say "I'll be the office worker so society can live" but even kind people can only take so much of that. So the office worker gets paid as much as doctor, but then a new problem arises. If being an office worker requires much less effort, then why bother being a doctor? Wait, then no one wants to be a doctor. What about the business that employs these high-priced office workers? I'm afraid not everyone can be paid like a doctor for different tasks. Kind acts now may lead to situations of great discontent later. I suppose the point is that these attributes solve a lot of problems, but come with a host of their own! Besides, very few conflicts need to be about or solved by violence. The troubles of everyday life can be an entertaining on their own. [Answer] You will probably need to dig at the phrase "kind, good-looking and frighteningly intelligent" a bit more and dig out the behaviors underneath that you wish to explore. All of these terms are relative terms, so you could have interesting challenges as they normalize for this new society. One thing to consider is that not every entity in the world is receiving this special genetic treatment. Nature is still nature. If aliens exist, they are unaffected. These could provide new forms of conflict. Related to the future, meaning of life questions are notoriously difficult to work through intellectually. If one has an idle intellect and decides to tackle the meaning of life, tremendous disagreement can rise up, challenging kindness. If kindness prevails, the only room for continued discussion is the future. everyone would be *fanatically* obsessed with the distant future. If everyone is just getting along chummily back home, and there is an entire intellect sitting idle in your brain, it would be natural to try to apply it to the future. Solving world hunger in 40 years would be a neat trick, but how about trying to maintain stability over 4000 years, or dealing with the death of the sun in 4000000000 years? Proton decay? Nasty problem when you're dealing with meaning of life questions. [Answer] The cynic in me suggests that humans will autorange their predjudices to fit the minimum and maximum variation, even if that minimum and maximum is very close together. Or, to put it another way, if you eliminate all the big differences between people, then the small differences become relatively more important. So you might end up with massive discrimination against people with wavy hair. You might find that the political spectrum is polarised between the raving right wingers who advocate helping the (very slightly) less well off in MOST circumstances, vs the hippy left loons who advocate helping the (very slightly) less well off in NEARLY ALL circumstances. As a slightly related example, see how the anti-vaccine movement is often driven by statistically very unlikely side-effects now that the real risk of dropping dead or being horribly paralyzed by actually getting the disease has been reduced to the point that side-effects are a larger relative threat. [Answer] There are three obvious approaches to me 1) underclass forms. Maybe they can't afford to genetically engineer everyone, and those that are not engineered become an underclass, a slave race of folks that can not stand to compete against the super geniuses. Their life would suck, plan and simple. 2) genetic mind control. The government is already engineering you, why not toss in some other tweaks. Maybe everyone is now genetically predisposed to following authority figures like the government. Everyone is predisposed to being a bit too happy about paying taxes. Basically they have messed with your disposition to get you to behave the way the government wants, no matter what. 3) disease Armageddon. Variance in genes is important because it provides adaptation potential. If everyone has the same genes from engineering they may find they lack the ability to adapt, and suddenly a disease ravages them because they engineered away all the genetic difference. [Answer] > > Say we have a rich, rich society, where due to scientific advances, a generous socialist-bent government willing to tax the rich at 75% and patriotic citizens mysteriously willing to pay said taxes, it becomes possible to genetically modify the entire next generation to predispose them towards being kind, good-looking and frighteningly intelligent. > > > ## Kindness How is this achieved? We can look at the opposites of kindness for an answer: * Aggression * Selfishness and self-interest * Lack of empathy So, in order to genetically create kind people, we'd need to counteract the above traits by increasing the following: * Passivity * Selflessness * Empathy Now you have a situation where one current generation that tends to think more heavily about the needs of others than the baseline person. But you still have the baseline progenitors, and the 1% or less of the population where the modifications didn't take. These people, who are more self-serving, would have a whole generation of super-intelligent pushovers to manipulate and coerce to do their bidding. ## Good-looking Attractiveness can be subjective, but some research suggests facial beauty, for instance, can be determined by how closely a face lies to the average of faces (composite images) an individual sees, and how symmetrical that face is. What baseline humans would determine to be ideal beauty would not necessarily be what the altered generation would see as beauty. As they are all going to look more like one another, the minute differences will stand out more. (Related to this is the controversial [Cross-race effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-race_effect)). Since our minds are powerful pieces of facial-recognition software, those differences may not even be noticed consciously. I could see this have multiple consequences: * The perfect ideal is upheld more, and even extremely minute variation from the standard is seen is subpar. Since these people are kind, they're not likely to bully or tease, but I think some ostracization could be inevitable. Perhaps it's more kind to keep the sub-optimals with eachother, so they aren't constantly reminded of their genetic failure. * Fetishes could develop around the idea of deviation from the norm, with the possibility of body modification becoming a wide trend. (See the Scuttler's from *Revelation Space* for an example of an extremely, intentionally asymmetrical species.) * The new generation, depending on their exposure to the previous generation, may have issues seeing their parents as being of the same people or society, because they're so physically different. * How are peoples with abnormalities handled? Surgery? Euthanasia? Shunning? How do the physically abnormal individuals handle their difference? ## Frighteningly intelligent You can bet that baseline people *will* be frightened by children so intelligent. Baseline people will be forced to confront their own weaknesses, obsolescence, ugliness, and so. People won't be happy, especially since this was a *government* decision, not a unanimous decision of the entire population. There's going to be some conflict there. Baselines are going to want to have some control over these super-people. Even aside from fear and control, you may run into social issues with the baseline people. For example, in *Childhood's End*, people were free to pursue arts and leisure when the Overlords took over running the planet. However, many were emotionally discontent and unsatisfied. In your scenario, the intelligent generation would essentially become the Overlords. For some baseline people, pursuing those interests may not be satisfying, so the geniuses may have to create some [*Good Work*](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/64346/utopia-where-no-one-has-to-work-but-people-want-to-work-anyway) style fake jobs to keep people busy. ## Utopia/Dystopia The problem with trying to create an ideal society in the immediately proceeding generation is that the ideals of the new society will not be the same as those of the parent generation. They will have been given the power of extreme intelligence and health (and probably longevity), and thus the ability to start creating a society that *they* deem is ideal. You're also going to have to deal with the problem of how the parents are going to be dealt with. In less than two decades their generation will most likely become entirely obsolete, but still requiring an inordinate amount of resources and care. How are disagreements about handling them going to be resolved? Then there's the possibility of all of the genetic modifications not working 100%, and you end up with frighteningly intelligent, good-looking *unkind* person that may want to rule the world, using everyone else as unwitting pawns. That outlier, to me, is extremely intriguing, especially if there's the possibility of them being even more intelligent than the new average. How would anyone else even know he was running things behind the scene? [Answer] Intelligence has little to do with morality. There will always be the immoral who seek to elevate themselves above others, and they will surely act similarly in such a world. If not intelligence, then the particular shade of hair color, eye color, or some other little detail will come out as "an effective metric of superiority", to which those who are compliant to or benefit from will adhere and promote. If they happen to be in the media, we already know how they'll act... [Answer] With only minor modifications, H.G. Wells covered this in his 1895 story, *The Time Machine* > > The Time Traveller stops in A.D. 802,701, where he meets the Eloi, a > society of small, elegant, childlike adults. They live in small > communities within large and futuristic yet slowly deteriorating > buildings, and having a fruit-based diet. His efforts to communicate > with them are hampered by their lack of curiosity or discipline. > > > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine> > > > The problem is of course the 1% violent people that you talk about. These become the Morlocks. > > Later in the dark, he is approached menacingly by the Morlocks, > ape-like troglodytes who live in darkness underground and surface only > at night. Exploring one of many "wells" that lead to the Morlocks' > dwellings, he discovers the machinery and industry that makes the > above-ground paradise of the Eloi possible. > > > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine> > > > [Answer] Well, the basic problem with your premise is that socialism is based on violence and coercion and fosters a political class that maintains its hold on power by making people dependent on the state for their livelihoods while constantly fostering mutual antagonism such that people fear their neighbors more than the state. Socialism requires a unequal concentration of political power in the hands of a few who in turn control a force monopoly so that those who are more productive than the norm can be coerced into supporting those who not as productive. So, if your society designers set out to eliminate the capacity for violence in the population you can't have a socialist system by definition. Without the capacity for violence, you'd actually end up up with some kind of anarchist-libertarian society in which no individual or group could coerce another to do anything. All interactions would be voluntary and negotiated. Government, as it exist solely to manage violence, would simply "wither away" as one theorist once put it in his own flawed theory. (Frankly, a lot of people would consider a world already a dystopia if they couldn't violently coerce others for the "common good". But I digress.) But assuming the societies designers understood that no violence means no state and no coercive redistribution, they could try to ensure that a everyone got cared for in a non-violent society by engineering out sociopaths and then engineering the rest of the population to have high levels of empathy. With high empathy, one person experiences the pain of another and if confronted by a person in need, they experience that person's pain of want and give the other whatever they just to stop their own empathic pain. (Of course, you have the classic problem of the "in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king problem. If even a tiny minority could commit violence or lacked significant empathy, they could forcibly dominate the rest. There are several classic science fiction stories based on that premiss. We'll skip over that trope.) But lets say your designers were careful did engineer an entire society of non-violent empaths who automatically and non violent redistributed the material wealth thye personally created automatically such that no one would go wanting. Well, it would likely be pretty nice... For a while. But if you did have automatic empathy based redistribution to make everyone at least materially equal, how would the society be able to build up surpluses resources to build new things? For someone to have a have a house, someone must create and possess the resources required to build the house but forgo immediately consuming those resources. But if such individuals are such super empaths that they cannot withhold any surplus resources from others who have even a little less than they do, then all resources will be redistributed and consumed immediately and usable surpluses will ever accumulate. In such a world, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniack would never find the capital (surplus resources) to create new computers and if even if they did, they would never be able to hold back their first dollar of profits and all subsequent profits to build a company to make more computers. There would be no innovation, no creativity nothing new would ever get made. For that matter, could the society stockpile even enough resources to ensure the repair and maintenance of existing resources? I would say that your sunshine and puppies utopia society would turn into a dystopia as it first stagnated and then began to material fall apart. The material standard of living would simply continuously decline. Thanks to redistribution, everyone would grow material more poor equally, but a society that landed in starships would find itself at a struggling preindustrial level in just a a few generations. People who try has hard as possible to mitigate the suffering of others but people would suffer and die horribly from disease, accident, natural disaster and eventually simple want. For the super empaths, all the death and suffering would be horrific torture. Especially if they understood that for some reason, their ancestors did not have to suffer so. They'd feel the suffering of others as their own, watch children die in agony and and feel like they themselves were dying. They suffer that torment with every death and yet not be able to stop themselves to continuing the cycle of spreading out the declining resources thinner and thinner over fewer and fewer survivors. At some point, they'd be faced with the choice of withholding the seed corn and letting some starve now so that the survivors could plant the next crop in the spring. But their programming would not allow them to not feed the starving right before them. So, they'd eat their seed corn and in the next year, they could not plant any more crops and all their food would run out. They would kill everyone by sharing out the food equally such no one received enough to survive and everyone would would starve equally to death. And the last super empath would feel it all, perhaps spending his final moments vainly trying to push the last crust of bread between the lips of a child whom the empath is to delirious to understand is already dead. His last thought as he tips over himself into the dust would be, "everyone was so smart, pretty and caring, why did we all die?" A society of pretty, super caring geniuses who turn their entire world into a robotic extermination camp. Sounds like a pretty horrible dystopia to me. ]
[Question] [ The sci-fi soldiers have bulky$^1$ armor that gets in the way of traditionally shouldering a rifle. They brace their rifles on their chest plates instead. Conditions are otherwise similar to modern combat. They've been doing this for long enough for their military to catch on and procure a rifle stock better suited to their needs Real rifle stocks are obviously a case of form-follows-function to fit a human shoulder. If the design purpose has changed and stocks now go up against a big plate of armor (which might itself be modified with a ridge, indentation, etc to help support the rifle, if that's useful) how would form follow function? --- 1: Think Doom Guy, all the guys in HALO, Imperial Stormtroopers, 3/4 of the armor from Mass Effect, all the guys in Starship Troopers, all the soldiers in Warhammer 40,000, etc, etc. It's not that they can't touch a rifle butt to their shoulder (or the armor over their shoulder), it's that the armor keeps the shoulder from making a stable pocket to support the weapon. [Answer] And Gun Jesus did Spake and say: "Lo, For thine problem didst already exist in thine obscure cavalry rifles from the 19th century" And Forgotten weapons did publish a Blog post about it: [And the people saw that it was good.](https://www.forgottenweapons.com/modele-1890-berthier-cuirassier-carbine/) [And here's the link when Ian get's his own.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G9a4c_61Bk) **Okay** - Serious answer time - Forgotten Weapons is an *excellent* resource for Firearm design and history - and as it turns out - the French had a similar problem - which is they wanted their armored Cavalry (Cuirass) to use a Carbine (shorter than a full-length rifle) - the Metal armor made getting a Cheek Weld hard and wood on metal made getting a good shoulder position hard - the result? The above rifle. To answer the question a different way - there would be no Buttstock. A buttstock has a number of functions: 1: Balance the weight of the Barrel 2: give a comfortable length-of-pull 3: Bring the sights of the rifle up to the eyeline 4: Recoil mitigation. 5: Storage So let's go through them * Balance. Well, if you are chest-bracing the Rifle, I think it's safe to say that it's both a big-ass gun and also, the counterbalance is your entire body * Length of pull. No longer an issue - you could look at the Smart gun from the Alien universe for this one - as to how that is held for a comfortable feel. * Sights. Again, Nope - if we are firing from the chest, either we have some form of periscope'd Optic or more likely, since we are Sci-Fi soldiers, we would use something similar to the [Apache Gunships Helmet sight that is slaved to the Gun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmet-mounted_display) - that is, the Helmet would feature it's own targetting system that is either slaved to the gun (if the Gun has the ability to move) or simply displays the point of impact. (will cover in more detail in a min) * Recoil Mitigation. Nope - that's now done by a combination of your chest and the weight of the armor. * Storage. Nope - Storage in a Buttstock is more about utilizing 'dead space' - so if there's no Buttstock, there's nothing to utilize. What I would envision is some form of ball joint and a semi-permanently attached firearm, possibly servo-assisted/stabilized (like the Alien Smart Gun). You could also look at [Drumline Harnesses](https://www.google.com/search?q=drum%20line%20harness&sca_esv=569891204&rlz=1C1CHZN_enNZ1067NZ1069&tbm=isch&sxsrf=AM9HkKkUhY154N_DG1DEwcJsj63vmKE_1Q:1696191931074&source=lnms&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi05Zas19WBAxVDZvUHHcHuBY8Q_AUoAnoECAEQBA&biw=1280&bih=651&dpr=1.5) as an idea for something that relatively quickly attaches/detaches, has a degree of movement (going from a 'deployed' position to a 'moving' position). The Ball-joint is your recoil mitigation, the harness is your weight balance, a smart helmet/integrated optic is your aiming system - and you don't need to worry about length of pull or additional storage. [Answer] Your question reminds me of the problem NASA faced when sending the astronauts to the Moon: due to the bulky space suit and helmet they were wearing, they could not use a conventional Earth camera, so NASA engineered a chest camera and trained the astronauts in using it. One of the major challenge was, and will be also in your case, the aiming: instead of aligning the axis of the lens/rifle with the target, they will need to look toward the target and trust that the alignment is according to their line of sight. While the astronauts didn't have a narrow zoom and a coarse alignment was sufficient (the rather wide field of the camera would allow for a decent image) with a rifle it could be a different story, unless they are wearing a shotgun like rifle. Therefore I think that some optics allowing the bearer of the armor to see what they are aiming at with the rifle mounted on their chest, and adjust accordingly: a periscope with a viewfinder would be the simplest solution. [Answer] ## Stocks are not always better than no stock While a stock gives a firearm a number of advantages, it also comes with its drawbacks. ``` Pros: Cons: - Better recoil control - Added weight - Reduces hand-shock - Limits the postures the weapon can be fired from - Easier to aim - Can become cumbersome in urban combat or other tight spaces ``` While most infantrymen agree that a stock is better than no stock, SWAT teams and vehicle crews often find that the stock inhibits them more than it helps; so, they will often be fielded with stockless firearms like the tactical shotgun or SMG shown below. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/AQvn9.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/AQvn9.png) [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/jmbGQ.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/jmbGQ.png) So, if your infantry already has too much armor for a stock to make since, it is probably because they are close-combat shock troops, in which case, they will find many advantages in ditching the stock anyway. ## With Power Armor, your hand "becomes the stock". Most of the future-tech settings the OP brought up don't just give soldiers thick heavy armor. They give them Power Armor. This is important because in addition to added protection, power armor can fulfil all of the roles that a stock is meant to serve which would make a stockless firearm universally more versatile in thier hands than one with a stock. Using the the same sort of technology that cameras use to compensate for wobbling free-hand shots, your power armor could auto-correct the aim of a soldier by synchronizing the armor with sensors on the firearm itself. Even with a stock, a human can't accurately aim more than a few hundred meters without extensive training, but AI assisted riffles exist today that allow an amateur to accurately hit targets a kilometer away. So, with a little bit of auto-correction, you can overcome any need for better recoil control or easy of aim because your computer assistance is doing that part for you. The soldier just needs to point the gun more-or-less at the target to be able to shot it. This just leaves the hand-shock issue which again can be nullified by the fact that you are holding the firearm with a robotically augmented grip. The recoil will simple go through your gauntlets and into the frame of your power armor instead of into your hand. Since the power armor is doing the job of a stock, you get the better flexibility of a stockless firearm with out any of the drawbacks. ## Why not a shoulder or chest mounted weapon? When you mount a firearm directly to the body, it limits your ability to fight around your terrain. You can't use a chest cannon from a deep trench or prone position, and any position you can use it from generally involves exposing a much larger portion of your body to shoot. Shoulder cannons are a bit better, but limited when fighting around a corner or through a murder hole. Also, both options are a major sang risk when moving through woods, ruins, or other kinds of tight terrain, because a gun in the hand can be rotated a lot more ways to unsnag it. Cover is one of the most important tactical considerations in any firefight because it both obscures your presence allowing you to shoot before you get shot, and it also minimizes your exposed body area making you a more difficult target to hit. Also, it takes more time to "step-out" to shoot a mounted weapon vs just reaching or tilting around a corner which gives the enemy more time to react. When you use a hand-held firearm, you can reposition it relative to your body based on your combat situation; so, no matter what situation you are facing, you can always lead with your gun without having to expose a significant part of your body. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/TXCm9.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/TXCm9.png) [Answer] I'd suggest that it depends in part on just how bulky the armour is. The optimum would probably to have a ball-and-socket joint between the armour and stock, and since it would be undesirable to reduce the thickness of the armour that implies that the futuristic infantryman would have balls (or at least hemispheres) in the region of his shoulders and chest to support the butt end of a drastically-lightened projectile weapon. [Answer] Nothing. Power armor won't use rifle stocks because the reasons for stocks are all eliminated by the armor itself. (bracing for improved aim and to handle recoil) I've often wondered why we don't (currently) have heads up display red dots. I should be able to draw and fire from the hip with my red dot showing on my glasses. There's nothing special about looking down the barrel. It's trivial to mount a camera on the barrel and project a dot on your visor showing exactly where your gun is pointed. Nintendo had the technology decades ago (how do you think duck hunt knew if you hit the duck?) Your fancy power armor better have that. At which point there's no need to raise the thing to eye level. The other purpose of the rifle stock is bracing both for aiming and recoil, neither of which you'd need because your power armor does it for you (and future ammo probably has less kick). I'm not even sure you need a rifle. Mount the barrel on the forearm and your space marines are always armed. "If I got arms I'm armed. ooh ra." Also, bullets are so 20th century. Don't you think we'll bring drones down to a small size in the coming centuries? Or tiny rocket powered missiles? Imagine a backpack full of bees. Bees with explosive bellies or with plasma cutters. Target with your visor and turn them loose. Or if you want a gun why have the meat computer do the targeting? Silicon is so much more precise. Just mount a turret on the shoulder and let the computer do the targeting. ]
[Question] [ Once the chain is swung and wraps around the desired structure could the magnetism be strong enough to support a person swinging from it? [Answer] It's possible with a sufficiently strong magnet. For work I have found myself operating close to a table made of a permanent magnet which was used as a base on which an heavy object was supposed to magnetically levitate and move. Before being allowed to get close to such table, I had to follow a safety training and learn all the safety procedures involved, which boil down to: * always cover the magnetic table with thick plastic covers before doing any work on it * do not wear anything which can be attracted by the magnet on your hands, arms and neck * if you happen to drop anything while working on it, do not try to stop its fall The magnet was so strong that if an allen key or a wrench would have found some fingers between itself and the plate, it would have easily crushed their bones to get closer. Even dropping a simple washer on it would have resulted in excruciating efforts to get it back. [Answer] ## Use a magnetorheological fluid to bind a ball and socket chain You obviously will want some kind of electro magnet because permanent magnets will bind to themselves prematurely and constantly get all tangled up, but you also can't afford to use up a lot of voltage because a chunky high voltage wire will weigh your rope down too much to be able to throw it any reasonable distance. So the optimal solution will be one that uses an electromagnet in a way that receives the best possible mechanical advantage so that it requires less input energy than what is required to hold your weight. This is where the magnetorheological fluid comes in. Magnets are on thier own are generally pretty easy to slide apart; so, just using a simple electromagnet would require one with much more binding force than your actual weight. Magnetorheological fluids however are fluids that harden into a plastic like substance when exposed to a magnetic field. However, they come with an interesting property in which this effect in increased when you also try to compress it; so, if you have this fluid, run a weak magnetic field through it, and then compress it, it hardens into a tough solid material able to hold up more weight than the input energy would suggest. So, what you do is you make the last few feet of your "rope" out of a ball-and-socket chain "lubricated" with MF surrounded by an electromagnetic sleeve. When you throw your rope and the end wraps around something, you press a button, and the MF hardens cementing the segments of your ball-and-socket chain together. Then when you got to put your weight on it, it compresses the MF inside of the chain joint collars which further hardens the bind preventing it from unwrapping until you turn the power off. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/NEC4G.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/NEC4G.png) [Answer] I think if you had VERY strong magnet(s) in the chain then this would work fairly well. Have the last link in your chain be magnetised, and then a few links back from that have another magnet - with the poles arranged so that when these 2 links touch, the magnetic attraction is aligned and then they will hold together very well indeed. Ideally, you would want the rest of the chain to be constucted from a non magnetic material, and one that had sufficient tensile strength to carry the load you want to swing from it. In addition, you'd want the rest of the chain to not be a brittle substance, otherwise you risk it cracking or even breaking over time due to repeated stress causing fatigue [Answer] While you can definitely get magnets strong enough to hold your weight, as well as the additional force from swinging or climbing, such magnets are likely not practical to keep around. However, if you can get your chain to wrap around the anchor point a couple times, you could probably rely on the loops to hold the weight and the magnet can just keep the chain from unlooping. ]
[Question] [ If a modern military acquired the means to grant some soldiers the ability to transform into a bipedal were-creature, what kind of military applications/roles would they be best suited for? **Abilities** They retain their intelligence, however they lose the ability to speak. They also have regenerative abilities that can be overwhelmed if too much damage is sustained. Plus, they will have any traits associated with the animal the were-creature is (a were-tiger would have all the traits associated with a tiger). **Vulnerabilities** Though possessing regenerative abilities, if they sustained enough damage they will completely stop healing. If the wounds are not treated, they will die. If they also revert back to human for a while, they cannot heal and will bleed out and die very quickly. [Answer] **Many little benefits, two big drawbacks.** Humans are the most lethal "animals" on Earth by a large margin. This is due to three factors -- intelligence, language, tool use. You specified they retain their intelligence and that language is lost. How about tool use? A were-bear or a were-tiger might be better at hand-to-hand combat than an unarmed human, but what if the human has a rifle and a barbed-fire entanglement in front of the position? In the "generic" assault role, the transformation does not help. As [Demigan](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/242438/how-useful-would-were-creatures-be-for-military-applications/242455#242455) and [Daron](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/242438/how-useful-would-were-creatures-be-for-military-applications/242442#242442) pointed out, an at-will transformation may be useful in little things, **if it can be controlled**. No good if it always happens on the full moon ... * Some forms might be helpful for carrying heavy loads in broken terrain, like mortar bombs or artillery shells. A were-bear or a were-bull? Some artillery or logistics units could be half weres of this kind, half human helpers to coordinate. * I disagree with the answer by Daron regarding the sabotage. An infiltrator who transforms into a bull in an electronics repair shop will pretty soon be a dead infiltrator, because not even bulls are bullet-proof. I agree with Daron regarding the infiltration. Seal SEALs? Wolf rangers? Are there enough weres to form units by speciality? If there are just a handful, they won't be used by the conventional military at all. [Answer] This answer is entirely dependent on what type of shapeshifting. If conservation of mass is not a requirement, literally anything goes. If things like conservation of mass *is* in effect, now we're talking about details of transformation. Are they restricted to something that has to maintain a roughly quadrupedal form with a generally human-like respiratory system and roughly equipment sensory apparatus? A more limited, but still extensive range of options. Can they use some variation so, for instance, gills for underwater operations, or echolocation? More options. Can they mix and match, so, say, a shark with echolocation, electrical generation organs, and detachable spines loaded with a paralytic venom? Options go up again. Or are the "hybrid forms" your typical anthropomorphic layout, so your standard minotaur or bipedal werewolf, or something similar? More restrictive, but still they provide some options your basic human might not have available. So, long story short, define your shapeshifting and you can get your answers. [Answer] **Stealth and Sabotage** [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/YcEbG.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/YcEbG.jpg) Your platoon of soldiers can transform into seagulls. They can transform into pigeons. They can transform into mosquitos. Transform and sneak past enemy lines. Sneak into the enemy camp. Untransform (or transform into something big). Sabotage their machinery. Sabotage their food and water. Sabotage their computers. I am not an army man. But I will hazard that modern military doctrine relies on the assumption that polar bears do not suddenly manifest inside locked rooms. Oh no, did you have all of your medical supplies locked inside your super-safe bunker? Guess twelve dust mites snuck in through the keyhole and then twelve triceratops smashed everything in sight. Too bad for you. Oh and remember your general? Yeah. . . . not any more. She got taken out by a snail in her garden. Tending the petunias she was. Thing turned into an elephant bird and stamped her into the ground. The neighbors say it was like putting a nail in rotten plywood. Anyway, your general is now dead. That means the map is over and your army is now our army. Good game. [Answer] It doesn't matter what animal they can become, its going to be either useful or neutral. Lets say your were-man can change into a small pony. Its not exactly dangerous and you don't get more weight carrying ability. You aren’t harder to hit either… but you can be faster. Bind your gear to your back (or have someone else do it), then move large distances through relative safety. Then before you get into combat range change back and gear up. You’ve just crossed large distances silently and less visible than vehicles to get to your position, thats a plus! There’s also simple things. Over the course of a day you get tired, a portion of that tiredness is micro damage to your body. Especially if you did a lot and have muscle pains afterwards. Your were-people would regenerate (is the regenerating only available during a transformation?). So they would always have a higher stamina as they would never suffer muscle pains or micro damage for long. Also even if they do need medical attention that shuts down their regeneration, at some point it would be healed enough for their regen to kick back in. So they would always have a shorter rehabilitation and less chance on permanent damage. Go farther and individual animals can be dangerous. A tiger is directly dangerous, but a terrier with a bunch of grenades should not be discounted. Or a swallow carrying a coconut sized object. ]
[Question] [ In my [previous question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/234454/i-designed-a-maglev-space-propulsion-tube-on-mt-everest-do-you-see-any-issues), I was discussing about the possibility of using a mass-driver on Mt. Everest, to propel payloads to space, and reduce the amount of fuel needed (RIP bulky rockets). A diagram below of my former design:[![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/g18Ua.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/g18Ua.png) However, there was a ton of issues with this design: * Dangling a tube from a balloon is a really risky idea as the balloon can be torn apart by the wind and jet-stream on top of Mt. Everest. This could result in collapse of the structure. Firing a payload is even worse, as a tube that is dangling could suddenly jerk and tear the balloon cord, with catastrophic consequences. * The Himalayas are an earthquake zone. The structure would break apart during earthquakes. * Even if you managed not to exceed 3-4gs acceleration, then the curve above the ground could cause a dramatic acceleration spike, this can lead to serious consequences for astronauts. * Mass drivers may work on airless planets like Moon and Mercury, but on Earth, the air is thick enough to burn the payload long before it attained orbit. So, after a lot of thoughts, and ideas, I came up with a grander and more realistic design for the **Mt. Everest Maglev Accelerator**, this time with no ridiculous balloons, or spikes. So here is the design and its principles. # Design * This design consists of a large tube that is erected on giant graphene rods about 10 inches wide in diameter. This provides immense strength, as graphene is strong enough not to crush its base and be rigid. * This design is a **ring-gun magnet** type accelerator. This means that the magnets are placed in rings that have the same poles facing the track. The interior of the tube would look sort of like this:[![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/B7wYE.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/B7wYE.png) * Cross-section of propulsion tube.[![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/FIksn.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/FIksn.png) * The ring-magnets are still permanent and have a greater strength of 10 teslas. They are not electromagnets. * The payload itself is attached with ring-magnets with like poles, i.e. south pole facing outwards. This generates strong repulsion that propel the rocket at high speeds. The ring-magnet themselves are reusable, they are detached from the payload, and fall back to earth, whereas the payload will gain even more momentum, due to conservation of I-can't-remember, as the ring-magnets are detached. * The tube viewed above from ground, looks sort of like this. (Apologies, I am crappy at photoshop, so this is the best depiction I can make). It is about 30 km tall, and stretches into the lower stratosphere. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/LxKJ0.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/LxKJ0.jpg) * The tube's actual length is however astounding. It is about 500 km long, and is mostly built underground. It is made of titanium in order to withstand the stress and pressure from the weight of the mountains above it, and withstands earthquakes. * The curve of the tube is gradual instead of sudden, as to prevent "jerks"(i.e. sudden high-Gs) # Principles The aim of the ~~mass driver~~ Maglev Accelerator is to make it travel so fast, that it won't have time to burn up in the atmosphere. I mean literally fast. The payload's velocity upon exiting the barrel is about 60-70 km/s (yes, Kms per second). The idea came from the [Plumbbob Pascal-B Borecap](https://www.businessinsider.com/fastest-object-robert-brownlee-2016-2?IR=T#since-then-brownlees-concludedit-was-going-too-fast-to-burn-up-before-reaching-outer-spaceafter-i-was-in-the-business-and-did-my-own-missile-launches-he-said-i-realized-that-that-piece-of-iron-didnt-have-time-to-burn-all-the-way-up-in-the-atmosphere-14), where it was theorised that it was moving so fast that it had literally no time to burn up in the atmosphere before reaching space. Although this would mean that the payload is moving too fast for it to be able to remain in orbit (about 6x Earth's Escape Velocity), that is not a problem as this accelerator is meant for interplanetary journey, such as travelling to Saturn, Mars and Moon. I will discuss a **orbit-grade accelerator** in a future question, but for now, this accelerator cannot be used for orbiting payloads. The reason why I am using Mt. Everest and not Chimborazo for the accelerator, is that Mt. Everest is actually closer to space than Chimborazo is. This may seem odd, but Mt. Everest's 9km height makes it closer to space than Chimborazo's 6km is. Although Earth being oblate makes Chimborazo cheat and get "taller" technically, Everest is still the victor, as the atmosphere is oblate like the Earth. The air pressure at the top of Mt. Chimborazo is just that at sea-level, whereas the air at the top of Mt. Everest is literally a partial vacuum, with just over a third that at sea-level. Everest's great height also provides structural support to the colossal accelerator to reach the required velocity. **Is this design more better for propelling payloads/passengers to space? If no, then what flaws do I have to fix?** Clarifications: * No, this accelerator is absolutely not used for orbital journeys. This accelerator is used for interplanetary journeys, such as Earth-Mars, or Earth-Saturn journeys Note: I'd like to avoid extended discussions in comments, as I have created [a chat room](https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/140455/mt-everest-maglev-accelerator-v2) for this question. [Answer] ## Impossibility 1: Ring magnets as depicted All magnetic fields need to be closed curves. The ring magnet as depicted would require a magnetic source at the very center of the ring, which is forbidden. The problem can be alleviated by placing many magnets on the outside in the correct orientation but with small wedge-shaped gaps between every two magnets. Technically you only need a few (1-3) long magnet rail tracks, which allows orientation control of the payload and considerably reduces construction costs. It's by the way better to use permanent magnets *attracting* to the track than repulsing from it, that way the payload can not *overturn* and slip out of the magnetic track. A simple set of ring motors could be used to give the capsule any wanted orientation by rotating the magnet tracks around the tube or their receptors on the payload - even allowing to simulate *rifling* to achieve spin stabilization. ## Impossibility 2: only permanent magnet accelerator The maglev track is perfect to get minimal drag, and as explained above, does work. However, it does not accelerate on its own - it simply provides a means to have extremely low friction to the guide rail. If you take a slice from real Maglev trains, a set of coils inside the train car is electrified to create repulsing forces in some areas and attracting in others, which all in all accelerate the vehicle. ## Impossibility 3: architectural constraints You have a $\pu{30 km}$ pipe extending for up to about $\pu{22 km}$ above the point we leave the tip of Mt Everest. It is supported on stilts up to $\pu{25 km}$ long, assuming that the highland below is *just* about $\pu{5 km}$ above sea level. That is well beyond what **any** material can do. Steel is typically blessed with allowing $\pu{25000 psi}\ (\pu{172 MPa})$ compressible force before failure, which is [6 times that of concrete](https://blog.redguard.com/compressive-strength-of-steel). But well-made steel can get better, up to $\pu{250 MPa}$ are possible. That's $\pu{250 000 000 N/m² }$. Above that, the column collapses under its own weight But the column itself weighs a lot: assuming we have a crossection of one square meter of steel, then each meter height (and thus each cubic-meter) weighs 7.85 tons $(\pu{7850 kg})$, exerting roughly $\pu{78500 N}$ each. At which point *stacking bricks* makes the lowest one crumble? Well... incidentally the compressive strength would itself allow for being 3184.71 meters tall. so roundabout 3 Kilometers. Or at **best** a tiny fraction of the pillar length needed to support the tube - and we haven't even assigned any weight to that. The pipe goes up to maybe 10 kilometers... and then it breaks down, having to end as it can't be supported with any material or construction. Exotic materials, such as Graphene fare much worse: Graphene's compressive strength is [only](https://aip.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1063/1.5020547) $\pu{8.5 MPa}$ under normal conditions but could be driven to $\pu{28.8 MPa}$ at $\pu{2267 kg/m³}$. As a result for a maximum pillar height of Graphene is just $\pu{375 m}$ or, with the special tricks, $\pu{1270 m}$ A 10-inch graphene rod fares exactly the same: It has $\pu{78.5 in²}$ or almost exactly $\pu{0.05 m²}$ area. Let's keep that. It can sustain the same pressure before collapsing, so the lowest piece can carry $\pu{0.05m²}\times \pu{28.8 kg/m²}$ load. Each Meter height weighs in at $\pu{0.05m³}\times \pu{2267kg/m³}$. As a result, we get exactly the same height for a stable column as before: 375 to $\pu{1270 m}$. [Answer] Though I don't see any reference to it in this question or your previous one, you should probably read about [StarTram](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarTram), because it was a project that considers many of the same things you're looking at. The StarTram authors used to have all their interesting stuff available for free on their website, but the main ebook is now paid-only. StarTram uses an evacuated tube with a "conventional" superconducting electromagnetic accelerator. Here's a diagram that looks a little like your own: [![Star tram gen one and gen two diagrams, showing horizontal acceleration paths which run up a mountainside so that the projectile exits high in the atmosphere so as to minimize drag forces. The Gen 2 diagram shows the massive superconducting structure that supports the muzzle at some 20km altitude](https://i.stack.imgur.com/xvRna.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/xvRna.png) The Gen 1 design, which has the muzzle of the accelerator at the top of a suitable mountain, is intended for cargo only as it has a 30G peak acceleration and a 6-12G peak decelleration when it hits the atmosphere upon exiting the muzzle. It uses a clever [plasma window](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_window) to maintain vacuum in the tube but still allow the projectile to egress the accelerator. It comes out at near orbital velocity, requiring some small boost rockets (<1km/s delta-V) to finish the job. The Gen 2 design uses a somewhat gonzo electromagnetic repulsion architecture using massive supercondcting cables. I won't regurgitate the exact details of this here, but suffice to say that the authors were well aware that massive scaffolding structures and balloons can't work. Whether or not their solution would is something I won't consider here. [![A star tram gen 2 accellerator muzzle, showing a craft exiting the accelerator at 20km altitude, and a series of tethers that fasten the tube to the ground against the repulsion force generated by superconducting cables along the length of the accelerator](https://i.stack.imgur.com/FwDdt.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/FwDdt.png) (image credit [NASA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Startramgeneration2.jpg)) > > The high altitude evacuated launch tube has a set of high current superconducting (SC) cables that magnetically interact with a second set of high current SC cables on the surface beneath to create a magnet levitation force of several metric tons per meter of tube length. The levitation force is greater than the weight of the launch tube plus its SC cables and tethers, resulting in a net upward force on the structure. In turn, the levitated structure is anchored to the ground by a network of high tensile strength, lightweight Kevlar or Spectra tethers > > > So, now I've shown you the competition, lets look at the details of your design. 1. Permanent magnet accelerator I can't see that this could ever work, even if you could get powerful enough permanent magnets (you probably can't) in sufficient quantity (you probably can't) that are light enough for your 30km high suspended section to work (almost certainly no). Just use a superconducting electromagnetic accelerator... it is something that could conceivably be built with present-day technology, after all. 2. Giant graphene rods Graphene has excellent tensile strength, but its compressive strength is less exciting, and a 30km tall tower that needs to withstand launch stresses and weather patterns is a fearsome undertaking to say the least. Other answers already go into more detail on this matter, but if you want a structure this tall then it needs to be suspended by some other means. I won't go into detail on this here, but maybe you could ask another question? 3. 60km/s muzzle velocity Brownlee lamented the commonly repeated story of the Pascal B test, because it resulted in a lot of people mocking his terrible understanding of aerodynamics. He just estimated the speed of the cap, but made no claims about it getting into space, and assumed it was vaporized in the lower atmosphere. Anyway, that niggle aside, I'm not sure you've necessarily consider the effects of hitting the atmosphere, even at 30km, at that sort of speed. Sure, the projectile will not be in the atmosphere for long, but not being there long enough to slow down below orbital velocity or burn up is not the same as being safe for the cargo. The initial forces on leaving the muzzle of the accelerator are too difficult for me to calculate, but I'm pretty certain they'll be extremely unpleasant if not outright dangerous. I'm not going to commit to these figures, but at an atmospheric density of ~0.01841kg/m3 ([wolfram alpha](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=density%20of%20air%20at%2030000m)), a vehicle with a drag coefficient of 0.09 (from the StarTram design) and travelling at 60 km/s is going to experience a drag force of the order of 10MN. A mass of 40 tonnes (from the StarTram design) will therefore experience a (probably transient) acceleration of ~24 gravities. That is a potentially aorta-dissecting amount of acceleration to apply to a human cargo, especiially given how rapidly it will be applied. For more reading on the subject, have a read of some of the many papers on the subject... here's one I found with a minute or two of searching: [Human Tolerance to Rapidly Applied Accelerations](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19980228043). I might be quite wrong here, but you're talking about a speed far too high to be safe even in a fairly thin atmosphere. > > Is this design more better for propelling payloads/passengers to space? If no, then what flaws do I have to fix? > > > Honestly, your design seems to be a combination of overkill and, uh, not-enough-kill. Lets gloss over whether or not the passengers of your craft will die instantly as their coffin leaves the muzzle of your death-cannon for now (but I suspect that the flight is likely to be physically traumatic if not fatal) and consider the other aspects of your idea. The StarTram design dealt with merely surface-to-orbit construction, with the reasonable assumption that if you've cracked the difficult issue of getting out of the Earth's gravity well then you can built much more appropriate interplanetary infrastructure in space. Thing is, your fixed accelerator makes it very difficult to aim... you get to fiddle with muzzle velocity to some degree, but everything else is limited by time of year and time of day. This in turn limits the number of targets you can reach in a convenient timespan. From space though, you have much more flexibility. Even aside from that is the issue of safety... a suborbital flight that requires active boosting into orbit can fail safe (assuming your launch vehicles can safely re-enter, which you should ensure) because you re-enter and can land. Your capsule on the other hand is not only going much faster than terrestrial escape velocity, but can easily exceed solar escape velocity! At Earth's orbit, solar escape velocity is ~42km/s. Earth's own orbital velocity is 30km/s, which means unless you're shooting in a retrograde direction then any problems mean you shoot out into interstellar space, and rescue is likely to be challenging. Don't be so impatient. You can launch your interplanetary vehicle into orbit and renezvous with a secondary propulsion system (eg. laser ablative, or plasma-push magsail or whatever) to hoof you in the right direction at the right time. The additional wait isn't going to be more than an hour or two, and the additional safety and considerable reduction in your accelerator size, cost and complexity will be well worth the tradeoff. (Note that you already have to have some kind of mechanism to impart a delta-V of tens of kilometers per second to your capsule, because you have to slow it down at its destination! As this is a required ability anyway, you may as well use it for the boost phase as well as the brake phase and save yourself a lot of hassle) [Answer] > > Is this design more better for propelling payloads/passengers to space? If no, then what flaws do I have to fix? > > > **Two Big Flaws** 1. How does it stay up? 2. How come it's so fast? You claim the graphite stilts will support the track no problem. How are they so dang strong? I feel safe to assume that no known material is strong enough to support a 30km tall 500km railway on stilts alone. The Earth moves and the air moves. I suggest you replace the stilts with a 500km tall solid unobtanium pyramid. On second thoughts why do we need supports at all? Just point Space Tube sideways. You need to launch things sideways to get to orbit anyway. And launching in a straight line in any direction will get you into space: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/EfAVL.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/EfAVL.png) You will need some supports if you desire a perfectly straight tube. But it is not obvious why that would help. Just accelerate along the Earth's curvature instead of a straight line. Of course the image is only accurate if the Earth is round. If your Earth is flat then your Space Ramp Tube is a good idea. The second problem, is how you claim the projectile exits at 40km/s. But how does it go so dang fast? You explain how it is levitated but not how it is accelerated. Maglev stuff, sure, there are real Maglev trains and they work somehow. But those bad boys go only 100ish m/s. That's much slower than Space Tube. Maybe Space Tube uses Particle accelerator tech to go fast. Those things are lined with magnets too. And they go very fast indeed. But particles are famously smaller than spaceships. There is also this: > > Mass drivers may work on airless planets like Moon and Mercury, but on Earth, the air is thick enough to burn the payload long before it attained orbit. > > > You give this problem but don't explain your solution. It sounds like Space Tube Mk. II is just as vulnerable to burning up as Space Tube Mk I. To fix this I suggest the inside of the tube have all the air pumped out. [Answer] Ditch Everest. Switch to Chimborazo in Ecuador. Two reasons: 1. Because it is closer to the equator, it's peak is actually farther from the center of the Earth. 2. Because it is closer to the equator, you get more of a boost from rotation of the Earth. Everest at 29.59 degrees North loses almost 14% of the rotational velocity. So launching from Chimborazo gets you additional altitude, and about 223 km/hr extra launch velocity. The structure you have envisioned is massively beyond our current tech. At both ends. Digging a slanted tunnel roughly 100 km long is getting to silly proportions. The [deepest mine right now is](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deepest_mines) 4 km deep. This is getting pretty close to the limits of our tech right now. The truss you envision holding the launch tube is grotesquely beyond what we can build now. The launch energy needs to be supplied. You need electromagnets up the length of the tube. The energy they need to supply, assuming a constant acceleration, increases as the speed increases. So you need to run gargantuan power cables up the structure as well. You might get someplace by forgetting the extension above and below the mountain. You could have some sort of electromagnetic launcher that pushed a sled that carried your orbiter. Assuming a 50 km track and only 1g, you get 1 km/s in 100 seconds, pretty close to Mach 1, up the mountain. This is fast enough that the sled could detach and the orbiter take over its own burn. The first 25 km or so of the track would be level then curve up the mountain. There are lots of variations on this. For example, the sled could also be a rocket motor that acted as a first stage. Or you could amp up the acceleration up the hill. At 4 g you get pretty close to Mach 2, in 25 seconds. You can get an idea of what you are gaining from launching from the mountain. At 4g you are basically getting the first 25 seconds of rocket power from your launch sled. Suppose you were able to build the truss and extend the ramp another 50 km. This gives you only about another 10 seconds. The part on the mountain might be worth it. Building this currently-impossible truss seems to be a diminishing return. ]
[Question] [ The rodents of unusual size in question are not implausibly large from a biological standpoint, being roughly the same weight as an American Beaver, but much more adapted for land living and with an omnivorous diet. But the problem stems from where they live. These rats are thriving in a dense urban environment, and I am unsure if an urban environment can support a population of larger animals. My initial idea is that there is lots of human and animal waste simply lying about since it’s a disgusting city. But I’m not sure if it’s a plausible explanation or if there’s something I’m missing that would prevent a larger animal from living off trash and hiding in abandoned alleyways. [Answer] ## Yes, there is a precedent for large animals inhabiting urban areas. The typical mass of a adult American beaver is 20 kg. Feral dogs living in urban areas are known to exceed this at times. Although 20 kg is on the large side for dogs, some dogs are much heavier. Note that the article mentioned below specifically mentions that they may be any breed. Are feral dogs present in cities? [Yes, they are](https://www.terrificpets.com/articles/102302565.asp), and present a problem. > > Feral dogs, as well as feral cats, are rapidly becoming a very serious > problem in most if not all of the larger metropolitan areas throughout > the world. Unfortunately these feral dogs, many which have been > abandoned by uncaring owners, have not only survived their life on the > streets but have also gone on to reproduce. This has further increased > the numbers and has lead to some very real health and genetic concerns > within these numbers. Feral dogs can be from any breed and most, > especially if born as feral puppies, are going to be mixed breed, > perhaps mixed breed for several generations. > > > Now, humans keeps abandoning pets which provides a continuous feedstock for wild animals, but as the article explains, such wild populations do breed. It is obvious that cities have dog-catchers and impound lots because of the population of animals that run loose. There is no reason to doubt that ROUS could survive in an urban setting. Besides, have you seen how big the existing rats are in NYC? [![NYC Rat](https://i.stack.imgur.com/gRnHZ.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/gRnHZ.jpg) [Answer] Larger animals can live in urban environments, like for example foxes do. However if you increase the size of the animal you have to reduce their total number in the environment: one thing is feeding rats, one thing is feeding something larger. With the same nutrient base, the larger the body, the smaller the total count of the animal. [Answer] **Here are your Giant Rats** [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/I3X4Z.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/I3X4Z.png) What you describe is essentially a raccoon. A smart, nonaquatic, opportunistic omnivore two feet long that loves to eat garbage. They do not live in my part of the world, but I have seen in cartoons that American cities are full of raccoons. This is much to the chagrin of the American people. American garbage tastes delicious you see. And every kilo eaten by raccoons is a kilo stolen from the hard working citizens. [Answer] I don't know if you're writing fantasy or science fiction, but much might depend on ... 1. whether the rats were sapient 2. whether the rats preyed on small children 3. whether humans used the big rats to exterminate the smaller ones and other vermin 4. whether humans used the rats as pets 5. whether humans used the rats as permanent surrogate babies or toddlers 6. whether rats could convincingly disguise themselves as cats, dogs, or people 7. whether the rats were social and could build gargantuan nests or systems of burrows the size of houses 8. whether the rats were social and guided by a sapient queen 9. whether certain organizations wanted to stop the efforts of other groups to exterminate the rascals 10. other factors. ]
[Question] [ To set the stage, 2 opposing groups exist in the binary Alpha Centauri system. The 2 stars have a roughly 80 year orbit that brings them as close at 11 AU together and as far as 36. A ship at a 1g acceleration will take 9.3 days at closest approach and 17.0 days at furthest. Previously, I had the history of these 2 nations basically going to war every 80 years as they get close to one another as the travel time is more feasible for this. The close orbit is present for roughly 12 years before they get further and further apart. My question is **in a an age of a torch drive starship and fusion economy, would this 7.7 day difference cause such a problem that most wars only happen during the close approach because the logistics behind backing anything further away would impede the war effort too much?** I'm probably overthinking it and that the necessary war effort would be difficult either way and a large command and control ship would need to go with the travelling ear group due to light lag time any way. [Answer] In a war doing what the enemy expects you to do might not be a smart idea. I have read that at the approach of the D day the Germans were expecting the allies to land during high tide, because it would have given the infantry a shorter walk on the beach, and so they packed the beaches with [Rommel's asparagi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rommel%27s_asparagus) and other defenses which would have worked well in high tide. Apparently the allies opted for landing during low tide, making all those defenses less effective. In your case it's also true that the closest approach seems to be the best option for attacking, therefore it's also what the defender choose as a moment to strengthen their defenses, and as an attacker you want to maximize the surprise effect. All in all, if those 7 days will make a difference depends on the specifics of the attacking forces: are they launching sort of a routine attack where they are well within the boundaries of their technology so that there are no big differences in choosing the long or the short path attack, or are they pushing those boundaries and even the savings related to those 7 days can make the difference between a completed and a failed mission? You can use this an element for your story, if it helps the plot. [Answer] Here's the biggest problem: > > A ship at a 1g acceleration will take 9.3 days at closest approach and 17.0 days at furthest. > > > If your ship can maintain a 1G thrust for nearly twice as long, there's clearly no problem, but it requires you to handwave away some fairly serious technological hurdles. You've nearly doubled your delta-V requirement for each leg of the journey, and remember that unless you can guarantee victory or the ability to safely refuel at your destination you will need to carry enough go-juice to get you there *and back again*. Running two 1G brachistochrones across 11AU and back requires a delta-V of approximately .1c. Across 36AU it'll be more like .2c. It is expensive (in terms of fuel and reaction mass) to have a delta-V that exceeds your exhaust velocity. If you're running fusion torches, then your exhaust velocity is unlikely to exceed 0.09c (you are familiar with [Atomic Rockets](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/fusionfuel.php#id--Fusion_Reactions), I assume? If not, *read it all*, ASAP!). The [mass ratio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_ratio) of your rocket is $R = e^{\Delta\_v/\Delta\_e}$. Lets imagine, for mathematical convenience, that your rockets have an exhaust velocity of 0.1c, which means that a delta-V of 0.1c gives you a mass ratio of e, or about 2.7 (equivalent to ~63% of the "takeoff" mass being go-juice). To achieve a delta-V of 0.2c with the same rockets gives you a mass ratio of more like 7.4, equivalent to ~86% of the "takeoff" weight being burnt to get you there and back. Just think, at the closest approach your ships can carry 2.7 times more payload mass. That adds up to quite a lot of munitions, or even troops if you were in to that sort of thing. "*I know*", you might be thinking, "*just make the ships 2.7 times bigger!*". Well, now they're going to be a lot more expensive, aren't they? Harder and pricier to build, harder and pricier to fuel. If you waited til the closest approach, you could have 2.7 times more ships instead. Doesn't that sound like a better deal? If your torch ships use some other technique for propulsion with a much higher exhaust velocity, such as antimatter, then this constraint doesn't apply (though you still need to build up a stockpile of antimatter twice as large, which is likely to be expensive and/or time consuming). This lets you tweak your tech to fit your story needs. (Personally I'd just dial down your rocket performance until doing a 36AU trip promptly seems impractical. 1G sustained brachistochrones require ridiculously powerful rockets, after all, and if they're easy to achieve then just having a rocket artillery duel seems likely to be the easiest means of waging war...) [Answer] It is certainly cheaper to wage war when both civilizations are close to each other. So unless they have unlimited resources that could be a strong reason for such a scenario to develop. The wars between the two nations could be somewhat ritualized, like the wars of the Aztecs, the so called "Flower Wars", which did not have the purpose to destroy the enemy but to capture some of them in order to sacrifice them to the gods. I do not assume that those two advanced nations do alien sacrifices, but I could imagine that they use a kind of limited warfare to settle disputes. If you do not have strong rules which both belligerents agree on, wars between technologically advanced nations should be very short and end disastrous. For example, a surprise attack against a planet with a strong laser weapon can wipe out a civilization in seconds. The laser is as fast as any signal you could send as a warning, so as soon as it is fired there is nothing you can do. In fact our conflicts are already somewhat ritualized. There is, for example, a broad agreement not to use nuclear bombs, because it would lead to mutually assured destraction. My claim is that every war between advanced civilizations of equal technological possibilities would lead to mutual destruction unless there are very specific rules both civilizations have agreed on. One of those agreements could be that military operations are only conducted during the years when both stars are closest to each other and when costs and energy expenditure is the lowest. They could wage war at any time, they just don't. Why don't they just live peacefully together? I don't know. Why don't we? [Answer] ### The two sides of the star Nine days means a lot. If your armies are going all out pew-pew and blasters out, a whole squadron could get smashed down to star dust in a quarter of the time. It's even worse with fuel : if we dare to take a comparison with some modern battle tanks, their fuel autonomy is at the very most one day1. This makes fuel, ammo and ship management an hell to predict, so picture it now for a 17 days travel. It looks like it's an impossible task for your space generals. But look it another way : If your travel time is already that bad, is it really important if it's longer? Can't we just work around that and nullify most ofthe issue? Yes, we can! When using land warfare as an example, we're not looking the right way. It's actually closer to modern naval warfare : Ships travel for days there, and they have autonomy for a good while2. What your armies need to do is to focus on self-autonomy rather than day-to-day resupplies strategies. Very big fuel and ammo tankers, flagships which can hold smaller ships with less autonomy (akin to aircraft carriers), [distance-for-fuel efficient engines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion), independent directives on a tactical level followed by rendez-vous points when the time to resupply comes... All these can make your troops more independent of logistics, making the issue of a 9 days trip much less critical, and a 7 day longer trip at most an hinderance on top of the initial issue. In other words : Initial costs of adapting to long travels are heavy, but adding a bit more once the warfare culture is adapted to it is more... Secondary. ### Conclusion **So if we sum up, yes, adding travel time is an issue, and usually an important one. But knowing your troops still needs at the very least 9 days of travel, they would have gone towards a more consistent, more autonomous way of getting resupplied. And knowing they would have adapted for the ideal situation, adding a single week of travel is much less important.** --- --- 1 : For instance the first version of the [M1 Abrams](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1_Abrams#Mobility) has a 500 US gallons tank, while it consumes 60 gallons per hour while moving. This means... (count on fingers), 7h of autonomy. Not accounting start time (10 gallons!) and idle time (10 gallons/hour). If that's not the love for good fuel, what is it ⛽? 2 : Here, we can see that the [aircraft carrier "Charles de Gaulle"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_aircraft_carrier_Charles_de_Gaulle) can hold 45 days of food and moves at most at 50km/h with virtually infinite autonomy, meaning it needs 20 hours for 1,000 km. In contrast, the greatest East-West width of the [Pacific Ocean is about 19,800 km](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Ocean#Geography), so naval travel times around the world are counted in days. [Answer] You ask whether logistical considerations "would impede the war effort too much". This is impossible to answer until you define "too much". Armies have historically [travelled for months](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Minard.png#/media/File:Minard.png) across hostile territory under severe weather conditions, so if the question is "will an invasion become unfeasible if it takes an extra week" then the answer is obviously "no". In fact I don't expect there would be that much of a necessity of getting across as fast as possible and many logistical issues can be mitigated by simply taking it slower ([Tortiliena's answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/232582/93084) goes into more detail as to why). But it comes down to: why do they fight? It's hard to imagine a motivation serious enough to cause otherwise independent, self-sufficient civilisations to commit significant resources and lives to fighting one another, yet that motivation somehow expires once travel takes 11 days instead of 10 (especially since the change would be extremely gradual). Any incentives developed during wartime, e.g. an expansion of the military industry or generals gaining political power, would tend to self-reinforce, making it hard to exit the war cycle. One option is ritual wars, as suggested by [Avun Jahei](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/232574/93084). It would work technically, but I'm a bit skeptical about using this in a narrative, because "my aliens do this illogical thing because their culture/religion says they Must" is a bit of a lazy trope. People object to their children dying in war. You'd have to have a very fanatical (and therefore stereotypical) society, and even then you'd probably want an underlying reason: humans, at least, tend to apply "moral" or "ritual" framing devices post-hoc to justify wars fought for "normal" reasons - resources, expansion, power. Maybe think about your story constraints. Do you specifically want this war to be fought for only ~12 years for every 80 year cycle? Find a *motivation* that only applies during those 12 years. The planets encroach into each other's space debris field? There is a resource of some sort that becomes inaccessible when the two planets are very close? Proximity perturbs the planets' geology such that each planet internally experiences significant geopolitical strife (due to displacement, crop failure etc) and every time someone comes up with the idea to channel these destructive circumstances into a war of expansion? These are trivial examples, but something along those lines would justify your setting and give it more depth. ]
[Question] [ **Closed**. This question needs [details or clarity](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers. --- **Want to improve this question?** Add details and clarify the problem by [editing this post](/posts/232039/edit). Closed 1 year ago. [Improve this question](/posts/232039/edit) An engineer finds himself in a fantasy world. Through a series of events he ends up leaving rebellion against the noble mage class. Because of his understanding of technology he is been able to raise the peasant class up to around America's Civil War level at least as far as weapons technology. The problem is the enemy Air Force. The mage class can summon these magical griffins that they can use as mobile air platforms that they can launch fireballs from. Is there a way to counter this magical Air Force with Civil War level weapons? Fireball range is line of sight. [Answer] The American Civil War had effective cannons and (towards the end) repeating rifles. The Revolutionary War might have more problems but civil war technology should be sufficient to counter griffins unless they can fly quite high. Practically speaking, I should think that a wizard flinging fireballs effectively would want to be no higher than a couple of hundred meters. Otherwise he's going to need some optical assistance for his targeting (although, being a wizard, maybe he does have that) and a couple of hundred meters would be well within civil war cannon range for things like cannister shot. It's worth noting that civil war rifles would not be much good against a target 200 yards in the air but the cannons would work. Smoothbore cannons had a range of about a mile -- I'm not sure what that translates to when firing "up" but I would think a few hundred yards would be fine. I'd expect rapid innovation of upward aiming cannister shot from cannons and mortars, and perhaps even explosive rockets. If the wizard can cruise around at 10,000 feet and fling fireballs effectively then he can probably do so with impunity. Nothing in the CW era would have that kind of range and they would have to develop some alternative strategies to mitigate the damage since they can't fight against it directly (only fight at night, or only in very rough terrain or forests where the wizards can't see them and there is lots of cover around, etc). [Answer] **An Ironclad defense!** Ironclads, fully metal armored gunships, were in use in the civil war era - making use of these to shut down the mages trade, block their supply lines, and so forth. They are designed to survive explosive shell hits, so a fireball should just glance off the armor. If the mages want to remove the blockade, they can either attack at close range, where they might be able to skip a fireball through a gun turret hole, but can also be shot, or they can try and swarm with soldiers,who should be massacred fairly easily The next innovation is, of course, to put thinner versions of the metal plates used in iron clads on the back of a cart - these can be pretty thin, a fireball's main properties are setting things on fire, not exploding, after all - can't do that to metal armor. Stick a Gatling gun or light artillery piece out the sides, and you have little mobile fortresses. It'd be a stretch to call them tanks, but they're ideal for holding out against flying, fireballing opponents. Again, use these to cut trade and supplies from reaching the mages [Answer] A simple question can determine the answer: what is the range and velocity of the air-launched fireballs? If they are fast and long range, such that they can be launched from high altitude, then there's not a whole lot you can do. If, on the other hand, they eventually fizzle out or dissipate if it takes too long to get to a target which means the griffin has to come in relatively low and slow in order for the bombardment to work, say within 200 meters, then may I introduce you to [canister shot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canister_shot). Essentially, you take a regular cannon and turn it into a massive shotgun. During the US Civil War, there are accounts of units being hit by canister or double canister at close range, such as at Pickett's Charge, where the unit literally disintegrated; the only thing left were a few recognizable body parts. Have a bunch of cannons pointing upward, and flying mages, if they have to get relatively close for their fireballs to work, turn into chunky salsa and fine red mist. At longer ranges, intercepting a few chunks of metal might not turn you into a cloud, but they'll ruin your day. [Answer] # A concrete defense: [Portland cement](https://canadianconcreteexpo.com/concrete-a-history-of-loss-betrayal-and-innovation/#:%7E:text=Modern%20concrete%20is%20due%20to,in%201824%20by%20Joseph%20Aspdin.) was invented in 1824, leading to the modern age of concrete production. Depending on how your fireballs work, they may be almost worthless against a fire-proof structure. If they are primarily flame and heat, a concrete structure might be almost invincible. Even with blast effects, a concrete fortification with metal shutters would be nearly impervious. Only if your fireballs mimic cannons and create high-velocity mass will fireballs stand a chance against a well-constructed defense. Also, don't rule out the humble industrially-produced [brick](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brick#:%7E:text=12th%2Dcentury%20craftsmanship-,China,used%20as%20flooring%20for%20houses.). Easy to make and transport, it would very likely be extremely effective against the much less forceful effects of mere fireballs. Huge fortresses could be built at every city and harbor. It isn't as hard as stone, but its just as fire-resistant. Such massive defenses were actually quite common in this period. The reduction in effectiveness of fireballs versus cannon balls means that strongly fortified defenses would play a critical role in dealing with such highly mobile forces. I'm guessing castles would be quite common in warfare on this world for this very reason. But the relative speed of building and cheapness of concrete and brick means you can have "castles" at many points, and protect vulnerable strategic locations with ease. # I Can't See! Effective smoke screens could be generated by many noxious materials involved in the industrial revolution. Since your fireballs require sight, even burning vegetation could generate significant smoke screens. Plus, guns of this period were famous for generating blinding clouds of smoke that prevented generals and soldiers alike from seeing what was happening. # Fire Proof: People have known about [asbestos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestos) for thousands of years. It is a mined product that was relatively uncommon but well known. Industrial-scale mining would be likely as people would value the fire-resistant properties of the material for numerous applications. Curtains in theaters were sometimes made of asbestos due to concerns about fires in theaters (sometimes quite disastrous events in the period). Suits of warriors could be made of asbestos or covered in asbestos outer linings. masks and filters could be developed that protect the skin from the flashes of flames coming from fireballs. But even the industrial production of somewhat fire-resistant leather would protect men. Wet wool was even used extensively by fire fighters of the period to protect from heat and flame. Somewhat effective [respirators](https://www.grand-island.com/home/showpublisheddocument/2096/635386213330930000) for dealing with smoke and flame were developed by 1824, and these could be part of a warrior's gear. Your soldiers might start to look more like WW1 troops in gas masks, but they would be surprisingly well protected from short-lived and non-adhering flames like those from naptha or similar materials. # Take a shot: Combine the concrete castles with some [mortars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_artillery_in_the_American_Civil_War#:%7E:text=Federal%20siege%20train-,Mortars,also%20classified%20as%20siege%20%26%20garrison.) for launching fused explosive shells up into the air, and your mages are reduced to lobbing fireballs off at huge distances blindly and hoping to hit something. Mortars were designed to lob shells at high angles and to range thousands of feet. Fuses in this period weren't proximity fused, but the speeds of the "aircraft" are much lower and the ranges shorter. The only thing holding back the invention of the civil war anti-aircraft gun was the relative lack of aircraft (balloons were relatively uncommon, and attempts to shoot them down generally improvised). The civil war saw fairly respectable [sniper rifles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitworth_rifle) with decent range and accuracy. Concealed snipers with long ranged guns could operate outside the normal ranks of the army (especially in elevated positions) to make any mage think twice about getting close enough to accurately target your troops. concealed clusters of snipers operating in teams could snipe at mages, draw them in to try and locate the tiny, concealed targets, and then ambush the mages with a fusillade of fire from the local equivalent of the Whitworth rifle. [Answer] # There is no effective air defense possible! As long as the mages can use the line of sight, they can outfly any ground gun of the civil war era. They just fly above the cannon reach and are impervious to small arms. But what is the cannon reach? ## maximum air defense hight Well, the [various field artillery pieces](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_artillery_in_the_American_Civil_War#Weapons) shoot between 1000 and 2800 yards at $\theta=5°$ elevation with muzzle velocities of 1000 to 1500 feet a second. Its velocity downrange will stay persistent, and its velocity up gets reduced by the acceleration downwards from earth attraction, this drawing an arc. All we need now is the muzzle velocity and we can calculate the shooting height technically we don't even need the downrange reach! So, let's plot the time it takes to get to the highest point. $$0=v\_{0}\sin\theta-g\*t$$ $$v\_h=v\_0\sin\theta$$ $$t=\frac {v\_h}{g}$$ Injecting the fastest shooting gun there, the [12 pounder Whithworth](https://civilwarwiki.net/w/index.php?title=12_pdr._Whitworth_Breechloading_Rifle) at 5° with $v\_0=\pu{475.2 m/s}$ and $g=\pu{9.81 m/s²}$, we get a time of $t=\pu{4.22 s}$ until its apex - which we can plug into the location formula for the shot. also, just for the test, let's plug the 5° where we know that it should be about $$y=\frac {v\_h^2} {2g}=\pu{87.42 m}$$ But it also points to a different problem: that gun should in theory have a range of 11.5 kilometers at that elevation, but it only has a reach of about 2.5 kilometers... where is the rest of the energy going?! Wind resistance. We completely ignored wind resistance! So let's fix the formula, add drag coefficient $C=0.47$ (even though that is for a sphere and the projectile is more [complex shaped](http://www.civilwarartillery.com/projectiles/rifled/iiia140.htm)) and a diameter of 2.75 inch or about $d=\pu{70 mm}$, air density $\rho=\pu{1.225 kg/m³}$, mass $m=\pu{5.4 kg}$ and thus $r=\pu{0.035 m}$. $$a\_{drag}=\frac 1 m C \rho r² v²=\pu{0.00013061 m}\times v(t)²$$ This can be plotted! Let's see... $$y=v\_0\sin\theta t- \frac 1 2 (g+a\_{drag}) t² $$ $$x=v\_0\cos\theta t- \frac 1 2 (a\_{drag}) t²$$ Now... with a bit of oversimplification (pinning the speed for the drag calculation) our flight times are different. For $\theta=5°$ the projectile only get [65 meters above the battle and impacts after 6.7 seconds](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=y%3D475.2%5Csin%285%C2%B0%29%20t-%20%281%2F2%29%20%289.81%20%2B%20%280.00013061*475.2%5E2%29%5Csin%285%C2%B0%29%29%20t%C2%B2). It also gives us a reach of [3114 meters](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=x%3D475.2%5Ccos%285%C2%B0%29%20t-%20%281%2F2%29%20%28%280.00013061*475.2%5E2%29%5Csin%285%C2%B0%29%29%20t%C2%B2%20with%20t%3D6.7), which is the actual range while the 2.5 kilometers is the **effective** range - as in, you shoot at targets at that range because you want to hit about chest-high. Now, let's turn that gun to 35° (the maximum the gun allows) and shoot... the projectile reaches its apex after about [10.15 seconds at 1400 meters](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=y%3D475.2%5Csin%2835%C2%B0%29%20t-%20%281%2F2%29%20%289.81%20%2B%20%280.00013061*475.2%5E2%29%5Csin%2835%C2%B0%29%29%20t%C2%B2) off the ground. Or almost a mile. If our engineer invents a mounting that allows shooting straight up, then the gun even can reach a height of about [2800 meters](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=y%3D475.2%5Csin%2890%C2%B0%29%20t-%20%281%2F2%29%20%289.81%20%2B%20%280.00013061*475.2%5E2%29%5Csin%2890%C2%B0%29%29%20t%C2%B2), close to two miles in height - with a flight time of 12 seconds to that point. ## only low air defense... Our mages can fly their griffons everywhere there is enough air to breath. That is anywhere below 26000 feet or 8 kilometers. The guns available only can deny the lower 2 miles to the mages and even that very ineffectively. So effectively the mages just fly at 2.5 kilometers high without any chance to hit them **at all** - and they just need to have either a very basic telescope to hit targets effectively, or just use indiscriminate bombardment of anything that looks like an encampment. But what can you see from that height? If you fly 4 kilometers like the [Italians over Ethiopia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_reconnaissance_in_World_War_II#Italian_reconnaissance_over_Ethiopia). They basically would see the world below in about 1:16000, so to be about 1 millimeter to them, the feature on the ground would be 16 meters wide - or about the size of a building. That's enough to barely make out an encampment while using a 4 times magnification optic allows spotting single vehicles. Though the mages fly at about half the height, so they spot at double the resolution. They can see single tents easily, vehicles become visible with a 2 times magnification and at 4 times they can see the artillery pieces pretty clearly. Now comes the nail in the coffin: flight time of the projectile. Assume the mage comes into the range of two kilometers because they want to snipe artillery. The gun fires. The flash of the gun gives away the position, the mage does literally nothing. The projectile reaches the spot the mage was expected to be at a crawling pace (it slows, remember?) and almost against its armor. Annoyed, the griffon smacks the solid slug projectile down towards the gun. It starts hurtling down and impacts directly next to the gun, killing the crew and gun. Or the mage does a tiny turn and the projectile misses by a dozen meters or three. And they can hurl a fireball down the same moment they see the flash and still be safe. You see, effective air defense is **impossible** with just that range and reaches of civil war ground guns unless you take to the air yourself. Cannister shot and explosive shells just wouldn't even get **close** to the height that the 12-pounder Whitworth can reach! Basically, any mage flying above about one mile is impervious to any air defense you could muster with that technology - and those very low flying mages can see individual vehicles clearly by eyesight! [Answer] Assuming the Griffons aren't invincible one way would be to use some type of whaling harpoon gun with a strong rope attached to the opposite side of the tip to injure and possibly drag down the griffons therefore knocking of the mages. You could also use a cannon to shoot down the Griffons. According to Wikipedia:(<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_artillery_in_the_American_Civil_War>) a 24-pounder Howitzer would have a range of 1,322 yards. so if the Griffons are not outside of that range, you should be able to shoot them down with relative ease unless the mages have a defense that can block an 18.4 pound cannon ball going at 1,060 yards per second. [Answer] Chain shot and bar shot come to mind. Maybe some form of flak if you have access to reliable fuses. That or pull an Anton Dilger and try to infect all the griffins with Anthrax or Glanders while they are still in their stables. If chemical weapons are on the table, chlorine gas could be produced from civil war era reagents. [Answer] **Rocket Artillery** based on the Mysorean rockets active mainly in the 1780s and 1790s. While very Inaccurate and used for ground targets, Theoretically You could shoot these into the air filled with shrapnel to act as a flak type weapon. I could imagine they would act as shrapnel filled fireworks That explode at a certain height causing a wide area explosion in the air, The reason to make them flak like is to counter the inaccuracy. ]
[Question] [ **Closed**. This question needs [details or clarity](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers. --- **Want to improve this question?** Add details and clarify the problem by [editing this post](/posts/222486/edit). Closed 1 year ago. The community reviewed whether to reopen this question 1 year ago and left it closed: > > Original close reason(s) were not resolved > > > [Improve this question](/posts/222486/edit) Exactly the question. How would glue or tape be able to stick to gas substances and remain "hanging" there mid-air. [Answer] **Gas molecules have very weak intermolecular cohesive force and they are always in motion** In case of a solid material, an adhesive tape sticks to the molecules on the surface of the solid which are already very close to one another. These surface molecules are stuck to rest of the molecules of the solid because of strong intermolecular cohesive force. In case of gaseous materials, even if the tape sticks to the surface molecules (which are already very apart), the surface molecules are very loosely stuck to the rest of the molecules of the gas because of very weak intermolecular cohesive force. Therefore if you stick a tape to surface molecules of gas, the tape will move away because gas molecules are always in motion. **Experiment** Stick adhesive tape to a piece of solid wax. It will stick to surface molecules of solid wax. Now melt the wax. The molecules of wax sticking to tape may remain there but all other molecules will flow away. [Answer] **It can't** A defining characteristic of a "gas" is a lack of structural cohesion. The *absolute best* that your hypothetical tape can achieve is to become coated with a layer (*maybe* even a certain thickness) of 'stuck' gas molecules. However, even if you conceptualize some sort of magic field which holds onto all gas molecules over a certain distance, once you're *at* that distance, the gas molecules *themselves* aren't "attached" to anything else. Basically, the only way an object can remain in place against the force of gravity is to exert force against something that *can't move*. At that point, you aren't talking about an "adhesive", you're talking about some sort of levitation technology. [Answer] ## Conceptual Tape In old and outdated models of physics, an object was considered to be conceptually whole in and of itself. That is, if you have a steel ball, and a magic spell to transmute steel into glass, when you turn half of that steel ball into glass, the spell is turning a steel ball into a ball that is 50:50 steel/glass. It's not a partial transmutation because things are considered indivisible. The whole is changed by changing part of it. You have transformed a Steel Ball into a Steel/Glass Ball which is a distinct new form reminiscent of 50% of the original form. Kind of a philosophical difference, but an important one for this argument. In a similar fashion, we have the concept of "My Grandfather's Axe", or the Ship of Theseus. Where an object is conceptually still the same object even though every part of it has been removed and replaced with a fresh copy. We also have our own bodies, which I understand pretty much completely change all their cells for new ones over the course of around a decade. The person I am now at age 30 is literally three whole people's worth of difference from when he was born, but he's still the same Conceptual Person. **So how does this relate to taping my poster to thin-air?** Simple really. The volume of air in the room is a conceptual whole. You aren't taping the air-molecules, you're taping to the object comprised by the molecules. Individual air molecules can flow and move as they like, even exiting the room and becoming part of a different space. But the whole. The concept of "Air in this room" is still intact and hasn't moved. So you tape it to that, because obviously in order for that object to move, the room it's contained in must move too. Room hasn't moved, therefore the air-concept-object hasn't moved either and therefore with the right adhesive I can tape my poster to it. QED. This obviously is completely impossible, but hey, it's magic tape and magic likes to deal in conceptual-space rather than real physics. **But I want it to work with real physics** Tough. Real Physics wouldn't do this, it doesn't make any sense and any solution that would force it to be possible would no longer resemble air or glue. [Answer] It isn't a question answered by one simple answer. Each gas can be wildly different from the last. There is a reason we have different glue types for solids, which is much more true for gasses. # Insulation A sponge is a simple method to hold on to certain gasses or liquids. It is nearly the same as just encasing it into something, but the material and internal 'vacuums' can pull and hold a gas close. The best way you can see a gas held still is in insulation. Here you either remove and/or hold a gas as still as possible, preventing heat exchange. From your clothes to thick sheets in the walls, they are meant to keep in heat by (in part) holding gas still. # Bonding or changing it's state You can bond the gas with something else. Oxygen can be bonded with just about anything. Burning something will start an oxidation reaction, bonding oxigen to the material. Another example is water. Add hydrogen to oxigen and it'll bond together to form water. This can be extracted again by, for example, electrolysis. But this goes further. Some gasses also solidify or behave differently with cold. # Lasers, pressure and other forces Using EM waves, magnatism or other forces you can put direct pressure on a gas, focussing it into one area. Using different properties to select a gas and forcing it into one area. Some might be transparent to some waves and others not, allowing them to be pushed. Same for magnetism. [Answer] As others have said, gas is a fluid (which flows) and is unable to hold something up. Here is a different solution: **Flying nanobots** The glue could have embedded nanobots capable of holding or carrying your object. They might involve [magnetic levitation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_levitation#Microrobotics) or wing-flapping behavior. **Magic** Depending on your story setting, a magical field could keep your glue in place wherever you intend it to be. [Answer] You want a thing to hang in air. You want to use the air to oppose gravity. There are ways to do this. 1. **Buoyancy.** [![lawnchair suspended by balloons](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8zUhB.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8zUhB.jpg) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawnchair_Larry_flight> You can use the mass of the gas to hang something of the same volume but less massive than the gas within the gas. Things that are more massive than the volume of gas they displace fall under the gas. Things that are less massive than the volume of gas they displace will rise above the gas. Things that are exactly the same mass as the volume of gas they displace are [neutrally buoyant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral_buoyancy) and neither ascend nor fall, instead staying in place within the gas. This is close to what you want. 2. **Use air resistance to slow descent.** [![parachutes](https://i.stack.imgur.com/GUWs9m.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/GUWs9m.jpg) This is the principle behind a [parachute](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parachute). The weight of the object to be hung in the air is hung by virtue of a large surface area which must displace the air as it falls. By redistributing the gravitational force pulling an object down to pull on a large mass of gas the speed of fall is decreased. Larger parachutes will slow the fall through the gas more but this method alone cannot decrease the speed of fall to zero. [Answer] Q: *How would glue or tape be able to stick to gas substances and remain "hanging" there mid-air.* **At 15 Kelvin it works fine** Use to hydrogen if you like, difficult to solidify, normally a gas. Freeze it. Your tape would be quite fixed ! hydrogen will be solid at that temperature, so it would always hang mid air (whether it sticks or not) **Suppose it would stick to the gas, how would you prevent your tape from flowing along ?** A gas substance does not "hang" anywhere, it will float toward lower pressure. Your adhesive tape will not "hang" or fix itself anywhere, it will (at least) float along with the gas. .. and *fall*, the tape is heavier than the gas **Solids sink in gasses** Suppose you would put your gas-sticking tape inside a jar. The air won't flow anywhere. Still, gas inside a jar consists of molecules that execute Brownian movement. This causes the molecules to move anywhere in your jar. ref <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_motion> In space, with zero gravity, your piece of Air-tape will be stationary inside the jar (what you want) or move around slowly. The molecules, colliding with your tape through Brownian motion would put (about) the same pressure all around the object. But on Earth, you have gravity. This will not be compensated by the Brownian motion. Result: inside the jar, your tape will fall to the bottom of the jar. ]
[Question] [ A sword with a blade made of metal, or the least, it looks metallic, shiny and clean. A sword as old or probably older than our civilization, it has writings on the blade, never seen before, never seen in any part of the world. The sword looks alive, it has eyes of iron or what appear to be iron eyelids, one eye for each side of the crossguard. Upon holding the sword, great pain will surge through the hand and travel upward to the head, a stream of pain like a river flowing through the body, a pain so strong, more than once people have screamed and shouted like children, but when the pain is over, the sword and the swordsman fuse together or, at least, the swordsman becomes a tool of the sword. It seems the sword will always overwrite the will of the swordsman by following their subconscious ideals and not their external intent and emotions. In the hand of a childish but loving man, the sword will never kill or injure another but only defend its user, even during emotions of vengeance, despairing hatred and frustration. In the hand of a man filled with dread and remorse, in the hand of a broken soul, it will vent and release all the hate within at once and kill anyone, even those they may love and cherish. This sword can turn a broken hero into a despicable villain and a reluctant criminal into something holy. When holding the sword for longer, the link between flesh and blade becomes stronger, the limbs move faster, the eyes see faster and the mind thinks faster, time will slow down allowing for more planned strikes and parries. A swordsman who never puts down the sword will hold godly powers, even be able to predict the trajectory of incoming bullets, almost read minds and see the future in simulations in their dreams, but that swordsman will become more and more a weapon and less and less alive. After days of not holding the sword, the link is broken and the flow of pain will repeat once again when grabbing the sword, as the jealous and affectionate sword punishes you for leaving it. **Question** The sword is a parasite created by the ancient ones, it doesn't come from this planet, the ancient ones never stepped foot on this planet, the sword hit the planet while falling in a semi-destroyed spaceship, a cargo spaceship transporting antiquities for a museum. The reason the cargo was never recovered is unknown, it has been many millennia since the fall. The sword, together with the rest of the cargo was an important piece of their history, now forever lost in this planet. Something must've happened to the old ones if they never came back for the cargo. How could a living biological sword that attaches to any living being survive for so much, endure so much abuse? **Details** -The sword is a bio-robot, made with genetic coding not with computer coding. -Whether the sword is conscious and sentient depends on your definition of consciousness, to some people consciousness is an illusion created by intelligence, to others it is the result of intelligence and some even believe it comes from the soul, something separated from flesh. I'm not here to answer that question. -The sword is a unique masterpiece done by an artisan, it has seen blood and many battles but never used en masse in any war or military force. [Answer] # The sword was stored in the black box If I understand your post, this is your question: > > How can a sturdy metallic artifact survive a crash from space? And how could an artificial, parasitic device survive untouched for so long? > > > This is maybe not as hard as it sounds. In the real world, airliners have a device called a [Flight Data Recorder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_recorder) (colloquially known as "the black box"), whose purpose is to allow people to figure out why the airplane crashed. Obviously, it can't fulfill that purpose if the crash destroys it. The solution is actually [non-exotic engineering](https://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/flight/modern/black-box.htm#pt4): * the device internals are such that the valuable data is stored in a separate component which is itself very sturdy; it's not just regular computer hard drives plugged into a regular motherboard * the device is encased in double-wrapped titanium or stainless steel * the device is placed in the part of the aircraft that is most likely to survive; that's not the cockpit, it's the tail, or the ceiling of the kitchen (aka "galley"); it varies based on the specifics of each aircraft If this sword is not just a tool, but a treasured artifact that played an important role in the aliens' history, it seems reasonable that they'd take similar precautions when transporting it. You don't say why the sword was in the spaceship. * If it's the only one they have, why are they moving it? Did they just bring it along to sightsee? Whatever the reason, unless it was literally on display in the spaceship prior to the crash, it was probably stored in a crash-resistant part of the ship, in a protective container, along with other things of similar importance. And if they have the technology to build this sword, they probably have better protective tech than sheets of titanium. It's even possible the sword was ejected from the crashing ship in some kind of escape pod, possibly with an escaping alien who later died on the surface of the planet (lack of food, unfriendly atmosphere, hungry wildlife). * Or maybe it *wasn't* the only one they had! Maybe the spaceship was transporting a *group* of sword-wielding people who each had their own, and this sword is merely the only one that survived (... we think). --- As far as the question of it not "dying" over the millennia, I don't think it necessarily follows from its parasitic nature that it will "starve" if unused for a long time. When real-world tech doesn't get the nutrients it needs (aka electricity), it doesn't lose some "spark of life." Yes, over your timescale, real-world electronics will degrade so badly they can't be used, but that's just because we don't make them out of materials designed to last that long. Importantly, we *do* build some devices to withstand much more serious abuse: just look at the computers we put into deep-space satellites, which have to withstand the vacuum, intense radiation and cosmic rays. The computer in Voyager 2 is not as fast as your smartphone, but it has already outlived your phone several times over. So, you can just assert that the sword is made out of very durable materials, and is perfectly sealed against the environment. When held by a host, it wakes from its slumber and draws power from the wielder. When there is no wielder, it returns to its slumber. Imagine a water wheel made out of stainless steel. If the river dries up for a thousand years, the wheel doesn't "die." When the water returns millennia later, the wheel starts spinning again. As a non-biological form of life, you don't have to assume it requires any kind of nourishment during periods of slumber. "Slumber" isn't even the right word: if we unplug a real computer, it's not asleep -- it's inert. Thus with the sword. It presumably wouldn't even be conscious of the amount of time that has passed -- every period of waking could be 1 hour, 1 year, 1 eon later. I imagine that one of the first things the sword does when bonding with a new host is to orient itself in time and space. [Answer] **Sword is a blood drinker!** And lymph drinker. The living sword regenerates itself by sapping the strength of its wielder, [Stormbringer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormbringer) style. Even more sap is sipped from people the sword can get the wielder to injure, for good or bad purposes. The sword does not really care as long as there are wounds made. The whole good person bad person thing is a shtick the sword invented to facilitate its main goal of blood and juice to slake its THIRST! [Answer] The sword is an Old One theater prop. Explains the sword shape. The suppression of consciousness to let the subconscious express itself was intended to help Old One thespians put aside their modern world and connect with the art. As to how it exists : the living part is packed inside extra-dimensional space inside the atoms of the prop (see The Three Body Problem). This explains both longevity and resistance to pretty much any damage. This might be off-the-shelf Old One electronics. [Answer] Simple - you said the sword was > > The sword is a bio-robot, made with genetic coding > > > So I’ll assume you mean cells and DNA. In this case, each “cell” of the sword would presumably have identical and complete copies of the sword’s “genetic information.” Therefore, as long as *any one cell* in the sword survives the crash, it will be able to replicate itself (given necessary resources, obviously) and eventually restore the sword to mint condition. Now for surviving thousands of years, the sword could reproduce neumann-machine style, gathering materials to create replicas of itself and so on. The cells could also simply divide to repair the sword as it tarnished over time. And eventually, it will be picked up again to fulfill its purpose. [Answer] I am going to split my answer in two parts: ## How to "survive" the crash? If an airplane or a spaceship crashes, its contents will not get pulverized unless its "descent" was meteor-like, maybe the crew / control computer actually tried to do an emergency landing, it just did not go smooth enough for them to survive (if there even was a crew). If the sword is placed in a container with some cushioning, I suspect the damage could be minimal and "heal-able" later on. ## How to survive long periods without any contact to other lifeforms? [Hibernation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hibernation) could be a built-in feature of your artifact. It might even change into a [more resilient form](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endospore) while hibernating. [Answer] The sword has a built-in stress reaction that reconfigures its nano-structure for survival in a bad situation, similar to how some types of bacteria form extremely resistant spores in adverse conditions. Being wielded causes the sword to break out of its spore-shell and revert to its original configuration. ]
[Question] [ Rather than a machine or computer to translate things, how could a sci fi drug of some sort (such as a pill that one or both parties has to take and be under the influence of, or a gas that fills an environment) act as a universal translator and allow users to understand other species’ languages by affecting their brain? [Answer] Scientists have found that, no matter what languages they spoke, most of the test people exposed to meaningless sounds like zizi would associate them to spiky objects, while sounds like bubu would have been associated to more rounded objects (I am quoting this out of memory, so the sounds might be slightly different). Now, let's assume because science-fiction that behind every word in every language there is a link to the "thing" signified with that word and that a rose will always be a rose also under another name, and imagine a drug which amplifies the capability of the brain to decode sounds, and let it connect the sound of a word with the "absolute substrate" out of which that word was made. Under the influence of this drug everybody would understand that 私は魚を食べています means "I am eating a fish", because it would connect the "absolute substrates" of I, fish, eat, act of doing. [Answer] The universal translation "drug" isn't a drug. Oh, it's administered and used like a drug, but it's actually an infusion of nanocomputers that have two functions. Obviously, they contain the software to not only translate a large sheaf of pre-loaded languages, but to learn other languages (the more bizarre the structure of the language, the longer that will take, of course), but the second function is just as important: they also construct neural interfaces to the optic and auditory nerves and to the language centers in the brain, allowing the nanomachine network to intercept sight and sound (there's an upgraded version that can work on scent and taste as well), perform the translation (in real time, for loaded languages) and convey the translated content directly to the language centers of the brain. Going the other way, motor nerves to the mouth, throat, and hands are interfaced (the upgraded version also assumes control of normally autonomic functions like pheromone production, as well as adding additional chemosynthesis capability for scent-based languages), so that the user "speaks" the way they're used to doing, and their voice (and hands, and optionally their entire skin) produces the language they're currently communicating in. Don't even ask about the ethical violations in the development tree that led to this capability -- but the end result is awesome, and bugs in the process are unheard of -- it says so right here in the sales brochure. In the unfortunate case of the user allowing their subscription to expire, the nanomachines will harmlessly (it says so right here) dissolve into simple sugars and nutrients, leaving any non-original languages (the ones they've learned in service) backed up in multiple locations against the expected result of a mere late renewal; these backups are guaranteed to last a minimum of one year. [Answer] **Temporary super enhanced language learning** Language is difficult. Even within humans we have words that don't, or are difficult to translate to another language. Even within the sake language, with dialects of big cities not far from another, I found that people can use a word as an insult or as everyday use. Interspecies it becomes so much more difficult. The way one speaks can be different, but also the importance can radically change. To learn something from the ground up takes years, just look at babies. Even if there's a basis it can take a long time. There are a 1001 things that can go wrong. A drug is near impossible to be of assistance. Caveats out of the way, a "real" drug could work as the following: The drugs are taken, together with a machine on the head that helps the drugs find the way to the right brain area's. The targets are word generation, word meaning, empathy and cultural understanding. There the drug changes the DNA expression to become as neuroplastic or even more than a babies. Together with a boatload of materials and energy for nerve growing, a rapid learning process can begin. Training is preferred, but mayne it works so well you can start talking and quickly you start to understand the meanings behind it. You can extrapolate a lot from there according to some research. Why wouldn't you use this with other parts of the brain? Huge neuroplasticity isn't what you want everywhere. Parts like the brainstem and cerebellum are better off with stability. You don't need to learn much more with heart control, digestion or vascular control. That is why you want to target specifics when needed, like with language learning. [Answer] **Have a panpsychic reality, and the drug induces a shared consciousness.** If you decide to have [panpsychism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism) be a true feature of your universe, then you could use it as a ground to argue (or just handwave) for the plausibility of a conscious entity being put in such a state-of-mind that they end up picking up, sharing or leaking consciousness with their surroundings. If your universal translation drug were instead a mind-altering drug that causes the user to receive or leak consciousness in this manner, then **having two nearby sentient beings use the drug at the same time could allow them to communicate at a sort of shared-experience level**, where the languages in which the thoughts are composed come packaged with their own interpretations. Leaving it at this point would come with lots of corollaries, however, many of which could be showstoppers or add too much noise to your worldbuilding: * It would be either impossible or a really cunning trick to lie to someone using the drug. * Because of this, one might be forced to take the drug as part of an interrogation in order to obtain information. * There would probably be a thriving trade in using the drug to share experiences that are particularly valuable, or educational, or interesting, or...ahem...yes. * You probably need to worldbuild a sensible picture of the "background noise" of conscious experience of everything else in their vicinity when they use the drug (all the way down to the fundamental wave/particles; all the way up to the lower hierarchies of their own brains?) and how they filter it out. You could perhaps overcome some of these by designing around them, such as: * Making users capable of "closing" their minds voluntarily while under the influence of the drug, * Creating side effects which would render the drug unenjoyable to use as a form of recreation, * Limiting the experiences being shared in some way (perhaps direct sensory is not shared, only "internal monologue"; perhaps you're limited to what the other entity is currently focusing on, etc.) Could be fun. Could be too much. Hope it's helpful :) [Answer] ONE PILL CASE: Each pill has several thousand nanorobots which have three basic functions: 1. They find and latch onto specific neurons 2. They can sense and produce an electric potential, taking energy from the ambient environment 3. They can communicate to other nanorobots via background EM Waves, ambient Wi-Fi The nanorobots find the language center in the brain and due to previous conformal mapping of the brain's networks, they are aware where exactly in the brain they need to cross the BBB(Blood Brain Barrier) to gain access to these neural networks and attach to respective neurons (both for language processing and speech generation) Due to the presence of free Ultra-high bandwidth Wi-fi everywhere, when they sense neural networks firing in a particular pattern which is similar to a pattern stored in the World's Linguistic Data base, they identify the language being spoken by the speaker. The host's activation pattern of the neurons in the speech generation area is now responsible for harnessing the linguistic data from nanobots in the language processing area and utilizing the database data over Wi-Fi to control the neurons firing in the speech generation area to produce speech in the other language. TWO PILL CASE: The nanorobots can use background EM waves/ Wi-Fi to also send data across two hosts who are not separated by a distance over 5 meters. This data is directly transmitted between nanorobots at language processing centers which fire respective neurons upon translation, and hence this acts as telepathy. [Answer] **Bioengineered semi-parasitic symbiotic bacteria** The pills contain a special bacteria, specifically for a (or several) group(s) of languages and cultures. The bacteria moves to the brain, identifying the language center. There it'll start the consumption of the brain matter, replacing ut with itself and growing nerve tissue. This process continues until the full language center is taken over. They grow initially in a set pattern, which makes the right connections to understand the important human and alien languages, as well as some dialects. After the initial growth the bacteria will behave just like mormal nerves, being fed by the host and making new connections where needed. Replacement by symbiotic or parasitic organisms is quite commonplace. An example us a parasite that goes into the mouth of a fish, constricts the tongue until it dies off and then takes it's place, functioning as a tongue. This is a bioengineered product, meaning its specific to the species. The aliens need a different one, tailored to them. Earlier products had to be engineered specifically per person to avoid rejection. Nowadays the bacteria is so good it blends in with most subjects immune sysrems without further engineering. The ones that are rejecting the bacteria are unfortunate and will have to go to surgery immediately to remove the debris and see what's hasn't been devoured of the language center. The pill needs to be engineered again with each new species, so after a new species is discovered it'll take time before the pills are ready. [Answer] **Humans find the virtual communication environment disconcerting.** Just humans need to take the drug. There is another species that takes another drug and a couple of species that just cant do it. Several species do OK with no drug but one must sit still while they do it. There is a virtual environment that hacks into brain pattern structures and facilitaes communication. Communication happens via a Snow Crash type virtual environment, or a Pokemon Go virtual overlay - that is the experience of the humans anyway. The AI might do it differently for other species. For the humans, having the AI add stuff to the perceptual environment is disconcerting at best and in some cases sickening. People can freak out. The drugs make it easier to accept what is happening and roll with it. The drugs change other aspects of reality though in mostly tolerable ways. There will of course come a time when the human protagonists need to communicate without drugs and so enter the program "sober". It is a different experience. ]
[Question] [ I have a character with the ability to touch an object and take away its interaction with outside forces such as gravity or pressure. An electric clock for instance would cease functioning because electricity is no longer flowing into the object, but it could get hit by a train and be fine because no force affected the object. So what might some unintended consequences of this be? Would the object even be visible if no light was reflecting off it, or would it be a static image? [Answer] **Your object would disappear utterly.** For all intents and purposes the object would no longer inhabit our plane of existence. It cannot be said to be "here" in any meaningful sense. It would be imperceptible as it could not be touched, light would not bounce off it to make it visible, gases would not carry away molecules to be smelled, and so on. And plus, from the perspective of someone who could somehow still see it, it would zoom off into the distance or down into the ground. Taken to its logical extreme this enchanted object would (immediately!) shoot into the universe following the trajectory it had when this spell was put on it. The gravity of the planet and its star would no longer constantly change the direction of the object, and it would go off in a straight line on a tangent to its planet's orbit, possibly traveling through the surface of the planet and back out at some remote site. I cannot think of any way that you could ever find it again. If you want to have funky bemagickized objects of this sort play a role in the story then you will need to have your protagonist limit the extent of his ensorcellemnt. And then you can have it be what you want. For example, something immune to light but still with mass can still take up space in your pocket and provoke questions from observers. This is pure fantasy but could still be fun. [Answer] If it's no longer affected by gravity (but Newton's rules still apply), it will immediately leave Earth; gravity is what keeps Earth in its orbit around the Sun. Right now, the Earth is moving 30 kilometers per second in a direction perpendicular to where the Sun appears to be; that object would continue flying in that direction since there are no forces acting on it. [Answer] It will disappear entirety, as light will pass through it. But let's assume you've handwaved a special case for photons. And also handwaved the "launched into space by it's own inertia" problem. If you've stopped the Electromagnetic forces, (eg stopping the flow of electrons), then you've stopped the ability for the clock to be hit by the train. The clock will appear to phase through the train, and come out the other side. Why? [Collisions are the electromagnetic force](https://wtamu.edu/%7Ecbaird/sq/mobile/2013/04/16/do-atoms-ever-actually-touch-each-other/) between atoms of two different objects. The atoms of two colliding objects will almost never actually touch each other. [Answer] I like my peers view that an object suddenly freed from gravity would fly onto space at great speed in hilarious ways. Let me offer an alter ative scenario though. Gravity is a force that is proportional to mass, which in very simplified terms comes from the Higgs bosons inside atoms. You can remove all mass from an object by removing those bosons. One such way is to convert them to energy. This will cause a release of energy following that famous equation, $E = mc^2$. There is some conversion here but back of napkin you get the same bang as 21.5 megatons of TNT (about 40%'ish of a Tsar Bomba) per kilogram (~2 pounds). That would be rude for everybody within a few hundred kilometers of the object (or miles - at this scale it's not much of a difference). As for the object itself, you may be thinking that if it's got no mass AND you make it unable to interact electromagnetically it might just stay intact. Unfortunately, [massless particles](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massless_particle) must all travel at light speed. Which means that despite not being affected by the country-destroying blast you created, the object will be disintegrated because all of its particles will be scattered in random directions at the universe's top speed. Your spell does not belong in the Alteration or Enchantment schools of magic, it belongs in Destruction. [Answer] At a fundamental level, there are only four forces of this universe: Gravitation, Electromagnetism, Strong force and Weak force. How the object is affected depends upon which force is 'cancelled'. Forget about the weak force; it will have no effect on the object as long as it isn't radioactive. If you turn it off, I think it will remove beta-decay from the object. Any other possible effect, I am not qualified enough to accurately answer. Safe to say this will not play a huge role in the effect (unless you're going *reaaaally* far into the technicalities. You also probably do not want to remove the Strong force (Strong Nuclear Force), as otherwise, all the nuclei of all atoms in the object would simultaneously split apart, and, well.... E=mc^2, nuclear hijinks ensue. Now, for electromagnetism (EM). It is the force responsible for both chemical reactions, and 'contact'. Indeed, atoms are mostly empty space, and when you touch something, you feel something is there because of electromagnetism. Light also reflects off of something because of electromagnetism (it is a wave in the EM field). If you remove the EM force, your object (a clock, in this case) will turn invisible, and it will phase through matter ie it will pass through the moving train unaffected, without collision. Of course no one will care, since no one sees it anyways. Now for a technicality: Do these forces continue to exist *within* the object? Or only between the object and the outside world? Because if you remove EM between atoms *within* the object, it will fall apart into atoms, breaking physical and chemical bonds alike. (Note that if you take this point, and only take away the forces between the outside and inside, preserving internal forces, then removing the strong interaction and the weak interaction will have no effect whatsoever on the object. They only act internally, so deleting internal-external forces doesn't do anything to them as they were not even present on that scale) Now, if you preserve internal EM and delete external EM, unless you have some magic to keep the clock in place, it falls towards the centre of the earth, from gravitation. If you remove gravity, it will *not* speed off into infinity. Now, assuming you have magic goggles to see it even when EM is removed, you will see it not fall towards the Earth, but hover in place, moving slightly towards the west, because since it is not affected by gravitation, it will not rotate along the Earth. As to why it doesn't fly off? Well, inertia. When you 'cut the string' of gravity, it still has a velocity equal to that of the Earth. It will slowly move away from the Earth as the Earth revolves, moving (again, slowly) on a path tangent to the Earth's orbit at the point where we switched off gravity, a traveler between the stars, perhaps to be seen again only by aliens if they also possess the magic to see objects who EM has been turned off... ]
[Question] [ The reason I'm asking is because I'm building a fantasy world where iron/steel is exceptionally poor and the materials necessary for bronze (copper, tin...etc) are super abundant and readily available just about everywhere. Just how big of an advantage would an army with bronze weapons (spear, sword,shield, bronze tipped arrows) & armor have over another more primitive army armed with stone & bone made weapons ? Could the army with bronze weapons & armor be expected to win easily ? [Answer] It all depends on the general and the state. The thing is that, generally speaking, a state with access to more advanced weapons would ALSO have access to more advanced warfare theory and thus that turns into more success in every aspect. Let me give you an example. In the Fallout universe a very well educated man was captured by a tribe of backwards people. However he was able to convince them to follow him and in no time he was their chief. He then used his knowledge to raid other tribes and expand his domain and finally he created what is called Caesars legion. Read the wiki for more. So what he did was not provide them with cutting edge tech as much as small improvements in the overall society and the theory behind warfare. So going back to your example. Would a state just possessing far superior weapons be able to translate that into the battlefield? Depends on the general I say. The historical examples of an army with superior number or tech that failed to wrestle an advantage from an inferior force, on paper, are far too many to start mentioning. You see warfare is all about maximizing your advantage. You know what they say: if you ever send your soldiers into a fair fight, you are a bad general. So you could actually incorporate that into the story. How? Well. Think of this as an admiral Yi or Sun Zu or a similar general who is really good in warfare and planning. Hannibal is that different as well. So your general X is commanding a force of lesser technology and ever lesser numbers. Yet using the principles of warfare correctly and brilliant maneuvers and loads of deception...etc he is capable of beating the crap out of empire B with all their endless legions and superior tech. So you have a scene where the "evil" generals are all setting around looking "evil" and bragging about their superior numbers. They even get bored of him and command a force that is 4:1 his army size. Now the rest is up to you I say. And overzealous wing commander charges the enemy and ruins the battle plan, the cavalry excel and they win the day...etc. Now that leads us into the obvious question. If 2 generals of comparable strength met, what will happen? Well. History would also tell us that the experience of the soldiers and officers as much as anything is a far better weapon that mere weapons. Moral and maneuvers and all that are the actual critical elements in war. So even small differences in those things will lead to a huge advantage on the field of battle. However if you build to a point where army A and army B are 100% equal in everything but army B has better weapons. Then, and only then, can you always expect army B to win. So it's all about context and what you do with the story and how you set up the two conflicts. Personally I think that capturing and trading equipment could help your bone and wood army. At least give the cavalry bronze headed weapons. More numbers is also an obvious point. So society will be impacted. You can also have "castles" but that will require special knowledge but it's your story. So you can go far with that. TL:DR it's all about context and the actual general in command of the army. [Answer] All else being equal, the Bronze Army will wipe the floor with the stone- and- leather army. (1) There is the widespread misconception that iron displaced bronze as the material for weapons because it is harder. This is not true. While modern steel, and late-medieval steel, is certainly far superior to bronze, the same is not true of the kind of iron that was available in ancient times. Iron became prevalent because it was much easier to procure (getting both copper and tin was much more difficult, especially after the breakdown of multiple empires and the corresponding trade routes about 1200 BC.) Bronze was still used for armor deep into the iron age and Classical antiquity, for example for hoplite armor and helmets. (2) Effects of weapons vs Armor: (source for this section: <https://acoup.blog/2019/06/21/collections-punching-through-some-armor-myths/> ) (a) Bronze armor will reliably prevent cutting, even from heavy hits with other bronze weapons, let alone stone. Leather armor will prevent light cutting hits, but not heavy cutting hits. (b) Metal Armor is pretty good against piercing attacks, though a really powerful blow can get through (not sure how a stone tip will fare in comparison to a bronze). Leather Armor is rather easily penetrated by piercing attacks. (3) Someone above mentioned the atztec Macuahuitl as example of a stone weapon that was equal to the metal weapons of the conquistadores. Wikipedia comes to a different conclusion (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macuahuitl>) : > > The macuahuitl had many drawbacks in combat versus European steel > swords. Despite being sharper, prismatic obsidian is also considerably > more brittle than steel; obsidian blades of the type used on the > macuahuitl tended to shatter on impact with other obsidian blades, > steel swords or plate armour. Obsidian blades also have difficulty > penetrating European mail. The thin, replaceable blades used on the > macuahuitl were easily dulled or chipped by repeated impacts on bone > or wood, making artful use of the weapon critical. It takes more time > to lift and swing a club than it does to thrust with a sword. More > space is needed as well, so warriors advanced in loose formations and > fought in single combat. > > > While Bronze is certainly weaker than steel, the fact that even bone could break them indicates that they wouldn't do especially well against bronze. [Answer] **Two Very Big Ones** So leaving aside the technological sophistication of the combatants (just because you use stone doesn't mean you're bad generals/soldiers, and just because you have lots of copper and tin in your region doesn't mean you're more advanced in other ways than the poor SOBs without) there are two BIG advantages I see for bronze warriors over stone ones. The first is **Protection**. Sure there are cloth armors that are surprisingly good, but you said stone and bone so I'm assuming that's the top military tech for that civilization. A bronze-faced shield, helmet, or breastplate is essentially invulnerable to stone-tipped spears and arrows. The enemy goes to stab you, hits the metal, the tip shatters, and your Bronze Age Hero (BAH) can dispatch his now-disarmed enemy with ease! You can make an effective mace and even a slashing sword of sorts(macuahuitl) but those weapons are comparatively short-ranged and have their own problems I'll get into in a bit. Meanwhile stone just isn't usable as armor in any meaningful way (I guess you could have stone pauldrons or helmets but they'd be REAL heavy and prone to breaking and as I've never seen a historical example I can only assume not actually worth it). Bone armor is better than nothing against cutting attacks like those from a swung sword or ax, but have so many gaps that they're not much use against thrusting weapons. You could of course have some specially hard/weirdly shaped bone from a local animal to improve their armor, but in general it's not going to cut it against a bronze spear. The second big advantage is **Attacking Quality** in the form of a bronze-tipped spear. The metal-tipped spear/pike was THE weapon of war (with few exceptions like the roman legionnaire) for millennia for a reason. It lets you fight effectively in tight formations because it takes less room to jab a spear than swing an ax/mace/sword. Plus you don't have to worry about being disarmed via point-breakage like your Stone and Bone using opponents. It lets you hit your enemy Over There, making it harder to be hit back. Bronze spears are great! Now let's go back to those stone mace/swords. Your Stone and Bone Warrior (SBW) has a spear, because he's no dummy and wants to kill his enemy Over There too, a stone mace, and a stone-edged sword. Well against bronze armor he knows the spear is a one-shot thing, more likely to get him killed than do good work. So he leaves that at home, or maybe flings it like a javelin before the hand to hand starts. Next up, his stone mace. It's GREAT. Big o'le rock, can kill even a guy wearing bronze armor via crush injury. His "sword" is a little less good, the cutting edges suffer like the spear did, reducing it to a less-effective mace. No matter, a stone mace was good enough for SBW's ancestor's so it's good enough for him! At least until he gets to the battlefield. Takes a bit of room to swing a mace around you see. Also while SBW can swing it at our Bronze Age Hero, SBW's buddy behind him CAN'T because a mace doesn't have great reach. Meanwhile BAH's buddies 2, 3, 4 ranks behind him can jab with their spears against their one opponent capable of causing them harm. Provided dude with stone club even gets close enough to hit a person with his mace rather than just bat at spear tips. So even in a battle with equal numbers or Stone & Bone having an advantage, at the point of contact the bronze spearmen in a phalanx will ALWAYS have a numerical advantage of 3-4 to 1. Maybe more depending on the length of their spears! Then of course the guys to either side going back those 3-4 ranks can ALSO kill our poor SBW, via a strike to their side (maybe only one side depending on if the bronze dudes have large shields etc) which means SBW has to keep track of 6ish spearpoints to stay alive, while the one guy he may or may not be able to reach with his mace only has to keep track of 1 thing capable of killing him. The effectiveness of a metal spear and armor combo allows for denser formations which in turn mean deadlier ones. Even if both sides know all the Art of War, your stone age dudes just can't form a phalanx or a shieldwall to match, and they'll come off worse in a battle where all other things are equal. Theoretically your stone and bone warriors will be more maneuverable with less armor to lug around, but that only helps but so much in a war where people still need to come in arm's reach to kill each other. As for ranged weapons like bows and slings, I think they matter less and differ only slightly from what I've written above. In practice hordes of archers just weren't much of a thing in the bronze age, and if you want them to be the differences between stone arrows v bronze armor and bronze arrows v bone armor would be about the same as their spear equivalents. Though perhaps if your Stone & Bone guys have horn bows they'd have a slight range advantage over pure wood bronze guy bows. (which matters less than Total War would have you believe, and anyway there are so many design considerations it's impossible to say one is always going to be better than the other.) Slingers were more important, and here to Bronze will likely have a slight advantage in both offense and defense. The Defense is obvious and we've already talked about it. Offensively lead shot for slings is better than stone (more regular in shape for accuracy, more dense for lethality). It seems to me a culture mining tin and copper also would have a supply of lead, but if you'd rather they didn't use lead slingshot (or maybe the stone&bone guys use lead too) the difference is only defensibly. But in the end both bows and slings were skirmishing weapons in the bronze age, not weapons of decision. That's gonna come down to men with hand weapons murdering each other, and barring miracles or crippling incompetence bronze has a decisive advantage. [Answer] **Technology is technology:** The fact of bronze isn't so much the key here as the reasons WHY one side has bronze and the other doesn't. Having bronze armor and bronze weapons means your state is backed by commerce and industry, logistics and technology. A sophisticated government provides for their army well, and this is reflected in a thousand small, subtle ways. There were some extremely sophisticated military technologies that didn't involve metal. The macuahuitl ( <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macuahuitl> ) was a very effective and deadly sword used by the Aztecs, who had virtually no military use for bronze or iron, for that matter. It was used to great effect against the Spaniards who had guns and steel (The Aztecs lost the war for lots of reasons). Linen laminate armor (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linothorax>) replaced bronze armor in Greek warfare, likely due to it's light weight, coolness and low cost. It is likely this armor was augmented with metal plates in vulnerable areas, but it was principally a non-metal armor, and it is likely you could use a cuir bouilli (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiled_leather>) technique to completely replace metal in armor. I suspect making bronze arrowheads and spear tips might be more efficient for an army than stone, but stone weapons are extremely sharp and deadly (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_tool>). A good crushing club with a heavy rock on the end is going to be about as effective as a mace. A sophisticated society with good stone weapons can be extremely competitive with a society with lots of bronze, if the social and organizational skills backing up the army are competitive with the rival society. A culture with a little bronze to augment their army could be in many ways superior to a bronze-dependent culture that doesn't need to be as sophisticated to field their main-line soldiers. [![Aztec weapons and armor](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ygkc5.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ygkc5.png) [Answer] I'm going to skirt the obvious, in that this is pretty much the way it went in our own past - You know the outcome. Put it into a different perspective with the ideas of 'Army' size, add the variables of improved and advanced training, tactical strategy, and ability to withstand a battle where attrition is a co-equal foe. "The Art of War" has been around a very long time, but holds principles still true today. It seems likely that the stone-weilders will not have these advantages, which is likely why we don't use stone in our battles anymore. [Answer] The weapon technology makes minimal difference. Training, discipline and morale will be the decisive factors in ancient battles, as well as generalship and strategy. A disciplined force with stone-tipped spears and hide shields will massacre a rabble with bronze equipment. Numbers count for something too, but with halfway decent generalship they are not a decisive factor. ]
[Question] [ **This question asks for hard science.** All answers to this question should be backed up by equations, empirical evidence, scientific papers, other citations, etc. Answers that do not satisfy this requirement might be removed. See [the tag description](/tags/hard-science/info) for more information. An eccentric genius who's also very rich, named Bob, wants to embarrass the American government because of an insult. For this purpose he has designed, built and tested his own space vehicle, under the pretext of space exploration. Now he has flown to the moon, taken the flag with him and has flown back. Ready to ridicule the American government, Bob wants to make sure that no one doubts that he has the real flag in his possession, and not an elaborate fake. * current state of the art for the government * The space flight to the moon and back is only available to Bob. * No one has ever taken the flag. * The carrying of the flag was not officially announced. * Only the flag (the cloth) was taken, not the pole or other parts. **What scientific methods can Bob or the government use to determine that Bob has the real flag in his possession and not an elaborate fake?** [Answer] Simply put, the flag on the surface (assuming Sea of Tranquility) will have a cumulative radiation exposure since July 1969. Everthing left behind by Apollo 11, instruments included, will have the same exposure and degradation level. Just as leaving a newspaper in the sun both fades and degrades the paper, the Flag, its mast and everything involved has been sujected to that same level since 1969. It would be virtially impossible to reproduce on Earth. Please see NASA's article at : [NASA Radiation Documents](https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/284273main_Radiation_HS_Mod1.pdf) [Answer] ## You don't have to prove a thing The very act of take-off in a rocket strong enough to leave the Earth will be immediately recognized by governments around the world as a possible ICBM launch. Dozens of world governments will be all eyes on your unannounced launch trying to figure out if you are a nuke or not. Assuming you are not shot out of the sky, your trajectory will be tracked and monitored across the globe. Every major space agency will watch your whole flight all the way down to the lunar surface, they will see that you landed at the Apollo 11 landing site and they will see your whole return. The moment you touch back on Earth, one or more world governments will have troops ready and waiting to take you into custody. They won't have to prove you stole the flag, because a dozen different nations can prove without a doubt that you went to the landing site and back... In all likelihood, no one will even question if you have the real flag or not and people will care a hell of a lot more that you risked starting a nuclear war over a prank. [Answer] **TL;DR: Film the whole trip in one shot, back and forth, and publish the video online.** Also, during the trip, film a screen with the latest Bitcoin blocks, the last tweets publicly written and/or latest BBC news for timestamping. You can use any other source of public timestamping of course, like the feed of stock prices, etc. (Optional: Upon retrieving the flag, shoot it with a paintball (indoor, against a hard surface) and film that. Making the exact same strain should be impossible for anyone else because its exact shape is random, especially on the edges of the strain. This will ease future authentification, if the flag is lost and found again but the video is proof enough that you're the one who brough it back to Earth.) As soon as you are back on earth, use the lastest Bitcoin block or any other public timestamped source of randomness and hash the video along with this. Send it to Nasa as soon as it's done so they know you didn't have time to forge the video. Shooting the flag assumes you are ok with straining the flag The NASA will see that a spaceship going back and forth, that the flag is missing, and you provide proof that it is in fact you who retrieved it. You can even livestream the event or publish the video online right after landing to skip the paintball part. Bonus: you can joke about the US or the NASA, or express your political views, and completely control the narrative for extra humiliation points. Edit: What if you want to release proof at a later date? Do the exact same thing, except that instead of releasing the video right after it's shooting, you make a cryptographic hash of it, which guarantees it's integrity, and publish that instead. When you decide to release the proof, release the unedited video, and geeks worldwide will confirm it's the original. [Answer] There may not be a recoverable flag at all. After up to 50 years of exposure to solar radiation and extremes of temperature with no air attenuation, the dyes are highly likely to have been bleached, and the nylon fabric itself may have degraded. In 2012, studies of photos of the moon landing sites showed that the flags were still standing, save one that fell over as a result of the rocket exhaust as the astronauts departed. While the lunar surface suffers from extremes of radiation and temperature, there is no wind, so until the nylon of the fabric degrades to the point where it can no longer support its own weight, the absence of wind means that there is no mechanical stress caused by motion to stress and weaken the fabric. This does not mean that the fabric is not degraded to the point where the movement of attempting to remove it from the lunar ground would cause the fabric to disintegrate. [Answer] One could examine on a microscopic scale the flag material for many many thousands of micrometeorite impacts. These would likely be difficult to replicate, unless you are willing to build a machine of some sort to blow smoke-sized particles at Mach 9 in a vacuum at your replica flag. [Answer] **This question asks for hard science.** All answers to this question should be backed up by equations, empirical evidence, scientific papers, other citations, etc. Answers that do not satisfy this requirement might be removed. See [the tag description](/tags/hard-science/info) for more information. I think the problem resides in the first sentence. > > Assuming I can fly into space, more precisely to the moon and back again. > > > If you assume that, then you might as well assume that your flag is the moon flag. If you documented your flight to the moon to such an extent that no one doubts it actually happened (a thing even the american government hasn't managed to do) then, it follows that the flag you picked up when you got there is the real one. The real question is how did you get to the moon? If you did, can anybody do it? And then, how come no one picked up the flag before you did? ]
[Question] [ **Closed**. This question is [opinion-based](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers. --- **Want to improve this question?** Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by [editing this post](/posts/169073/edit). Closed 3 years ago. [Improve this question](/posts/169073/edit) In an universe with several worlds, how would people from different planets define their age in a way that everyone use the same basis ? * Different species have different lifespan, like humans up to 80 *something*, elves up to 300 *something*, ... * The planets are not from the same system or galaxy, in fact people don't know where their planets are located in the universe, or how far they are from each other, so you can not use for example the sun or another common celestial body * Fantasy world, medieval like, so there is no scientific way to explain age If possible, I'd like to find an idea that is not "they pick a main planet and apply their standard" [Answer] > > If possible, I'd like to find an idea that is not "they pick a main planet and apply their standard" > > > They likely wouldn't. It's hard enough for *us* on one planet to use a standard, try to apply it across species and different planets. In fact, let me illustrate this with an example from the real world: ask somebody from the USA how tall they are. Now ask somebody from, say France. They'll tell you quite different numbers even if the two people are the same size. Ask them how much they weigh, and you'd get different numbers. Ask them what is the temperature outside and again - two different numbers. Different locations *on the same planet* use different measurements for the fundamentally the same things. Oh, and time isn't actually different. We at least agree about minutes, hours and days but ask our American and French friends to write the date and compare them. Different numbers again. Different *notation*, too. Go across the world and everybody will be noting the dates in different ways - some separate them with `/` others with `.` third with just a space. Some will prefer Roman numerals for months, others words. It's not like we don't have a standard for this, either: [![XKCD comic issue #1179 titled "ISO 8601" talking about how standard for date format](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/iso_8601.png)](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/iso_8601.png) If you still think "oh, it's just the dates, right", then you'd want to have to [listen to this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY) detailing even more date/time issues. Bonus fact: did you know that the ISO 8601 standard also covers week numbers and a week can't belong to more than one year? Now you do. As a result the ISO year/week is not necessarily the same as the calendar week. Sometimes the last day or two of one year might fall into the next one. Or the first day or two of the new year might be counted towards the last one. All this to say that we'd likely handle the different dates the same way: not very well. Each planet can have its own time counting, likely using their own units. You'd be able to convert between them - say, 5 [planet A years] might equal 7.5 [planet B years] or 3.5 of [planet C years]. Therefore the natives from these would likely just keep using the units they are used to and likely just convert if they need to converse with somebody else. Cross-world traveller from planet A would still count their age in [planet A years] which has an advantage that they can return to planet A and can just celebrate their birthday on the same date as every other year. [Answer] **As a percentage or fraction of your typical lifespan** This works best if elves etc. have proportionately longer childhoods. A typical person on Earth lives to 80 Earth-years and I am 40, so my age is 50% or "one half-life". On planet Zod a human lifespan is 30 Zod-years, so an elf lives to about 113 Zod-years. An elf aged 150 Earth-years (aka 56 Zod-years) is also aged 50%, "one half-life" and may be biologically the same age even if the elf was born long before me. If species age proportionately, then everyone reaches adulthood at approximately "one quarter-life". Longer spans of time might use a human lifespan as a unit of measurement. [Answer] **Incorporate this very issue into your story** Of course time keeping was an important issue in the higher societies of wise men, that's why they discussed it, and the Time Keepers where formed. A small detachment of them exist in every "civilized" world, where they mantain a pulsating magical orb that is syncronized with every other orb. By counting the repetitive pulses (each every x time, as your story needs) they can keep track of passage of time in a standarized way. As always, not everyone uses this system, but wizards and scholars prefer it for obvious reasons. [Answer] You can set a universal time standard, that's planet-independent, and can be applied to faraway galaxies that aren't able to keep track of the rotations of a distant planet, by using universal physics time-based constants to keep track of time. The way we do it, currently, is by creating microwave pulses whose frequency is a rational fraction of the [caesium-133](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesium_standard) isotope. Caesium-133 has a hyperfine energy excitation in its ground state whose energy difference is equal to that of a photon of light whose frequency is *exactly* 9 192 631 770 oscillations per second. (It used to be extremely close to that integer number, but since then we have *redefined* the second so that it is an exact integer.) So, when tuning a microwave signal to the exact frequency needed to excite Cs-133 in this particular transition, the signal can be tuned to 1/9192631770th its original frequency, and we take its pulses to be "seconds". In principle, instructions for this procedure can be given to a distant galaxy that cannot keep track of Earth's rotations, and they would have the exact same unit of "seconds" that we do. And if we don't want to define longer stretches of time in an anthropomorphic sense, we can use nice round numbers instead. For example, a "day" can be 100 000 seconds instead of 86 400, and a "year" can be 50 million seconds, instead of 31.536 million seconds. --- Another way to do use universal physics that's not locally dependent is to describe everything in terms of large multiples of [Planck times](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_time). One Planck time one unitless value of time in "natural units", where universal constants $c$, $G$, and $\hbar$ are set to 1. (The above units are the speed of light, universal gravitational constant, and reduced Planck constant, respectively.) Physicists work in natural units all the time, as a convenient way of saving them a lot of time writing symbols. When that happens, time, distance, etc. are basically unitless numbers. Again, conventions can be made for talking about large portions of time. For example, we can define the "day" to be $10^{48}$ Planck times. (Clearly each species would make a name for it; they wouldn't say "I'm leaving for my trip, I'll be back in $6 \times 10^{48}$ Planck times.") The advantage to Planck Time, over Cs-133, is that the latter is a far more arbitrary choice of measuring time than the former. The constants $c$, $G$, and $\hbar$ are universal, and far more broadly descriptive of general physics than an extremely specific multiple of an extremely specific atomic energy transition. If we ever made first contact with an advanced alien species, and started talking about durations with them, we would most likely talk about elapsed durations in terms of Planck times. --- I would keep in mind that it's *convenient* to talk about time in terms of your planet's rotational cycles. Especially if you're biologically tuned to sync your sleep cycles with the rotations. That's how we mentally keep track of time in order of days. If you had an event set for 8 days from now, but one "day" was, say, 0.7 rotational cycles of your planet, it would be mentally confusing to track when the event is, and you'd have to do the math. So while the above standards can be adopted as a universal standard for communication with people from other planets, people from the same planet would still probably talk about time in terms of their own rotational cycles. [Answer] I assume all relevant species know the concept of time and have a way to keep track of their time or else they would not even know how old they are compared to other members of their species. All you need now is a way to mathematically convert the unit of time the humans use to the unit of time the elves use and then they can tell each other how old they are. This may get more complicated if one of the measurements is not linear like when the elves live on a planet which doesn't have a constant year length so to know their age in human years you have to take into account the different elf year lengths. But in general it's like measuring in meters compared to measuring in feet. You just have to find the right conversion factor. [Answer] According to a comment posted by OP, travel between worlds is by magic portal. These portals could all experience a fluctuation, or oscillation, that happens at a very regular interval (say once every earth year). Every portal in the universe experiences this fluctuation at the same rate, based off of some yet to be discovered fundamental principle of the universe. This fluctuation can then be used to count the passage of time. ]
[Question] [ Building out a place less than 100 years in the future where the world is finally in agreement that it's coming to an end, in about 10 years or less. The air is trash, high government people are in space or in their little safety castles in New Zealand, and most citizens are trapped within city limits due to the scarcity of resources. In this specific city, people on the ground level live in constant threat of violence disease and starvation. I'd love to make it possible for law enforcement to be an outright abandoned position with 10 years to go for the world, with a little logic tied in. Currently in Chicago (throwing police under the bus here of course) I have friends with family in law enforcement who specifically avoid calls in certain areas on the south side due to lack of training, safety concerns, lack of balls, what have you. I'm trying to envision that real position abandonment on a wider scale across a major city given the circumstances. Obviously the high end government posts have been abandoned, so I'm trying to map out a trickle down effect that reaches local law enforcement. Can you? [Answer] As official enforcement fades or fails, unofficial enforcement rises. It starts as vigilantes. And then some local charismatic leader gets a few blocks organised. Maybe it's only guys walking in a group and carrying clubs at first. Resources of any kind become the sources of power for fiefdoms. Source of food, source of water, source of shelter, source of weapons, source of medicine, etc. Various deals and alliances develop. Whacky people last for a while doing whacky things. Then people get sick of them, and some event occurs to change things, maybe not for the better. Lots of movies and TV shows. The Walking Dead is big on this theme. So are many westerns. As mentioned in a comment, Somalia is in the process. The parts of the former USSR provide many examples of possible paths. Depending on the level of available tech, a new political structure will develop. Probably after a lot of people die due to violence, starvation, exposure, and disease. You will get local strongmen who hold together a city block or two. Or set fire to a city block or two in order to get rid of an annoying neighbor. [Answer] It is pretty straightforward: citizens obey the law enforcement because they know that there is a government behind them, exercising its power. If the government is not capable of exercising its power, then the law enforcement are simply wearing a fancy dress taken from some Village People video clip. You state that the high up are gone, it means there is nobody in the government to exercise any power. In other words if I dress like a policeman of the Austroungarian empire and start walking in the road of any of its former possession shouting orders, I will be lucky if I get just laughed at. [Answer] **TL;DR** Anarchy and chaos would ensue **Actual answer** In a situation that you have presented, yes, there would be an "effect" on the populace. As you stated, the high-end government has pulled out of their positions, to their various places. The remainder that has been left behind would have a sort-of collapse effect. The high-end remainders would do one of two things; leave, or install a sort-of dictatorship. The others would do almost the same. There would be looting and r\*ping from the lower-level forces, as they realize that there is no law left. There would be revolts from the citizens, and there would be anarchy. Citizens could and would form factions, and would attack their new oppressors or other factions. [Answer] Looking from a western civilization viewpoint, it would look very bad, however it would not be murder in the streets and burning the town down in chaos. Where I stay, the police force is pretty much broken. Corruption runs so deep, the high up powers are all bribed and paid off, and so do nothing other than loot all finances. The boots on the ground, even if they wanted to do something, can't as they have no support or equipment. This has led a to there being a fair amount of the country with areas where state services do not go to whole cities and towns, not just some parts of the city. Police vehicles get stoned and burned, Ambulance and firefighting vehicles get hi-jacked and stripped, etc. The residents do not want the government there, as they have a system which works better, in their opinion, and our name for it is **Mob Justice**. Gangs run a lot of the stuff, from drinking establishments and gambling and drugs, to prostitution, to local bashing and intimidation rackets, down to petty theft. For the most part however, normal people just go about their daily lives. There are rules that everyone knows you do not break though. 1. You never harm your neighbors. ( If you commit crimes, do not do it in your area. Steal from the people over there, go sell drugs over there. Gang fight? do it over over on that side, etc.) 2. Some crimes are off limits. Steal someones cell phone, you might get chased by some people for a couple of blocks. If they catch you they will beat you up, and then its done. Harm a woman or child, and the entire community will band together to find you, and when they do they will kill you. A common favorite is called necklacing. Sensitive viewer warning (It involves forcing a tire over the person, pinning their arms to the side, dousing them in petrol or other flammable liquids, and then burning them.) 3.Your actions must benefit the group. Stealing from those people, brings money into your local area. Alcohol, drugs, prostitution etc being run, is for those that stay in the area. Just some of the kinds of unwritten rules. When everyone obeys, stuff runs smoothly. When someone breaks it, all hell breaks loose. So while you would not get a total anarchy situation, it is still lawless. [Answer] In my city there are alredy vast areas that police rarely go, and when they go, they go with armored veihicles, kill some drug cartel soldiers, loot the cocaine and guns and leave. Why is it so? Because the cartels are better equipped, know their territory, have more money that can be used both to fund their quasi-military operations and bribe the top cops, judges and politicians, while the cops are poorly equipped, poorly trained, their pay is low and their leadership is corrupt, incompetent or have their hands tied due to lack of cooperation, bribed judges and laws passed by politicians financed by the cartels. For all pratical proposes the soldiers in the police force have been abandoned by their leadership, the State. What the low level cops, angry with this situation did? They created militias that, at first, focused on killing cartel members without following due process, they simply invaded the slums and killed the cartels. Of course, that costs money, because the cops had to buy their own guns and amno, fuel their own cars, etc. So the cop militias became cartels themselves, extorting the neighborhoods, selling drugs, running abortion clinics and bordellos. The cops became the criminals they intended to fight. [Answer] It seems to me that if everyone knows that the world will end in ten years or less, then **the lack of a local police force is among the least of their problems.** Perhaps more importantly, **it's not the most-interesting story to tell** about this scenario, although that's obviously a subjective opinion on my part. My world-building suspicion is that pretty much everyone's life becomes essentially *parasitic* -- feeding off whatever has already been created. If the world is lucky, it'll end before the Spam and Twinkies run out. [Answer] There's that old saying that a society is only three meals away from anarchy. Being that the government and other high ups have left, then it seems unlikely that anyone is around to pay the police force, army or other government officials, if money even has any value still. So policing - at least in the protect and serve capacity - does not give the police themselves any resources, like food, or other benefits that you might want considering the world is ending soon. There is little incentive for them to remain, so it seems likely that a lot of them may just leave the force and find other methods to get money, food or resources. I would imagine some may use their skills, training and any equipment they have managed to hang on to and offer up their services to people who are resource rich as private security. Others may form militia or gangs and use their skills to rob others, or create safe zones for a price. A few may stick around for a while, out of a sense of duty or in an attempt to maintain order. However, what are they meant to do with any criminals they arrest? They have no money or resources coming in, so they are unlikely to be able to imprison them and just keep them alive. This means they either need to use the prisoners somehow to farm or make stuff they can use or trade or alternatively execute anyone who commits any crime. If its the former, then once it gets to a certain prison population size - how do they maintain control? If its the latter - it may maintain order for a very short while, but it isn't going to sit well with regular people, who are probably all committing a few minor crimes just to stay alive and the police force will eventually be overthrown. ]
[Question] [ **Closed.** This question is [off-topic](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers. --- You are asking questions about a story set in a world instead of about building a world. For more information, see [Why is my question "Too Story Based" and how do I get it opened?](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3300/49). Closed 4 years ago. [Improve this question](/posts/157721/edit) The Siamese twin character is actually a product of a mad scientist sewing two halves of separate female bodies together and keeping both heads. Their body will essentially look like one body apart from widening up towards the shoulders to fit the two heads with a little space between both necks and heads. Ignoring the realities that this wouldn't be likely possible in the real world how can I at times get away with them going out in public maybe taking turns to be in control with the other head quietly hides somehow? As they are female there may be more options for extravagant clothing and head garments or if theres another options that can allow this character to hide the second head for short moments out in public other than maybe turning to the side or other obscuring view points. Edit, I just thought a strange haircut could be an option, the hiding one pushing the hair over their face as the other combs some of theres over the hidden head but I am not sold on this idea yet. [Answer] There is one way: Hide it in plain sight. With the right makeup and clothing, you can make it look like a costume. This will admittingly work best with some sort of event (maybe a Halloween party or season) The main idea is to convince people that since it's so obvious, it must be fake. It's obviously a costume right? Two headed people don't exist. Hiding in plain sight. [Answer] Zaphod, president of the Galaxy, once hid his second head by putting a cage over it and pretending it held a talking bird. In the movie, he also hides it in his [coat collar](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZO9oKNKGNo). [Answer] Hair cuts, scarves, large hats, you could fun with a cloak with a hood. If there is magic, there could be some way o magically hiding the other head. At the same time though, it may be fun to just freak everyone out by walking around with two heads. [Answer] If this is a modern world, how about a little almost-technomancy? I assume if there’s a mad scientist capable of sewing two heads onto a single body, there could be a second skilled mad scientist/tech whiz who would be up for the fun of hiding two heads in plain sight. There’s two science-related solutions I can think of off the top of my head. 1) The second head can be **cloaked by a cloaking device**. This one would be very hard to achieve with modern-day technologies, but perhaps in the future it wouldn’t be nearly as difficult. Even in the modern day we have some more limited prototypes capable of certain ‘stealth’ effects (see [here](https://globalnews.ca/news/4302166/invisibility-cloak-technology/)). Whatever cloaking device you use, you could hang a lampshade (not literal) on it by explaining any technical glitches that happen with it on makeup, special effects, or covering it with clothing. The device would probably work very well in dark places, like clubs or some bars. It would also make the story more entertaining because the flaws of the device itself affects how your character interacts with her world, eg. hiding in shadows, an occasional baddie seeing through the disguise and wiping his eyes in confusion after seeing it back to normal, etc. 2) We make the second head **[somebody else’s problem](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_else%27s_problem)**. This refers to a device from the book series *Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy*, where a Somebody Else’s Problem field is generated to make people ignore whatever is under it, as if it’s ‘somebody else’s problem’. This one is more of a hard sell; essentially there would be some kind of hypnotic device that induces others not to pay attention to the second head. You could again use makeup, clothes, etc to make the other head even more attention-worthy, especially if it were a head-turner. This one could also make for fun in the story, as glitches can make things more adventurous, although if the device were glitch free enough it could also allow the character to be more carefree in their interactions. It might even be good enough that people touching the second head would have no idea. (It’s also, in my opinion, the coolest device in the Hitchhiker series). Edit: 2.a) This one is also out there, but on the subject of clothing, perhaps as your character is out in a crowd and needs to stay out of attention, a piece of clothing with some [optical illusion](https://www.livescience.com/23094-spiral-circle-illusion-explained.html) patterns would be nice. It could let your characters head seem smaller, or, even better, give a severe headache to anyone who focused their gaze on it, enough to let them overlook the ‘slightly larger’ head of your character. ]
[Question] [ **Closed**. This question is [opinion-based](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers. --- **Want to improve this question?** Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by [editing this post](/posts/149736/edit). Closed 4 years ago. [Improve this question](/posts/149736/edit) In my story, magic is powered by souls collected from dead people. The specifics are pretty complex, but in general, a soul is quite a large source of power for magic and will last casual day-to-day users (who would use magic around the house) about six months. How would people not affiliated with some “magician’s guild” have a consistent and reliable access to souls? Around 50% of the population has the ability to cast basic spells, so there will be high demand. (Using animal souls is a possible idea, but I’d rather not take that route.) [Answer] # Filicide and then some, probably closer to genocide. You've set up some hardcore necromancy here in terms of the sheer number of recently deceased persons required just for a normal person to maintain access to their magic. A soul lasts 6 months for a normal user, it takes 9 months to make a new soul. Given the existence of the magicians guilds there's the implied existence of high drain magic users. Even if a woman kept herself continuously pregnant all her fertile life, she'd still only have access to magic 2/3 of the time for half her lifespan, and 50% of the population has access to magic. Given that any legitimately acquired souls are going to be in the control of the wealthy and powerful guilds, the average person is only going to have access to souls by going out there and getting fresh ones from "the wild" as it were. There will be seas of blood. [Answer] # They don't... Considering the relative scarcity of souls (if 50% of the population use magic and a soul lasts half a year, that's one year of magic per capita for "simple household use"), souls would quickly become a restricted, state controlled resource to be used primarily in research, warfare, public infrastructure and important government functions. Researchers could probably apply for one the way they apply for, say, grants or particle collider time in our world, and there *might* be ways for the super rich to buy a handful off a less-well-off nation, but the general population would not have access to this power source. # ...unless there's a secondary source Magic in > > Full Metal Alchemist (the first anime, if I recall correctly) > > > was fueled by souls harvested from a parallel dimension. A single portal wouldn't solve your fuel issue, but alleviate the pressure somewhat. If you have access to several parallel worlds, you should be okay. Another possibilty might be harvesting souls from people that died a long time ago, before magic was commonplace. Souls would be cheap for a while but eventually run out, which, if your world's population growth is anything like ours, will happen much earlier that the general population might assume. [Answer] This depends on an enormous number of factors related to how your society functions and when exactly a soul is created. If life begins at conception then there are ample souls floating around as that is extremely common compared to just the number of pregnancies much less births. With souls being valuable contraception will be a foolish waste while it would be prudent for women to conceive as often as possible. If conception is enough then each fertile woman will likely produce a few a year. If it actually takes a viable pregnancy, then each affluent (magic user) household needs a few slave women (non-magic capable) to each generate a new soul once a year. Once the pregnancy has produced a soul, harvest it. If this happens at 'quickening', then late-term abortion (safest route - no need to take the risk of childbirth itself); if the soul isn't created until birth, then sacrifice the newborn. This makes souls a sustainable resource for the cost of maintaining 2 or 3 slave women - the third allows for a little insurance and eventual replacements when fertility falls. You may think such brooding slaves are abhorrent, but such sentiments will quickly see your magic-deprived society fall to the magically powerful empires. [Answer] # Just use slaves, and make them breed like rabbits Of course, the morality of doing such a thing is in question however, any individual could have a completely self sustaining source of souls if they were to use two fertile female slaves to produce children at the rate of one child per year per slave. The children would then be killed for their souls. The problems with this strategy are: 1. Having slaves (possibly morally objectionable to you) 2. Killing children (though there's nothing to say that you couldn't keep them alive till adulthood, but that'd take more resources) 3. You're either going to be complicit in the rape of your slaves, or forcing them into a type of prostitution. Watch "The Handmaid's Tale" for more exposition into what I'm talking about. Please note that I do not personally promote any of the actions listed above, however, this question is about fictional worldbuilding, and this answer speaks to what might be a good story. As far as I know, there is nothing unethical about having people in a fictional story do unethical things. In fact I think you would find very few stories where all the characters behave 100% ethically. [Answer] Contracts would be the way to go. It becomes a basic consumable. Probably something along the lines of a person signing a contract with a soul collector, where their soul is given over to them for an amount of currency. Part of the magics of the contract, is the soul is automatically transferred to the collector upon the sellers death. The seller on the other hand, can then either get the currency when signing the contract, or get a greater amount upon their death transferred to any next of kin. Souls are then sold by the soul collector to whomever has be money to pay for it. It essentially becomes a sort of bank, where your soul is the collateral. This will of course only really make sence in a world without an afterlife, or at least no mayor believe in it. (essentially you would need a world where people believe their soul isn't hurt, or damaged and no discomfort is experienced when used as a fuel source. [Answer] A whole lot depends on what souls are and what the populace feels about them. Obviously, if there is some kind of eternal afterlife, people would not want to sign their souls away unless they can look forward to eternal suffering, nor is it likely that it will be considered at all ethical to harvest souls from a good afterlife. It may be that people who are certain of eternal damnation (or some such) would be willing to do so, but since souls only last 6 months, a typical household will use up hundreds over a lifetime. There would hence have to be far more people willing to give up their souls than there are people alive. An alternative is to use damned souls from past criminals and sinners; however, since there (arguably) are more people living today than there has been the last several thousand years, the supply will still likely run out fairly quickly (even if it is considered okay to harvest long-deceased 'good' souls). Hence, no matter how you go about it, there will not be a supply of human souls large enough for the average citizen to use for power. Soul power will of necessity be limited to a small elite, who might not worry about leaving any soul supplies for future generations. (Sounds familiar, doesn't it?) If animals souls are good enough, I imagine that their souls will be harvested when they are slaughtered for food. A cow soul might be good for several month's supply, while a chicken soul is only good for a few days, etc. The gruesome variant, where only human souls are useful, is to treat the vast majority of the population as alright for soul harvesting. Maybe they are suckered or forced into contracts from birth, or they may be a slave race of some kind that is considered less than human - not unlike how many southern US states had a majority of black slaves before the Civil War. Harvested souls could then be auctioned off or simply sold in grocecy stores the way cooking gas used to be. [Answer] # Brain-dead people's souls can be collected, and they also keep on "producing" a low-energy soul. Let's think of a soul as if it was a liquid. Everyone of us, at every moment of our life, has one liter of soul. This soul cannot be harvested during life because our vital force keeps our soul within our body with very strong ties. When a person dies, these ties are suddenly cut and it becomes possible to collect the soul. However, if a person is brain-dead or in another critical health state, the ties with their soul are loosened enough for the soul to be collected, but not enough for the body to not feel the urge to replenish the liter of soul if some milliliters of it have leaked. Of course, since it's an extremely weakened body, the refill will be slow, so the output will be, let's say, 200 millisouls per six months and not a whole liter of soul as if it was collected from a dead body. The huge pro of it is that it becomes a **renewable source of magic**. Now you have a healthcare system that's very eager to keep everyone physically alive in some sort of huge soul-collecting hospital ward. You'd have to have a lot of space for this kind of structure, but since brain-dead people can be kept in that state for a very long time, you'd never have a magic shortage again. Who knows, maybe you can even purchase some brain-dead people to refill your household's day-to-day magic need... [Answer] You didn't specify tech level, so you could probably have your wizards buy souls online. This is a thing in our world. [In 2007 a man tried to sell his soul on eBay:](http://m.digitaljournal.com/article/247454) > > A Los Angeles man is selling his soul in an eBay auction for $1 million to raise money for Christmas presents. He said selling at eBay is better than letting the Devil have his soul. > > > The seller told his buyers in the auction that he has no money for Christmas, and all he has left to sell is his soul. He said he is willing to let go of that for $1 million. > According to Sky News who has seen the auction, the soul will apparently be shipped in a glass jar along with a document showing the transfer of ownership. > > > He said he is not using his soul lately and selling at eBay is a better option than letting the Devil have it. > > > The seller from LA added, according to Sky.com: *"Keep it for yourself, or give it to someone you know who needs one. Who knows what it may be capable of?"* > > > Not long after that eBay changed its policy to explicitly forbid users from selling their souls (somewhere along the EULA you've already transfered ownership to eBay anyway). But who knows, maybe you can buy them with [manacoin](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/112321/21222) in the astral web. [Answer] ## Factory Farming with Women and Industrialised Childmurder Souls in your world are like milk, eggs and meat in ours. Highly desired products which can humanely and at a high quality only be provided in a small quantity. Thus humanely and high quality go out of the window to satisfy the thirst of the many consumers. The living conditions of the women will be akin to cattle in factory farms. [![enter image description here](https://www.transcend.org/tms/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Smithfield-Circle-Four-Farms-piglets-pigs-factory-pig-aminal-cruelty-abuse-09-1506966729.jpg)](https://www.transcend.org/tms/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Smithfield-Circle-Four-Farms-piglets-pigs-factory-pig-aminal-cruelty-abuse-09-1506966729.jpg) # Basics On that note there are two factors we need to consider about this, firstly how old a baby needs to be to have a soul and how functional a woman has to be to successfully bear a child meant for the butchers block. [![enter image description here](https://www.scienceabc.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/stages-of-fetal-development.jpg)](https://www.scienceabc.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/stages-of-fetal-development.jpg) While I'm unwilling to get into the debate if life and a soul is created at conception, it seem to be a lazy handwave one could use to circumvent the issue. Yet looking at the picture above the head of the fetus looks developed enough for me to contain a soul between 4 and 6 months. If this were to be the case it would be great news, since forced late abortion could cut the cost for the farmer or pimp by 30 to 60% compared to regular childbirth, which wpuld be great for the consumers of souls, too since it would make the prices even lower. The secound point isn't really about the functionality of the child production mechanism in a woman under different conditions, it is rather about the most economic way to keep them in the stable. [Fully comatose women can get pregnant and birth functioning children](https://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/25/nyregion/woman-29-still-in-10-year-coma-is-pregnant-by-a-rapist.html) but keeping them alive in a coma sounds like it requires more resources to keep them alive than just leaving the active, so it won't be a consumer friendly and thus unpopular method. Yet keeping fully functional women in the stables will cost a lot, too due to the security and conditioning required to kerp the peace. Thus I suggest that a few female babies with disierable traits are used to breed a more compliment herd of lifestock and that those breeding women are made mentally disabled by a surgical procedure (bashing them over the head with a crowbar might suffice). A trait which would be highly desirable would be an extremely early onset of ovulation. Acvording to [this article](https://www.livescience.com/33170-youngest-age-give-birth-pregnancy.html) this may happen at an azge of eight months and the girl in question gave birth at 5. This promises huge cuts in breeding cist compared to the usual 11 to 12 year growth time. An interesting spinn on this could be a the production of higher value souls, whose mothers lived better lives than the factory farm lifestock. Maybe baby corpes freely produced by poor women for their financial survival or even self-produced via a [The Handmaids Tale](https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Handmaid%E2%80%99s_Tale_%E2%80%93_Der_Report_der_Magd) private prostitutes could be the soul equivalent of free-range farming and organic food. # Moral Considerations **If your worlds societies are like ours there are none, except from a few naive activists.** This might sound harsh, but looking at the history of slavery, child labor, sex trafficking, factory farming and society's general acceptance/unwillingness to give up commodities for the betterment of third world citizens living standards/practiced ignorance of these horrible conditions shows that this what the market and the culture of consume which have developed in every industrialised and in certain ways in pre industrial societies lead to if the profit incentive is strong enough. # Disclaimer I don't believe that such a stance as I suggested your society will have towards women and children is in any way right or good. I just started extrapolating situations similar to your question and things turned dark and uncomfortably real. ]
[Question] [ > > A tin foil hat is a hat made from one or more sheets of aluminium > foil, or a piece of conventional headgear lined with foil, worn in the > belief or hope that it shields the brain from threats such as > electromagnetic fields, mind control, and mind reading. > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_foil_hat> > > > In a dystopia that has 1940s technology, the government claims they can read people's thoughts via electromagnetism. Whether or not this is true is irrelevant to my question. Most of the population believe it and every week there are live radio broadcasts of trials in which people are convicted of having illegal thoughts. This of course is a good way of getting rid of dissidents. A network of rebels have taken to attending secret meetings where their hidey-holes are lined with tinfoil and they wear elaborate Faraday Cage type hats. In public they currently walk around repetitively chanting 'pure' thoughts in their heads to avoid detection. The reasoning is that the government can't listen to everyone at once and so if an agent drops in on their thoughts they will maximise their chances of not being revealed. They would like a more effective method of protection. **Question** Please help the rebels to design the best possible headgear that will stop the government spying on their thoughts. The criterion for success is to balance blocking electromagnetic radiation as effectively as possible whilst at the same time remaining inconspicuous on the streets. **Notes** I repeat: Whether or not the government can actually spy on their thoughts is irrelevant. The rebels believe it and want to block radiation inconspicuously whilst in public. The technology and clothing-fashions are similar to those of the West in the 1940s. Both men and women rebels need protection. However ideally the protection should enclose the whole head somehow or even the whole body. It's a tough challenge. [Answer] # Most effective Faraday-Cage hat design to avoid government spying. > > The criterion for success is to balance blocking electromagnetic > radiation as effectively as possible whilst at the same time remaining > inconspicuous on the streets. > > > # The obvious answer is [internal](http://www.corrosion-doctors.org/Implants/Historical.htm): > > The earliest written record of an application of metal in surgical > procedure is from the year 1565. > > > However, until **[Lister](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Lister,_1st_Baron_Lister)’s** aseptic surgical technique was developed in > the **1860s**, various metal devices such as wires and pins which were > constructed of iron, gold, silver, platinum, etc., and tissue > transplantations were not largely successful mainly due to infection > after implantation. > > > * The technology in terms of the medicine to safely implant an internal faraday cage under the skin of the skull *was available 80 years before your era needed it*. Needle puncture sized wounds planted in an irregular row, on most people would disappear more or less without trace blending in with the [smallpox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox) and [measles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles) scars (which would have been common), and the wires themselves (gold is best) could have been placed under the muscles and nerves nearest the bone, to not interfere with movement. * The implication being, one would simply be able to stroll down the street on a hot sunny day without wearing a conspicuously hot hat or ludicrous looking hair-net, trying to not look shifty. * People would be able to go to the theatre without row in front offending in turn every other row behind. * Bald people would be above suspicion and reproach. * City Gents could doff their hats politley without fear of discovery. [Answer] They should craft their own wigs. Wigs are usually strands of hair sewn onto or woven into a soft textile mesh ([look how it's done](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yMdcz_aWs0)). If the rebels add a layer of very fine metal mesh on top before attaching the hair, they have most of their heads covered with a "mind read shield" and if the wig ever falls off, they can pretend to be embarrassed to have lost their perfectly normal, insuspicious wig. If the government allows people enough freedom to wear religious headgear, a Hijab or Turban could hide some aluminium foil. Or they could found a new religion and declare a noodle strainer to be their [traditional religious headgear](https://www.venganza.org/2018/10/pastafarian-headgear-statement/)... [Answer] Just do what I do... Keep a patriotic parrot on your shoulder whenever you are thinking subversive thoughts. Teach it to sing the national anthem and recite your government's various holy documents by heart. Then put in your ear plugs and think your illegal thoughts. Chances are that if the government is listening, at least half of the thoughts which they hear coming from your head space will be acceptable to them while the other half will be garbled by squawks and atonal whistles. Admittedly, this is not very inconspicuous and even less so in a 1940's style culture. But with an era-appropriate sailor outfit, it might be acceptable to most passers by and the children would love it. Keep in mind that the best way to avoid standing out is to not look like you are trying to not stand out. [Answer] The best to surround the brain would be a ushanka style hat [![ushanka](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0ejBW.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0ejBW.jpg) threaded with thin metal wires to form a cage all around the brain when closed below the chin. For warmer climates, where this style of hat would be all but inconspicuous, one would have to settle for a headband, again threaded with metal wires and maybe wrapped to go around cheek and chin (I wasn't able to find a picture showing that kind of wearing). [![headband](https://i.stack.imgur.com/czFPA.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/czFPA.jpg) In particular for the headband it would of paramount importance to use as thin as possible metal wires, to prevent making the whole thing too rigid and noticeable. Therefore the material of election would be gold: it is a good electric conductor and can be worked in wires with rather simple technology. [Answer] For women, I would recommend the pillbox hat, or any one of many women's hats that came with a veil. There was also a hat called the turban. You can get an idea of how well these might work [here](https://vintagedancer.com/1940s/1940s-hats/) or [here](https://www.villagehatshop.com/content/50/history-of-hats.html), or you might find another useful piece of head wear. A woman's hat shouldn't be hard to find as many of them came with mesh veils, which in your story could be made from metal to impede thought reading. For men, it's a little harder since most had brims and didn't cover the back of the head very well. This might not be a problem since the back of the head contains the brain stem which is used mostly for autonomic function rather than higher order thinking. A sport cap that covers the back of the neck is obviously the best choice shown [here](https://vintagedancer.com/1940s/1940s-mens-hats-styles/), but wouldn't be common in hot weather. Another option would be the hunter cap. Though most common for hunters, it might be useful for some rebels. Another option would be something like a bowler hat which is deliberately made too large for the wearer resulting in it resting lower on the head and protecting more of the brain. [Answer] A close-fitting metal cap, with a [Turban](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turban) tied over the top. This has the advantage of being one of the few forms of headwear that a man would not be socially obligated to remove while indoors. (Another good example of which being a wig, as mentioned in [Elmy's answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/136479/47510)) [Answer] **Such a hat already exists** [![RF Shielding for your Mind](https://i.stack.imgur.com/R2Tmp.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/R2Tmp.png) This hat is made of nylon with a silver-coating. It will produce 35 dB at 1-10 GHz with a surface resistivity: <0.5 Ohm/sq. This will reduce electromagnetic waves emanating from the brain by a factor of 5500%, which should effectively block the ability to read electromagnetic waves emanating from the brain. The great thing about a cap like this is it's lightweight, hand-washable, soft, safe for skin contact, stretches and can be worn under other hats to hide the fact you're a possible rebel attempting malfeasance. In reality, you can coat almost any hat on the inside, so you're not really limited to always wearing this as headgear. You could also purchase silver mesh, install it inside a hat lining and get the same effect, but have a wider variety of hats to choose from to better hide your secret activities. I am including a link to find out more information purposes. It links to Amazon and if Worldbuilding has a problem with that, let me know and I will remove it. Good luck storming the castle. * <https://amzn.to/2RTWoCQ> ]
[Question] [ My search for "Monster Hunter" invariably gives me a ton of results related to the videogame and this is making my research a bit tricky. What I'm looking for is any instance in history of a real organization that could be, even loosely, considered dedicated to "monster" hunting. Alternatively I'd settle for a mythological one (from anywhere in the world). A good match is, of course, The Inquisition, but i already used it as a model for a different part of the setting and I'd like to take from somewhere else. I know some mythological figures (e.g.: [from here](https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/hunters-mythology)) that were dedicated to hunting monsters but they did not have anything close to an actual organization as far as i know. [Answer] Finding real organizations based on the hunting of monsters and other supernatural beings would be difficult as most of these "hunts" would be temporary events based on public hysteria due to a natural incident (mob-based witch hunts of history) or were more individual efforts like hanging garlic and paying attention to signs (like a [2012 vampire scare](https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/12/121217-vampire-serbia-supernatural-garlic-fangs-science-weird/)). Mythological is not going to be much better as the typical stories are based on "errant knights", the lone hero, or just small groups of adventures (*Gilgamesh* involves only 2 people & *Journey to the West* only a small group, for example). That said, I do have two ideas that could be altered to fit (or even be considered) monster hunting organizations: --- Of "demons" & Yokai: ### Classical Western Demons You already are using the Order of Inquisitors so why not include the Order of Exorcists? Exorcisim is not technically monster hunting in the strict sense but could also be adapted. There are also two organizations which definently exist for this purpose. The first is **The International Association of Exorcists** (not affiliated with the Catholic Church1) which was [founded in the 1990s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Association_of_Exorcists) with the focus of finding and stopping demon possession. Also, though there is no Order of the Exorcist within the church, the Vatican [does require](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorcism_in_the_Catholic_Church#History) that "*each diocese have a specially trained priest who is able to diagnose demonic possession and perform exorcisms when necessary*." ### Eastern Spirits and Demons In Japanese culture, yokai, akuma, and oni tend to mix and merge so its even easier to see them as "monsters". In this case though, the Shinto religion places such emphasis on [purification](http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/shinto/ritesrituals/harae.shtml) that any priest (Kannushi) of the sect can perform these. In modern times, the idea of a priest purifying an object or area to rid it of yokai invokes more of an image of water, salt, and a old man waving a bunch of white paper. In ancient times, stories of people actually battling these creatures certainly exist and we have records of shinto priests being employed by the Empire to [perform purification rituals as early as 772](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%C5%8Dkai#Ancient_history). So in that sense, these early temples could be seen as monster hunting - though more as a by-product of serving their kami than as a real focus - and if an area happened to have above average yokai/oni/akuma rate a temple might dedicate a portion of the priest and meka as purifiers. --- 1 I did find a [reference](https://drfrancisyoung.com/2016/05/20/publication-of-a-history-of-exorcism-in-catholic-christianity/) to the removal of the actual order in 1973 but the source is suspect - so unless I find better evidence I wouldn't say the Catholic Church had an official order of exorcists. [Answer] Mythological creatures were never such a real threat to the world to have somebody set up an organization chasing them. Maybe some individual person was fool enough to embark in some kind of search Considering the [etymology of the word](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster) > > Monster derives from the Latin monstrum, itself derived ultimately from the verb moneo ("to remind, warn, instruct, or foretell"), and denotes anything "strange or singular, contrary to the usual course of nature, by which the gods give notice of evil," "a strange, unnatural, hideous person, animal, or thing," or any "monstrous or unusual thing, circumstance, or adventure." > > > If you extend the concept of monster to anything bizarre or extraordinary, the closest things that I can relate to a (fictional) organization searching for a monstrum would be: * the Argonauts (mythological on their own) * King Arthur and his companions chasing the Holy Grail (but in this case it was not a notice of evil) * Baudolino and his comrades in Eco's book Baudolino (fictional characters) * the Spanish Conquistadores looking for Eldorado (historical figures) * people searching for Loch Ness, Big Foot and Yeti (not sure if they qualify as organization, but definitely more than single person) [Answer] Warning: Not exactly monster hunters historically speaking Something like the Frumentarii could work. Basically the Frumentarii were wheat collectors for the Roman Empire who eventually became spy masters as well as the secret police of the Empire. Now what the Romans did was pretty ingenious. Instead of making a new burea within the Roman government they turned wheat collectors into spy masters. This gave the Romans a vast ready made intelligence service and one that was already spread across the Empire. Now for the monster hunting. Some Frumentarii where tied to the legions because of their knowledge of terrain and the provinces themselves. While not exactly assassin's you could easily have a organization like the Frumentarii have a intelligence service, but also assassins or in your case monster hunters. If they are tied to the army they could also have agents that try to recruit members from the military. [Answer] It depends on what you mean by 'monsters', but by positing the Inquisitions as an example I presume you mean 'hunting real humans that are made out to be monsters'. If this is the scenario, and you are willing to go with modern history, then McCarthy and his hunt for 'communists' would certainly qualify. It definitely qualifies as a modern day 'Inquisition'. McCarthy's forces were clearly well organized and followed a command structure. A bit further back in history, is the concerted American campaign to completely eradicate the American Indigenous populations. They were portrayed as evil, menacing non-human monsters that had to be eliminated for the welfare of Americans. In this case, the organized body would be the American military backed by Congress. If you add the term 'organizations' to 'monster hunters' in a google search, you get some pretty good hits, [including](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_Hunters) > > The Monster Hunters are a fictional group appearing in American comic > books published by Marvel Comics. This group exists in Marvel's shared > universe, known as the Marvel Universe. > > > The team was created as a retcon to explain some events in the history > of the Marvel Universe that were no longer plausible due to previous > retcons. Their adventures are set during the late 1940s and 50's, a > time when (in real life) Marvel/Atlas was mostly printing stories > about strange monsters and alien invaders. > > > and an entire book (actually, a quite humorous fictional Novel) about contemporary monster hunting organizations [Monster Hunter Siege](https://books.google.ca/books?id=JyUpDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT67&lpg=PT67&dq=hunting+monsters+organizations&source=bl&ots=4we8_Jigo5&sig=QnqJ9LPbmM1NIZHlOYZk2zTqMmU&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwie9dOZ6-LdAhXs7YMKHc8jBWUQ6AEwCXoECAIQAQ#v=onepage&q=hunting%20monsters%20organizations&f=false) [Answer] A simple answer. ### Zoos. Think about it. Especially back in times where wildlife were not sufficiently well understood, exotic animals were widely collected on behalf of rich patrons. To be able to exhibit the skin of the latest curiosity was a mark of your superiority. To be able to exhibit the animal alive - that was really something special. Further back again, of course, the Romans had an extra use for their exotic animals. They wanted a spectacle in the arena, so the more ferocious and monstrous the creature, the more kudos for the patrons of the games. This attitude continued well into the 1960s and 70s. It wasn't until naturalists like Durrell and Scott put the focus on zoos preserving endangered species, instead of just being somewhere to gawp at the strange creatures, that things changed. So if you want an organisation of real monster hunters, look at anyone with interests in natural history and in hunting rare and dangerous animals. This has always been a thing, from the Greeks and Romans, through Pliny's studies, to bear baiting in Europe, to the animals brought to the various courts around Europe, to colonial hunters around the world. No shortage of all this. [Answer] Try a search for cryptozoology. One of the best known probably the now defunct International Society for Cryptozoology. For fictional references try the Etheric Explorers Club (Paul Marlow), the Explorers Club graphic novels and the work of James Board - Pinterest is a good start. Also fictional the Laundry Files by Charles Stross. [Answer] May be a bit more mundane that what you are looking for - but; **Park Rangers / Wardens** There are [records](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_ranger#History) regarding people fulfilling a park ranger / forest warden role going back centuries. They were in charge of maintaining the royal forests, deterring poachers, managing game animals and a host of other duties. They also got used in times of war for patrolling and conducting missions and reconnaissance through rough terrain. It's only in more modern times that the civilian and military roles have diverged. It is easy to imagine hunting or fending off supernatural creatures or monsters becoming part of their duties. [Answer] I think the best answer is the SCP organization, it is an organization that defends humans of paranormal activity. This includes monsters, "haunted places", alternative dimensions, legends and myths. I do not think i have to explain all of it as it is too broad and then my answer will be deleted **for being too broad**, I will leave two links and I hope it is OK. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCP_Foundation> (what is SCP) and <http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-series> (official site, I think) ]
[Question] [ My human civilization is facing (much like us) the threat of anthropogenic climate change. For whatever reasons, they are unwilling to take action by reducing the use of fossil fuels and refuse to use "normal" geoengineering. Ultimately, they decide for a rather unusual (and stupid) solution: air-conditioning Pretty straightforward eh! If the atmosphere is too hot just cool it down. Obviously the consequences on the climate would be dire to say the least. However, I am not interested in that. What I'm asking is: Do we have the technology to build an "air-conditioner" (the scale is not important, a single gargantuan one or a billion tiny ones I'm not interested) that can cool the atmosphere, such that the waste heat is in the form of infrared photons that are (mostly) radiated into space? (So that we have a net cooling of the planet as a system) Limitations: It can use only current technology and must be powered by electricity. EDIT: It seems many are confused about this question. All I'm asking is if we can build a machine that cools the air and radiate the waste heat in outer space. [Answer] # Not possible [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/MOgkB.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/MOgkB.jpg) Earth's [energy budget](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_energy_budget#Indirect_measurement) is such that there is an estimate +0.58 W/m$^2$ energy flux, averaged over the Earth's surface. For a surface of $5.1\times10^{14} \text{ m}^2$, this means we have to push about 300 TW back into space. Total [human energy consumption](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption) from all sources is about 18 TW. Global [primary net productivity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_production#GPP_and_NPP) is around 70 TW. Therefore, all humanity, and all plants and algae on the planet, capture about 1/3 of the energy that we need to direct back into space. The sun hits the Earth with 174,000 TW of solar power, so it is kind of overwhelming. Current technology can't solve the global warming problem by direct energy transfer. [Answer] ## Completely possible Fly your trusty Giant Ice Cube spaceship to comet, cut out a giant block ice, fly it back to Earth and drop it in the ocean. Repeat every few years until the comet is empty, then panic and destroy all robots. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1EjYf.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1EjYf.jpg) (If it works for Futurama, it'll work for you!) [Answer] Build a shade. No, build **many shades**. Weather baloons are cheap, so are the [space blankets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_blanket) in a first aid kit. Attach 4 baloons to the corners of a big blanket, add a frame to keep the blanket unfolded and let the construct soar into the sky. Just make sure you have the cooling side of the blanket facing down... Weather baloons usually rise until they pop in the thin atmosphere, so you need to anchor your sun shades above cloud level somehow. A thin wire back down to earth might work, or you attach a little water tank and a controller to the bottom (parachute style). The controller measures the current altitude and releases water if the baloon sinks too low due to gas escaping. And if you insist on using *more* energy than the controller needs to measure altitude and release water, you can replace the weather baloons with drones. These would have to have *big* rotors (they would resemble a helicopter or military drone more than a quadcoper drone) to even be able to reach the required altitude and use up far more energy. [Answer] **Sure thing!** (as long as you remove the need for it to be powered)... [Stanford researchers](https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/195105-stanford-uses-the-ultimate-heat-exchanger-outer-space-for-free-unlimited-cooling) have developed a composite which does exactly what you need, with the bonus of not requiring power and therefore pumping more heat in to your environment. Don't forget, every watt of power you consume is a the same amount of heat created. Cover as much of the earth's surface with this as possible and you'll see some pretty severe temperature swings. It works in two ways, by reflecting 97% the incoming solar energy back in to the atmosphere, and emitting heat in long infrared to minimize interaction with the atmosphere. And if you REALLY need them to require electricity, then I can install a green flashing LED on them to let you know everything is working fine. [Answer] # Possible This is a computer heat sink: ![CPU hest dink](https://i.stack.imgur.com/FUgOE.jpg) It is built out of metal, and to maximize its surface-to-volume ratio. You need is continental arrays of these beasts in temperate areas, and in such a way that they get the least solar exposition possible. They should also be sealed within glass with a vacuum inside. By night they will pull heat from the ground and radiate it to space. You may have to move the population of North America, Europe and Russia to the tropics in order to cover enough area for this to work, but hey, what is a little eviction between friends? [Answer] The greenhouse effect is what keeps this earth from being a snowball, without it, global mean temperature would be -17°C - it is just the tiniest amount out of whack - about 2.7W/m2, meaning two and a half Watts per square meter too much power is retained, slowly heating the earth. (<http://wiki.bildungsserver.de/klimawandel/index.php/Treibhauseffekt>). So to just cancel it, we'd need to get that down to zero. To actually cool down, we'd need to go beyond that. Heat pumps are about 300% effective, meaning for every Watt invested you heat as much as you would using resistive heating of three Watts. Same applies to cooling. So to get -3W of effect, we need to invest 1W into a heat pump. For every square meter. This should work solar powered, because otherwise the energy-production will free even more energy (it might bite us in the rear with solar modules, too, because they absorb a lot of the light to heat - we'd need special modules that have a high albedo). So we'd need 1W/m2 of solar capacity, on the whole earth, or, assuming 20% efficiency on the solar panels, 250W/m2 light (already including nightime) - solar cells on 1/50th of global surface, which is just double the surface of North America. The direct way of increasing albedo by covering some landmass in mirrors would be hugely more effective, but no airconditioning per se (if you're not inclined to redub earth 'airconditioner'...) ]
[Question] [ Watching TV series [The 100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_100_(TV_series)) reminded me of one huge flaw of Fallout shelters. (Spoiler ahead, I think?) Most of the bunkers depicted in popular works have one huge design flaw: **There is only one entrance to the fallout bunker** Examples: Games Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 show atomic bunkers with only one exit. (I haven't played any other [Fallout](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallout_(series)) game, shame on me.) Most of the bunkers shown in the TV series *The 100* also have just only one exit. I understand, that if you want to have a bunker strong enough to survive an atomic blast, you have to seal it as much as possible, therefore having only one exit from the bunker is a reasonable idea. However, having just one exit from the bunker creates a huge design flaw. For instance, if a bunker is under a building, such a building can collapse on such an exit, literally trapping you inside. Yes, it creates nice plot ideas, however it feeels pretty dumb. Because, you just survived a freaking atomic blast, just to be killed by not having the possibility to go out and therefore starving to death. **Should my atomic bunker have more than one exit? What drawbacks will I have if the bunker will have more than one exit?** To clarify: I am designing "both in one." I want to have a bunker, possibly under a building. This bunker has to survive a nuclear blast, which results such building collapsing on it. Then, such bunker should be able to keep 1200 people alive for about 5 years. After that people should be able to go out and seek for food. Plausibility of the rest in the specification is solved. Assume the bunker is capable to do all of above, when answering, focus on the exits and possible drawbacks. Please keep in mind, that I want to have reality in check. So the design does not to count with possibility of building collapsing. Say the bunker itself is on the outskirts and you do not actually expect direct hit. [Answer] And now for something completely different... If you can afford to build a shelter for 1200 people for 5 years - food, water, energy, medical supplies & facilities, etc. then you can afford **a tunnel boring machine**: [![a boring machine](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8BO5V.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8BO5V.jpg) Actually, you don't need a really BIG boring machine. Something designed to dig an 8' diameter tunnel would be sufficient. You map out possibilities before you go in, and when you are ready to dig out, you just start boring! [Answer] You have a small tunnel that leads to a hatch which opens inwards. This hatch has been buried by 4 feet of loose sand. This way the emergency exit is hidden, and since the hatch opens inwards it cant be blocked by putting something heavy on top of it. Thats what all the actual nuclear silos use. You bury the escape hatch under sand, then make the top foot or so regular topsoil and get grass to grow over it. My neighbor's job was manning nuclear silos and he talked about how theyd actually forgotten where one was and paved over it. He said the guys manning the silo werent too happy to discover that should they need to escape theyd dig through all the sand just to hit concrete. [Answer] Multiplying the access points you multiply the points of potential failure in containing the radiation out. Therefore, as you state, it is pretty logic to have just one entrance/exit. There is no point in worrying about exiting a shelter if you will die of radiation poisoning in that shelter. To deal with the situation you mention it's way better what it's done in the shelter design: * large storage of food and water, for surviving long term * radio communication system With the radio communication you can: * get a grasp of what's going on out there. * call for help in case the exit is blocked. You might object: what if no living person is around and I still want to exit? Well, if no living person is around you can safely bet on high radiation levels. Therefore you are just asking for a different way of achieving death. I think a pistol with a single shot would be the best option at this point. ]