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In our timeline, the Industrial Revolution spanned from 1760 to 1820...or 1840, depending on which source we're talking about. Bottom line is, this period in modern history was a pretty big deal, perhaps the biggest. Rather than overload this question with a list of what made the Industrial Revolution such a big deal, let me instead link you to [12 Industrial Revolution Facts that Changed the World](https://interestingengineering.com/12-industrial-revolution-facts-that-changed-the-world).
The incentive that gave rise to our Industrial Revolution was the invention of many products that made the production of cloth less tedious:
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> Starting in the mid-18th century, innovations like the flying shuttle,
> the spinning jenny, the water frame and the power loom made weaving
> cloth and spinning yarn and thread much easier. Producing cloth became
> faster and required less time and far less human labor.
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> More efficient, mechanized production meant Britain’s new textile
> factories could meet the growing demand for cloth both at home and
> abroad, where the nation’s many overseas colonies provided a captive
> market for its goods. In addition to textiles, the British iron
> industry also adopted new innovations.
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[Link right here.](https://www.history.com/topics/industrial-revolution/industrial-revolution)
In this alternate history scenario, the Industrial Revolution began in the Middle Ages. Specifically, either the High (1000-1250) or Late (1250-1500) Middle Ages. But what sorts of circumstances would force any European kingdom within that window to switch from rural to industrial?
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There is no single point of departure.
You need access to capital to build the factories. You need banking. You need laws and policies that encourage inventors and experimenters, and protect the rulers from a predatory ruling class. You need educational institutions to train all those inventors and bankers and lawyers and engineers and managers. You need a society that is open to new ideas and permits the social mobility of newly-wealthy inventors and factory owners.
[Answer]
## An errant campfire
In 1790, [a hunter named Necho Allen](http://www.ci.pottsville.pa.us/html/history.htm) fell asleep with his campfire burning. He was surprised to find an outcrop of black stone burning when he woke up - a mineral we call *anthracite*.
A mishap of this type in ancient times would have *tempted* a civilization with a source of dense, hot burning fuel. The rest is just writing.
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On the assumption that the industrial revolution happened when the population increased to a point where enough people were close enough for synergy, meaning that you could start mass producing iron pots or bolts of cloth and have a large enough market for it to be worthwhile, what you want is for the population to be higher.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/xO16Z.png) [source](http://chartsbin.com/view/28k)
The industrial revolution kicked off at about when the population hit six million.
Want that to happen in the 1400 instead? Just avoid the black death, that big drop around 1350.
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## The printing press
By 1450 Gutenberg had developed a working press based on moveable type. This was a huge technology enabling development allowing much cheaper books, encouraged literacy in general, and made otherwise obscure technical documents cheap enough to be more widely distributed.
This device could have be developed hundreds of years earlier though.
Screw presses had been used since Roman times. Wood block printing date back to at least 868 (in China), and moveable type (wood and ceramic type) date to the 11th century.
Crude metal casting dates back thousands of years.
Gutenberg apparently developed ink that was more suitable for metal type, but this refinement did not require a conceptual break - more of keep trying things until something works well enough.
Moveable metal type was invented in [China in the 12th century](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing_in_East_Asia#Metal_movable_type_in_China); they were hampered by their language since so many unique symbols were required for printing.
Movable metal type printing could have been developed and practical hundreds of years earlier, and it would have sparked an earlier Renaissance.
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Plague.
Better termed an epidemic or pandemic. Bubonic plague was the reason the industrial revolution happened in Europe but not in Africa and the Americas. The Black Plague did affect Asia, so I'm not sure how that compares with Europe.
Gunpowder was known but firearms were much inferior weapons to archery. When there is plenty of labor, scribes provide no problem which needs a printing press. Likewise people didn't see a problem with laborious weaving. It took a while after the plague to develop the steam engine but the pressure to use it and other labor saving devices comes from the plague.
The quick drop in population disrupted solutions which relied on plenty of labor. This started our favoring labor saving whenever possible.
**More Detail:**
On the plus side, repeating the development from the Black Plague has verisimilitude as it actually happened. On the negative side, it actually happened in our timeline so what makes the new timeline different?
There were earlier plagues in recorded history, including the Plague of Justinian, so you also have to consider how things made the Black Plague the right time to set off the events leading to industrialization.
Before the Black Plague there was the [Medieval Warm Period](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period) where agriculture flourished into areas previously unable to support it and population swelled. Following that was the [Little Ice Age](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age) which reversed the success of agriculture, the farm land expanded into failed to be productive and there was much starvation. This made the Black Plague much worse than it might have been because people who grew up during the famine had their immune system compromised at the age where the immune system develops. (See *The Great Mortality* by John Kelly.)
Prior to the Renaissance had been the Mongol Empire. By the way, the globalization from that empire was a big factor in triggering the plague pandemic. After the collapse of the Mongol Empire the Renaissance was driven to re-establish eastern trade to return to access to eastern products such as silk and spices.
So looking at factors which brought about the Industrial Revolution in our timeline includes the confluence of drive to re-establish far away trade with the upheaval of the social and political structure (ending Feudalism) from the great die off from famine due to drop in temperature from favorable to unfavorable and from deaths from a pandemic. This led to the Enlightenment, then the Renaissance, then the Industrial Revolution.
As other answers have said, the Industrial Revolution took very big societal factors over centuries, so it might be a struggle to insert into an alternate timeline. It still may be worth considering the above in how it came about in our timeline.
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**Keep Rome Alive**
Speculate that Rome never fell, and you still have that caste of people who are both obscenely rich and obsessed with some field of science, be it chemistry, physics, mathematics, or just writing an encyclopedia. More importantly, that caste could draw the wealth of a much larger area than what was possible in medieval times, financing much larger scientific and technological projects.
How would Rome survive long enough?
Well, nobody knows why it fell. The empire was very stable, with slight variations depending on what border war was won or lost, it just lost more than it gained over the centuries, and nobody really knows why exactly.
One thing that would have allowed Rome to project power better would have been better communications. They had horse couriers, but [semaphores](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semaphore) are even faster; this might well be enough to tip the balance in favor of Rome expanding more and for a longer time.
Note that an alternate timeline like this might have changed the power structure enough that Rome could have developed in any direction an author would want - except fragmentation into kingdoms. I.e. the whole medieval power structure would never have existed; Byzantium existed until roughly 1500 AD, which was a state of bureaucracy and fierce internal power struggles. I.e. it's not the right answer for every story plan.
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Branko Milanovic has [blogged](http://glineq.blogspot.com/2016/05/economic-reflections-on-fall-of.html) about why the industrial revolution didn't happen in Byzantium; the short answer is that, like most of the states in the High Middle Ages, it's feudal economic order wasn't exactly conducive to development.
If you want to tell a story that's got some academic backing, maybe you could say the Venetians or Portuguese "discover" the Americas much earlier. Kenneth Pomeranz has a theory that the "ghost acres" of the Americas after the epidemics of the Columbian Exchange. I don't think this is particularly compelling—the Industrial Revolution didn't begin in Spain and Portugal, but perhaps the influx of specie and new crops paved the way for the development of mercantile states in the Netherlands and England and the financial institutions developed there then funded the inventions of the Industrial Revolution. Also potatoes were an efficient form of food production that allowed people to move out of agriculture and into cities (Nancy Qian and Nathan Nunn have a paper on this). But it just seems like a bankshot thing to me: the Industrial Revolution was the invention of industrial technologies and the reason it didn't happen in other places with deep financial systems or lots of food or lots of wealth was that they didn't figure out that you can use coal to power turbines (Britain's GDP didn't reach the levels of the Dutch Golden Age or Italian city-states until after the invention of many of the technologies of the first Industrial Revolution.)
So if you said a couple hundred nobles in the High Middle Ages somehow got into invention and business (which would be WAY out of character, but maybe they fell under the influence of some bishop obsessed with technological progress), and invented some key industrial technologies, I'd find that more persuasive than a story about "discovering" the Americas or increased financialization and capitalism.
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I think the big enabler of the Industrial Revolution was the solution to Zeno’s Dichotomy Paradox (490 - 430 BC), in part by Isaac Newton using estimation (1642 - 1726), and more fully in Squeeze Theorem by Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777 -1855).
Derivatives and integrals (calculus) made first an impossible, then merely very tedious class of problems extremely easy to work with. These kinds of problems are used in much of the industrial design underpinning the Industrial Revolution.
Examples:
Calculus is used to compute stresses and strains over spans when under distributed load. (Euler-Bernoulli Beam Theory, 1750)
Calculus is used to compute friction, frictional heating, and how much cooling is required to keep a material being worked from breaking. (Benjamin Thompson, Lord Rutherford. 1798)
Calculus also helps you explain the otherwise mysterious losses in pressure of pipes over a distance (boundary fields) and why fluid in pipes may not flow any faster than a certain amount, no matter how hard you push (choked flow). (Claude-Louis Navier, 1823; with additional work by George Stokes)
Calculus also gives us the definition of infinity, and a tangible many way of identifying when a system should, “blow up” (Pierre Simon Laplace, 1799)
These insights were, I think, original and not building on any other idea or work. I think they could have happened any time after Zeno initially described the problem.
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# Early democratic projects
## Early steam engines
The industrial revolution began with the invention of productive steam engines in the 18th century. However, precursors to those engines existed as early as the [1st century](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_steam_engine#Precursors). Even though those machines were not exactly fit for productive application, it seems plausible that the necessary technological progress could have been made relatively quickly. Why didn't that happen, then? Most probably because of social reasons.
## Democracy kills cheap labor
Engineers of ancient Rome knew of the [Aeolipile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile), and would have had the knowledge and resources to make it production-ready. However, they were quite busy with designing military applications and infrastructure, as well as bringing water to the sizeable (and growing) population of Rome. Additionally, there was simply no need, because Rome's economy was based on slave labor, which was exceedingly cheap.
A [medium article](https://medium.com/not-be-condemned-to-repeat-it/could-rome-have-invented-the-steam-engine-7a3b03d6b37f) states:
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> The missing component, perhaps, was *the will* [emphasis in original] to find a source of greater power than what was offered by domesticated animals, the wind or water streams. The Roman world was a slave economy, employing abundant and cheap muscle power provided by human captives. Practically none of the great thinkers of the classical age, no matter how thought out their perspectives on other ethical issues, dared question the legitimacy of slavery.
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Now, if we could remove slave labor from that environment, the pressure to find a technological replacement should further the development of steam engines quickly and drastically. How do we do that?
The easiest way seems to lie in early democratic movements, providing certain protections and liberties to the common people. For the time period you want, an obvious candidate is the [Magna Carta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta), which was signed in 1215. We know now that it still took several hundred years for democracy to be established in Europe, but it the ideas were there, and therefore history could have gone differently (I don't know if you would like to describe that process in any detail, in the worst case you could probably just handwave it, as it is often done in alternative-timeline stories).
As Philipp pointed out in the comments, it should be noted the economy in the middle ages is not slave-based as it was in ancient Rome, but it is based on a very similar system of [servitude](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom). This is what I based my reasoning on, but I failed to make it explicit, before.
## Caveats
If you already have a strong democracy established, the industrial revolution will certainly look differently than the one in our universe (consider the [social impact](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution#Social_effects) as well as [criticism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution#Criticisms) leveled against industrialization), so if you want to keep it similar, the democratic project must not be too succesfull (enough to prevent slavery, but not enough to prevent huge gaps in wealth and power between owners and workers).
This is of course not too far from what happened in England in the 18th century: Even though steam engines were more expensive and less powerful than water mills for quite some time, they allowed the building and operation of factories in densely populated areas, independently from any rivers. So if you want to go down that road, our own history might just give you what you need.
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## Move the Renaissance Forward
The Roman Empire already had elements of the industrial revolution when it fell. It had water powered mills that could automate the mass production of flour, it had corporations that used production lines to increase productivity, they had mechanical clocks, they had cranes for lifting bulk loads cargo, and all sorts of other stuff that we do not really think of as being invented until the industrial revolution. Based on what we do know about how mechanized the Romans were and how little stuff survives for 2000 years, it is likely that they were even much more mechanized than we can prove.
If Rome did not fall, it is very likely that the industrial revolution as we know it would have happened well before the high medieval period; so, for you timeline to work, you still need Rome to fall and the Church to seize totalitarian control over the flow of knowledge, but you need to shorten the amount of time that the Church is able to maintain that control by a few hundred years.
The Renaissance period happened once the accumulated knowledge of the church began to spread to the general population. It was this time of rediscovery where scholars quickly advanced civilization not just through new inventions, but through the rediscovery of these things that had been invented in the ancient world. Once you trigger the Renaissance movement, it is a pretty straight line to the early Industrial Revolution as Roman technology is rediscovered.
**The Caveat:**
While the Early Industrial Revolution is easy to move around because it was mostly just the revival of the Roman way of life, how long it would take people to reach the full knowledge of the Later Industrial Revolution is completely unknown. Many of the discoveries that made the Late Industrial Revolution possible took place during the medieval period; so, if you just skip that part of history, it is unclear if knowledge of things like chemistry, physics, and material sciences would actually be accelerated or not.
My opinion is that you would still reach the Late Industrial Period ahead of schedule due to a higher interest in science that the Renaissance created, but that the Industrial Revolution would span a significantly longer period of time before moving into the modern age. So what was for us less than 100 years of rapid development could in your world start in 1000AD, but take several hundred years to reach its maturity.
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**Either the Mongol Invasion is stopped before it gets off the ground, or it's taken a much more serious toll by the time it reaches Baghdad.**
Without this major disruptive event, the [Islamic Golden Age](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age) could continue and the unification of knowledge into a single *lingua franca* (though you'd no longer call it that), could spark it as early as the 11th century.
From [this list](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inventions_in_the_medieval_Islamic_world) of technologies discovered during this period:
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> 8th century: Geared Gristmill
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> 9th Century: Algebra ... Automatic Controls ... Kerosene ... Programmable Machine ... wind power
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> 10th Century: Scientific Method
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By the 9th Century all the necessary precursor technologies were in place in the Islamic world, you just needed someone with a problem that only machinery could solve.
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A quick off the cuff thought as it seems you're angling for the textiles/cloth aspect rather than "muh industry".
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> Baron McBaronson wants to inspire the loyalty of his peasants and improve their quality of life, reasoning that a happy peasant is a productive peasant. After a walk through his village he notices that their clothing is often dirty, torn and poor quality. Upon returning to his castle he calls his advisory team/wizards/alchemists/engineers/flavourful smart dudes and promises a title/land grant to the one that can produce cheap clothes for the peasants.
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There is another aspect to this. The Protestant Reformation broke the monopoly on "truth". Throughout the 1200-1500's, the Roman church tied political control to its control of "truth". Gutenberg enabled the Reformation by breaking the monopoly on books. The combination was a political challenge to the Holy Roman Empire (which is why there was a 30 years war.) But the result was support for free thinking in parts of Europe - the parts of Europe where first the Scientific revolution happened and then, the industrial revolution. (There are those that claim that the Protestant Reformation built on the rights of the free man in ancient German culture.)
We needed first political support for free thinking, then the banking reforms to allow that free thinking to build new business structures, and then, we had the industrial improvements.
Even today, we can see that towns in the US with the tradition of allowing free thinking tend to have far more new businesses spring up (Austin TX, SF CA). Contrast that with a university town such as College Station, Texas which celebrates Tradition.
Contrast that political environment with the how the Roman Church dealt with differences of thought such as the massacre at Béziers where we got the expression "Kill them all and let God sort them out." Or the massacre of the French protestants in Florida in 1565. The trial of Galileo is just part of the attempt to control the "truth".
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Let's face it, the Industrial Revolution, like all great moments in history, was *honking complex.* Deconstructing it and then trying to reconstruct all those myriads of threads is unreasonable! Let's instead look at two of the pivotal discoveries that changed the world and see what can be done with them.
**Gunpowder**
China is believed to have invented it about A.D. 850 and it's believed to have arrived in Europe somewhere during the 13th century.
**Coal**
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> In Europe, the Romans turned Britain into a 2nd Century A.D. coal hotbed, seeking to exploit as much of Roman Britain’s coalfields as possible. Archaeological excavation over the following centuries has discovered the remnants of coal stores at numerous forts along the famous Hadrian’s Wall. The nearby fort, Longovicium, houses evidence of the Romans having a smelting industry set up in Northern England. ... Coal in Britain became far less prevalent a resource following the decline of the Roman Empire until the Industrial Revolution, whose apex hinged on the mass availability of coal to power intrepid steam engines, heat buildings, and not long after, begin being used to generate electricity. ([Source](https://www.worldwide-rs.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-coal-71951410412))
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Why I picked coal is obvious, although we need a reason to reinvigorate its use post-Roman-Empire, but why gunpowder? Because we need a reason to put coal to serious use at a much, much earlier date. And for that, we need two events.
1. We need the [little ice age](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age), which occurred in Europe from about 1300 to 1850, to be colder, maybe even a ***lot*** colder, and occur between 850 and 1050. This will drive people to demand heat long before the pre-industrial (and yet quite industrialized) infrastructure existed. (This allows an excess of energy to be available for industrialization.)
2. We need gunpowder, and the inevitable changes to war that would ensue, to arrive at about year 900.
Why, do you ask?
***Construction***
The industrial revolution happened, if we simplify it to the point of making angels weep, because people *needed stuff.* They needed clothes and transportation and a bazillion other things, and they needed that stuff in quantity and they needed it yesterday! We need your medieval people to need *stuff.* A lot of stuff. But what would an agricultural high-to-late medieval society need?
Walls to protect them from invaders and the worsening cold.
The result is the foundation for an industrial revolution. Coal is being used to warm buildings and your society suddenly needs more of it. A lot more of it. Then those cannoneers (because the tech for guns hasn't really arrived yet) show up and start pounding on the castle walls, giving invention the mother it desperately craves. Now we need to build, build strong, and build fast! That means mining, moving, cutting, shaping, tons and tons of *stuff.* Wood, stone, metal... *stuff.*
And that's when some bright monk sitting with a friend in front of his coal-fired fireplace discussing how his hobby [trip hammer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trip_hammer) (currently being used to bedazzle his favorite frock) could be modified to build armor faster, looks at the the whistling iron teapot over the fire and, noticing the lid gently rotating on the pot as the excess steam escapes, says the most dangerous thing anyone on earth can say to another...
*Here, hold my beer.*
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My goal is to create a world somewhere on the line of steampunk and solarpunk, where what we call alternative energies are actually more economically practical than combustion. It's a fantasy book, so magic is central, but the civilization would be comparable to our own today (no digital tech, but more advanced in terms of energy production, architecture, engineering, etc.).
I have a magical explanation for this, which is basically that the fire god was chopped up and put into the world when it was created (into the body to earth, breath to air, blood to water, power into the sun), so there's more ambient energy in these sources, and it's more readily extracted.
Is there a scientific principle or constant I could change that would help me justify this more than magically? I could also just make it so that petrol/coal don't exist (or don't exist as much), but I'm hoping there's some theoretical scientific explanation for why "green energy" just works better here. Thanks!
[Answer]
**The road not taken**
Energy comes in many forms. The existence of electricity has been known at least 2000 years BCE. It might not be known at the time what it actually was or how it worked. 600 BCE more research was done into static electricity, showing the 'magnetic' effects of rubbing things together. Electricity has surfaced here and there for various purposes. Numbing effects, giving shocks as entertainment for others and the like.
The fact that electricity has been known about, gives many options for people to start research into it. Research that with a bit of luck can stumble on the fact it can be used for moving objects. If people then start searching to increase these effects as well as generating them, you have a path to electric transport.
Steam engines might not be focused on before the movement power of electricity is discovered. Although we've burned things since we 'discovered' fire, the locomotion came much later. It is unlikely, but not impossible, that we never think to use steam as a locomotive power. Or not at a frand scale. Just like electricity, burning has been around for a long time before they thought to really use it for locomotion.
If we're talking about internal combustion engine with gas or oil, it is a difficult to capture and refine substance. Electricity could easily start earlier than these engines.
*In fact, that actually has happened.*
Although there might've been steam driven cars before that, an electric motor with batteries was created in 1834, while the first combustion engine seems to have arrived 1860. If batteries and electric generation improved quicker, it would allow to dominate the market. A combustion engine might never apprear as a contender. Indeed, according to some (conspiracy) theories the electric car had a fighting chance, but was brought down by the gas powered cars due to economic gain. Companies saw they could make more money as they could also sell more expensive fuel. So they made sure it wouldn't be a viable alternative.
From finding motive power from electricity it's just a few steps to put a lot of research efforts in electricity generation and storage.
**TLDR**
Due to how research doesn't follow a standard path, electricity could easily be 'invented' much earlier and become the main power. It has been seen and known about for ages, allowing research to take an interest and luck out on finding a power for movement. It's relatively easy to transport. Storage is more complex, but batteries have existed a long time. Better versions will be researched quite diligently, as it's where a lot of economic gain lies. It can simply be the best alternative.
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Indeed, I will turn my comment into an answer.
There is one area on Earth that exactly fits your requirements. It has absolutely no oil, gas, or coal reserves. Yet it obtains almost all of its power needs domestically, through renewable resources.
[Iceland](https://www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/icelands-sustainable-energy-story-model-world).
With just a bit of handwaving, no real need for magic otherwise, no physical laws are broken, you can have a thriving industrial steampunk society. No combustion necessary.
Scale up Iceland to a continent size. Geothermal vents supplying steam everywhere. Hot enough to cook with, heat the houses with, and even drive generators. Lots of water for hydro powered wheels and mills. Can also be used to provide power for turning and drop-forging metals.
For even higher temperatures, Iceland also has continuous lava flows. Lava is hot enough to melt copper, make glass, and process other elements. Here is where the handwaving cones in. The trick would be to have small, continuous lava flows that can be controlled and directed. Copper does not have to be formed into wires to generate electricity, one can mold and hammer it into bars that do nicely. Put the raw copper ore into clay molds, flow the lava over it, you have copper bars. Okay, maybe lots of impurities, but it will suffice. The water wheel mills can provide energy for forging these bars into useable products. Place copper bars around a water wheel, and natural magnets, and one has an effective but crude generator. With electricity comes the ability to process even more metals, and produce machines. Process copper in continuously improving refinements and build better and better generators.
Plus, lava retains it heat for a substantial period of time. One could imagine an industry where lava is cut into sections while still very hot, and used for such things as crude ceramic kilns and glass molds.
As for why there is no fossil fuel engines, Iceland has no fossil fuels except wood. Come to think of it, Hawaii doesn't either. No volcanic area does. As far as I know, fossil fuels can not form under such volcanic conditions.
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Fossil fuels didn't pick up steam on Earth (pun intended) because of oil. Coal is plentiful and accessible in certain areas without complicated machinery. Wood and peat were also early fuel sources.
Coal all came to be during the Carboniferous era, between when trees evolved lignin, and bacteria evolved the ability to break it down. If you want to hamper the adoption of fossil fuels, imagine a world without a long Carboniferous era. Of course, that would be a very different world, with a lot more carbon in the atmosphere. It depends how much you want to handwave.
Perhaps the most accessible technology for capturing useful amounts of solar energy is capturing it as heat. You can actually store large amounts of heat energy from solar by heating liquid in solar collectors and pumping it through pipes into the ground. It turns out that heat doesn't migrate through the ground as fast as we usually think, and there's a lot of heat capacity in the ground. Most of the heat you pump down there will still be recoverable up to a year later. This means you can create stored geothermal energy from solar energy with relatively simple methods.
Geothermal can be used directly for heating buildings and even driving steam turbines. You could smelt ores (maybe?), make big machines and factories that way. You could run pumps for irrigation and pumping water out of mines, etc. You could have an electricity grid once you invent generators. But you will not have portable power. The energy density is too low. Perhaps you could use compressed air motors for short range vehicles like we do now. Fossil fuels are very attractive for powering vehicles. And once you have steam engines, you'll have access to oil unless you handwave that away too.
Now there is one thing that blows the energy density of fossil fuels out of the water: nuclear fission. Solar thermal plus geothermal would get you access to uranium by mining. You could run centrifuges to refine it. Remember, the first nuclear bomb was created before computers were in widespread use. We understood enough about electricity to make generators before the internal combustion engine was huge. Plus, the first steam engines ran on wood.
So I think it's feasible to get where you're going if you somehow get rid of coal as an easy solution, get rid of oil as an easy solution, and accept that big ships, airships, etc., need to use nuclear.
Now methane... That's hard to ignore. Not sure what you'd do to handwave away methane.
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I don't understand why you would even need much energy if there's no digital tech.
However, instead of changing such a big thing like a scientific constant, you can just say that their planet has a new type of metal which induces electricity in itself when introduced to sun rays. Or some other rays specifically (like gamma, infrared, etc)
Thus introducing not the solar power we are used to here on earth, but solar power in concept and thus cleaner power in general.
And there would be no explanation needed as to why that metal exists on that planet and not on earth.
At least, for the most part, that can be ignored. Because stuff around the universe is not present in all planets. You can very easily reason that this metal simply does not exist on earth, but does on that planet.
Plus, introducing a new type of metal is more related to magic than changing a scientific constant.
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**Your world is not old. No fossils, no fossil fuels.**
Just because the environment is something like ours doesn't mean it's history is anything like ours. What if the gods created it a mere 5000 years ago?
Scott suggested you haven't had a long Carboniferous era; maybe it hasn't even happened yet? And if there weren't dinosaurs (or other organisms) a hundred million years ago, there wouldn't be oil in the ground, right?
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Simply state that the biological waste and corpses of the common life of your planet do not burn, nor do they decay into something that burns. It is one of the many miracles of our real world planet that it's life and life byproducts are combustible. I don't know specifically what chemistry would have to change but I have no difficulty believing that very small changes could do the trick. Your reader's probably won't need a scientific explanation
Then all you need to do is stay consistent in the rest of your world building. For example, you can't have a fire-god on a world where things don't burn. So make it an energy-god, full of the abstract non-fire energy which your magic feeds upon.
Edit : In pursuit of consistency, you probably shouldn't "state" that things don't burn as I originally suggested. Burn would be a foreign concept to the inhabitants of your world, so they certainly wouldn't mention it during narration or exposition. Keep the chemistry answer in your back pocket for use during author-interviews or sci-fi convention q&a sessions. It is always nice to have real reasons for the way your fictional world works, even when your story lacks any way for you to expose those reasons.
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**Geothermal evolves from waterwheels.**
[Waterwheels](https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-waterwheel-4077881) are ancient and have been employed for millenia to harness the energy of moving water.
In your world, geothermal features are common. Persons familiar with waterwheels first make constructs where geothermally heated water emerges from the ground lift to turn the wheel. The next step is to use the energy and pressure directly to turn the wheel. Steam pistons are built into the ground where there is heat but not hot water to duplicate the effects of heated groundwater.
The problem with geothermal is that it is not portable. You are tied to places where the earth provides heat. Factories and mills are definitely doable but you cannot make a steamship or steam locomotive without portable heat.
Maybe the available geothermal heat means your people dont need to burn things for heat and so they are not fire makers. You could make portable heat that is not from burning things. Maybe nuclear power from refined isotopes? Maybe solar concentrators. People want to duplicate the geothermal steam engines.
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## The great fire of Alexandria
When 90% of knowledge has to be re-invented from scratch, people work with what they have.
In your world, electricity was invented by an ancient empire long ago, used primarily used for electroplating metals. Waterwheels combined with magnetic dynamos are used to generate the requisite electrical power.
This was a trade secret of the Ancient Empire, along with the waterwheel / dynamo setup they used to power the technology.
Then the fire came. A lot of knowledge was destroyed. In their panic, certain treatises critical to the use of dynamos to generate electricity were saved but many copies were scattered to the wind in the process.
Not only is the secret now out, but most treatises on mathematics and geometry are lost, hindering the development of practical engineering by a couple of thousand years.
With the invention of the electric lantern, the rest is history.
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[Petroleum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum) is derived from fossilized organic material such a zooplankton and algae.
It your world it is possible oil eithe didn't form because the organic material didn't settle into an oxygen-less environment and decomposed quickly leaving no material to form oil, or if it did fall into such an environment and oil was formed it is buried so deep it had not been discovered.
Regarding coal, the quality of coal deposits vary around the world. In your world coal could be contaminated with a lot more nasty elements such as sulfur and mixed with sediment during it formation that it makes a horrible substance to burn producing all types of horrible wastes including sulfur dioxide, which quickly turns into atmospheric sulfuric acid.
The inhabitants of your world fear coal and the wastes it produces when burned that they ban the use of coal.
Alternatively, any coal deposits could be very thin and very deep and thus not worth digging up and using.
Because of this, they concentrate on and develop other forms of energy. In their very early development they may initially use coal some as a heat source to get some metals, but once they have a minimum, critical mass of metals they abandon coal for cleaner sources of heat.
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It's worth breaking down what it means to suggest that fossil fuels are more "economical" than the alternatives.
On this, I would highly recommend Andreas Malm's excellent Fossil Capital.
Malm draws on a Marxist analysis to show that factory owners in Britain at the start of the industrial revolution didn't in fact chose coal as a fuel because it was more efficient or cheaper than water. Rather they embraced it because of the control it gave them.
Coal could run reliably during the working day, whereas factories powered by water had to respond to the vagaries of the climate and landscape. There were proposals which would have allowed owners to minimise some of this, building networks to carry water to factories, but these required cooperation between businesses which were otherwise in competition.
Additionally, water power required factories be built in an appropriate location, whereas coal powered production could take place in cities which already had a large population owners could draw a workforce from.
One possible basis for a solarpunk industrial revolution (?) is to imagine that early labour disputes - which as Malm argues sometimes targetted steam power directly - played out differently. With a different array of forces, owners might have been more open to embracing alternative power sources.
I expect not everybody will accept Malm's analysis nor to trudge through all 500 pages of the book to better understand it. But I mention it here to suggest that one doesn't have to look to 'scientific' explanations for your society, they may also be located in society.
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Sort of like how in Pacific Rim, the giant mecha are piloted by two individuals with a temporary telepathic link in order to share the mental load. This is something that one person alone cannot do (usually, anyway). But even if one person could pilot a mecha alone without negative side effects, it seems to me that two people working in tandem with a telepathic link would still outperform a single individual.
In a situation where two people share each other's thoughts/feelings/perceptions and can coordinate actions perfectly without discussion, perhaps even when not physically together, what tasks or professions would these two linked individuals excel at over others?
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### Almost everything will see *some* benefit.
Firstly any project large enough to be divided between multiple people will see an improvement with 2 people mentally connected, as no work will be duplicated, and no time will be wasted communicating with each other. They will be slightly better software engineers than 2 equivalently skilled unlinked engineers, and they will be slightly better bricklayers than if they were unlinked, and basically everything in between will see a small subtle difference.
Where they could really shine though:
* [Insider trading and market manipulation](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/189304/78800).
+ One person works in a company in a CFO or similar role, another uses that information to buy shares using that forbidden knowledge
* Most team sports.
+ Eg. Tennis doubles with perfect mind link will be able to outperform basically everyone - You have an extra vision frustum and can position yourself optimally without communication.
* [Spying](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/189328/78800)
+ One can be working in a top secret company, the other can be their spymaster.
+ Counter surveillance will never detect any exchange of information no matter how intense they supervise them.
* While not usually considered a "profession"; Anything intimate / romantic / sexual between the two will be greatly improved - total knowledge of what your partner is experiencing (and shared experience) can mutually optimise the experiences.
+ I wont go into further detail.
* [Poker Tournaments](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/189411/78800), and gameshows.
+ Two separate people not in communication who are able to work together can tip the odds in a poker tournament, as they both know 2 extra cards that aren't in the deck than their peers, allowing them to more precisely calculate odds.
* [Perfectly organised crime / insurance fraud](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/189310/78800)
+ Person 1 buys a building, person 2 burns it down. Person 1 has no record of communication with Person 2, thus anyone investigating the insurance fraud can find no evidence of it.
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If the neural link allows one side to rationally perceive the others thoughts/feelings/perceptions about the task without mixing them with their own, that would be extremely valuable in a couple of professions:
### Teaching/Tutoring
For teaching it would allow the teacher to observe exactly what a student does and doesn't understand. Additionally allowing the to see what methods are working and why would enable tuning the teaching to help the student as much as possible. Alternatively, it might be possible for the student to simply perceive the explanation over the neural link, allowing the teacher to enrich the explanation with their own thoughts and feelings.
### Psychology/Counseling
For a psychologist, the neural link would allow a far better understanding of the patients thoughts and feelings, easing diagnostics. In counseling, this would allow the counselor to more closely observe the patients feelings as they help them navigate them.
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**Sex**
Being able to experience your sexual partner's perspective would be a fine addition to a consensual sex act. In such a scenario, ideally each partner is interested in the experience of the other and is paying close attention. Mind meld would make this much easier and allow both partners to take actions that maximize the chance of a pleasurable intimate experience for both.
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This would significantly benefit any profession that requires time critical tasks in collaboration, as these professions are where time taken to communicate really matters. The main question is if you can link more than 2 people, as in many professions being limited to 2 people would be a serious limitation.
Ignoring combat professions as related in pacific rim:
### Music and Dance
Being able to understand what the partner is doing and act in concert as they are doing it significantly ease the synchronization of the performers moves. Or as a pair of musicians they could potentially improvise an entire duet with the ability to understand what they're partner is doing at the point they thinking it rather than at the point they hear it.
### Transport Pilot
All commercial airliners are operated by two pilots both as a backup, and as a way of easing the load. Provided the neural link did not pose a risk of incapacitating both pilots, it would allow the two pilots to far more effectively share the critical tasks of takeoff and landing.
### Tower Crane Operator
A crane operator is often high up and can't effectively see where what they are lowering into place is. This currently solved using radios, but a neural link would allow the crane operator to effectively see when the crane is, and also where the load is, allowing them to maneuver it into position more safely and efficiently.
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> Activities/tasks that would benefit from mind melding
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Figuring out what your wife/girlfriend/both actually mean, and actually want.
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I don't think you mentioned at what range this link can be maintained between two individuals, but if it operates at fairly significant distances, say up to a couple km or miles, here are some extra advantages.
**Foraging**
Both individuals can split up and search for food more effectively, such as within a forest. If one of them finds something tasty and worth eating, the other can be guided to that location. If there are threats in the area that the finder has taken note of, such as harmful plants, predatory animals, or physical hazards such as strong rivers, sinkholes, ravines etc., the approaching individual can be made aware of and/or guided around them.
**Protection**
You could call this a task in a way, as well as a duty, if both individuals are important to one another for whatever reason. In the context of a relationship, for example, whoever is in a potentially dangerous area could constantly transmit information about the status of his/her exploratory mission. If he/she is attacked, that could be immediately made known to the other, and he/she guided to the exact location of the individual who was attacked. Additional information about the nature of the attackers, such as weapons, numbers, tactics, etc. could also be sent. This would give the responding individual advance notice and time for them to plan a counterattack/rescue strategy beforehand. This would of course work much better if the distance between the two was relatively small, so as to allow for more rapid intervention.
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My post-apocalyptic world is to be populated by new creatures such as Giant Geckos, Trihorns, and super-strong giant humans.
The setting is a few centuries after World War III takes place, so new species of creatures can't have evolved so quickly.
How can I artificially increase the rate, so evolution of species is extremely fast?
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It's called selective breeding, and humans have been doing it about as long as they've had domesticated animals. (And plants too, but you just ask about animals.)
Perhaps the best example is the dog. The ancestral wolf has been selectively bred into hundreds if not thousands of different varieties, ranging in size from Chihuahuas and Pekinese to St. Bernards and Irish Wolfhounds. They've been bred for special abilities: the scent-following of the Bloodhound, the endurance of sled dogs, the herding ability of the Border Collie, and many others.
Dogs are hardly the only example. Just about every domesticated animal has been selectively bred, for example miniature horses, giant draft breeds, thoroughbred race horses... Cows are bred to give large amounts of milk if they're dairy cattle, or to produce lots of meat if they're beef cattle. Darwin bred pigeons as research for his Origin of Species.
Of course, if your world happens to have a surviving genetic engineering lab, you can do this in even less time with more possible variations.
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Reusing part of [my own answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/152844/30492) to another question:
When DNA manipulation techniques were yet to come, and scientists wanted to explore genetic mutation, they had to use something similar to what you depicted. They applied [this method](https://www.ilpost.it/2017/03/25/spaghetti-nucleari/) to developing new plant variants.
How did it work?
They placed a gamma emitter in the center of a circular field, then planted crops all around.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/MZfuH.jpg)
During growth the crops were exposed to different level of gamma radiation, and developed various random mutations. The produced, mutated seeds were then planted on a normal field and the plants tested for useful mutations.
This is how some of the currently most diffused wheat varieties have been developed.
While this can be applied to plants, it's hardly transferrable to animals/humans:
* plants produce hundreds to thousands seeds each time. Living birth animals at best
can have ten babies per time. Humans hardly go past 1. Since you are playing with statistics, big numbers are your friend here.
* plants, especially crops used for farming, reproduce once a year and within one season. Humans cannot reproduce earlier than about 12 years from birth. Again, big numbers are your friends.
* plants do not have specific body plans and organs, while animals do. Parts of a plant growing chaotically will generally not harm the rest of the plant, while this will kill animals. (credits @IndigoFenix for pointing it out)
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**A specially engineered virus**
What you're looking for is a way of inducing mutations between species, ideally in a way that doesn't mess up a lot of their genomes. If you're also looking for this to be not driven solely by artificial selection, I'd suggest engineering a virus.
Viruses are very effective at moving genes across species - a process called transduction. Essentially, viruses insert themselves into the host's genome. When they replicate, they bring along genetic material from the host. This is normally a rare event, but there's no reason a heavily designed virus couldn't do this deliberately. You could get very rapid, useful gene flow between organisms, or even species, if you create a virus with the following properties:
1. Not detrimental to the host - If it's going to harm the creature's chance of survival, this will be less than useful
2. Needs to modify the germ line - creatures have to pass on the virus, so it needs to alter the sperm or eggs of the creatures it infects
Some extra engineering might let the virus act like Crispr gene editing, and actively swap out alleles between creatures. If, by another mechanism, you tweek the virus to replicate most strongly in the healthiest individuals, you'd end up with a virus that spreads through and modifies the genes of a population multiple times a generation, upgrading their genes to the ones from the healthiest individuals in the population.
(there's a lot more to how genomes work than genes, and this would be hopelessly impractical in real life, but it's an interesting start)
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***Frankenstein's Nanites:***
As long as we're reusing answers, my solution to [THIS](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/177004/what-would-encourage-multiple-animal-species-to-evolve-human-features-simultaneo/177011#177011) question could apply here. If nanites designed to repair damage (including cancers and other genetic problems) built for other original species (or to recover and recapitulate DNA from prehistoric sources) were poorly engineered, they might start malfunctioning and spilling over into the environment despite safeguards by ignorant inventors who didn't realize the dangers of their newly created products.
Imagine if someone really WAS trying to create a [Jurassic Park](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_Park_(film)), and was using the newly invented and very powerful technology of the [CRISPR](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR_gene_editing)-equivalent in nanites. Some of these things would be designed to insert specific gene sequences. Some might have been mid-construction to try and responsively repair and retro-engineer organisms after birth and then integrate the new DNA into the genome of the offspring.
Now these nanites have their creators die, but they are still carrying out their functions. Only problem: there are no creators to turn them off when they spread into geckos and start trying to turn them into tyrranosaurs or terror birds. Plus, the nanites are constructed with the programming in the nanite equivalent to DNA. As the engineers feared, the nanites start mutating, with their instructions getting crazier and crazier. After a few decades or centuries, they either become strange specialist organelles in species, or else the built-in protective measures eventually cause them to fail.
So you have a wild, short-term boost in species evolution spreading outward from a central lab. Further, degenerate nanites might still be out there, performing quasi-magical effects on species they have formed a stable relationship with (like fill-in-the blank: weaving carbon nanofibers under the skin or inducing rapid healing, or continuously repairing the genetic effects of mutation so the resulting species is effectively immune to ionizing radiation).
The nanites might even spread to other species, trying to turn an unsuspecting human into a gecko-terror bird/human hybrid (badly, most likely). This could lead to unrelated species having clusters of similarities in an ecosystem. Imagine an island where everything a mosquito bites is cross-contaminated with a nanite in the middle of fixing a gene, then it "fixes" the equivalent gene in the new species. Every animal species in that ecosystem now has the same gene for velociraptor fast-muscle twitch response, for example.
Eventually, all these will fail, functionally disappearing or becoming the equivalent of viruses. But oh, the fun you can have in the meanwhile!
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**Mad scientists**, of course!
Your post-apocalypse retained one or a few rich and organized societies.
E.g., New Zealand was left alone, and the destruction of the rest of the world affected it catastrophically but not quite apocalyptically.
Genetic engineering research got done.
Even if the society eventually collapsed, the products got loose in the wild.
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After World War III all humans were sterile due to chemical weapons being used massively, the only way to bring new humans to the world was with the help of genetic engineering, but it was too expensive for most. The latest technology was used to make sure the few infants brought to life were as strong as possible. They repopulated the earth during the following centuries.
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You may be surprised but evolution could occur rapidly in case of extreme stress or environmental change.
I quickly introduce natural occurring but quite rare and often lethal process that can 'speed up ' evolution.
**Transposable Element**
You may not have heard about Transposable Element TE. But those are some small sequences of your genome that are kind of independent. They can replicate and duplicate inside your genome and are usually in a repressed state. It has been shown that sometimes a rush of TE activity may help organisms to adapt simply by "shuffling the genome" or "disturbing it". For example, it is believed that this process (not alone) allows some fish in the artic to become particularly adapt to cold water. (no blood cells at this temperature oxygen concentration in water and so "blood" is enough without the need of blood cell)
**Whole Genome Duplication**
Whole Genome Duplication is the duplication of all your genome. instead of having X chromosome you have 2x. It actually happened several times in the history of evolution. By duplicating your genetic material at such sale it creates redundancy and so the gene copy can evolve much faster (the original function is still assured by the other copy) and it's believed that this even at the origin of the vertebrate (<https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1197285/>)
You may help it by increasing the natural rate of mutation for a time. Like by radiation fallout post-WW III.
If you want to increase artificially the rate of evolution. I only see three ways: Increase mutation rate, intelligent design or selection.
intelligent design, society has created those creatures by genetic manipulation not necessarily in one time. The mutations are directed and designed to create those creatures.
Selection those creatures are been made by selective breeding as proposed by @jamesqf
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wondering the mechanism of how a grappling hook would be able grip onto most surfaces without missing the hit or sliding off.
in video games grappling hooks are ropes or chains which when thrown onto anything they always 100% grip it strongly and are able to hold the weight of the person either for climbing walls, mountains and trees or for pulling enemies one onto the other and smashing them.
The part of hooking correctly 100% of the time seems kind of improbable, specially onto flat surfaces.
that's why the idea of an animal, robust one which can be trained came to mind.
so the question raises, is it realistic to make an animal which can bite through rock and hold the grip with their jaws realistic?
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> is it realistic to make an animal which can bite through rock and hold the grip with their jaws realistic?
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Biting through any rock is highly unrealistic. Granite is a well known problematic rock to be pierced, even for machinery with no biological limitations.
If you really want something that grips on almost any material, you are better off going in the direction of the [gecko feet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_feet):
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0l62j.jpg)
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Added bonus: you can reuse the same gripping tool when you move around, while something stuck in rock is going to be hard to take out.
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While the bite-through-the-rock part might be a bit implausible, I find the premise completely plausible. *Dune* had chairdogs. We use service animals today to assist the blind. Navies have [used marine mammals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_marine_mammal) for various purposes (like dolphins for mine detection).
Frankly, I could easily believe such a creature being a beloved companion - perhaps a primate that could simply climb to where you want it to go and hold on tight. In fact, given that all the creature needs is a harness to which your rope is tied, and maybe add a little psychic connection so the primate knows exactly where to stop climbing... the basics of this idea are completely believable.
It'd need to be a strong little honker, of course, given that you weigh more than it does. But I don't think that compromises the idea at all. In fact, I'm a bit surprised someone hasn't tried to train a primate to do this in real life.
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Why Jaws when you can just Stick it?
Sure, a lizard of some sort would be cool, but various wall materials could break teeth and cause all kinds of other problems. What if your critter happens to hit the wall backed by a steel I beam or something? Anything with the bite strength to manage something like that, or granite, or marble, is going to be to big and heavy to stealthily deploy.
So dial it back down the evolution tree and take another branch and go with an invertebrate instead.
You could take a cue from maybe banana slugs or maybe even a limpet. Limpet teeth are stronger than spider silk [According to this link.](https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31500883)
So give your mad scientist a new lab coat, and tell him to get to work on a grappler with a big limpet on the end. Maybe some sort of spider/limpet hybrid to get the benefit of spider silk in the bargain.
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How about air breathing octopi? Certainly intelligent enough to be trained, although they strike me as too intelligent to want to do a task like this a lot. The suckers and flexible arms give them lots of gripping power.
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**Giant Squirrels!**
Normal squirrels are mammals, intelligent and trainable. No need to bite through rock. Train them to carry a thin cord, loop it and bring it back down. Attach a rope and haul it up.
Alternatively breed **giant squirrels**! They would be excellent climbers and, with tungsten tooth caps could even chew through rock.
You doubt their ability to climb castle walls? See this video <https://youtu.be/H3TAt5javHs>
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Your best bet would be monitor lizards. They are strong enough to hold the weight of many men and have a good lizard-like grip, even on relatively smooth rock surfaces. [Here](https://round.glass/sustain/species/bengal-monitor-lizard/) is a link that refers to a legend on how generals used these lizards to scale fort walls. I am not sure if these legends have been verified till date. Monitor lizards are kept as pets, and there's even evidence that they can be trained to a certain extent.
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**Closed.** This question is [off-topic](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
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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 3 years ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/178843/edit)
Everyone could agree that smashing a sword or shooting an arrow onto your plate of food is not the brightest idea, but vampires are even more extreme.
Vampires eat like spiders, they inject a substance onto the body of their victims which reacts with blood creating an acid which pre-digests the victim. Severed victims who experienced serious blood loss would only be partially digested or raw. Plus if someone is missing their head or a limb, most of the acid would leak out.
Vampires do not have particular super powers,other than perfect night vision and Incredible leaping powers, a vampire can jump 1.5 metres high from standing. Oh and they don't age obviously! But other than that they are vulnerable to being killed normally.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/SF2xK.png)
They all look like the average aristocratic figure and they probably invented BDSM, oh and they have freakish red eyes! Not just a normal red, but brilliant red!
Knowing that I still question how do vampires wage wars without severing limbs and causing important blood loss on their enemies/meals ? It must be a method which is really effective since it was used through most of vampire history and evolution, and over the eons people hardly adapted to counteract the vampires.
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In combat between to factions one made of normal humans and the other made of vampires as described above, how does the vampire faction defeat the human armies without causing damages which would result in serious blood loss?
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Vampires might like to eat their enemies. But they don't eat enemies on the battle field. Someone will come up and kick them, hard. It is analogous to soldiers who have sex with their captives, or members of a conquered population. Those soldiers are not having sex with enemies on the battlefield. I don't think. Not in a pitched battle anyway.
Vampires make war the same way fancy folks do anything grubby and distasteful: they have someone else do it. Vampires usually are in leadership positions and so deploy armies of humans which use the standard tactics of the day. Just as victorious armies evaluate the conquered for persons of interest (for example, the Mongols looked for craftsmen) so too your vampires peruse the conquered for persons of interest to them.
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## Prisoners
Casualities in battles are usually quite low. Most of casualities occure during rout, and even then, only a small portion of soldiers die, the majority is either captured, or managed to flee.
Don't worry about killing some of the soldiers, if it's the only mean to capture a larger part of them.
And don't worry about holywood-style last stand, not only they are rare in history, but if beeing captured mean death with a painless poison, just after a BDSM experience, lot of folks would prefer that instead of fighting to the last and endure a long, painfull death
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**Mace**
Humanity (and vampirity) has always been very inventive in killing others, and while swords, daggers and arrows have always been a staple of warfare, they are far from the only options. There is an entire arsenal of weapons available that is used to inflict blunt force trauma, which will typically cause *internal* bleeding and fractures, but will keep "the blood in the bag" so to speak.
From [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mace_(bludgeon))
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> During the Middle Ages metal armour such as mail protected against the
> blows of edged weapons.[2] Solid metal maces and war hammers proved
> able to inflict damage on well armoured knights, as the force of a
> blow from a mace is great enough to cause damage without penetrating
> the armour.
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So where prehistoric humans might use a stone axe on the battlefield, a prehistoric vampire would rather use a club, so as to not spoil their meal. In the middle ages it's swords for the humans and mace for the vampires, and moving on to the modern age, vampires now have a myriad of options available to them including (but not limited to) gases, bombs that kill through shock wave rather than shrapnel, biological agents etc. etc.
Also, vampires *fight mean*. Just like we don't care about our honor when killing the animals we eat, vampires do not care how we die, as long as their meal isn't spoiled. No vampire ever cosigned the Geneva convention. This means that if they can gas, trap, drown or burn (hmmm, crispy) their prey without even confronting them, they will. Vampires are evil after all.
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If vampires are eating entire armies and so much so that they want to conserve blood from every single soldier -- your vampires aren't going to last long. They are obviously running through their food source with such speed that they will exterminate humanity and then starve.
Predators must be seriously out-numbered by prey.
Consequently, how are they going to work out how to do this before it's moot?
Edit: As a logical consequence, the actual reaction of sensible vampires to war is to make peace by whatever means will work. Magic? Use it. Negotiations? Use them. Treachery? Use it. Anything to keep the sheep docile so you can fleece them, instead of watching them stampede into a marsh and drown.
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I present to you: war hammers and maces.
[Maces](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mace_(bludgeon)) and [war hammers](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_hammer) have been used since before the modern ages, so they should accessible to your vampires. Both of these weapons are blunt (have blunt variants, as both also have spiked variants which could easily pierce the enemy with enough force), usually useful against armored enemies and what's best in your case: will likely cause fractures and internal bleeding, ensuring that acid of yours reach better every single crevice in the body (plus, if they invented BDSM, they might be into having their enemies agonizing in the ground because their limbs were smashed with a hammer or club). Dealing with archery might not be too much of a problem if they are skilled enough, as a well shot arrow can kill a knight with minimal blood loss. If your vampires have good vision, they might want to take aim and take down the more troublesome looking enemies from afar.
For better reference, though more centered around more classic vampires and in a more individual perspective, [this video from Shadiversity](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DTX0qlsV1Yxk&ved=2ahUKEwjM4OnopYvqAhWWEbkGHdZ4DCUQo7QBMAF6BAgCEAE&usg=AOvVaw2Y0akGFUKD5sAJ934xiZYy) actually explores this concept of the weapon most suited to incapacitate an enemy with minimal blood loss.
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**Cauterize open wounds with hot metal**
As Kepotx said in [their answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/178846/66146), the actual ratio of fatality is actually quite low in a battle, leaving you with plenty of wounded prisoners.
If you're just gonna eat them, you could simply cauterize all open wounds with red-hot metal and stop blood loss like that. It's not gonna do much to save the lives of the wounded, as infections are the primary cause of death. But it'll keep them alive a few hours to a few days depending on the severity of the wound, and it should keep the blood inside the body long enough for the venom to take effect.
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I agree that the mace and hammer would be what vampires would use. even better would be a steel quarterstaff, which in the hands of a creature such as vampire, would be far deadlier.
as a matter of fact, i saw a video by Shad Brooks about what weapons vampires would actually use:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX0qlsV1Yxk&list=PLWklwxMTl4sxf_Yvz8ePW7tcpDnhGpKV_&index=34>
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[](https://web.archive.org/web/20200420194501/https://images.ecosia.org/6Tody0fWMuwTruQ70rz0_LJ8VNM=/0x390/smart/http%3A%2F%2Fsites.psu.edu%2Fcams180hoplite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2Fsites%2F25279%2F2015%2F04%2F1-a-phalanx.jpg)
This is the enemy infantry line.
[](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wL7ZI8hqfDE/UOOjGcb1TxI/AAAAAAAAW9c/Nfy_SCJFlkc/s1600/iran+iranian+navy+test+fires+Strait+of+Hormuz+Noor+long-range+anti-ship+cruise+missile+150%E2%80%93200+km+%28255+km+air-launched%29+Yingji-82+or+YJ-82+Eagle+Strike+CSS-N-8+Saccade%29+coast-to-sea+QaderMightymissilLand+%283%29.jpg)
This is our archmage casting fireball.
Area of effect spells can be found in most magic systems. However, whatever the exact effects of the spells are, hitting a tightly grouped crowd is always going to do most damage. In premodern battles strong formations, which don't break are what everyone wants. Those formations usually consist of tightly grouped infantry, as shown on the first picture.
While in our world line-infantry combat was ended by the advent of the machine-gun, I suspect that in a world with magic, AoE spells will have the same effect much earlier. **The question is how warfare would evolve to deal with these spells.** Some solutions I came up with are:
1. Power Level Control
Just keep the mages and the magic system free of AoE spells. However this isn't really what I want and probably won't even work. Getting creative with some alchemical neurotoxin and telekinesis will be as bad as an all out arcane firestorm. Additionally I want my mages to be powerful.
As a side note, while a large percentage of the population in my setting can learn magic, few actually do. Of these, most are weak witches, healers, charlatans and shamans. Few have the potential and fewer get the education to become proper wizards. Fewer of these actually have the inclination and talent to become proper war mages. However, most nations do have at least some of these around.
2. Antimagic
Using countermagic to neutralise magic will only work if both sides are equal on the magical front. Otherwise smashing the enemy with spells is preferable. Of course, if antimagic is an absolute counter to magic this will work, but will also make mages really weak.
3. Magical Resistance
Shielding the troops with protective gear and magic might work for rich elite troops, but not for the peasant infantry. Furthermore magical resistance can be circumvented. While a fireball might fizzle out when it hits an antimagic zone, a 500 kilogram boulder propelled by a telekinesis spell will carry on as a ballistic projectile.
Magical resistance might be somewhat useful, but will ultimately only force the mages to adopt new tactics.
4. Spread Out The Troops
The tightly packed front line is what make AoE spells so effective. If there are fewer soldiers per unit of area, AoE spells become less effective. However a loose melée front line fails its original purpose, which is allowing the warriors to mutually support each other. This would mean that melée infantry would disappear from large battles and that loose formations of missile infantry with secondary melée armaments would dominate.
5. Mobility
Assuming that spells announce themselves before they hit, dodging could be a viable strategy. Cavalry comes to mind here. Heavy cavalry to harness the ranged infantry and mages and horse archers as an upgrade of the ranged infantry.
6. Entrenchment
Since AoE spells could be avoided by taking cover and since traditional defences against cavalry are gone, entrenching one's position on a battlefield becomes increasingly important. [Defensive fighting positions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_fighting_position) with a special focus on cavalry defence might become relevant on the battlefield. This would also mean that bows and crossbows, which can be operated kneeling would become relevant weapons. Caltrops and spikes, maybe doubling as javelins, could be used to enhance the defence of such positions.
While I think that line-infantry tactics would still be used in minor battles and skirmishes when no mages are around, major battles with mages involved might use tactics as described above. **Did I miss something? Are there better ideas for adapting pre-modern armies to AoE magic?**
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> This is our archmage casting fireball.
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It is a better example than perhaps you intended. *That* is an antiship missile. A NATO equivalent, perhaps the [Harpoon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harpoon_(missile)), costs a million bucks a go. You don't use it on grunts; it is a specialist and expensive device intended to destroy big, tough and expensive targets.
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> Fewer of these actually have the inclination and talent to become proper war mages. However, most nations do have at least some of these around.
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A *nation* only has *some* war mages. This makes them very rare, and very valuable. You absolutely don't want to waste them swatting frightened farmers. Use them to take out high-value targets like other war mages, large fortifications, perhaps even warships. Most battles won't see any sign of such fearsomely dangerous people, for the same reason that most battles won't have the king personally present either. They have better things to do with their time.
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> While in our world line-infanterie combat was ended by the advent of the maschine-gun, I suspect that in a world with magic AoE spells will have the same effect much earlier.
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Given the rarity of your boom-wizards, I suspect most battles will be fought pretty much as they always were. When a wizard is present, I would expect the slaughter to be terrible, and no lessons would have been learned.
Cannon, volley guns, mortars, rockets and cannon firing explosive shells all thoroughly predated the machinegun and did not end combat in formations... machineguns just made it unambiguous. Until your boom-wizards are more commonplace, formation fighting seems likely to remain.
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> This is the enemy infanterie line.
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If that's what your wizards are used against, I'd expect them to get slaughtered the very first time they come across someone like the Scythians or Mongols. If the Mongols had similar wizards, I'd expect them to be *devastating* against the sort of fortifications which helped hold them off from conquering Europe. They're the sort of forces that will take best advantage of them, as they are already a highly mobile and non-formation-fighting army. Perhaps the survivors might emulate them, or more likely the descendants of the invaders will keep those tactics once the parent empire breaks up.
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I am actually dealing with this situation myself in my magic system. Basically what I have is the power of three m1 abrams on the back of each of the magic users with AOE attacks. They can also fire them as fast as a bolt action rifle, sometimes. So, OP, right? I have a society that counters this in two ways: Ambush and a retreating arrow barrage. Because these guys are so over-powered for the tech level they are found in, you can't take them head-on, you can only reduce their numbers while they chase you halfway around the world. But I have nothing for line infantry that can fight them in pre-modern times. But my magic isn't your magic, so here are a few options.
**Zombies**
Basically, if you have any magic user that can make a ridiculous amount of Flacc infantry (zombies, wild beasts, tame beasts, sick beasts, insect swarms, flocks of birds, hive-mind humanoid built to die, etc.) you have got a cheap army that poses some level of danger to these magic-users, and even though they are the exact reverse of high-level warriors, they are also entirely expendable and their only purpose is to basically slow the enemy down.
**Magicians attack!**
Basically, if you really want to kill magicians, you often have to use magicians. Basically, if thousands or tens of thousands of mages have similar powers, not everyone with those powers will be part of the same team, which means you can counter mages with mages.
**Assassins**
Just because they can kill doesn't mean they are great at healing wounds dealt secretly in the night. simply put, if a nation has absolutely amazing assassins, they will have a strong incentive to draw out a campaign as long as possible to let their spys do most of the work before their army enters the battle.
**Bombs**
I know you said pre-modern, but gunpowder was a random discovery, it's not something developed in modern times and it's not something you have to limit to a particular tech level. You can make steam engines without gunpowder and gunpowder without steam engines. Basically, these would be used when un-powered or weakly powered forces successfully ambush an army. It's basically AOE magic lite, but it is better than nothing.
**Bio-weapons**
Who knows? maybe these people are really great at making diseases in the lab, even in pre-modern times. IN a desperate situation, they may leverage their power to unleash secret diseases against larger powers to prevent war!
**Chemical weapons**
Basically, you can make a gas-mask in medieval times, so there is reason to use chemical weapons if your people are able to make them, and a higher risk compared to reward.
**In the end**
if they kill the flesh, but not stone, build a wall and tell them to climb. But if the stone will not hold them back, water is your final chance. But once they get across the water, then no army will stop them. The only thing you can do is use some sort of guerilla tactics and overpower them in the odd fronts they are not prepared for. This is exactly how insurgents fight the US army in Afghanistan and how they fight the Sauds in Yemen. When taking on a more powerful foe, you never take them head-on. You take them where they are weak.
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### Counterspells
The biggest killer of the pre-modern warfare style is the creation of an unblockable (or mostly unblockable) attack. When both armies can deal significantly more damage than they can resist, the main conflict on the battlefield transforms from attack-and-defense to stealth-and-intelligence - hiding the position of your own forces while revealing those of your enemies, allowing you to hit them with the big guns before they can hit you with theirs. This is basically what most modern warfare is built around.
If you don't want that in your world, you're going to have to deal with the "unblockable" part. If your mages are missile launchers, I suggest the magical equivalent of the anti-missile missile - mages who specialize in shooting down enemy fireballs, shielding their own troops, or disrupting spells at a distance before they are cast. While the mages sling attack spells across the battlefield and set up barriers to defend their own side, the melee fighters charge beneath the fireworks bursting over their heads.
This creates an interesting strategic effect - tightly grouped armies are stronger in melee than spread-out ones, but this formation makes them vulnerable to enemy magic attack. The more an army can depend on their counter-mages to block enemy magic attack, the stronger they will be in melee - but these armies will be much more vulnerable to any attacks that manage to eliminate their own mages.
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Well — just as a suggestion — assuming that powerful magics take a reasonable amount of time to cast, and battle-mages need line-of-sight to cast these spells, then you could have cadres of anti-mage mages, whose job (like snipers) is to pick off enemy mages (using small, quick spells) before the enemy mages pull off big area-of-effect spells.
Alternately, mages could work like artillery, used for suppression fire and softening targets while infantry take cover in fox-holes or trenches, and then cease to allow foot soldiers to advance.
But from the perspective of a foot soldier, only two things would really help: some kind of magical shield (either for individuals or entire phalanxes) that would keep the worst of AOE spells from affecting them, or something that would allow them to close with enemy foot soldiers quickly enough that AOE spells could not be used without wiping out both sides. Otherwise it would just be attrition, like in the early days of cannon: charge full speed, expect the enemy to get off a couple of volleys that vaporize a certain percentage of your troops, and hope the survivors are disciplined enough to overrun the enemy lines and the mages to secure the field.
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**It all depends on how magic works at a tactical level.** Can powerful AoEs be cast at a whim, or do they take some time to prepare, or do they need time to recharge? Can they be unleashed everywhere or are there restrictions? Is the location decided upon beginning the casting or when it's completed? Can it be pre-placed like mines?
Depending on this, you might get vastly different answers. For example let's assume that *AoEs is range-limited and needs some time to be casted*.
Maneuverability is key in such a scenario. AoE cannot be used to swiftly counter unexpected threats, so you'll see units like horse archers in loose formations maneuvering around.
Their goal would be to harass the enemy and to try and provoke them to either use their AoE up against them or suffer losses. If the enemy uses his AoE, the rest of the army has time to get into melee range until new AoEs are ready to be used. If successful, the enemy now can't use his AoE because he would hit his own troops. Friendly casters would be needed to provide some protection at a later stage, because if the enemy has lost anyway, he might be desperate enough to try AoE even if it hits its own troops.
Oh, ambushes would be a viable tactic, too.
If *AoE has tight placement restrictions* (like "max 500m away from the caster" or "within line of sight"), the key to winning battles is intelligence: knowing where the enemy casters are. From that knowledge, commanders would decide upon bypassing the casters, trying to have them assassinated, lure them away, deploy their own ranged troops outside of caster range or simply try counter-artillery tactics with their own casters. Infantry would only be send in if the enemies casters appear to be sufficiently busy.
If *AoEs can be cast at a whim in rapid succession*, your best bet is concealing your troops as long as possible, to minimize exposure to enemy AoE before the actual melee starts. Ambushes and general guerilla-style tactics would dominate warfare in such a world, not big armies meeting on open battlefields. If powerful mages are scarce they can't be everywhere, so if the enemy wants to control your territory there will be garrisons and other units without magic support spread out. These, and the supply lines of the bigger enemy troop concentrations (that have mages with them) would be the main focus of the fighting. The inferior side would just avoid fighting with the enemies' mages directly because it's pointless.
If *AoE works like mines*, the tactical aproach would be "try to prepare a battlefield and force the enemy to fight there by clever maneuvering".
**That being said, I don't think that this kind of warfare would be common in your world.** You're thinking about using your mages tactically, but most likely they would be used strategically. If a mage is capable of terrible AoE damage, surely they can somehow sneak into an enemies city and start some nasty fires? Destroy stuff like dams or mines? In a medieval world, where most of the economy besides farming is located in very few towns and cities, these possibilities would make war against magically capable enemies a bad idea: Everyone has more to lose then to win.
Think of them as a kind of nuclear weapon: Sure, you can use them on the battlefield, but that's not the way to get most out of them. You get most out of them if you use them as a strategic threat to your opponents. The US and USSR did not spend their nukes on each other. The used them to bully everyone around who did not have nukes and wasn't allied to someone who had. Realms where mages are plentiful would do just the same, all other realms would seek to ally with one of those realms or just be at their mercy anyway. Warfare would probably mostly consist of something like all the proxy wars during the cold war. Realms with negligible magical abilities fighting other such realms.
Adding to this would be a phenomenon similar to the "brain drain", where the big and wealthy realms have much more to offer for talented mages and thus bleed the smaller realms dry of them.
All of that would make all-out use of combat magic in battles between large armies somewhat rare.
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**Nothing Changes... if you go back far enough**
*In premodern battles strong formations, which don't break are what everyone wants.* - This is not universally true by any means. Nor is it universally true that forces which fought in such a fashion were automatically superior to those that did not. (Looking at you, Vikings-in-North-America and Crassus' Legions)
Instead what you traditionally had were raids, ambushes, and the occasional "Pitched battle" which involved warriors exchanging ranged fire (javelins, arrows, what-have-you) at roughly 2/3 the maximum distance of their chosen weapon in a loose formation. Close combat weapons were (again, usually) used only in pursuit of fleeing foes, most of whom got away. If you want the details of the whys and whyfores I suggest *War Before Civilization* but I think for your setting two reasons trump the others:
1: Raids and Ambushes were more effective. It's WAAAAAY safer (for the attacker) to burn down a village at night and spear people fleeing burning houses/ambush a lone hunter than fight in a pitched battle.
2: Pitched battles were un-sustainability lethal for population size.
Your battle-mages will mean these two qualities, especially the second one, are still true even after your societies start being able to have larger populations. Any attempt at "ganging up" can be countered by one wizard shooting one fireball, nobody'll risk it. So battles will stay at what you might call a "large skirmish" style fight. Because of the increased lethality, ambushes and raids will still be the preferred method of warfare. After all, 15 guys, 2 of them mages, can do as much or more damage sneaking around and launching a wall-breaking fireball followed by house-destroying fireballs in the middle of the night as 1,000 infantry and accouterments can besieging a place for a year.
So what you'd actually end up having is battle-mage societies adopting "primitive" style warfare as a matter of course, and only those non-magic-using "Savages" will be stupid enough to actually stand shoulder-to-shoulder in a fight. Your system makes mass-battles far less likely in any event, as small groups can do massive damage to societies on their own. So instead of one large army maneuvering against an opposing large army and finally a battle/siege takes place, you'll have dozens or hundreds of small groups raiding into enemy territory trying to annihilate similar groups in ambushes or destroy settlements.
I should point out that the "primitive" style of warfare I described above is actually MORE deadly than modern war as a % of population, let alone other types of ancient warfare. By orders of magnitude. *War Before Civilization* did the math, and turns out you are more likely to die by warfare in any given year as, say, a Native American of almost any tribe we have a reliable record for (pre or post Europeans) than as a Russian OR German 1914-1945, or a Frenchman during the Napoleonic wars. So even though your "pitched battles" are rarer and might LOOK less deadly than two pike phalanxes crashing into each other, in reality the actual war will be wildly more devastating.
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Love the meme! I go a similar situation with my own mages they are surface to air missiles and everyone else is 14th middle ages. I counter the issue with my mages tire with large missile launches over time. There is also risk of it falling there is a distance the enemy must be within so the missile can fall onto them but it also can't kill them all so similar to cannons just keep moving fast close the gap the mages can not fire upon their own side with missiles at some point and must switch to tactics like flame wisp and other things that are easier to aim and harm specific targets they do not want to magic their side as much as possible. Eventually magic users must push into the horde or wait for a break in the line to utilize spells because it could be too compact like shooting your gun in a crowd.
Mages have the advantage at first but you can mess them up a bit with long arrows as they then need to shield and cast meaning they must do so blindly or else leave a small window for them to see and guage through leaving their eyes open for snipers or a very lucky shot.
I do have black powder guns that have magical properties so if the enemy has a few of these rare things around it can harm mages as they must prepare their shields for what they face bullets are new so many will assume arrows if some are launched and will prepare a weaker shield for it as having the shield up does drain their magical side they must pace themselves in long battles less they can't cast and their side gets overrun.
Now later I introduce front line mage soliders into the mix who can be in your face and with powers at first this is beyond devastating. Magic is used in your face in line of sight carefully launched unless they do it right off the gate as an opener they can do a large scale blast taking out many enemy but not once the clashing begins.
Their weapons will utilize their magic as well able to hold the elements or become stronger like sheering metal armor but time is against the mage they are pouring their power into their items and utilizing shields if required in addition to that the enemy will overtime step up their game with guns and anti magical arrowheads, armor, and swords the enemy is forced to innovate along with more wave and new tactics.
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They are artillery.
Yes they can launch massive AoE bombs, but its not like they can show up and snap their fingers! They need time for the big ones to be unleashed. Time to set up, cast one and perhaps even a downtime before they can pack up and move as residual magic needs to be dealt with.
On top of that this isn't a missile guided by internal navigation, several planes and a satellite. This is one human trying to toss a massive bomb across a large distance as no one wants to be near it when it hits. Accuracy might be a problem when you are trying to point your spell by hand across a kilometer or more distance. Accidentally hit a tree or rock closer to home and you could have a serious problem, or you overshoot your target and waste the shot.
A Harpoon missile has about 221kg TNT worth of explosives (at least I assume its TNT equivalent of explosives mentioned). [This article](https://www.sccm.org/getattachment/cc197ca2-fe84-47c0-b3ef-7d00abd6271b/Conventional-Explosions-and-Blast-Injuries) mentions that a 220 kg explosive has a lethal blast radius of 30m and a serious injury radius of 450m (I don't think its a guaranteed serious injury though, but getting hit by shrapnel from a car bomb). That's a lot of distance to aim your magic over and hit accurately.
So spells are powerful, but the enemy can mitigate it somewhat by getting closer and forcing less powerful spells to be cast. It can also take time to prepare the spells, people could have tell-tale signs they are being targeted, the accuracy might be a problem and if it takes time to deal with after-effects of casting the spell you generate a vulnerable time period in which an enemy mage can try to do some counter-battery fire or soldiers can try and break through to the mage, possibly with cavalry or archers.
It makes mages more of a cannon. Lethal, important but not complete game-changers.
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I think your point about counter/anti-magic is somewhat unfair, just like historical battles were. Historically, the side with more people usually won and soldiers had an advantage over warriors (fight as a team vs fight as an individual). Realistically, whenever you have a battle between two forces, there are **two scenarios**:
* **They are more-or-less evenly matched.** Every commander knows that to counter the opponent's magic, you need your own magic division. Each squad or platoon gets their own dedicated mage compliment who are responsible for shielding the grunts from enemy fireballs (and the grunts are to protect the squishy magi from enemy grunts). The overall effect that this has on warfare is that it becomes a little more fast-paced and a little more strategic because HVT's in the form of magic users are suddenly available.
* **There is a gross power disparity.** One side has the obvious overwhelming magical advantage. For example, army A shows up with a cabal of archmages and army B has two hedge witches and a magical mascot dog. In a straight battle, army A would turn army B to chunky salsa, so what do they do? *They obviously surrender or retreat immediately*. Commanders aren't stupid, and the grunts aren't either. If they feel like they're about to be slaughtered by the enemy or that their magic support is insufficient, they'd simply refuse to attack.
Added to this is the fact that a force without magical support would never get large enough to get into a large-scale battle anyways, because wizards can preempt any hostilities. Even then, having an unfair battle isn't anything new. Just look at the great armies of antiquity like the Roman one: they simply steamrolled over any minor opponent and having mages wouldn't have changed much.
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In a very large and decadent galactic empire (think of Asimov's foundation empire), a new technology leap allows planet's government bodies to communicate instantaneously across the galaxy. It can be considered a space telegraph. It also means that there is no or few limit to knowledge access (as long as the knowledge database is part of the network).
Because of this new technology, the planets on the edge of the galaxy notice that the empire has become decadent (both on the technological level and societal level), is not able to maintain peace (warlords regularly try their luck - without success so far) and will probably ask more of its subjects in hope to restore order. The planets of the border of the galaxy are the most technologically advanced of the empire, as they were colonised later (or more exactly they only have access to the most recent technology whereas planets colonised before have to maintain and use older tech), but they are also the weakest and less populated.
How would such a planet/group of planet/political bodies gain its independence from a dying, but still strong, empire? It is expected that an independence declaration would result in a military answer but the travel time from the core of the Empire to its edge is around 100 years (but armies can be garrisoned closer). How would the independents use this time to prepare?
Except from the instantaneous communication, the technological level is pretty low for a space traveling civilisation: long distance travel can only be made by big ships (smaller or individual ships cannot go far), energy would probably be nuclear (fission or fusion depending on the planet's history), no spectacular weapons.
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The details of how (or whether) interplanetary war could work is a giant topic in its own right. But as user535733 points out in their comment, it is likely that if Planet A just wants to *destroy* Planet B, they'll always be able to. The mere fact of interstellar travel implies being able to accelerate a large rock to a good fraction of light speed, and make it invisible to any kind of telescope. And if you don't share a planet with your enemy, there's no limit on how much destruction you can afford to inflict.
Of course, if the outer planets have (or can build) their own interstellar travel capability, that is a double-edged sword, and they can just advise the empire that a steady train of invisible planet-killer asteroids are already in flight, and if the empire tries anything, those missiles won't get the instruction to abort at the last minute. The weaker planet has the advantage in that kind of game of chicken, since they have less to lose.
Otherwise, their only option is to use the next 100 years to evacuate to a different planet in secret. The secrecy would be very difficult unless the government of the rebel planet can totally control all faster-than-light communication with the empire.
But if the FTL telegraph is widespread – if everyone on every planet has one in their pocket – that has all sorts of interesting implications about how the empire would work. Distant planets could have very active commerce with one another, because even though physical goods take generations to actually arrive, they can be bought and sold in flight (and, up to a point, diverted from one destination planet to another); plus, things like movies, music, accountancy, legal advice and dating websites would be unaffected by distance. In that case, military power would be almost irrelevant – if you tell planet B you're going to invade them in 100 years' time, they can hire assassins, ruin your economy etc. within weeks.
So, if setting up the planetary rebellion is your main goal, I would suggest that the FTL telegraph is a ten-billion-dollar building-sized device that can only send a thousand text messages in a year.
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**Communication != Contribution**
There are a few considerations that factor in to the decision that the masters of an empire take when faced with a request for independence of a colonial state;
1) Ongoing Contributions of the Colony to the Empire
2) Ongoing Expenditure in maintaining / defending that colony
3) Reputational Damage
Let's deal with these one by one. A colony that is contributing to the empire in a critical way (either it is a contribution well above the cost of maintenance and defence, or it is a source of a critical resource that is not available elsewhere) is unlikely to get any traction on an attempt to assert independence. It's in the interest of the Empire to preserve the existing relationship.
A colony can solve this problem by either agreeing to generous trade arrangements, ensuring that there are alternative sources of critical resources that the Empire needs, or by finding their own access to these critical resources to be depleted. So, if there is a resource that the colony is obligated to provide but production is reduced due to 'critical shortages' or whatever excuse you can sell to the Empire, your usefulness reduces. It sounds counter-intuitive but if the Empire genuinely believes they have sucked you dry of what they need, they tend to lose interest, especially given the cost of maintaining you as a dependent colony.
That of course leads us to point 2 and the fact that it takes 100 years to get from the core to the outer colony tells me that shipping goods or troops there is going to be hideously expensive. If you can't provide them what they need, and it's going to cost them more to keep you in the empire either through concessions or through military action, they are less inclined to do so. A bad investment is a bad investment whether it is a flutter on a dodgy horse at the races or in maintaining and defending a non-performing colony. Good leaders would understand that so wouldn't press the issue if they were approached in a respectful way with their request.
That brings us into point number 3 - if we were to look at the American Declaration of Independence as an example, this is probably the classic example of what not to do on both sides.
Britain was unresponsive to the requests of the Americans and saw their colony as little more than a resource that needed to do as it was told.
America boldly declared themselves independent in a 'sod-you' to the British, who were forced to respond in an attempt to preserve their reputation on the international stage.
So; if your outer colony really wants independence, all it has to do is follow 3 simple steps;
1) Minimise your usefulness
2) Maximise your cost of maintenance (already done in part by the tyranny of distance)
3) Ask nicely
There are plenty of examples of how this works in practice. Just look at pretty much every African nation in the post-imperial era. Also look at India, Canada, and Australia as examples of how to detach from Britain with minimal, if any, bloodshed.
The mistake that can be made (and we learn this from the Roman experience) is to say that independence is a threat to an empire. That empires must by necessity grow. This just isn't the case and good leaders that have learnt from history know that and as such are not going to push the issue unless they're slapped in the face.
In short, gaining your independence may be a lot easier than you're led to think by those in power in the Empire. They're not going to advertise the fact but if a few colonies on the fringe want to leave they may actually breathe a sigh of relief; more resources to spread across the rest of their (now smaller) borders to protect themselves and their subjects.
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**By not mattering enough**
Afghanistan has done this repeatedly since the bronze age. A bigger, stronger, richer empire absorbs them, only for them to re-emerge as an independant and uncontrolled state the moment said empire is on the ropes. This is possible for a few reasons.
1: The value they pose to the empire is outweighed by the cost of re-subjugating them
2: a strong local culture that paid lip service to the conquerors while maintaining a local identity exists
3: said strong local culture simply never stops resisting. Every overt and expensive move against them by the parent empire is met with low grade but unceasing resistance. This makes it unprofitable to maintain a presence there.
4: They are so far removed from the center of power that losing control of them will go unnoticed by the majority of the empire. Converseley, expending a laughably high amount of resources on re-conquering them WILL be noticed by the empire negativley.
**Conclusion**
If you want to know how some unimportant backwater manages to establish itself as an independant state seperate from the seemingly invincible empire, just read up on why afghanistan has become "The Graveyard of Empires." Essentially, periodically throughout history they have managed to make themselves a more expensive problem to deal with than its worth, and been abandoned because said empire is too busy trying to fry bigger fish.
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The answer is quietly. The Empire's capacity for the projection of force takes a long time to implement. Locally based battalions can attack sooner. The name of the game is gradually and subtly change the management arrangements. In fact, an Empire will be mostly managed and controlled by local officials and institutions.
A remote planet aware the Empire is falling apart and wanting to gain their independence will exploit imperial officialdom and institutions to strengthen themselves against the impending collapse of the central power. They will do this to ostensibly strengthen the Empire, locally, in their planetary system. Effectively they will be self-managing and self-governing.
Now what they won't do is play the mug's game of actually declaring themselves as being independent. No-one wants the Imperial forces to turn up a century later and blast your planet into dust. Actually, if the Empire only has fission and fusion weapons this won't reduce planets to dust, but they will do a lot of damage. Populations will get hurt.
Your remote planet will become independent by becoming independent through taking over the imperial system of government at the local level. They will end up ruling and governing themselves. And isn't this what independence is all about? Of course, it is!
Stick your collective head about the parapet and declare yourselves independent from the Empire and you will get stomped on. Better to sneak out the back door, while still calling yourself a loyal part of the Empire, while becoming *de facto* independent. Substance is always more important than style.
There is absolutely no need to try and fight a massively more powerful opponent in the form of the Empire, when you know you will inevitably lose.
Once the Empire has actually fallen, then the remote planet can fully declare itself an independent world.
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The best play may be to simply wait for an opportunity to present itself. Decadent empires by definition often have many domestic problems. These could range from widespread corruption to very serious affairs like civil wars over the throne.
With enough corruption present and many layers between the local administration and the core imperial bureaucracy, your planet could be autonomous in every aspect except name. Such a situation would be *de facto* independence with both sides pretending otherwise out of political convenience.
An empire whose core regions are busy fighting each other in support of various imperial claimants will hardly have the time or resources to go and pacify some rogue planet out in the periphery. This need not be open civil war. Even an internal power struggle can stall normal government operations. Post-conflict, a new ruler might well have to prioritize building support in core regions at the expense of letting more distant regions run wild.
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Deception. Take over the FTL communications. "Everything's fine here, no problems, don't need any more security." Stage shows or bribes for any official inspectors. Have a robust counter-intelligence to capture or subvert spies.
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### Mutually assured destruction
The lesson from [Ender's Game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ender%27s_Game) is that you plan your attack in advance.
The first act of the newly-independent planet would be to construct a battle fleet and send it to the Imperial Core, crewed with people prepared to die for their independent planet. (I'm assuming some kind of cryosleep exists and these aren't generation ships.) And with FTL communication, make absolutely 100% sure that this battle fleet is on its way and that the crews are all fully prepared for suicide runs on the Imperial Core planets. If your intention is simply to bomb the planet until the radioactive lava splashes, the gravity well and the size of space are always on the side of the attacker, and there is very little the planet can do about it.
When the battle fleet arrive at the Imperial Core, they can check (with FTL communication) whether the independent planet is still independent. If it is, great - they must have reached some deal with the Empire. If not, it's Hammer-of-God time.
In theory, the Empire could evacuate their core planets and move elsewhere. In practise it's hard to see that working in a decadent Empire without strong civil authority. Plus an Empire being too weak to defend its core planets is going to be a sign that other planets can't rely on it either, which will have a cascade effect from other planets bidding for independence.
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# The enemy of my enemy is my friend
By using the advanced method of communication, the rebelling planet could attempt to utilize their rebellion as a means of incentive for others to act out against the Empire.
Supposedly, the rebelling planet has some resource that's valuable to the empire (otherwise, why be there?), which is now being deprived from the Empire. Combined with the fact that rebellions take additional resources to address, convincing enemies or other rebellious planets to take action is a strategy that might pan out. This will be especially effective if your 'allies' are made aware of forces that are being sent to take out your planet (which means that there are fewer forces to deal with additional uprisings or foreign armies).
It might make a difference between only receiving half of the number of enemy forces when they arrive (as the other half are reassigned to somewhere more valuable), or the enemy army is delayed by another 100-so years.
As anyone who's ever played Faster Than Light can tell you, dealing with 2 problems simultaneously is much more difficult than dealing with 2 problems consecutively. So the more problems you cause for the Empire at once, the less effective they'll be at dealing with you.
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Guerrilla warfare is the comparison that comes to mind. If the population on the rim of the empire is willing to give up the notion of continuously holding any given planet as territory, then mobility becomes their advantage. By the time the imperial forces have done the years of travelling to reach a destination, their targets have long since moved on.
This advantage grows if you combine this with a geometric realization, that the size of the territory on the rim of an empire is vast compared to the size of the core. The population of the core will be much greater with more disposable resources to put into military might for awhile, but in terms of travel and military policing, and the resources those burn, the rim has a potential strategic advantage provided they can drag out the conflict long enough to starve the core of its excess resource stores. This becomes even greater if the instantaneous communication is used to collaborate with renegades that are sprinkled around the rim. The imperial forces could be playing whack-a-mole travelling back and forth between random locations on roughly opposite sides of the empire.
As the conflict grows and the population at the core becomes more dissatisfied with how their lives become constrained by the demand for resources and manpower, that same instantaneous communication mechanism can become the way to transmit back propaganda that supports the growing discontent. Eventually the empire has to put as much effort into solidifying its hold on the core, as it was in trying to bring the rim to heel. It may even decide it just isn't worth losing it all, and starts to replace conflict with negotiation. Since the rim has the newer technology, trade may become the excuse for starting to coexist, as the traded resources could be brought to the core, and perhaps satisfy the unhappy population.
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[Question]
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I'm no engineer, but I was wondering how a steam-powered door would work. I want it to be difficult to open unless you know how (not a simple "twist the doorknob and open"). There is access to plenty of water and fire in this scenario as well.
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[Hero of Alexandria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero_of_Alexandria) (c. 10 CE – c. 70 CE) was a Greek mathematician and engineer who was active in the 1st century CE in his native city of Alexandria, Roman Egypt.
He wrote several books describing very advanced machines, including a fully automated theater play performed by marionettes actuated *"by a binary-like system of ropes, knots, and simple machines operated by a rotating cylindrical cogwheel"* (Wikipedia).
More inline with the question, he described an engine which *"used air from a closed chamber heated by an altar fire to displace water from a sealed vessel; the water was collected and its weight, pulling on a rope, opened temple doors"*. (Wikipedia)
The construction of the machine is described in his book, [*Pneumatica*](http://himedo.net/TheHopkinThomasProject/TimeLine/Wales/Steam/URochesterCollection/Hero/index-2.html), [section 37](http://himedo.net/TheHopkinThomasProject/TimeLine/Wales/Steam/URochesterCollection/Hero/section37.html).
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> *The construction of a small temple such that, on lighting a fire, the doors shall open spontaneously, and shut again when the fire is extinguished. Let the proposed temple stand on a pedestal, A B C D, on which lies a small altar, E D.*
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> *Through the altar insert a tube, F G, of which the mouth F is within the altar and the the mouth G is contained in a globe, H, reaching nearly to its centre: the tube must be soldered into the globe, in which a bent siphon, K L M, is placed. Let the hinges of the doors be extended downwards and turn freely on pivots in the base A B C D; and from the hinges let two chains, running into one, be attached, by means of a pulley, to a hollow vessel, N X, which is suspended; while other chains, wound upon the hinges in an opposite direction to the former, and running into one, are attached, by means of a pulley, to a leaden weight, on the descent of which the doors will be shut. Let the outer leg of the siphon K L M lead into the suspended vessel; and through a hole, P, which must be carefully closed afterwards, pour water into the globe enough to fill one half of it.*
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> *It will be found that, when the fire has grown hot, the air in the altar becoming heated expands into a larger space; and, passing through the tube F G into the globe, it will drive out the liquid contained there through the siphon K L M into the suspended vessel, which, descending with its weight, will tighten the chains and open the doors. Again, when the fire is extinguished, the rarefied air will escape through the pores in the side of the globe, and the bent siphon, (the extremity of which will be immersed in the water in the suspended vessel) will draw up the liquid in the vessel in order to fill up the void left by the particles removed.*
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> *When the vessel is lightened the weight suspended will preponderate and shut the doors.*
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> *Some in place of water use quicksilver, as it is heavier than water and is easily disunited by fire.*
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> (Hero of Alexandria, [*Pneumatica*](http://himedo.net/TheHopkinThomasProject/TimeLine/Wales/Steam/URochesterCollection/Hero/index-2.html), 37, translation by Bennet Woodcroft, London, 1851.)
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[](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hero_of_Alexandria.png) [](http://himedo.net/TheHopkinThomasProject/TimeLine/Wales/Steam/URochesterCollection/Hero/section37.html)
*Left, a 17th century German portrait of Hero of Alexandria. Right, a diagram illustrating Hero's pneumatic temple doors, as depicted in the 1851 English translation by Bennet Woodcroft.*
[Answer]
Forget postulation; there's a real example of a steam-powered levering mechanism (in this case a bridge deck, but no reason why it couldn't be a door) within Tower Bridge in London.
London's Tower bridge is a Victorian steam-powered\* bascule bridge; the bridge deck is moved (rocked/"basculed") using a cantilever and hydraulics system. The hydraulics system is powered using massive steam-operated driving engines, which drive the pumps which move the river water into accumulators (storage reservoirs). With the aid of the weight of the cantilever, the weight of the bridge deck is overcome and the deck is raised. The mechanism is so well balanced/engineered that it only takes a minute for the process to complete from the moment the operator engages the pump.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/PSsdj.png)
<https://www.towerbridge.org.uk/Visit-Engine-Rooms/>
<https://www.towerbridge.org.uk/bridge-history/> (See **How It Works**)
Applying this to your original question, there's no reason why you couldn't do the same thing. In the case of Tower Bridge, the moving part is overcoming gravity. With a door, moving laterally of course, the force direction may be translated using a pulley. A steam pump puts some water into an accumulator, the accumulator drops, pulling the rope or chain on the pulley, the rope/chain on the other end is attached to the door which could, if you so wished, weigh tonnes.
In order for the door to return to its original position, an additional pump isn't required; a static weight (similar in operation to Tower Bridge's deck) may be chained taking the door in the opposite direction; the accumulator's contents are discharged in order to have the process reversed.
Note that the mechanism itself may be placed a distance away (owing to the pulleys), possibly underneath the door itself, hidden from view. The driving mechanism also has the potential to be armoured (such as behind a stone wall or floor) in the scenario that it's a defensive feature; much the same way that drawbridge/portcullis mechanisms were hidden in castles.
Regarding your "difficult to open" requirement: with this approach it's down to your imagination. Could be twist to open, could be a hidden lever; a book or statue that requires to be pulled. You could even have tap dancing on a sequence of floor tiles, operating effectively as a combination lock\*\*. Anything that could be used effectively as a switch to fire up the steam engine hidden in the neighbouring room.
\*strictly speaking the bridge has been electric-powered since 1976, however it was originally steam-powered.
\*\*"In the Latin alphabet, Jehovah begins with an I!"
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Well, if you want a puzzle or lock of some kind, then do that yourself, but the basic action of opening a door is still "Push/Pull/Activate (Input Device).
Steam is pretty good at pressurizing, but as with all gases, it will want to expand before pressure starts to rise above normal. If you make it a bit longer than it needs to be to fill the doorway, you can fit a hollow space in the bottom. Place that over a chamber with valves to your boiler. When the steam is released into the chamber, it will push up the door with an action that might look similar to a trombone slide. When it's at the top, it can be locked and held in place. Lowering can be as simple as pulling a lever to release the lock.
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If you've ever seen the control panel of a steam locomotive, it certainly meets your criteria of 'difficult to {operate} unless you know how':
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ffjt1.jpg)
The ridiculous number of valves fundamentally does quite a simple job - regulates the flow of steam into a cylinder, where the pressure drives a piston. Many of the controls exist to prevent the boiler pressure exceeding safe limits.
Your simplest option, therefore, is to have an extremely heavy slider door, not unlike a blast door, which is opened and closed with a simple steam piston acting against the foundations of the building. The boiler must be fired up and brought up to pressure, then the steam can transfer energy to the piston to slide the door open. Difficulty to open can be achieved by not labelling any of the valves (which is evil in its own right!) and relying on some esoteric instructions, shapes, or mystic riddles to inform the protagonist(s) which are the correct valves to operate to cause the door to open (and should they get it wrong, a catastrophic boiler explosion is a good possibility). And because the door is incredibly heavy (just like the hundreds of tonnes of iron that form a locomotive), moving the door with anything less than its own power is impractical.
You could even store most of the moving parts on the other side of the door, leaving only the furnace and valves accessible (although do note that the moving parts have a huge appetite for oil, so in practical terms keeping these on the other side might mean the door seizes shut through lack of lubricant over time.
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[Question]
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In my upcoming novel, my protagonist decided to paint every part of his body in mud before engaging with the fire breathing dragon which dwells at the bottom of a dormant volcano. The flame from the dragon can turn sand into glass. Of course, my protagonist will have to keep maintaining the moisture level in the mud, but I'm concerned that the dragon will make a terracotta soldier out of him instead. Is this a good method to go head to head with the vile creature? If not, how can I touch up to give him a fighting chance?
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Your protagonist is really going to get burned badly.
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> The flame from the dragon can turn sand into glass
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Glass won't form until you cool molten sand and it won't be molten until about 1600 C which means your protagonist would get a third degree burn easily ( one second at about 160 C is enough ) from contact with molten dirt and sand in mud.
There's simply too much heat coming in to avoid this.
The most vulnerable parts will be any skin that directly contacts the mud. And mud is *wet*, so unless your chap/lass has a fully covering waterproof layer underneath the mud they're in major trouble. Any wet cloth would be really problematic - it will either burn or become extremely hot and will transmit that direct to the skin underneath.
You not only need a lot of layers, you need to be able to get them off quickly before you're cooked by them.
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> how can I touch up to give him a fighting chance?
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Well unless this is a very conveniently small dragon you have an additional problem : It's going to hit you as soon as it can after it flames you.
Your hero, let's call him/her "Crispee", will first suffer, at best, a very nasty attack from flame which will, at best, act as suppressing "fire" which Crispee can't do much in (probably won't even be able to see the dragon, let alone attack it).
And the second that's over, Crispee will find (if your dragon is of traditional design) a large claw casually slapping Crispee into the next country.
The way to defeat a dragon is clearly to have multiple attackers. So only one survives to claim the hand of the fair princess/burly prince, this is OK and we can remember the sacrifice of Crispee's late friends Burnit and Ashby who were alas killed distracting the dragon while Crispee got close enough to strike at the beast's heart.
If you're planning to use magic at all, the time to use it would be during the dragon killing phase. :-)
You could limit the dragon in some way : exhausted after flaming, so the hero "just" has to dodge (hide) from the first flame and get in quick before it recovers to fry Crispee and/or thump Crispee so hard that parts land in different places. So you need Crispee to get close enough to antagonize the dragon into flaming, but to choose a spot that provides quick cover (a prepared ambush ?) to survive the flaming and rush out heroically and do something PETA would probably complain about.
That kind of stuff.
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It depends on how hot the dragon's flame is, and how long it lasts. If the dragon is capable of just a brief burst of flame, it will probably work, depending on just how thick the mud layer is.
OTOH, if the dragon is capable of a prolonged flame of even moderate intensity, then you will have created a succulent new dragon delicacy, knight baked in clay. See e.g. this recipe for trout: <http://innatthecrossroads.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/dsc_0407.jpg?resize=584%2C388> "The clay acts as kind of a dutch oven for the food, keeping the moisture inside the fish. When the first clay fish finally cracked, we were surprised and delighted to find the flesh perfectly cooked and flaking off the bones. It was creamy and tender, with a wonderful, clean taste."
[Answer]
No, the hero is going to die a horrifying death.
Not by the mechanisms demonstrated so far in other answers (although they are going to be pretty horrible anyway) but because you have made no provision to protect the lungs. The hero is going to be exposed to the heat of a large industrial kiln or molten glass tank in a glassblowing studio. Unless he can hold his breath for the duration of the fight, **he is going to breath in fire** and destroy his lungs.
Modern stuntmen are often filmed being set on fire, and special precautions must be taken to do the stunt, including slathering all exposed skin in fireproof gel, wearing Nomex or similar fireproof undergarments and *not breathing in the flames*.
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> Burn scenes
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> Scenes in which someone is actually set on fire are among the most dangerous ever filmed. The stuntman wears several layers of protective clothing, including fire-resistant materials like asbestos. Special gloves and a hood cover the hands and head. In most burn scenes, the hood is clearly evident, though its appearance can be minimized by good editing. **Inside the hood is a small breathing apparatus connected to a small oxygen tank.** The performer is then coated in a specially prepared flammable gel. They are not simply doused in gasoline -- that would be suicidal. Before the burn is lit, multiple extinguishers and paramedics must be at the scene. The burn itself is carefully timed.
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<https://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/stuntmen5.htm>
Firemen and industrial workers exposed to these sorts of conditions are similarly protected by multiple layers of [fireproof clothing](https://infogalactic.com/info/Fire_proximity_suit), ventilation or breathing systems and so on.
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Water is good at protecting from heat as long as it can evaporate and thus subtract heat. I think this is the idea behind the mud armor and incidentally also behind our natural sweating mechanism.
The problem we don't face when sweating is that once you have the cloud of hot vapor it will condensate on colder surfaces, such as a body, transferring back the heat.
And of course once the mud has been cooked it will absorb much less water.
All in all, I think the only way for this to work is that your hero keeps moving under the flames, so that he can leaves as much steam as possible behind, and that he has chances to completely renew the mud armor after each "roasting session".
This implies:
* short contact with the flames, not a "dive through them to aim at the mouth"
* reasonable time to be hidden, naked and spreading mud on the body
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Based off the comments, I don't think mud will be particularly effective. If your protagonist is instead near water and has a shield, you could have him use the water as protection and the shield to ward of any direct flames when they are away from the water or luring the dragon to the water.
The mud could probably help your protagonist in warding of some minor burns as the heat is deflected off the shield and can be constantly be reapplied if your protagonist uses the shoreline and keeps moving into the water and out of it, basically covering themselves in mud as they fight.
Or you can have the dragon land in the mud or crash into it, and slowly be bogged down by it, giving your protagonist a better chance of reaching the dragon and hitting it.
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**TL;DR** Give him a thin layer of non-circulating air under the mud. Air is an excellent insulator.
First, the science on [insulation](https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/1006-insulation "Insulation"). The principle proposed is the same one used for thermal window panes.
A possible way to work it into the plot is that the hero discovers the mud from a certain river is magnetic (maybe from high iron content) when it "clings" to pan that he was washing. He previously learned a legend or bit of ancient lore that the only way to withstand the fire of a dragon was with the protection of the Gods of Earth and Air and that the stream he chose to wash his pan in was, in fact, sacred to them (uh oh!).
Once it's time to face the dragon, the elders insist that the hero engage in the traditional ceremony prior to facing a potent enemy. The warrior tradition is to be painted in protective runes from head to toe from the Gods of Air. The hero realizes ceremonial paint is also magnetic and, if he's lucky, will repel the mud. This would give him a thin layer of stationary air between the mud and his skin, acting as an insulator, fulfilling the legend.
So painted in runes prior to facing the dragon, he wallows in the river mud, forming a protective, insulating layer of air under the wet mud.
**Potential issues:**
1. He has a limited supply of air while in this state. He either has to finish quickly or devise a way to get air.
2. He has to be able to see or otherwise sense the dragon. His entire body will be covered in mud.
3. The mud isn't going to just "hover" in place over his skin, so maybe there's an attraction of the mud to the iron in his blood to keep his "shell" intact.
4. The insulation will not protect against physical dragon strikes. One swipe of the claw and it's lights out.
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To quote Mr. Miyagi -- "Best defense... no be there."
Going up against a huge, fire-breathing beast with only a sword, shield and some mud sounds like a perfect mix for a funeral pyre honoring your intrepid warrior.
I would suggest an alternative of the warrior somehow outsmarting the dragon so that it can be defeated without directly engaging and succumbing to the flames. Perhaps fighting somewhere that the dragon cannot use its abilities or is hindered somehow. OR -- something that gives the warrior a huge advantage in the engagement (traps or the like.)
I keep thinking of Schwartzenegger going up against the Predator. Direct confrontation is borderline suicidal. Outwitting the beast to whittle it down and eventually finish it is probably a better, more likely, finish.
Just my 2 cents.
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You can make a very good chicken by wrapping it in mud and tossing it in the fire. It keeps all the steam on the inside and cooks the chicken. When you crack off the mud, you have a moist and delicious chicken.
I am sure the dragon will appreciate the effective cooking wrapper around his dinner.
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[Question]
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Our Heroes are a small group of people around the level of the heroes of *The Skylark Of Space*. Operating on a budget of maybe ten million dollars, they've built a spacecraft with a mass somewhere around 75 metric tons, which can take off from an ordinary runway using jet engines and then, once out of the atmosphere throttle, the specific impulse up to 8000 seconds or beyond.
* Mass: 75 tons
* Mass Ratio: 3
* Propellant: Water or Liquid Methane
* Crew: 2, plus up to 2 passengers, plus 250 kg cargo
* Powerplant: Proton-Proton Fusion, 5 GW output electron beam
* Engines: 2x Thermal Turbojet/Rocket, 1x high-Isp-low-thrust plasma
The problem? They want to be able to fly this wonder around, land at various airstrips, not get chased by the Air Force in the air or the FAA on the ground or the news media in general, have access to spare parts and facilities, and not be forced to give up the secret of tiny lightweight high-power proton-proton fusion before they've built up a substantial space infrastructure to flee to.
Their cunning plan? Claim that they just legitimately developed a high-performance jet aircraft with a vastly less dramatic description (but fitting its appearance and atmospheric flight performance), then register their spaceship as an instance of that aircraft.
The question: What barriers are they going to face to this? "This is air traffic control, did you just accelerate to FIFTEEN TIMES your Vne?!" is obvious, unless they can drop off the radar somehow. And I imagine that somebody might want to do too close of an inspection at some point. How long are they going to be able to keep up the game, and how is it going to fall apart? What about third-world countries?
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Your main problem would be during an [FAA Airworthiness Inspection](http://www.faa-aircraft-certification.com/standard-airworthiness-certification.html) that must be issued before your plane is approved for a flight certificate.
I'm guessing that most of your space-flight modifications can't easily be disguised as your normal Boeing equipment.
Without FAA approval, it's very unlikely you'll get approval to fly or land anywhere. You'll get a visit from the local air force pretty quickly after you take off, and the military police as soon as you land.
[Answer]
# [Plane spotters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_spotting)
Their biggest problem — that will hit them instantly — are all the plane spotters, that will instantly realize that this is a very exotic plane, and post out requests on the Internet asking "What is this aircraft type?!".
And even if they make their plane a copy of an existing model, these ~~annoying nerds~~ cunning enthusiasts will take note of the registration number. If your heroes use an unknown registration number, this will be noticed. If they use a known number, they are likely to run into the case where the "same" plane is spotted in two different locations at the same time, which will be noticed.
# Solution
Your heroes need to buy an existing plane, hide that, and then make their space plane look like and identical copy of that plane.
As for operations, there are vast areas that are not controlled by Air Traffic Control, like out over the big oceans. So over land they would need to mimic a normal aircraft and fly it like the aircraft of that type. One obstacle here is that they need to be as knowledgeable as licensed pilots. But with enough hours on public flight simulator servers and listening to enough ATC chatter, they can probably fake it, especially if they keep to small regional airports.
Then they just need to make it out over open water, turn off their transponders, and go to space.
...stealthily. They do not want to trigger a [nuclear attack alert](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-Based_Infrared_System).
[Answer]
## Radar invisibility that can be turned on and off
You've raised a good point: our airspace is currently monitored permanently by radar.
Any unplanned disappearance below or above radar level, is very likely to be detected and will raise serious questions.
The only solution to that is to be invisible to radar, but that also means you can never officially land on any airstrip that is managed by air-traffic control, because that would draw attention and questions.
Your question says they want to be able to land at various airstrips, so they must be able to be visible on radar when they want, and invisible when they don't want.
You must of course be extremely careful when going from one mode to another. From visible to invisible, you need to give air-traffic control a good reason why you're going below (landing somewhere?). The other way, again, you need to be below the radar when switching.
[Answer]
There are actually two separate issues here (which were noted by other posters as well), detection in flight and detection on the ground.
Detection in flight is not only by radar, although the vast majority of the worlds ATC systems use conventional radars. Various military systems use radars in different bands, and some may actually use multi spectral radars which can "chirp" at several different frequencies at once (postulated as a means to defeat "Stealth" aircraft.
This vehicle also uses a nuclear fusion reaction which will emit a massive amount of heat energy, and you have stated the output is a relativistic electron beam (used to heat the reaction mass), so there will be some pretty impressive electromagnetic signatures from the engine as well. Modern fighter aircraft have targeting pods which passively seek out emissions, so this is another way the craft will be spotted and identified as being very much out of the ordinary.
Once on the ground, the issue is not only nosy "plane spotters", but various customs agencies, not to mention aviation officials and quite possibly intelligence agencies (both national forces and industrial spies) will be looking for reasons to get close to the aircraft.
Given the parameters, perhaps the only way to really disguise the fact you have such a vehicle is to go the route of the classic 1960's TV show "Thunderbirds". The high performance vehicles were hidden in a secret base and launched only when necessary. The heroes lived in a much less intrusive society (no cell phones and cell phone cameras), so the issue of landing and doing things was less difficult. Today, the craft might have to only be launched at night, do "point to point" flights from secret base to secret base, and otherwise avoid well travelled air routes or obvious military choke points (like the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap which is patrolled by the RAF).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/YidBJ.jpg)
*Nobody's going to notice....*
Covering the craft with [metamaterials](https://infogalactic.com/info/Metamaterial_cloaking) might limit the visibility on particular radar frequencies, but the craft has other signatures (including sonic booms if you are very careless) which metamaterials don't guard against.
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Biggest problem might be building more planes.
So, if they scrounge up some funding, and start building one or two actual planes of that description - maybe with some of the tech they used to make the spaceship for genuinely better designs, or maybe just regular technology gussied up - they can alter them as much as possible to *resemble* the spaceship-as-a-plane. The more they can make the interior resemble their spaceship, the better.
And once they have a regular-ish plane or two, they can file themselves as a small business flying cargo or passengers or whatever, with a plane that can, for example, pass FAA inspection, won't need shenanigans around radar detection, doesn't matter if people see it or ask questions about the model, and basically have nothing to hide. And that has flight plans and cargo runs and passengers that do, in fact, exactly what they say they're going to do.
The spaceship, therefore, is a hidden "extra" plane. Depending on how closely it matches the real planes, it can be occasionally swapped out for one of the real planes (swapping all attendant paperwork), set up as a real plane by certifying one of the real planes a second time with a new registration and re-purposing the old papers, kept in storage or on display to be touted as a prototype or a backup (that sometimes goes missing when actually needed), possibly modified to pass FAA inspection once they have firsthand knowledge of what they're looking for, or simply hidden away until it's ready to be used... and if used when a real plane is in the area, any sightings will be attributed to *that* plane, see?
And, as a bonus, they could perhaps pick up enough real work with the planes they build to make the business pay for itself, or even give them a bit of profit to plow into other parts of the greater plan.
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So you have a spaceship. I'm pretty sure you built it to actually go to space, eventually.
Assuming you came up with a lot of clever tricks to avoid anyone noticing (the other answers already cover how difficult that will be), you have one obstacle you won't be able to surpass.
Even if you managed to reach space unnoticed (which you won't. Assuming your launch was in the US, then the russians will be all over the "red telephone" before you left the atmosphere), how are you going to hide your re-entry?
Someone will deinitely notice that. While it might first be mistaken for a comet or something, the fact that it doen't go splash where it should will raise questions. Long before you are near enough to ground level to attempt a landing the place will be swarming with fighter jets curious to see what kind of object is invading their airspace.
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1) Your craft as configured will not reach space in the first place. Your good engine can only be used once you are pretty close to orbit.
2) You are going at it the wrong way anyway. A quick perusal of the rules shows that you can fly an aircraft you designed and built but the certification process will require a lot of disclosure that your people do not want to make. Besides, that's a needless cost and safety issue.
Given the specs you provide they shouldn't build an aircraft at all. Rather, they should buy an ordinary airplane that can be modified to do the job. Provide some means to fold the space engines into the airframe so it looks normal. My understanding of the rules is that so long as the plane still flies by the book (a type-rated pilot unaware of your mods could fly it normally) it doesn't matter what cargo you carry--even if said cargo is a space drive.
Now, actually using that space drive will bring down the wrath of the FAA and a few other agencies because there are treaties about space launches. However, you can hide from them in this case. Fly out over the ocean under VFR rules until you're beyond radar range. Now climb to space. I would advise a pure black airplane with the best in stealth you can devise as you don't want to be detected by the orbit-watching systems. Go into deep space as soon as possible, don't linger near the Earth where you'll be detected in time. (One detection isn't going to be a big deal. Repeated detections will eventually lead to the realization that there's someone operating spacecraft with technology far beyond what we have as you won't be leaving behind the launch plumes that mark every other rocket.)
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So the world's first space plane, the X-15 "Achieved" sub-orbital flight in 1963. I say achieved because it flew at an altitude that would merit USAF Astronaut wings (80 km) but FAI metrics for space flight records are higher (100 km).
The X-15 is also the uncontested speed demon of the skies, with a top speed of Mach 6. This is 3 times the max speed of the F-22 and about twice the speed of the SR-71 (officially Mach 3.2 but we'll expand upon this).
The trouble you will face with this design is that it could never become space worthy without assistance. Space missions were achieved by a "mother-ship" launch, or strapping it to another plane to achieve altitude and then release the X-15 from there to continue the ascent (Superman Returns has an intended idea with the falling plane sequence). It simply couldn't carry the fuel needed to put itself into suborbital flight.
The SR-71 is an unusual plane that might meet your specs (except size... it came in 1 and 2 man variants). Optimal performance of it was achieved at Mach 3.2, though just how fast it could go was never really discussed. Officially, Wikipedia lists its top speed at Mach 3.3 but during test flights it was observed at speeds of Mach 3.4 and in one combat mission it was reported at speeds of Mach 3.5 (notably, higher speeds seemed to reduce fuel consumption as the pilot that achieved this speed returned with way more fuel than he should have had). While not stealth as we think of it, it had a low radar cross section which was enough to shake radar lock from SAMs by slightly changes in speed, altitude, or heading. It could fly at just shy of a 26 km ceiling (F-22 has a 20 km ceiling by comparison), and with the combo of speed and altitude, it was impossible for intercept craft to catch up with it. The only two lost in active service were bot a result of mechanical issues, not enemy actions. This plane was famously used as the model of the famed X-Jet from X-Men, and although it's fictional cousin is much bigger, the boast "If they have anything that can pick up our jet, they deserve to catch us" is pretty accurate of the SR-71, even after it's retirement two decades ago.
As a final point, the speed of the Shuttle at Launch in Atmoshpere is about Mach 2.6, though orbital speeds are about Mach 23-25 (though most note this as if it was in atmosphere... not being a physicist, I wouldn't know why the distinction is such that it is.)
As noted elsewhere, since all of these craft are designed to be the fastest thing in the sky, they have little practicality as much else... SR-71 could be sized up to include an additional crew and cargo with only minimal strain on the fabric of reality (again, "Physics works" is the most I know on that subject). You'd have a lot of fuel issues and the real SR-71 had a ton of maintenance quirks that amounted to a week of downtime following a single flight to get it back up to flight standards for next mission. It also never got to any height remotely space worthy, but as far as the best military craft are concerned, it might as well be in outer space. It could go from NYC to LA in under 2 hours. With those numbers, outer space isn't required.
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[Question]
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Location: an interstellar gas cloud
Situation: an alien family stops for about half an Earth hour in the middle of the cloud to have a snack along their trip (by stops I mean they get null relative velocity with respect to the cloud's collective motion).
The kids in the family, after playing for a while with a ball, the size of a tennis ball, filled with sand or lead, leave it next to their starship and forget it there when they leave.
Question: besides neglecting the "no litter" signs on the space highway, will this plausibly result in triggering the formation of a star?
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# Either a star was about to form or it wasn't
A star forms when a sufficiently large mass of hydrogen and other interstellar media collects in a sufficiently small volume. Once this happens, the inexorable pull of gravity will cause a swirling proto-stellar disk, and once densities and temperatures are high enough, fusion ignition and a true star.
The mass required is something on the order of 1e30 kg. You ball is not going to have much of an effect, unless your aliens are playing with a ball the size of Jupiter.
# Your tennis ball is insignificant compared to the power of the force (of gravity of the interstellar cloud)
Lets say your tennis ball is 0.1m across and 1kg (not really a tennis ball, I guess). The standard gravitational parameter $GM$ for this ball is $6.674\times10^{-11} \text{ m}^3\text{s}^{-2}$. If you multiply this by the mass of a nearby object and the distance between them, you get the force exterted on this object. Lets say you have a microscopic spec of space dust, 1e-6 kg at 1 meter away. The force on this speck from the tennis ball is $6.674\times10^{-17} \text{N}$, and the acceleration is $6.674\times10^{-11} \text{ ms}^{-2}$. At this acceleration it will take two days to pull the speck to the tennis ball, if nothing else is affecting it. At 10 meters it takes about 63 days.
But surely, the speck has some sort of velocity of its own. It is moving in whatever direction relative to the tennis ball, and the tennis ball's gravity barely affects it. In fact, the tennis ball is more likely to attract another particle through static electric charge than through gravity. It is the electric charge of small specks of space dust that probably formed the seed for planet and star formation.
# Conclusion
You tennis ball will not have a major effect on the cloud. If it was going to form a star, then it still will in a few million years. If it was not going to, then your tennis ball is now part of the mysterious dark matter. Dark matter as space litter? So that's why they have all those signs on the highway!
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Trigger - probably not that easily.
Make it faster - yes.
If the gas cloud was massive enough to eventually form a star, more massive object might start attracting particles, and be nucleus of star formation, making it happen much earlier, removing chance and need for fluctuations.
I would go for engine. If they move using gravity, their engine might, during its start up, create quite strong gravitational field that would attract particles from a large volume. and then, instead of missing each other and flying away, particles would instead hit a ball.
Details needs to be figured out when you will decide about their propulsion.
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It's not going to make much difference.
Nebula are many, many times larger than a star and many, many times more massive. If a nebula has the potential to form a star at all, it will have already formed "clumps" of denser gas, and these areas will be the places that attract more clumps together. If it isn't going to form a star, the ball isn't going to push it over the edge.
Think of it this way: if the ball was completely vaporized, how big would the cloud it forms be? Maybe the size of a large room? Practically nothing next to the rest of the nebula. The gravity from the ball as a solid isn't any higher than the gravity of the ball as a gas, and will have no more effect.
However, if the family is from a highly advanced civilization with a ship that moves at a significant percentage of light speed, the ship can potentially be leaving a high-energy wake behind it. This could compress areas of the cloud more than they would be otherwise, and may trigger star formation.
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No. Consider that besides gas and fine dust, there are already bodies of asteroid, planetismal, planet, and brown-dwarf size floating around. So even if the ball, as kingledion speculates, is the size of Jupiter, it will not make a difference.
If this is a [star-forming region](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_formation#Interstellar_clouds), it is millions of times larger than a single star’s portion of that. Your peturbation might be like the butterfly that causes a hurricane—[any change to a chaotic system substantially alters the results](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect). So maybe this patch would have wound up forming a star with planets, but because of the change, [one impact happened a *little* differently](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant-impact_hypothesis).
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Reality check??? The premise of the question is totally divorced from reality. There is no reason whatsoever to stop the spaceship in the middle of nowhere to "have lunch". Assuming the aliens craft operates on known physics, it will take a huge amount of fuel to accelerate or decelerate to the relativistic speeds required to go anywhere quickly. Why would you waste fuel by stopping and starting up again? If the aliens don't want to be crushed with huge g forces then accelerating or decelerating to those sort of speeds will take months.
And NO a small lump of rock, floating in a gas cloud with many others could not possibly create a star, unless you are considering the butterfly effect, in which case it will collapse into a star as if it was going to happen anyway, and the effect is just as likely to stop a star forming. (in the same way that you breathing now could cause or stop a hurricane next year because the weather is very sensitive to tiny changes, but without vast computers and data on every air current across the world there is no way of telling what would have happened otherwise.)
The vast plume of hot exhaust gas could perhaps trigger star formation to happen slightly differently but I would need data on the engine and gas cloud to calculate that.(only of you have a large ship), Heat more likely to stop gas cloud collapsing.
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Static electricity from the ball starts to attract matter from the gas cloud....over time that mass is big enough to attract more matter through gravity. In some millions years maybe the mass is so big that starts nuclear fusion of Hydrogen and becomes a star...
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In our theoretical alternate universe Nazi Germany--thanks to its scientists that in real history were split and used by the US and USSR--managed to reach the level of nuclear warheads and ICBM technology that the US accomplished in the early/mid 1950s, producing systems comparable to the Atlas and Titan ICBM projects (range of 5,000 - 10,000 miles).
Scraping up funding, they produce 12 such ICBMs, complete with nuclear warheads, and had them online as of late November 1944, about six months before the actual invasion of Berlin by the Allied Forces in real history. Two of the ICBMs were used, one as an example on the Eastern front, and one as an example on the Western front (the exact targets are unspecified, answers may select locations if they feel targets are material to the question). After these examples, the Allies decided to sign a ceasefire and hostilities on both sides were stopped. Part of the ceasefire allowed Nazi Germany to continue to occupy all of the land it currently possessed.
The Pacific Theater continued along a path roughly characteristic to our own history, ending with America dropping the two nuclear bombs on Japan; Nazi Germany does not act to interfere with this theater per the terms of the ceasefire. The Empire of Japan signs unconditional surrender.
The question becomes: **Given both the internal factors within Nazi Germany and the external pressures from the growing Cold War** (in whatever the cold war might take in this alternate universe) **is Nazi Germany stable enough to probabilistically survive to modern day?**
If it would *not* survive to modern day (due to either internal politics/structure or external forces) what would enable it to do so?
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Better than survive, they'd thrive.
The key here is that they are in the position of power. They have missile technology more than a decade more advanced than anyone else on the planet - as you said, they're comparable to what the US had in 1955, but that was with ten years of Nazi scientists helping them. So without their help, say that they're 15 years advanced.
Neither the US or the USSR get Nazi scientists. So the resulting nuclear proliferation is much slower than it was in our universe. As a result, the Germans are able to subtly control things - Europe is small enough that they would basically be able to strong-arm anyone else into better trade deals, etc.
The timing also plays in Germany's favor. November of 1944 is just a few months before the USSR captured Auschwitz. If the Allies don't capture Auschwitz, there won't be the same level of understanding of how awful the Holocaust was, meaning that worldwide opinion of the Nazi party won't be as bad as it became in our universe.
The primary disadvantage that Germany has is that it doesn't have much land. The US and the USSR have a lot of open ground, which is good for having ICBM launch sites - you don't want your launch sites to be right next to your major cities, and the more land you have the more missiles you can have. Germany would not be able to keep up with the number of launch sites that the US and USSR could maintain (once their technology caught up, of course).
However, the technology lead to start with, coupled with being able to (unofficially) strong-arm the poor post-war economies of Europe and an improved public opinion over what we'd expect from our universe, they're in a very good position to lead the Cold War and emerge very strong for WWIII, whenever that happens.
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**Nazi Germany perishes anyways.**
The Soviets and Americans remain allies; the Soviets have a dangerous lunatic on their doorstep, and the Americans see the Soviets as a buffer to keep the Nazis from expansionism. Hitler, Goebbels, and a few of the other fanatics are still in power in Germany and, emboldened by their super-weapon, take the opportunity to regroup and continue their plan to dominate Europe. Rather than dividing European territory up between victorious allies to rebuild, the treaty freezes the battlefronts where they are, and most every European nation now has it's own version of the Iron Curtain, complete with troop buildups. This is NOT a stable situation. WWIII begins soon thereafter.
Whether or not nuclear weapons are exchanged, Nazi Germany will likely not fare well in this scenario. It has almost no diplomatic capital, and American infrastructure was never greatly affected by the war. It's only option is a first-strike capability but it is unlikely to be able to completely wipe out all of its enemies in the initial salvo.
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No. In November 1944 the western allies were already in Germany ([Operation Queen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Queen)) and the Russians were close to crossing into Germany. Neither side would have stopped just because of at most a dozen nukes (which would have been fission bombs in the Hiroshima class, i.e. 20KT, not hydrogen bombs in the 20MT range). But most of Germany would have been destroyed even more than actually happened.
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With quite a lot of differences. Assuming one of the various attempts at getting rid of the lunatics in power worked, it would probably have ended up as one of your 'classic' authoritarian military states - Franco survived ww2, and was in power literally until his death, and the only reason that Spain went into a full democracy was the king didn't *want* to be an absolute monarch.
"Only an idiot fights a war on two fronts. Only the heir to the throne of the kingdom of idiots would fight a war on twelve fronts." And that's literally what Germany did.And that wasn't helped by the Japanese either. And for the record, Germany probably had the tech to hit both fronts with missiles - these would be IRBMs.
So this is what I imagine happening. You need to take Hitler out of the equation - he and Goebbels are replaced by someone a little more realistic. I'd like to think they'd realise all the frothing about Jews was just populist politics, and something like the [Madagascar plan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Plan) happens. In return for that, Germany *doesn't* end up losing key scientists who left. That puts them ahead in terms of development.
Since the concentration camps are abandoned and blamed on Hitler, working with the germans would be more tasteful, with the worst excesses conveniently blamed on hitler. I'm sure *some* folks within their new allies wouldn't care but I suspect for most, at least on the short term, would be essential
Much like Franco, the new government is instead purely virulently *anti communist* and instead of wasting resources on wonder weapons (other than nukes and rockets) focuses on consolidation, defence and *cultural exchanges*. They take advantage of the cold war to position themselves as a bulwark against communism. While the rump French state is still making noises and they and the Vichy French are involved in occasional scuffles, much like our cold war, the Americans and British have bases in the much enlarged Germany, with Poland and the rest of occupied eastern Europe being the equivalent of Berlin.
The post war Germany has many of the strengths it's always had - extreme technical competence, and they'd have resources from the occupied nations. That said, they'd have to *evolve*. Germans would be outnumbered by other nations and while it would be a one party state, as time went on, and the party integrated the occupied nations, the cultural and national identity of the state would no longer be "German nationalist". As time went on, in order to survive, the state would embrace a *pan European* identity, though with Germany considered a first amongst equals.
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The first problem is Hitler's succession. By 1944 he was alredy quite sick. That would only get worse and he probably wouldn't live much longer. His death would create a power vacuum as the death of empire builders tend to, for example the death of Timur, Alexander or Shi Huangdi. In the best case (for the nazi regime) some kind of military junta would take the power. In the worse a civil war would erupt.
In the case of a nazi military junta in the fifties nazi germany economy would be permanently crippled because of the war damages. Pillaging Europe would only go so far because Europe itself was quite ruined. The permanently big military budget would drain the few resources the State would have. By the seventies the economic strain would be too great and nazi germany wouldn't be able to keep the pace with the US and the USSR in the arms race and in the eighties the regime would go bankrupt and the german empire desintegrate. Expect Yugoslavia-level civil wars in all Europe during this desintegration as the opressed peoples rise up in rebellion and kill all germans and the germans kill them back. By 2000 the germans will be lucky if some kind of german reich exists at all, like the serbs in our timeline having a much diminished Serbia after the civil war.
In the case of a nazi civil war both the soviets and the americans will invade and it will be a rush toward the german core. Both the US and the USSR will use nukes on the german launch sites and nuclear facilites and, since Germany is a dense country, that means lot of incinerated cities.
The only way for the nazis to survive is to find allies outside Europe. That means courting Latin American countries, that were alredy quite fond of Nazi Germany (ex.: Argentina and Brazil), to finance rebellions in Africa and help natural allies (South Africa due to the apartheid and Egypt due to jewish question in Palestine comes to my mind) and, above all, India. A nazi-allied independent India, receiving nazi tech and sending supplies would give the nazis some longevity, maybe avoiding the bankrupcy in the eighties that I mentioned above, at the cost of feeding a tiger that would one day bite back.
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Given the above scenario, the Cold War would have been an entirely different proposition. the Western and Eastern blocks would have had a third party (ie Germany) jammed in between them, to which neither would be well disposed.
Much of the general tension that came to be called the Cold War would instead have been focussed on Germany.
The unfortunate Germans would be in a position where they survived the war but their nation and economy is in ruins and they have no friends.
In the real world, the German economy was helped back on its feet by the victorious Allies. We may have made them pay reparations and split the country in two, but we also happily bought lots of Volkswagens. In your scenario, having forced the Allies into a corner, I would expect that Germany would be universally hated and all but isolated. Another major war would be virtually inevitable.
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I'd argue that in this set up, there is no cold war. Once the US proves they can drop the bomb via planes, they've proved they're actually inferior to Nazi capabilities. At this point, the Nazis know it's only a matter of time before the US catches up. To prevent that, I'd argue they'd send up the Luftwaffe to intercept and shoot down any US planes on or near Nazi territory (thus blocking US retaliation) whilst sending an ICBM to New York (thus devastating America, but keeping intact the mechanism for them to surrender). If they had about a dozen of these missiles in '44, its likely they have plenty more than that by '45, causing US surrender.
If the US suddenly becomes Nazi America, then I think it's fairly game over. Russia won't be able to develop the bomb before the Nazis are capable of making the American War machine work for them. I think the world slowly crumbles to Nazi rule as they take over each power most likely to develop the bomb the next, until all that remains is the Reich.
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Not from 1944 onwards, the war pretty much lost by then.
... however, if you allowed for a Soviet collapse in 1942 or early 1943:
Then Nazi Germany would advance to the line [Arkhangelsk-Astrakhan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-A_line), and make some sort of peace with the remaining Soviet Union. The Nazis wouldn't have the manpower to conquer the whole USSR; nor would they have had the time, there was still a war going on in the west, and the strategic bombing campaign was starting to hurt.
With many divisons freed up, and moving west; a cold-hot war would develop between Nazi Germany and the western Allies. Allow for a peace, and you're in for a Cold War between the Nazis and the US, with a reduced USSR in the mix.
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I'm pretty certain that the lunatic in power would not allow Nazi Germany to survive very long. My guess is that Nukes would be used ineffectively because by 1944 many of those in power under Hitler were nearly as crazy as he was. With the pressure from Japan off of their flank, the Russians were already pushing into German territory and they were taking it PERSONALLY. I do mean the all caps here. Look into how eastern Germany fared as the Russians invaded. It was not pretty.
Now, if one of the coup attempts succeeded, could be a very different story. Several of the German Generals were pretty smart, and they knew Hitler was nuts. They might well have fought effectively for survival. The problem is that they would have been cut off from resources. The ability to project power outside of the realm of Nukes would get severely eroded. Sanctions and such would probably work to bring the German stat to it's knees. It would take a lot of time though.
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The question becomes: **Given both the internal factors within Nazi Germany and the external pressures from the growing Cold War (in whatever the cold war might take in this alternate universe) is Nazi Germany stable enough to probabilistically survive to modern day?**
I am not sure the nuclear option is best it just justifies finishing them off before they use the weapon again. What about a military coup in Germany leads to new leaders. Who
1. Fascist but less extremist.
2. Settle the war with most of Germany intact.
3. Economy is messed up, and Germany is like every other European fascist client state of the USA (Spain, Greece)
4. Germany runs the risk of democratic revolt at any point going forward. It may also be subject to pro-communist revolt.
**If it would not survive to modern day (due to either internal politics/structure or external forces) what would enable it to do so?**
5. All Fascist relics collapsed by the 1990's their aging leaders offering nothing to progress the nation. The cold war threats is gone, so they can't raise the communist fears to justify holding back democracy.
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I read [What would make scientists realize they were on a flat world?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/42387/what-would-make-scientists-realize-they-were-on-a-flat-world), and I decided to make a similar one.
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**Scenario:** While poking around in an alien ruin, scientists discover a gateway which offers instant transportation to an planet.
**The Observed World:** The gateway leads to a planet. The planet is in a planetary system that has a star. 42 planets rotate around it. The planetary system doesn't have any other celestial object. Besides the planetary system, there are other stars that form constellations.
**The Actual World:** The planetary system is actually inside an artificially constructed hollow sphere. The solid part of the sphere is of made of 2-Methyl-1,3,5-trinitrobenzene. Its hollow part is a sphere that is concentric with the hollow sphere. It produces no gravity in its hollow part. But it is thick enough that things outside it can feel gravity.
On the discontinuity between the solid and hollow part, there is a screen that displays the stars. The resolution of the screen is high enough, the paths of the stars and light are simulated well enough.
The hallow part of the sphere is large enough. No planet will hit the inside of the sphere.
**Question:** If a team of scientists are sent through the gateway with the purpose of investigating the planetary system, how would they realize that they are inside a hollow sphere?
Particularly, what would stand out to someone with a good grasp of physics, or astrophysics, even if they had no reason to suspect that they are in a hollow sphere?
Going out of the planetary system is not in their plan.
I'm not looking for a mathematical proof, but rather something that visibly stands out and would make a scientist decide to perform such a proof in the first place.
Their available technology is modern-day: spaceships, space shuttles, space stations, telescopes, etc.
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Assuming you can trick them by matching the correct spectra of light coming from each individual star, you still run into the problem of a projection on a 2D surface not being able to effectively simulate 3D space at more than one location. e.g. Even if your screen properly tracks the movement of the location of the observers and updates the relative positions of the stars, anyone not in the same location will be seeing incorrect positions.
Lo-tech example:
imagine three posts in the ground, in a triangular formation. If you stand some distance away and look at the top of the posts mostly equidistant from two, you will see something like: (imagine it's dark with glow pain on the tops)
`o o o`
A person standing several feet to your left will see
`o o o`
Whereas a person standing to you right will see
`o o o`
A 2 dimensional projection on a screen will not be able to reproduce that.
[Answer]
**The universe would look far too *hot*.**
Your sphere is not transparent, so it will absorb and then re-radiate all energy emitted by the star it encloses, at a range of frequencies according to its temperature. (This energy will be radiated as [black-body radiation.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation)
Anyone looking at anything outside the solar system with something like a radio telescope would see this thermal radiation in place of the standard cosmic background radiation. Furthermore, this would give them the ability to precisely determine how big the sphere was, since it would radiate heat at the same intensity as the radiation it absorbed from its star.
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Assuming that the sphere is thick enough to block external transmissions, and assuming that the display screens do not also emit a replacement for those missing signals, then the [cosmic background radiation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_background_radiation) might be missing.
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Once on the planet in the hollow sphere system the scientists would set up a radio telescope to locate pulsars. Because pulsars are the ideal sign posts for navigating around the galaxy. This would be standard navigational procedure for interstellar expeditions. If the sphere blocks signals from outside, they won't be able to detect the pulsars. In fact, they will soon discover everything else in the radio universe was blocked too.
A quick check with radar and lidar will fairly soon reveal this system is inside a hollow sphere.
I have assumed basic technology like radar, radio telescopes and lidars will highly advanced kit and quite portable to boot. Their use will be standard procedure for galactic explorers making it straight forward to discover the nature of this closed system.
Information about using pulsars for interstellar navigation can be found at:
<https://www.technologyreview.com/s/413615/how-to-use-pulsars-for-interstellar-navigation/>
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I would expect a significant amount of light would be reflected back inside the sphere, think LED screen outdoors on a bright day.
An observer on one of the planets inside the sphere will see a white sky day and night.
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[Question]
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Joe Doomsdayer is an otherwise average 30 year old guy, with one exception: When he turned 30 he got a vision that the world as we know it is going to end when he turns 55.
And, to make things more interesting: He is right. By end of the year 2040 the Earth is going to witness an apocalypse wiping out at least 80% of the population.
**What steps should Joe make to survive the upcoming apocalypse?**
Some background:
* I am planning some natural disaster as the main apocalypse. However, assume for the scope of this question, that the type of apocalypse is unknown to Joe.
* As said above, Joe should be also be unable to prove that such an apocalypse is going to happen (best candidates are volcano eruptions).
* Joe is the only one who had such a vision. The vision itself is religious and not backed by any hard evidence.
* Joe is living in Europe right now, but he is willing to move somewhere else.
* Joe turned 30 "yesterday" (Earth, current day)
* And as stated in the beginning, Joe is an average person, so he has limited resources.
[Answer]
**Short answer: Joe needs to become a mariner and ship-owner.**
**Long answer.** I'm assuming that Joe knows the date of the catastrophe to within a month but has no idea as to its nature other than that it will be global. So Joe makes a list:
* Super-volcano eruption
* Nuclear War
* Killer Pandemic (natural or otherwise makes no difference)
* Large meteor impact
* EMP war or Carrington event leading to global failure of electrical infrastructures
* A runaway ecological collapse (faster than most expect; Joe *knows* )
The locations of dormant super-volcanoes are known. Don't be near. Nuclear targets will almost all be land-based. To catch a pandemic you probably have to be in contact with humanity at large during its ravages. Be isolated. Meteors you'll have to trust to luck, at least for now. Be mobile in case an astronomer gives enough warning. And following on from whatever catastrophe strikes, there will be a terrible period of starvation and war, until the human population has fallen 80%+ to a level at which the survivors can support themselves with whatever level of technology remains.
Best bet for survival is to be at sea in an ocean-capable vessel and to be able to stay there while the worst of the consequences on land work themselves out. A dozen people on a deep-sea fishing vessel provisioned with surviving these catastrophes in mind is about the best chance.
Provisioning: Spares for everything electrical that the ship can't work without, sealed in Faraday cages (in case EMPed). Solar still (water, though as a last resort one can get water out of fish flesh without a still). Lots of fishing lines and hooks (indefinite food supply). Vitamins, especially C, to supplement a fish diet for several years. Ideally the ship is an anachronism that has sail(s) as well as a diesel engine. Chronometers and Sextants and the knowledge to use them. Trade goods, for eventual landfall. A Faraday-protected PC, with all human knowledge on DVDs (Or at least a good encyclopaedia). Seeds, of old-fashioned crops that can be re-sown from last year's harvest. I won't go on. Joe has nearly 25 years to work it out.
Weapons? If I were Joe, not. Those who live by the sword die by the sword. Better to throw your lot in with the survivors once the megadeaths are over. Small isolated rural communities survive on cooperation not conflict.
Joe can openly be known as a bit of a survivalist "nut". He owns his ship. He makes a profit. No-one else believes in his apocalypse, but its his money he's spending on making his boat apocalypse-ready. He'll get amused tolerance if he's good-humoured. Much of the work also makes it one of the safer boats to be on in a storm.
Come the last month, Joe loads his few select loved ones on board (he's trained them as crew!) and sets out for the deep ocean. He sticks it out at sea for as long as he can. If there's anyone still broadcasting two-plus years later, he'll know the best places to return to land. If not, aim at a remote island with a low human population density and a tolerable climate. Saint Helena might be a good bet.
If becoming owner of an ocean-going fishing vessel within 25 years is beyond his abilities, next best bet is to emigrate to such an island.
**Alternative involving such as island.** If Joe has the gift of the gab, he can persuade a billionaire philanthropist to set up what might come to be called "The university at the end of the world" (only partly in jest). In normal times it would be a place where academics could take a one-year sabbatical to de-stress, think long deep thoughts, make the odd breakthrough, talk to other like-minded academics, and provide children in one of the world's most remote locations with a better education than would normally be available to them. It would also be well-stocked against the day that humanity finally and fatally screws up. Joe knows this day is coming but if he's smart he doesn't say this. Just points out that we won't stay lucky for ever and that the billionaire could arrange for a lifeboat out of the interest on his fortune.
Once it's up and running Joe and his family emigrate there as permanent staff.
By the way, if any billionaires are reading this, please do take this idea and run with it. Because we *won't* stay lucky for ever.
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Preparing for any natural calamity, some patterns are common
# Food
This is the first and foremost thing to take care of. The amount of food one would required depends on:
1- the size of family he is keeping.
2- the type of his/her region. for example in cities, if most people are dead, it means more food is readily available for you. but if you are in a rural area, the more people die, the *lesser* food you would have available to you.
3- the type of food available and required. for example, you would prefer to store food which does not rot quickly, which has high nutrition value and which can be dried/salted for easy storage. if you are forced to store low quality food, you would need greater amounts of it.
Note that water is included in food.
# Other Primary Consumables
This includes batteries, flares, fuel (gasoline, firewood etc), matchboxes (or lighters), oxygen tanks, soap, shampoo, sun screen lotions and creams, tissue paper etc. Also don't forget a generous supply of medicines.
# Weapons
This is important if the survivalist happens to live in a despotic, lawless or far off area where animals and/or criminals are a major threat. Once again, the choice of guns (handguns versus shotguns versus rifles versus SMGs) falls completely on what is available (and legal), cost factors and what the person is proficient with.
# Shelter-Construction
This depends solely on the type of disaster. There are some types of disaster (for example nuclear fallout or government collapse) where you are forced into a hideout for days. A shelter with a tsunami in mind would be different from a shelter built for surviving a hurricane or government collapse. The shelter needs to stock the supplies and be sturdy. It needs to have place(s) for sleeping, a toilet facility, safekeeping of important objects and a place where the person can sit and read/write.
# Training And Mindset
Survivalism is not limited to using shelter and supplies only. It incorporates psychological factor and training too. The person always needs to be ready for the worst *what if* which he can possibly face. Cooking, first aid and fire-making are the foremost and primary skills without which survivalism has no meaning. Next comes combat training (just in case), sign language and learning different types of edible and poisonous plants (and animals).
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If he knows **where** the catastrophe is going to happen he should move to far away from it. Otherwise, nothing other than choose his investments with the apocalypse in mind.
The thing is, a disaster that is going to wipe out 80% of the world's population must be selective in area. If 80% of the people in a modern society are killed the system will have so many holes that it collapses. We are extremely dependent on resources from elsewhere, when that breaks down the death toll will be major. If we have to fall back on locally-produced resources the US isn't going to be supporting anything like 60 million people.
Thus we can conclude that the disaster will kill basically everyone in an area comprising 80% of the world's population and leave the rest untouched.
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**Joe needs to set himself up a a religious cult leader.** This gives him access to more resources as well as a small army capable of defending the compound. When his apocalyptic vision proves out, they will be very protective of their leader. Running a cult well can give you access to considerable resources.
He can select for needed skills, etc. to get more than any one person could manage by themselves.
Nubile females is a popular option. But pretty much all of the traditional survivalist goods and services will be useful. Food, seeds, guns and ammo, cigarettes and liquor (very useful trade items as well as medicinal), practical knowledge in book form as well as actual experience -- everything from animal husbandry to smithing would quickly be very useful skills.
Have well water power with windmill powered pumps. Convenient forest access and a simple sawmill will also be very desirable.
Don't be overly dependent upon guns. Crossbows and longbows are much easier to make and supply than modern guns. Learning how to make good quality gunpowder and having access to the components could be a major advantage over the long run though.
Select an environment that has enough natural winter cold so you can have ice-houses for keeping drugs and vitamins around for a long time as well as food preservation. Most medicines have an extended shelf life if kept cold at all times.
Build your business based on organic farming. This will be superlative training for when things go south. Many traditional farmers develop a large variety of survival skills. Also a very good way to use organic waste.
You also want well trained guard dogs. Grazing animals are an excellent source of milk and meat that will be very useful.
If at all possible, find a sugar daddy/mommy. Make him/her part of the religion. Even one million dollars wisely invested would make a huge difference in your ultimate survival.
There are lots of other things you would probably wish you had. Assign the job to a few of your brighter disciples and let them spend as needed with a budget with the option to come to you with special projects.
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The first issue is to get resources, money and lands to build the shelters needed.
Assuming he is an average person he should borrow as much money as he can, if he knows there is going to happen the apocalypse he shouldn't care about bills.
As he doesn't know what kind of disaster will happen he should build a few shelters and be prepared for different kinds of scenarios. Store food, water, books and medicines would be of great help. He doesn't have to have all this items in which one of the shelters, as the apocalypse is getting closer he will have some clues about what is going to happen and he can have enough time to move all his resources to one of the shelters.
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Joe Doomsdayer knows the exact day of the apocalypse, but not its nature.
While this makes it a bit difficult to plan ahead, there are two main patterns, both of which have been discussed here already: the arch approach, and the bunker approach.
Since the ship option has been discussed, i will stick to the bunker.
The fact that he will not be surprised by the event gives him a head start. Wherever he chooses to be when the event comes, he should make sure he knows his surroundings very well.
Since he does not know what kind of event is going to happen, he should plan for all kinds of things.
A bunker in a landslide would not help him very much, while a ship does not offer much protection against radioactive rain.
So, he should look for a shelter that fits this bill:
* be far away from major cities
* don't be somewhere where a radioactive dust / chemical cloud will be blown to
* be far away from major volcanos
* be far away from tectonic fault lines
* be somewhere where being flooded / buried under mud etc is very unlikely
* have fresh water near, preferably underground
* be not too far from a medium sized city, so you can go looting after the event
* have enough space available for yourself, your companions, and domestic animals (think chicken and rabbits at least), in large enough supply to re-establish a healthy population of them.
* Be inconspicious enough that the locals don't learn of the stronghold, and the stash.
This is more or less a description of a farm (plus some underground structures)
Once you have established that, start building up your supplies:
* store food, and water, at least enough to last all of you for two years
* store books, both fiction and non-fiction, and encyclopedias
* store medicine. Especially painkillers, antiseptics, antibiotics, bandaids and such.
* have a radio, or preferably more than one, stored in a metal box
* store weapons and ammunition, mostly to defend your stronghold
* store some low-tech weapons, especially crossbows, because you will run out of ammunition for your guns eventually
* store tools. all kind of tools, and in large quantities
* learn some handy skills: farming, fishing, carpentry, welding. Sewing and knitting should go without notice.
* have bicycles.
* Have backpacks.
* have very large amounts of fuel, mostly for cooking and heating.
* make sure the entire stronghold and equipment can go on indefinitely without electricity, and that those things that cannot are expendable.
* Learn to make beer, and maybe to distil alcohol.
Joe is now set up very well. Preferably, he should be at this point something like a year before the event.
This is the point where he can make huge depts to buy everything he might still be missing (or wanting). Knowing that he will not need to pay it back will surely be a comforting thought.
The only kind of apocalypse that could still get at them now would be some sort of disease. So, 3-6 months before the event, they should end physical contact with the rest of society. To avoid suspicion, they should still make phone calls, use the internet and such.
Other than that, the group should just wait now, maybe improve the defences of the stronghold, practice their skills, enjoy life, and scan the news for hints on the nature of the event to come.
Then, after the apocalypse has happened, The group should venture out as soon as possible on large looting sprees. Clear out the local library, home depot, and supermarket storages. The fact that they were not surprised by the apocalypse has put them in the position to plan all this beforehand. Learn where and how he can and should break in, what they should haul away, and how.
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Trying to form a mostly logical basis for a world that would have one region always in darkness while also having a day-night cycle.
My first thought was to ask if a planet could have an axial tilt always facing away from its star, but upon reading other questions on the site it seems that's not possible.
My most recent idea is a moon that is tidally locked to its planet with its rotation around its planet just happening to correspond with the time the planet's orbit takes around its star. Don't know if this is logically possible?
Thoughts on that idea and/or any other possible explanation for such a world?
P.S. Just read about precession while writing this post, but it seems that would be is the realm of millennia on such a planet to reasonably occur although the length of year on this world can be just about anything if it allows for this to work and for the planet to be habitable.
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You can achieve this, but not via your moon idea. You need your planet to have very little axial tilt, and a deep basin at or near one of its poles, surrounded by mountains.
Within the basin, the sun will never rise, although if there is an atmosphere, it will never be truly dark in the basin, due to scattering in the atmosphere. There will likely also be reflection from mountains, but that depends on the exact topography.
Earth's Moon has quite a few places like this. Of course, they're mostly craters.
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If a planet is **tidally locked** and has an **eccentric orbit**, then it can experience [libration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libration) causing some parts of the surface to experience a day/night cycle.
The Earth's moon exhibits an eccentric orbit causing it to rotate faster around the Earth at some times and slower at other times. Thus, the point on the moon facing towards the Earth will rock back and forth slightly over the course of an orbit. As a result, some regions of the moon can permanently view the Earth, some regions never view the Earth, and some regions can view the Earth rise and set over the horizon with each orbital cycle.
If our planet is tidally locked to its star, then we could get a similar effect, where part of the planet is always in daylight, part of the planet is always in night, and a region in between has a day-night cycle. In the case of the moon, the effect is about 8 degrees, so the star would stay near the horizon and the region would experience varying strengths of twilight, but a more eccentric orbit could result in more pronounced effects, potentially even going from fully day into fully night (though observers would see the sun rise, pause, turn around and set, and then repeat, on a yearly cycle). If the eccentricity is too large, then it will likely end up in some other spin-orbit resonance (like Mercury spinning 3 times for every 2 orbits around the sun), and I'll admit that I don't know where exactly that line is.
I know you asked for a solution that doesn't tidally lock the planet, but having the planet be tidally locked in this way causes regions of the planet to have a day-night cycle and other regions not to, which might work for your purposes.
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If parts of the planet experience a day-night cycle while other parts don't, then there must be some local phenomenon blocking out light from entering a region that doesn't. I propose **smoke from naturally-persisting fires**.
It's possible for reservoirs of fossil fuels to catch on fire and burn until they run out of fuel to burn.
For example, there is the "Door to Hell" in Turkmenistan, formally called the [Darvaza gas crater](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darvaza_gas_crater), which has been burning for over half a century:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/NTyMl.jpg)
This particular incident was caused by human activities, but natural geologic and meteorological phenomena could cause the same effects (not likely, but it can happen).
We need two circumstances to line up: the fire needs to produce a bunch of smoke, and the local conditions need to trap that smoke in.
For the fire producing smoke, we can use a burning coal vein, like at the [Centralia Mine Fire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire) in Pennsylvania, USA, or we can burn impure natural gas that contains contaminants that produce sulfurous and nitrous oxides.
To trap the smoke in, all we need are nearby mountains that make it harder for air to leave. For example, the LA basin had this effect, with mountains on three sides and an ocean on the fourth, that trapped smog in very effectively (and caused LA to have massive issues with smog before modern clean air regulations). You could get a similar effect with mountains on all sides, if you have a place like that.
If those conditions line up, then you can have a fire burning that fills an area with smoke. If the smoke is strong enough, we might even lead to night-like conditions permanently in an area. Though do note that the smoke will also result in very poor air quality, with people living there also inhaling a bunch of smoke (expect a lot of lung problems from anyone living there).
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**shade**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/zY7I0.jpg)
It is shady on the forest floor. Shadier yet under the kelp forest. Your planet has floating photosynthesizers greedy for the light. Underneath is always crepuscular and gloomy.
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In my story giants are about 13-14ft tall and weigh usually a little bit more or less than 1,000 pounds. Giants communicate through stomping their feet, and while running or walking through modulations of the footfall. Though while doing this the it would be the equivalent of being gagged while talking, other giants can understand what you're trying to say it sounds much more muffled. Giants also tend to be usually individualistic, and don't usually form very large groups. I was thinking of a few ways they could hide their massive size, maybe hiding underneath the grass waiting for something to walk over them. They could also simply raid villages for cows and sheeps, but I wanted hear others ideas on how such big and loud things could ever hunt anything.
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> others ideas on how such big and loud things could ever hunt anything
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Why not take an example from humans, and have your giants be endurance predators? "*You can hide, but you can't run!*" sort of thing. They have excellent tracking skills, and follow big herds with long, efficient strides and tire their prey out til it just can't run anymore. If your giants follow a humanlike bodyplan, throwing seems like it would be an inevitable tool. Accurate, dangerous throwing is a bit of a human signature special move, compared to other animals.
Also, careful with "big and loud". Elephants are known for being kinda big, but they can move almost silently when they want... big feet and a relaxed pace work well in that regard. Your giants might not be ninja-like ambushers, but there's no reason that they have to clomp-clomp about everywhere if they didn't want to.
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> They could also simply raid villages for cows and sheeps
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Humans have encountered many large, dangerous animals in their history. Animals with whom they have competed for food and territory. Huge things with massive claws and teeth that couldn't possibly be outrun or outfought.
There also used to be several other kinds of hominid out there. Intelligent, tool using species.
Nowadays, the other hominids are long gone, and almost all of the hazardous megafauna have gone too. Don't steal sheep from the human villages. It will end very, very badly for you.
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## They're trappers.
Being able to relatively rapidly construct large-scale traps (in relation to the fauna) - be they of the body-gripping or deadfall type, trapping pits or pentraps - giants don't even have to get near their prey, and prefer catching larger amounts of live animals to minimize efforts and waste.
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**They don't hunt, they wait, watch the skies, listen and follow their noses.** - Slight frame-challenge.
Many herds of animals will roam for miles in search of water or grazing. Often they get picked-off by predators or just die of dehydration/disease/degenerate diseases associated with age.
The movement or presence of crows, vultures, hawks, condors, eagles, hyenas and coyotes all indicates the potential presence of fallen-flesh. Following these creatures is the key. Yep, they're scavengers and carrion-eaters, taking meat where they find it, fending-off predators from their kills, and other little creatures that might otherwise steal their meal. Their noses can smell that characteristic never-forgotten smell of death before it even takes the creature destined to become their next meal.
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I'm writing a novel that takes place in a future where we've just begun to go interstellar, but the costs are still quite high and the purpose is definitely scientific study, exploration, and so on. FTL is not an option. Within the solar system we are quite advanced in the sense that we have colonized Mars, Venus, a good number of asteroids, various moons of Jupiter, Saturn . . . . not long has passed (a few centuries at the most; still working out the details) so terraforming is in very early stages or not being attempted at all; but asteroid mining is extremely lucrative and humanity is overall very well-established in terms of orbital colonies, space travel, and such.
I'm not sure all that background is helpful, but wanted to give the general picture. My question is what methods of non-rocket spacelaunch are going to be most prominent at various stages of human advancement? I've done a bit of research and it seems like, with the sorts of resources I'm giving my civilization, an orbital ring might be a very strong option . . . . augmented of course by individual projectile launchers and whatnot used by individual corporations and so on . . . . but I'm going after the overall most efficient method, here. I haven't found anything comparing exact building costs and payload capacities and such. Does anyone have a link? If not, any ideas?
As humanity advances of course, we have to assume some degree of technological innovation. So a space elevator might be unfeasible today partly because of technological limitations; but in the future should I assume it will be possible? Probably, at least EVENTUALLY. So at what point in the future will such things become possible enough to make them more cost-effective than, say, a less advanced method that might be more realistic in the near term? Would something like an orbital ring be unfeasible for so long that startrams or mass drivers or guns or whatever would become predominant first? Is my impression that they would be easier correct or totally off?
Does my question make sense? Also, I am asking paticularly about Earth here but any random thoughts on other matters, like Mars' lighter atmosphere making a space elevator more realistic, would be welcome. Thanks!
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You really only have three main options to get into orbit:
1. Rockets / continuous thrust
2. Space elevator
3. As a Projectile from a "Big Gun" (All of your velocity acquired at once)
Space elevators have been discussed to death and back. They are the gold standard for cheap space access but are by far the most difficult to construct and maintain. Not to mention they would be a huge failure point for any hostile group to strike.
You want to move away rockets, so the next thing to look at are "Projectile" based launches. The general concept is you get your orbital payload up to speed on the ground.
The issue with accelerating your spacebound payload to orbital velocities within an atmosphere is the atmosphere... and the acceleration. The G forces caused by drag alone would probably be beyond human survival (if launched from sea level).
You could have an unmanned vessel launch from a massive, multi-mile long railgun inside a vacuum tube, installed at as high of an elevation as possible to mitigate those challenges. Even then you'll need a rocket burn to correct your orbit into something stable.
One interesting approach is a form of rocketry called Laser Ablation Propulsion (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_propulsion>) where you have a ground based laser system vaporize a plate at the bottom of your launch vehicle, and the pressure from the plasma plume pushes you away.
Realistically, the future will probably combine multiple approaches rather than relying entirely on any one approach.
Imagine a huge circular magnetic accelerator track that gradually brings a manned launch vehicle up to "pretty fast but survivable" speeds. That launches and gains some additional velocity from a ground based laser system. Then it uses chemical rockets to reach a skyhook (<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqwpQarrDwk>) and is off!
There's also the potential for Nuclear rockets, but those will probably be taboo for Earth bound launches for.... ever.
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## Space Elevators
The key here is to use a very thin ribbon of carbon nano-fiber cables instead of one big ginormous metal cable as is most often depicted in science fiction.
While it used to be assumed that a space elevator would cost over a trillion dollars, advancements in carbon nano-fiber technology has lead to [newer ideas on the design of space elevators that could cost as little as 6.2 billion USD](http://www.niac.usra.edu/files/library/meetings/annual/jun02/521Edwards.pdf) to construct the first one and only about 2 billion per elevator after that. And they could have an operational cost of only ~100 USD per kilogram.
For comparison, the final cost of the US Interstate system was about 129 billion USD... and that was decades ago; so, inflation wise think closer to 740 billion USD. So for the same relative price as the US interstate building project, one could construct about 370 space elevators with a total lift capacity of about 1.5 million lb per day and operate at a cost that is 27 times cheaper than a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket per kg and about 545 times cheaper than a space shuttle.
The human race would need to seriously ramp up our ability to mass produce high quality carbon nano-fibers to make this happen, but being able to reach the required levels of refinement and production should not take more than a few decades from now when you look at current trends.
I'd be very surprised if the first space elevators were actually as cheap as this since there are bound to be some unforeseen hurdles to overcome, but once a country gets the first dozen or so of these built, it seems pretty reasonable to assume that the price could come down to the more conservative 2 billion dollar figure.
So shipping things up and down to space would still be more expensive than normal freight, but in comparison, very affordable. Since you mention space mining, many of the precious metals you can get from an asteroid are worth well over 100$/lb so silver, gold, platinum, Iridium, etc. could all become economically viable to import.
## ... As For Mars
Mars would benefit a lot from sticking with rockets for a while because the lower gravity turns the "tyranny of rockets" problem into more of the "inconvenience of rockets" problem. Whereas rockets on Earth are made from expensive alloys and filled with premium grade fuels just to waste 95% of their mass on getting into orbit, on Mars you can produce much lower grade fuels and use less efficient materials to build rockets that can carry 20-40 times as large of a payload for their size. On Mars you also need to consider the limitations of industrialization. It is not Earth; so, man power is VERY limited and industrialization much more risky. So a super precise and large scale manufacturing project like building a space elevator may be outside of their abilities for a while compared to Earth while simple methane powered rockets could be built relatively early on.
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There are two structures that have not been mentioned yet:
## Space Fountain##
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/rn6Nd.png)
Wikipedia article here: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_fountain>
This is a very clever design, and relatively easy to build.
The basic principle is this: Shoot a stream of metal pellets at high speed through a vacuum tube. Twist the tube upwards 90 degrees with a big magnet so that the pellets travel upwards. Turn the pellets at the top 180 degrees so they travel downward again.
The stream of pellets will lift the entire assembly into the air
## Launch Loop
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1gNnT.png)
Wikipedia article here: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop>
This is a superstructure which is 2 000km long and similar to the space fountain. It sounds great, but the big hurdle is where to build it, as 2 000km is a lot of space, and the only real-estate that I think would work on earth would be North africa, or floating on the ocean
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# Space Whip
I'm not sure I can do this justice but in his book *Seveneves*, Niel Stephenson posited a novel means of getting into orbit. You have a satellite with two very long, thick cables on either side, which is rotating on an axis tangent to the curvature of the earth, so at all times, one cable is approaching the earth and the other is moving away. Thing is, the satellite's rotation does not need to be very fast in order for the movement at the end of the whip to be much, much faster, like cracking a whip. So you simply need to fly up high enough to reach the end of the whip (in the book, a character did so using a nanotech flying wing suit, just lazily catching updrafts until she reached the required altitude, but you don't need to get that exotic, any regular aircraft could do the trick), and latch on to the end of the whip as it passes overhead. The resulting whip-crack will launch you into orbit, simply detach when you get high/fast enough. The whip on the other side of the satellite will then descend towards Earth and pick up another passenger, so it stays in a stable rotation in orbit. A number of these satellites could be placed in various geostationary orbits to provide easy access to space from each of their locations. The book also featured a larger one with a non-geostationary orbit that can visit several proscribed locations as it circles the planet.
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No launch system can really do the job *entirely* without rockets, even a space elevator will need rockets to shift stuff to orbits that don't intersect the space elevator. (You *will* want to put stuff into such orbits, in part because intersecting the space elevator will make people angry.) Making the needed changes to orbits can easily take a good chunk of the rocket propulsion that would be needed to get into the destination orbit directly.
It turns out that rockets are really good at what they do, and it's really hard to come up with an alternative that's better than just making the rocket portion a little bigger. Alternatives like mass drivers and elevators also have throughput issues...you've got one big bottleneck on your traffic...and again, only target specific orbits. Rockets can more or less go anywhere from anywhere with a launch mount and stacking/fueling infrastructure, making them a much more scalable approach to moving material.
Maybe beam-assisted launch could be useful, launch vehicles using laser or microwave beams from the ground to heat their propellant. The vehicles would be more complicated and more infrastructure would be required, but could get better specific impulse. Note that this hasn't historically been a trade that has resulted in lower costs. It might be an approach that works better away from Earth, where less thrust and power are needed and there's less weather to mess with the beams.
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In increasing order of launch volumes required for viability:
1. Things to assist the rocket launch process in some way. Things like [balloons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyCat) to get you past most of the atmosphere before you start with the rockets, [spaceplanes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_(spacecraft)), [skyhooks et al](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momentum_exchange_tether) and the like. These have relatively low costs, work with currently available technology, and can generate cost savings at relatively low launch volumes. These will likely be the first things taking over from rockets, being used to build up our orbital infrastructure.
2. Localised rocket replacement systems. These are things that can be made in a relatively small geographical area. They're all much more expensive than the above, but don't involve mass-scale international cooperation, and can be net cost savings at moderate (relatively speaking) launch volumes. Things like [space elevators](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator), [space fountains](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_fountain), [mass drivers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarTram) (and [variants thereon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ram_accelerator)), building up to, at the outer limits of "localised", [launch loops](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop). These will come in once we have orbital infrastructure (at least enough of it to make them financially viable), and be used for expansion beyond that.
3. [Orbital rings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_ring). These get their own category, because they're just that ridiculous. These are end-game for methods of getting from earth to space: ludicrously expensive at the outset, but dropping launch costs down to almost nothing, essentially the world over, and requiring global cooperation to even begin constructing. There's essentially no point in building them until a significant percentage of our industry is in space, when you want things like commuting to space for work to be viable.
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Two main categories of non-rocket space launch:
1. Other Vehicles:
Space Planes are currently in development. A plane that flies to the edge of the atmosphere then keeps going. Very similar to a rocket in some ways, but not a rocket. See some development/details at: <https://www.reactionengines.co.uk/>
2. Structures:
Examples include the famous Space Elevator, the Orbital Ring you mention, the Space Tower and various "big guns" like the Victorians thought space travel might look like. Skyhooks are also worth a mention, they are kind of Space-Elevator like in concept but maybe more near-future (not so reliant on super-materials).
See this series of YouTube videos that goes through a large number of space-launch technologies and their potentials.
<https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIIOUpOge0LsGJI_vni4xvfBQTuryTwlU>
Think about the *tone* you want to set with these machines in your story. Do you want to "wow" the reader with the sheer scale of the future? ("One hundred billion people called Earth home"). Do you want technology that feels so advanced its like magic? (The Space Elevator cable super material). Or do you want the opposite? (It feels so possible, so real). Do you want to actually dedicate time talking about these things? (A Space-plane requires no explanation, a space elevator it probably needs a few lines of description so that readers know what to picture.)
Final point of warning. We don't have these machines yet, they are speculative. If any of these things do one day exist they will not look quite the same. It will be like the difference between a modern, real Helicopter and a Leonardo da Vinci sketch. Or between a Zeppelin and this thing.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/rweUYm.png)
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**Setting Background**
I'm working on an admittedly silly sounding setting. Technologically advanced space fairing humans become stranded on a ring of asteroids in orbit around a large planet. They have lost the vast majority of their technology in the process of becoming stranded, but the existing stations keep them alive. They rebuild slowly. The micro-gravity that they live in makes space travel accessible at a far lower level of technological process, and so by the time they have reached what we might consider medieval tech, they are scooting around the vacuum of space in resin-laminated wooden ships propelled by compressed air.
**Mechanical Power** I've got most of this figured out already. Don't worry about how the ships work, don't worry about how life support works. What I need to know is what these people use as a source of mechanical energy for tasks like milling, air circulation, etc.
**Constraints** No electricity. No non-human animals of any kind. And no offense to people who *are* into this, but I am desperately trying to avoid steam power in order to keep this from getting too "Steam Punk". [Like the ancient Greeks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile) and many other peoples from antiquity, these folk understand that pressurized steam has force to it, but lack the mechanical precision to make an efficient steam engine - something that took a long time to figure out!
**Materials** Cast iron, low quality steal, copper alloys, dandelion sap rubber, wood, plant fiber cloths, and leather from human skin. Open to other materials if they make sense for the setting.
**Ideas so far**
1. Temperature differential. Exploiting the dark side/light side of the asteroids.
2. Tidal force. The planet that these asteroids orbit presumably has a very strong tidal force on these little asteroids. Would some sort of crank ratchet pendulum be able to generate a sufficient amount of power?
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**Asteroid wheel.**
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphnis_(moon)>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6AnxB.jpg)
Saturns moon Daphnis cruises along in a gap that it has cleared in one of the rings. The rings are made of smaller stuff. Your medievals live on a similar rock and have erected wheels about the circumference of their rock. Like a waterwheel, these extract energy from impacting icy rubble as they pass by the slower ring on the outside and the faster on the inside.
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I’m shamelessly stealing from the late, great Sir Terry Pratchett here but:
**Devices**
Nobody knows how they were made. Like the Habitats, they are relics of a bygone age. A Device does nothing but turn, or reciprocate, or wiggle, with impossible torque and seemingly endless energy. Though they might have previously had some purpose they are now naught but motive curiosities.
Your people have hoarded what devices they can find, amassing some thousands of them. They have learnt the secrets of starting/stopping them and figured out methods to harness their immeasurable power using only primitive materials. One ship can get all the mechanical power it needs from a single Device, but as the supply is limited and nobody knows how to make more they are inconceivably valuable.
After all, how can one mill grain without the help of an unstoppable, indestructible, unfathomable, ancient motor?
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# Solar Powered Stirling Engine or Solar Sail "Wind"mills
This can depend on the star your planet and asteroids orbit, but you can have the light heat a black surface to create the temperature differential of a [Stirling engine.](https://www.stirlingengine.com/low-temperature/)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Az73f.png)
[Solar Sails](https://www.planetary.org/articles/what-is-solar-sailing) are large, thin sails used by small spacecraft. They operate off the miniscule amount of momentum delivered by photons, it may be small, but it is constant acceleration over a long period of time. These are used to move low mass objects to high speeds. You could set up solar mills that instead of sails moved by the wind, the photons move your massive sails.
Both of these would be best paired with Cast-Iron Flywheels with magnetic bearings. The heat differential and the photon momentum will be delivering low energy, but these can be built up to useable levels with a flywheel.
This is where the micro-gravity and vacuum help you out. If you are lucky enough to have some magnetic material, you can create an almost frictionless flywheel that has constant energy fed into it as long as the star shines. Your only real limits would be how much light your asteroids receive and the strength of cast iron. If you receive too much light, your flywheel could rip itself apart.
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Look at [H. Beam Piper's](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/676237.Space_Viking) novel [*Space Viking*](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20728).
Piper was always pessimistic about human government. In this novel he posits an Industrial Feudal society. feudal does not have to equal low tech. Economically each company/fiefdom is in essence a company town, with services and employment provided by the fief holder. Individuals may have subfiefs within the fief. Each has oaths of fealty to the level above, and fief holders have duties and obligations to those below.
Another example is [Larry Niven's](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/583441.Oath_of_Fealty#) novel *Oath of Fealty* which amounts to a feudal micro society within a broader capitalistic one.
Ken Follett's series of books, "Pillars of the Earth" and "World Without End" provide a good view of the network of obligations that filled the feudal world.
At it's core feudalism is a set of non equal but symmetric set of duties and obligations, rights and privileges.
You can see some of this in Company Towns. I knew the chief electrician for Winnipeg Hydro's dams at Point du Bois and Slave Falls. The company owned the entire town. Everyone rented from the company at nominal rates. The store was privately run, but the premises leased from the company.
Point du Bois was an oddity that arose from the only access initially was by train, and it didn't run on a regular schedule. Another company town was Potlatch Idaho, a lumber town. While housing was privately owned, the company just asked the city council for their budget, and wrote them a cheque. No property taxes. Company owners figured that this was their duty to people who were living and supporting their work. Company towns can be oppressive, as a means to make sure that your labour force barely breaks even, or they can be less oppressive, and just complicated.
In the alluded to book above, "Space Viking" piper makes a first order approximation to industrial feudalism.
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Maybe you could harness a cryovolcano or geyser? I think those typically have methane in them, though, so I can't imagine why they wouldn't just burn that if their habitat is somehow still giving them enough of an earth-like atmosphere to burn wood and cast iron.
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Imagine an apex predator that has become technological advanced, but has kept "hunting with tooth and claw" in its daily routine as a way to feed itself (cultural, traditional reasons and such). So no technology or tools allowed. Being civilized, the creature wants a way to efficiently kill its prey and with a minimum of pain and mess. What methods would this predator use? To be clear, I'm interested in the kill, not the hunt itself.
So far I have thought of the way lion's kill (choking the prey) and slicing the throat, though I believe the latter, without sedation, is not painless at all.
Edit: just to be clear, not looking for gruesome depictions or descriptions, but looking for as less violence as possible.
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**Only the Kill, Not the Hunt**
For this civilized predator, if only the kill is important due to cultural and traditional reasons, these predators can follow the same routine that most humans in various parts of the world follow.
The daily routine of an average predator will be like,
Go to the nearby shopping complex (or a basic street market), pick up the prey of your choice (like an alien rabbit, a chicken, or goat).
During dinner time, give your prey some water to drink, mixed with powerful sleeping agents (no side effects for predators), once its unconscious,
**a more traditional predator** can use its tooth or claw to break the neck or
**a modern one** can use an artificial claw machine that basically works like a butcher knife, minus the bloody mess.
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**Poison**
The [cone snail](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_snail) inject a neurotoxin that paralyzes and kills it's prey. Some also feature a pain killer to keep the prey calm while dying.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/NwLbn.jpg)
Poison can easily be the fastest, cleanest and least painful way to die (It can also be the slowest, messist and most painful way to die too)
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Like it always has been done.
If this creature traditionally hunted by walking its victim to death, then that is how it would do so traditionally.
Tradition does not care about how painful something is.
But that is beside the point. How does a well cultured individual kill? For convenience to itself.
Why? Because a well cultured individual does not wish to spend more time on the killing than it either wants to, or has to. Its certainly not because it would cause the least amount of pain to the prey.
Why? Because its *prey*, not an *equal*. If the suffering of the prey is to have any significance its is because:
1. it genuinely affects the taste/nutrition.
2. The predator is going to receive flack for it from *equals*, or institutions it participates in.
3. The predator feels bad for it, making it more of a pet than prey.
Today there are wide variety of methods for dispatching prey animals: Bolts to the head, throat slitting, suffocation, neck breaking, poison/sleeping compounds, etc...
Some places don't even bother to kill first and simply start disassembling the animal straight away. Death is a consequence. This isn't too dissimilar to the feeding patterns of numerous predators who don't have the luxury of killing the prey first (Orca), or eat the prey whole (Frog), or have already sufficiently restrained the prey (Boa Constrictor).
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However lets presume that this predator wants the quadfecta of efficiency for itself, minimal pain for its prey, cultured tradition, and no tools.
First the species has dissected numerous specimens of the prey, some of them while they were still very much alive to identify the pain system, neural pathways, and senses.
Second they would have to understand the organisation of the thinking being done by the prey, and which part of the thinking they desire to not feel pain. In some species this will not be possible.
Case in point are plants, they have no nervous system but a highly developed chemical thinking. There is no way to prevent a tree from experiencing "pain" as it makes sense to them.
Alternately with animals its possible to prevent the conscious perception of pain, even though other parts of thinking are well aware of the pain.
Third with this cultured knowledge and having defined what "painless death" means, and then a prey animal for which its possible reasonably to provide this too.
* They kill during the time when this system is at its least arousable. In our world this would be at the deepest part of sleep, about 2-4hours in.
* They aim to severe/obliterate the pain receptor system immediately and follow up by dispatching in whatever manner is reasonable. In our world the brain stem is the oldest part of the brain, and is also responsible for processing pain. Obliterating this part of the brain serves to provide much of the value in a "painless death".
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Cougars and other large cats prefer to strangle their prey. When done professionally (and for most predators it can't be in any other way) it is a quick (i.e. a few seconds), reliable and not-so-painful death.
This method was used to butcher animals for skin before electricity came in hand. It also was often used by "non-professional" butchers, because you need quite a bit of training to, for example, cut an animal's throat in such a way that it (more or less) instantly kills the animal, and not leave it in hours of agony.
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Probably tangential to the answer, but one major issue is that this tradition would likely either disappear or be warped and abstractized as time and civilization development grows.
It's a perfectly fine tradition for relatively low-tech low-population communities, but as they grow and expand, it becomes a less and less efficient way to consume your meal, eventually bumping in the issues that there's just not enough land available for everybody to enjoy their meal-hunt, resulting in the stiffling of the population growth. That, and there's also an issue of the hunt-animal being kept alive until the very moment it is to be hunted, which would add additional expenses and would made long-term reserves unviable - if there's a sudden plague among the livestock that results in most of them dying - your population is screwed if they were unwilling to make stockpiles of frozen meat or refuse to eat in non-traditional way.
In this situation the ones that will go "screw the traditions, I just want to eat!" would instantly get an edge over the competitors, and would be able to multiply their population (Which directly leads to the technological and social advancements) and make it much more resilient via them having to spend less expenses and land area on food production and consumption.
Especially if they're advanced enough, since this implies massive population densities that would made "traditional hunting" to be flat out impossible to anybody except for maybe the priveleged wealthy few who can affort to both own enough land to hunt on and animals to hunt, and to waste time on hunting your meal instead of quickly consuming the meal and buggering off to do something more productive. The rest would have to be content with buying refrigerated meat from slaughterhouses.
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I'm assuming that the tooth and claw method means that they'll hunt the target as they always did, but once they get to the prey and are about to kill it they want to do it as painlessly as possible.
They might not use tools and weapons for the kill, but they could still augment themselves in order to make the kill less painful. For example imagine if they can wear a glove-like item on the top of their paws (that doesn't touch the ground) that will excrete a powerful local painkiller the moment their claws extend. This way the moment their nails embed themselves in the target it's local pain centers are immediately shut down and the pain is as short as possible. Should the prey escape it's not (too much) debilitated by the painkiller. Possibly another material can be injected alongside the painkiller to keep the prey awake and moving in order to counteract any sedative effects from the painkiller.
Similarly you could have a pressure-sensitive item that you can insert in the mouth. Upon a bite (a pretty strong one at that to prevent accidents) the item will release a painkiller. This one would need to be calibrated so it does not do much when ingested, and only kills pain when inserted into the bloodstream through a bite (or if you are unlucky a wound in your own mouth. Possibly you can have an edible cream with a neutralizing agent inside your mouth first?).
I can't tell you exactly what substances you have to use, the interplay between painkillers and a dozen other things is just too complex and you would have to ask an anesteasiologist and chemist/apothecary for exact details.
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Remember that prey coevolves with predators. For a civilized predator that has never evolved to use tools, the prey should be just as smart and civilized.
Also, pack hunters tend to take out the old and sick of the herd, which are easier kills.
So - approach such a member of the prey species and start a process of seduction.
1. Strum their pain with your fingers
2. Sing their life with words
3. [Kill them softly with your song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKOtzIo-uYw)
Seriously now, [talk it out with the prey. Arrange the whole thing with them.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOUobuGaY7U) If you have their consent, [it's even vegan](https://vegetarianism.stackexchange.com/questions/1820/is-consensual-cannibalism-vegan). If the prey won't struggle then there won't be much a mess, you can even use drowning or suffocation to avoid a bloody mess; You also avoid using poison, which might spoil the meat.
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Breed the animal so the animal enjoys praise,and petting (or the chase) so much that it can ignore pain or perceive pain as pleasure for a predictable period of time.
Do at least some number of repeats over some time period, perhaps hours or days before the final time,
then use whatever method suited to kill within the time the animal is conscious and pain immune.
The difficult part is proving this to the reader, but you can use technology to do that
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**Guillotine**.
**The French knew their stuff**.
Honestly the guillotine might be even more humane that our current method, [read](https://theconversation.com/why-the-guillotine-may-be-less-cruel-than-execution-by-slow-poisoning-121034).
Basically it takes about a second to chop a head off.
But it gets better. Because it is chopping it from neck it kills quickly. And this part I'm totally blacking out on but this quickly severs something in the neck that results in a very painless death, or as painless as possible.
And just like the French who needed to do a lot of public murder ASAP the guillotine if very fast and incredibly cheap to make.
I'd wager with our current technologies we can create a super super sharp blade, diamond edges or something, that wont need as much maintenance as steal would.
Also perfectly calculated to deliver consistent results.
Quote: "While the moment of execution could be nothing but terrifying, that second of suffering was brief in comparison to the 43 minutes it took for Lockett to die after lethal drugs were administered. "
So. Believe it or not it is much faster and more humane that current methods.
**Throat slitting**.
Another popular method used to murder animals. A quick movement and the thing is dead. Professional butchers can do it insanely fast and the amount of pain or suffering can cleanly be said as minimal.
**Hanging**.
Another popular method of murder and it is praised to be a lot faster **if** the knot is done correctly.
It snaps the neck in an instant and shuts the brain off immediately.
Also quick and easy to use, then it is very cheap as well.
Bonus points for not having blood getting out and ruining your pristine carpet.
So. Basically it's all about the neck. Cut the thing from the back in a quick strike and they person dies almost instantly with like a second of pain.
**However** neuroscience might need to check into that though. How much actual data we have I simply don't know. We could also argue about what they mean.
But basically we can all agree that a moment of pain will be needed until you shut the whole body down using anesthesia.
Speaking of which. **Total anesthesia**
Makes a lot of sense honestly. If you can totally drug the person then you don't have much of a problem. Then you can chop them off piece by piece if you want.
Anyway I honestly think that those methods done correctly, like a standard type of guillotine for example, not only offer the best overall method but is even less painful than stuff we currently use against humans. What a depressing sentence that was, and that is coming from someone who believes in capital punishment. But I digress.
Anyway I did not make a lot of distinction between human or other animals here because things should be, overall, the same when it comes to a quick death.
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A travelling space fleet found an old militarized asteroid, with weaponry, space suits, munitions, and food which had been sitting there for 5 years. Is it still usable and safe?
Guns- coilguns, powered by a nuclear generator on the interior of the asteroid. Exposed to the vacuum of space.
* Did they rust or anything?
* They should work if I get the generator back up, right?
Space suits- single unit personal suits that can withstand the vacuum of space. Comparable to the suits that have been used in previous missions(Apollo and stuff). In a pressurized area, but in 0G
* Do they still work?
* Are they safe?
Munitions- small missiles with an explosive warhead launched from coilguns. Most in pressurized area, some in a vacuum.
* Probably need a recharge for the targeting system, right?
* Would the ones in vacuum still work?
* Will the warhead still work?
Food- Mountain Houses or Ramen. In a pressurized area.
* Is it still good?
Generator- large nuclear generator. In a pressurized area.
* Will it still work?
* Is it safe?(assume it was emptied when the inhabitants left)
* How long to start it up?
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Parts exposed to vacuum: mechanical parts will have to be recertified and examined for possible [vacuum welding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_welding). Parts exposed to external vacuum are probably slightly corroded and will require scrubbing and re-passivation.
Plastics and rubbers will as a rule need to be replaced due to storage embrittling (the evaporation of plasticizers from the plastics). Chemical batteries will require replacement. Fuel cell and osmotic membranes (CO2 scrubbers etc.) will also need replacement.
Missiles should work, the targeting system will require recharging but not replacement since it almost certainly uses solid-state supercapacitors.
The nuclear generator is probably good and only needs replacement for parts having undergone secondary activation. Still requires recertification but should be relatively easy to do.
The foodstuff might be a bit stale, but is probably still eatable.
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**It depends on radiation.**
Superfast charged particles aka cosmic rays are bad for biological organisms. [Cosmic rays can also mess with electronics](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/32663/what-are-the-effects-of-cosmic-rays-on-consumer-electronics) and the effects are cumulative. Cosmic rays come from various energetic space phenomena but inside a solar system the main source is the solar wind.
Maybe your militarized meteor has all the good stuff deep down inside, using the bulk of the meteor as shielding. Or maybe it had active magnetic shielding at one time, which has since stopped working. The cumulative effect of particle radiation on your electronics might have irreparably damaged them. It does not take much to get fussy electronics to not work. I might want to put some distance between me and the nuclear coilgun thing the first time you try it.
Cumulative radiation could also embrittle plastic parts of vacuum suits.
Food and water would be best off if it were sterile to start with. Radiation and vacuum is not going to do that stuff any harm. Ordinary firearms would be ok too if you really have to fight; probably those would do better in desiccated vacuum than they would on earth. Also if the previous inhabitants had a stack of interesting magazines those will be ok although styles might look dated.
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It depends.
It depends on the temperature and position. If the objects are left in sunlight and warm up the result may well be different to objects kept in shade and cool down.
It depends how close the asteroid is to the sun and how quickly it spins. If the items experience a regular heating and cooling cycle it will be more detrimental than if they are kept at a constant (low) temperature inside the asteroid or in perpetually shade.
It depends on the design of the items, items like spacesuits are designed to be exposed to a vacuum and depending on design might well survive quite well. Sterile food should store quite well but again depending on the design of the packaging. Hot/cold cycles might cause containers to rupture.
It depends on the level of micrometeorites in the area. If the items are exposed on the surface this might be significant for some items especially if large areas are exposed there is an increased likelihood of some minor damage.
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yes. Had an MRE dating from the gulf war era, and it was still good, but everything should be good to go.
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> A travelling space fleet found an old militarized asteroid, with weaponry, space suits, munitions, and food which had been sitting there for 5 years. Is it still usable and safe?
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In general: **Yes**
En Detail: **It depends on a lot of variables**
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Basically there are four major influences that take place:
* Temperature
+ Absolute
+ Temperature difference
+ Change over time
* Radiation
+ Soft (Light)
+ Hard (all forms)
* Atmosphere (or lack thereof)
+ Pressure
+ Composition
* Impacts of other bodies
## Temperature
Like on earth storing stuff to hot or too cold might destroy it. This might be due chemical effects (breaking up of molecules), physical effects (breaking of crystal structure) or 'simple' mechanical effect due different rate of expansion/contraction of combined materials - like a recoil operation jamming when hot.
Equally damaging is temperature difference. With a gradient high enough even 'simple' materials - like a steel plate - will degenerate over time and ultimately break.
Cyclic change of temperature is most devastating on the long run, as it combines all effects over and over again. So even small ones will add up.
*As a result*, no matter how advanced a technology is, it might be advisable to keepas much technology at controlled non changing temperature.
## Radiation
Already soft radiation, like intense light will change composition of complex molecules - just think of a a newspaper in bright sunlight. Depending on distance from a star light may have a great influence on durability of the asteroid at whole and the station in particular.
Then there is hard radiation, no matter if Alpha, Beta or Gama. All will add corrosion to uncovered surfaces as well as breaking their structures, making them ultimate crumble.
*As a result*, no matter how advanced a technology is, it might be advisable to not expose their devices as little as possible, use cover wherever possible - much like gun ports on sailing ships.
## Atmosphere (or lack thereof)
To start with, there is no real air tight system Any station not maintained (manual or automatic) will loose pressure. It might only be small, a few liter a day, but with ageing structural integrity it'll gets more and more. Most important for your setting might be that the station will for sure have a lower pressure than expected - beside the effect that it might have had a lower to start with, as saving on pressure is saving on energy and supplies.
Equally the composition of the atmosphere plays a role. If the station is mothballed, a standard breathing one (with Oxygen) might have been replaced by a nitrogen only to reduce oxidation effects. This in fact may be as well in non mothballed stat be used for some less frequented sections.
Last but not least, pressure also adds to disintegration. So a mothballed station might again have a way lower pressure.
Then there is vacuum. While it can be assumed that any technology able to maintain a travelling space fleet and asteroid station has sufficient means of lubrication and sealing for every day operation, this might not always be the same for long term situations.
*As a result*, no matter how advanced a technology is, it might be advisable to keep as much as possible stored 'inside' at controlled pressure and atmosphere.
## Impacts of other bodies
Space is empty ... but at the same time filled with tiny bullets chasing you installations every tiny meteoroid will leave a scratch mark on exposed surfaces. They are the low sped high mass equivalents of radiation. One may be not of great influence, over time they sum up.
*As a result*, no matter how advanced a technology is, it might, once again, be advisable to store whatever needs to stay intact inside and covered.
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Taking all of the above into account - and considering that we're talking about a civilisation capable to maintain a travelling fleet in space - it is safe to assume that the station will be mostly usable if build proper and left in a mothballed state.
Though, it still, I wouldn't assume that it's done with simply switching on power. After all, that usually won't work with a car left in a carport (but on earth) for five years. Even less for a space station. Depending on size it will take days to level temperature (and pressure) up. Just think of it, heat isn't distributed magically around the station but in pipes. They get leaky, clogged up or simply malfunction in some valve. Be prepared to have at least one guy called Mario.
Until that is working, you crew will have to wear space suits - maybe not heavy suits that let one survive in outer space, but at least light 'indoor' versions like the new Boing ones, able to keep pressure and regulate temperature.
And then there is the nuclear plant. They are like the wet dream of plumbers and function in no way like with the animation shown to general public (no matter if fission or fusion). It isn't connecting a backup battery and pulling some rods. They as well degenerate over time. Control rods in a fission reactor are consumables (and Tschenobyl happened in part due stuck rods).
And so on...
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**Bottom line:**
Either make your civilisation so perfect and high above, that the station is fully functional and still operating (in mothballed mode) or be prepared to invest quite some time to get it up again.
Food on the other hand shouldn't be a big deal, if preserved proper, like canned in a container good for the (inside) environment, it will bear all the same "advantages" of durable food known form Earth :)
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> A travelling space fleet found an old militarized asteroid, with weaponry, space suits, munitions, and food which had been sitting there for 5 years. Is it still usable and safe?
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Depends on whether its stored properly.
Most modern militaries have processes for long term storage - storing ammunition in airtight cans, coating guns in cosmoline, a waxy grease and so on.
I'd argue that any military with any sense would design its long term storage around the environment. You might need to replace expendable items - batteries and such which wouldn't be there.
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> Guns- coilguns, powered by a nuclear generator on the interior of the asteroid. Exposed to the vacuum of space.
>
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A lot of real life military gear *does* survive adverse conditions, but a space gun would likely be designed to be stowed unless needed. Why do a space walk when you can retract said guns, keep them at normal atmospheric and maintain them in a shirt sleeve environment?
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> Space suits- single unit personal suits that can withstand the vacuum of space. Comparable to the suits that have been used in previous missions(Apollo and stuff). In a pressurized area, but in 0G
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Unlike 70s space missions, or even modern ones, an asteroid base is probably designed for longer term, self contained activity. You *will* want to test these, but you'd probably have the tools to. They'd likely be designed for long term use (till the next resupply) and chances are they'd have a workshop for fixing these.
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> Munitions- small missiles with an explosive warhead launched from coilguns. Most in pressurized area, some in a vacuum.
>
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Probably stored in containers designed for vacuum, possibly with an inert internal atmosphere. Once again, if you know you're in space for the long term, you're going to design things around the environment, with robust storage that handles airlessness and the wild potential temperature changes of space. If militaries do anything well, its cheap, robust storage.
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> Food- Mountain Houses or Ramen. In a pressurized area.
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No one eats that in the military. Most military food these days is stored in retort pouches, and isn't dehydrated, just processed for long life. [Food in space](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_food) *specifically* could be dehydrated or irradiated for long shelf life, and once again, be specifically designed for the requirements.
You might even have fresh, plant food, or the remnants of the facilities to grow it as a way of waste/atmosphere reprocessing, though these might not be happy sitting untended for half a decade. You would need lights and pumps, but would be a logical way to dispose of/use the waste products of human habitation.
These might *not* be usable, but might provide an appropriate level of challenge or drama if desired.
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Consider a heavily urbanized society with modern or near future technology with hybrid visual/infrared security cameras in all public areas and most stores, restaurants, office buildings, etc. These cameras are capable of performing facial recognition (aided with thermal cameras and skin texture recognition algorithms to defeat efforts at disguise). While they are not usually monitored, once a crime happens, the police will look at the footage at the crime scene, and follow the perpetrator forwards (to where they went) and backwards (to where they came from) in time in order to determine their identity and catch them. The police are relatively smart about this, and will not be defeated by simple countermeasures. If you destroy a camera, they will look at the last footage transmitted by the camera for anyone near it or anyone with a weapon, look at the footage for the cameras in the areas nearby and interrogate people, etc. If you leave your house with a mask on, they will simply track you back to your house and catch you. If you go into a bathroom stall or other area without cameras, put on a mask, then leave and commit the crime, they will track you back to the stall by viewing footage backwards (bathrooms also have cameras, just not the stalls), then watch the stall door until they see you entering.
The cameras are also difficult to hack. They have no signal receivers whatsoever, and cannot be sent commands remotely. Obtaining physical access to them is also difficult, as they are usually in elevated positions, as they spray fluorescent purple dye designed to be hard to wash off onto anyone accessing them without proper equipment, as passersby will see you doing it, and as most cameras are within the field of view of 2-3 other cameras which will spot you. The cameras are powered by electrical cables, but also have batteries which can last for 3 months without replacement for backup. They continuously broadcast their footage, and their footage is then captured and stored at multiple independent facilities. In case of a malfunction of these facilities, the cameras also store footage from the last several months, which can be downloaded by physically accessing the cameras with special equipment. The data centers can be hacked, of course, but there are many of them for each city which makes this difficult, and breaking through their security is difficult for all but the most resourceful criminals.
With this in mind, how would you as a street level criminal (or other enemy of the law) without access to advanced hacking tools, connections with law enforcement/high officials, and such defeat this surveillance?
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The False Dilemma/False Dichotomy logic fallacy often presents as this black and white conditional. The reality of even this dire scenario is there are cracks and blind spots intrinsic to any absolute system.
There is a series that presented the absolute monitor to crime as a collection of mind-readers. In the series, the mind-readers eventually are blocked by a hood that didn't allow them to read the minds of the wearer. In your absolute monitor world, some kind of shield method or device would eventually be developed.
Technically, your system of cameras have multiple vulnerabilities in the systems. The cameras individually have limits and can be taken out. Even in scenarios where multiple cameras are deployed, there are blind spots as well as vulnerabilities to the critical ones. The messaging channels are also targets for interception and interference. The storage base has volume as well as retrieval challenges for all of that video content. It is not like simple data content.
The processing and enrichment of the video content is a potential backlog as you are spending enormous amounts of compute power for content about people following the law that will never require review. It all has to be processed to meet your criteria of finding every instance of one law-breaker where ever they have traveled.
3D printed masks have been shown capable of defeating facial recognition programs. Photographs also have been used to defeat facial recognition programs.
Often it isn't the street level criminal that has intents on such systems. Many movies show that the character gaining some level of pass on an absolute system is being helped to achieve a goal by someone with better access and abilities to bypass security protocols.
Simple things like construction can introduce blind spots and other camera challenges that didn't exist when the cameras were deployed. This would entail another channel of video enrichment that would have to be processed to minimize blind spots.
Sewers can be big bypasses to street/building video surveillance. Character could have a delivery system based on vehicles that hide their presence from the cameras, park over the access point to deliver them into the sewers, and when done, retrieve them allowing them to show up on camera where they belong and without any indication they were "missing".
There is a show on our clandestine spy techniques. The fellow in charge of our spy training studied magician sleight of hand and techniques and developed methods to transfer contraband, messages and even change costumes in highly challenging conditions. When the techniques being studied are built upon discoveries that are shared and enhanced by folks living under these conditions, they will develop techniques to avoid surveillance in interesting and useful ways.
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Have one person, disguised in advance, arrive from out of town and neutralize all relevant cameras (shoot them with a black paintball gun or something) around the area. That person finishes the job and leaves (out of town). Police have no way to track them once they exit the limits of the city (and the cameras).
Then have your main criminals show up and do whatever they were planning to do. Afterwards, they disappear from the dead camera zone after blending in with the local crowd.
The cameras are not actively monitored, so the police won't be aware of all this until they are long gone.
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A drop in ordinary muggings, a shift to other forms of crime.
* A rise in pickpocketing by teams. One blocks the camera with an umbrella, the other distracts the mark, the third does the theft.
* A rise in crime against people who deliberately sought privacy. Some fool thought he'd get an one-night-stand his wife wouldn't know, instead he got relieved of his wallet.
* A letter from a Nigerian prince.
* A shoplifter who patches a barcode for a different, cheaper product onto the box.
* No system is impossible to hack. It just takes more or less effort. If hacking is difficult, it would only be done for major crimes.
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**Turn off the lights.**
These are cameras. They need light. I have night vision goggles and do not. Before I sneak in to your museum and steal your valuable collection of vintage underthings, I cut power to the lights. I do this from under the street, setting a device which will go off shortly before my arrival on the roof.
Because no doubt the cameras have some sort of built in light, I am wearing a Gumby costume with my night vision goggles. Yes I know about thermal and skin texture but you will probably just catch the real Gumby, not me.
I leave the Gumby costume behind and, ultracameras having (utterly) failed, clever forensic types check the costume interior for DNA - which they find, and it is yours, saved by me after a romantic tryst we had some time ago. You should have called the next day.
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I read a novella when I was young (40 years ago, so I'd have to do a story identification question over on Sci Fi and Fantasy to figure out the title or author) about a man who lived in a society with a system much like you describe who became obsessed with successfully committing a murder despite the obvious difficulty in doing so.
What he did was contrive a set of circumstances such that his behavior, *from the perspective of the camera*, appeared reasonable. He murdered his victim (Perhaps his wife? I can't remember for sure) while making it look like self-defense. The camera couldn't get into his mind, after all; and with careful planning the camera was made to see what he wanted it to see.
This might not be a great approach for petty property crime, but for murder and assault it can be made to work. And if you can make it work for murder and assault, you can make it work for *conspiracy* to commit those crimes; and there is money in conspiracy.
What makes conspiracy special? Well, the elements of a conspiracy can be widely separated in time and space. A surveillance system that observes and records *everything* has the huge problem of determining what recorded footage to observe when investigating a crime. If someone is investigating the death of your neighbor, they might never decide to review the footage of a meeting you had with a third party three years ago at which you set a conspiracy in motion to have him murdered by someone who pretended to lose control of their car.
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The problem is logistics. So what if your cameras see every crime, you don't have the manpower to study every tape and track down every criminal. And even if you manage that, now you have to have tons of cops to go arrest every criminal. And some of these will require more than one cop to apprehend.
Checking the tape only when there has been a crime reported doesn't solve anything either, because many crimes aren't reported immediately. Say someone was on vacation and their house was broken into, which they don't report until weeks later when they get back. So you have to keep weeks worth of footage from every camera. How many petabytes of storage would that take for even a small city?
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For a particularly large crime, a gang might:
Send in a team during peak business hours.
Have one member enter a bathroom, ensuring they are not alone.
Set off an EMP inside the bathroom, disabling all nearby electronics.
Carry out the job.
Escape in the confusion.
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In order to be so pervasive, the police must be a large organization.
Find the bad apples in that barrel. Corrupt members usually *want* to be known (just not by their non-corrupt fellows) - that's how they make their extra money on the side. Corrupt members also tend to help and protect each other.
"In the news, investigators today arrested a Metropolis Police camera technician on suspicion of bribery and conspiracy. A State police spokesperson said that the technician had been aiding criminals to avoid detection in exchange for a share, and may have been doing so for years. Many hundreds of robberies and other violent crimes may be involved. The technician's supervisor has been suspended and is also under investigation. The Metropolis Police Chief announced support for both, and said that she was sure both would be fully exonerated."
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**Managed Uncertainty through Non-compliance**
Police will have tons of public cameras all over the place, but as an honest, hard working slumlord, keeping cameras in my public areas is too expensive. Oh, the government is willing to pay for the installation? Err... I ment they cost to much to maintain. Oh, they pay to maintain them as well... what I meant to say is that breaker that powers the cameras is faulty. Yeah, so you see, there is no way I can keep my cameras running all the time like I am supposed to. I guess I will just have to pay the occasional fine and move on.
Now the question you may be asking yourself is why would any intelligent businessman choose to pay the fine instead of fix it?
You see, many of my residents are good hardworking honest people who just need a home like anyone else, but others are... not. It is this later group of tenants who are willing to pay double market value in rent, to keep those cameras offline. When they are up to no good, they just put on a mask before they leave, go do their thing, and don't take off the mask until they get home.
When the cops show up, and ask to see the footage, I just give them the usual lip service: "Awe man, that breaker failed again, sorry officers. Can't you just get a warrant to search all 300 units for that mask. No? That violates search-and-seizure laws, really? Oh, and you are fining me 200 USD for the building code violation? Well that sucks, but I can see why that is a reasonable consequence here."
I pay my fines with a smile knowing that I'm racking in an extra 100,000 USD a month keeping those cameras offline.
**Unmanaged Uncertainty**
I am a criminal who lives in a row of 6 townhouses. The street is monitored, but I can reach any of the other townhouses though our inter-connected backyards unseen. I find out that my neighbor is going on vacation; so, one night while he is gone and all my other neighbors are home, I put on a mask, go through the backyard to exit his house, do my crime, then come back through his house.
When the cops come to investigate, they can see clearly that my neighbor was not home (no need to get him in trouble). But they cannot trace me back to my home. Instead I am at worst one of 5 suspects. In a world where jurors expect cops to be able to track people back to their homes, this would create too much reasonable doubt to prosecute.
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As others have said, every system has gaps, where it is impractical, illegal or impossible to surveil all activity in all points of location and time. It's really not difficult to very easily and inexpensively exploit the weaknesses of even the most expensive camera systems.
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One of the big ones for cameras is adoption of a sufficient level of video technology that identifying you using the video feed is even possible. You ever see those grainy surveillance videos of convenience store or retail robbery-shootings, where someone's dead or in the hospital fighting for their life, and the police are asking for anyone with information? You look at the hopeless blob of digitally-zoomed pixels and go "how on earth could anyone possibly identify that guy from that picture?".
Well, that's the point; if the police had a clear, high-resolution still of the guy's face, they wouldn't need the public's help identifying the guy. Despite the proliferation of cheap surveillance cameras, that's exactly what they are, cheap; most of the systems in convenience stores are ridiculously outdated, primitive and of hopelessly poor optical quality, even if they were only installed a few years back. They were sold to C-store owners and managers running their shops on an extremely tight budget, by unscrupulous vendors unloading old, cheap cameras at ridiculous markup. Coupled with non-ideal placement, like up in a corner where they hope you don't notice instead of looking right over the cashier's shoulder from two or three angles (which is more expensive and less discreet), it's little wonder the best the system can do is a 10x10-pixel blob of an out-of-focus face extending their arm at the cashier.
You're handwaving that away by having the government come in and install the very best available technology, but even a country like China, that's spent billions on video surveillance to date, doesn't have the very best cameras *everywhere*. A criminal can exploit gaps in coverage of the very latest cameras that have the ability to see under facemasks (whatever Applied Phlebotinum you want to use to enable that) by picking his route to and from the target area. If he's one of a thousand people walking down a particular block with a mask on (very common in dense Asian cities, even without an ongoing coronavirus epidemic), nothing will seem out of the ordinary, and even if he's spotted on camera committing a crime, facial recognition may not catch him because he never got close enough to a camera with sufficient resolution and imaging tech to identify him behind a surgical mask.
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Your handwave of a comprehensive, overlapping network of cameras instantly accessible to the police from anywhere is a very significant one when talking about an individual's actions or those of any organized team; no matter how well a team does its job defacing cameras, if you have enough, the criminal will spend enough time trying to black out the area that he won't actually be able to commit the crime he was trying to commit before the police show up to stop him.
However, that leads to a much more effective attack vector. Don't take out the cameras, take out the network connections to the recorders and police surveillance centers. Communications networks are inherently tree-based; large trunks feed smaller branches that service the "leaves" of the network. It's inefficient to provide an individual and separately routed dedicated link from each camera to the surveillance hub/recorder, so instead, the signals from a group of cameras are consolidated onto a single higher-bandwidth link. Those links are far more vulnerable than too many people actively realize, and with much more focused application of destruction, you can take out much larger sections of the grid for much longer than throwing a few rocks at camera lenses.
You don't remove a tree from your yard by plucking every leaf; you take down a tree by lopping off branches and sections of the trunk one at a time until there's nothing left. You might be taking out the public internet as well; so be it, if the communications companies are in kahoots with the government to such a degree that the government can piggyback its camera system on commercial internet, then the internet companies can share in the pain. Generally speaking, even in the modern age, the government needs advanced communication technology to work against a resistance more than the resistance needs it to work against the government.
And, if you just want to take out the cameras for 15 minutes so your buddies can hit the jewelry store in the center of the grid serviced by the fiber bundle you just ran a chainsaw through, that's far more effective than defacing or shooting out every camera that could catch the other team in the act. Will you get caught on camera in some incriminating way before you can disable them? Probably. But your buddies are much less likely to, and your share of the money from the heist is more than enough to put your little brother through law school.
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Another major gap is that with a camera system, you're looking for visible evidence of the commission of a crime. There are quite a few crimes that have no visual cues. For instance, you can steal someone's identity with an RFID reader in a handbag in relatively close proximity to their wallet. Luckily for real-world society, this fact became pointedly obvious soon after the introduction of RFID-enabled no-swipe cards, and most of the world has instead transitioned to smart chip technology that requires the card to be in physical electrically-continuous contact with the reader. However, the concept of a payment method that is totally automatic and doesn't require you to fish through pockets or set up your smartphone for communication with the card reader is still of very high interest to payment processors, and when they come up with one, there *will* be a plausible way to hack it.
Want to get darker? You can commit mass murder without anyone having a clue for weeks. Just walk down any densely-packed sidewalk with a backpack. Nobody will have any idea they're already dead for days, even weeks, until everyone that was walking down that block at that time starts slurring their speech, losing their coordination, balance and their memory, and exhibiting other symptoms of wide-ranging central nervous system dementia. A few simple tests will reveal the patient has about 20 times the lethal dose of mercury in their cerebrospinal fluid, and are far beyond any hope of treatment. Death will be a slow degradation over a period of several more weeks, where victims forget how to speak, who their friends and family are, how to eat and drink, how to avoid wetting or soiling themselves, until eventually the toxin impairs the brain stem sufficiently to cause loss of autonomic nerve function and the heart stops.
Because your backpack was spraying an invisible mist of dimethylmercury, one of the most hideous toxins ever devised by modern science, and easy enough to prepare in a run-down apartment with the contents of an old HVAC thermostat, some tincture of iodine, denatured alcohol, a couple road flares and a homemade glovebox. Sure, you're practically guaranteed to be the first fatality, and will suffer all the above symptoms totally alone in your off-the-grid hideaway to avoid being identified as patient zero, assuming you don't put a bullet in your own brain once you get off the grid, bfore the mercury can eat it alive. If you know enough about this compound to avoid that fate, you'll be in very rare company (one of *maybe* a few thousand people in the country with graduate-level education in organometallic chemistry) and thus probably known to the government as someone who could pull this attack off. So, once you're seen on a busy sidewalk in a business district of a major city you've never visited in your life, police won't need a whole lot of video surveillance tech to connect these dots. But if you want to prove, in the most undeniable way, that the country's surveillance system is worthless to protect people from those who wish harm on them, this is how you'd do it.
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That's assuming you even care about not *immediately* getting caught. Drama writers like trying to write about perfect murders (or nearly so), because they're so difficult to manage and make the writer and the reader have to really think. In the real world, criminals, especially murderers, don't tend to plan too much. If you want a bunch of people dead, you don't worry too much about the perfect murder; you get in a cargo van and mow down a hundred people on a city sidewalk in five minutes.
Sure, your chances of getting away even from the immediate crime scene are basically zero. That's not the point. The point is, 50 people are dead, you did it, and the government, with its all-seeing surveillance system, was totally powerless to stop you, because you did absolutely nothing to tip them off to imminent criminal activity until the second you yanked the wheel to the side and floored it. Just as it will be totally powerless to stop the next guy, and the one after that, no matter how many rights it takes away in the name of public safety. More than a few mass killings, regardless of weapon, have been perpetrated in recent years for the specific purpose of sending the message that no-one, least of all the government, can guarantee your safety, and the pain will continue long after any one perpetrator is caught or killed. That's a message that is only magnified by the multi-angle views of the killings available to the media through the very camera network set up ostensibly to make society safer.
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So I would first start making dry runs of my escape. Look for camera gaps that do exist and use those to adjust my movement and my appearance. Some may have to be improvised but gaps will happen... suppose a camera on the street is opposite a trash pick-up sight on a crowded street. Dip behind the garbage truck, change appearence, and go in a different direction... or dip into a shop or even better, private residence, where cameras might not exist. It could be a complete stranger or a front, but either way, it needs law enforcement to gather eyewitness statements and good luck.
And before you think "a stranger won't let me in the house," they don't have to know me at all. If I'm already committing a crime, I can just break and enter... I'll tell passers-by I locked my keys inside... or carry a clip board and let the dotty old lady know "I'm here to inspect the utility." Clipboards are not as good as keys when trying to access difficult spots... but damn near close because who carries a clipboard except important people who need to?
In addition, use common feature hiding clothing. A hoodie will hide your face from 3 angles and a baseball cap, pulled low, will cover a good portion of my face that's identifiable. I'd also use getaway vehicles that are common place. Remember the DC Sniper. I lived in the area at the time so I can tell you how scary it was that they couldn't track the dude. And the reason was they were looking for the wrong car. The sniper drove a blue sedan but for most of the investigation, they were looking for a white utility van... which is a common choice for workers of all type who drive to sites (gardeners, plumbers, cable repair men, electricians, construction crews, carpeters, ect). And the reason for this was simple. White Vans will always look out of place in residential areas but are ubiquotous enough that there is a high chance that they will be near the site of any random location. Combined with the Sniper's first day having three shootings in mere hours (one of whom wasn't immediately know as he had been on his lawn mower at the time and fell into the blades... it wasn't for some time that the bullet was found), and following that would only strike once per day after that and at different times of day. If two of the initial three killings had witnesses say they saw a white van driving around near the time the shot happened, then the BOLO for a white van gets out and they aren't even looking for another car. Back to the clothing, the colors should be uniform and not "muted or dulled" and not stand out. If your city has a major sports team, maybe use typical merch that's commonly available to support the team. If you're in Baltimore looking for a man with Orange and Black (the Orioles team colors) on a game day, good luck to you. Might as well be asked to figure out who is telling a lie in the halls of Congress at this very moment (One of the reasons Chicago police doubted Jesse Smollet's story was because he described his attackers wearing the famous bright read MAGA hats from Republican Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign... problem was, Chicago had largely been a bastion of the Democrats and the last time a Republican was elected to Mayor of the city, Al Capone was a major backer in his election. Police, and many Chicagoans, didn't have a clue where they could buy MAGA hats anywhere near the city.)
It may also be that the crime is "time delayed" such that by the time the initial plot is underway, the perpetrator is out of the city where there is no surveillance. If I'm a terrorist with a bomb plot, one can get out of the city while the confusion is underway. Timothy McVeigh, the Tokyo Subway Gas attackers, and the Boston Bombers all were away from the scene of their respective crimes by the time the authorities became aware something was up, and would have ample time to flee before getting caught. The city can only track me while I'm in the city. Once I leave, I can come back and plausibly say you got the wrong guy. Not to mention, the first part of the response is to triage victims. In fact, in all three cases, they were identified by investigators by means other than camera footage (McVeigh was famously arrested for driving without a liscense and conceal carrying a gun illegally after being clocked speeding. One of the Sarin gas attackers confessed and the organization he was with had used chemical agents in attacks before. The Boston Bombers were identified by a survivor who saw them dropped a bomb and described them. Police released camera footage of them without any identities known at the time (dubbed "black hat" and "white hat" for the **baseball caps** (see) the wore to partially conceal their identities).
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For most of human history there have been two pillars of authority that affected most everyone's live; religion and government. I'm trying to come up with a concept of a third, but am struggling to think of something that has the same all-encompassing effect. Academia/Science was my initial thought, but realistically, most people are not part of it or effected by it, and even fewer historically. Maybe something involving the economy, but I'm not sure how to make that work.
So is there a third pillar of authority that I can use that would exist in tandem, but not at odds (for the most part) with the other two? I'm not sure where in my world-timeline I want to put it, so it doesn't necessarily have to be a "since the dawn of civilization" thing, but its a seed I want to plant somewhere and then see how it unfolds. Realistically I can put it anywhere and use a dark-age as a hand waving reset if I need to.
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**Family.**
Its smaller than the others but much more important. What your elders tell you to do has historically mattered way more than what some distant monarch or priest has to say.
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I propose **The Media**.
It's already a "third pillar" in today's society: Both church and state have to stay on their toes to avoid the dreaded "trial by media", and quite a few have embraced its power with the mantra "there's no such thing as bad publicity".
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# The bourgeoisie
Those who own the means of production. Your employers.
There are plenty of examples of industrialists trying to control every aspect of the lives of their employees, to an extent that the state and the church would be jealous of. Consider, the case of [George Pullman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Pullman#Pullman_company_town).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DjvkX.jpg)
Pullman was an industrialist with an elaborate moral philosophy. He built an entire town, specifically for his employees, designed to promote his ideas of a moral and healthy lifestyle. It was specifically planned to have no saloons and no vice district:
>
> Pullman ruled the town like a feudal baron. Pullman prohibited
> independent newspapers, public speeches, town meetings or open
> discussion. His inspectors regularly entered homes to inspect for
> cleanliness and could terminate workers' leases on ten days' notice.
> The church stood empty since no approved denomination would pay rent,
> and no other congregation was allowed. He prohibited private
> charitable organizations.
>
>
>
All aspects of life in the town (which he named after himself) were controlled, all goods were supplied by Pullman companies and the rent was taken directly out of the paycheck.
I'm no expert in political philosophy, but I think it's not a new idea that religion, the state, and the bourgeouisie are three forces vying for control over the lives of the working class.
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Take a page from Real Life (TM):
I introduce you to, **Yourself!**
You've already mentioned cross & crown as the two great pillars of authority in human society for much of its history. Since the rise of humanism, during the Enlightenment, human societies have, historically, shed their reliance on the two ancient pillars. We got rid of kings and pubahs in favour of presidents and communes; authoritarian & corrupt bureaucracies have been replaced by elected bodies. And then we got rid of law and order, to an extent that is still in progress, and have determined that We the Mob will replace that pillar.
We got rid of God and the Church (in the West) and replaced them with Scientism, an entirely human religion based solely on materialism. We got rid of religion and its arcane and stifling rules and, once again, determined that We the Mob shall make our own rules and thus replace that pillar.
A quick look at social media and the nightly news shows us evidence of the action in the end stages of the game.
**You** have the power to make your own choices: it's all good, all things are relative, what's truth? Heck, you just make up your own truth and your own rules! You have replaced kings and presidents, gods and priests all with your own personal authority.
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**Balance isn't the real issue here, stability is.**
Pretty much any group could assume the third role simply by rivaling the other two in power and influence, but this structure will likely not last long before someone get's overthrown. In order to gain stability, there needs to be **mutual dependence** between the three powers. Although they are often at odds with each other, they each depend on the other two in some way. There is some animosity between them, but it is in each of their best interest to ultimately protect the others. The absence of any one would leave the other two weaker, not stronger. I have listed a few ideas below.
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**Crime syndicate**
A powerful enough crime organization (mafia style) could certainly influence the government enough to stay in power. The don't want to overthrow the government as it benefits them and the government doesn't want to stop them due to internal corruption (bribery, extortion, threats, etc.). They would face more opposition from the church, but could also have corrupted enough of the clergy to maintain their power.
**Wealthy noble class**
The most elite families have enough social and financial power to influence both the church and the government. They want a say in what happens, but don't want to do the governing themselves, and the church and government both depend on their funding.
**The common people**
The lower classes do not have nearly enough power to directly oppose the church or government, but they can easily stop production and effectively the entire economy by refusing to work. (Effectively, a massive labor union.) They depend on the government and the church for protection, infrastructure, etc. and the church and government depend on the people being happy and productive. There can also exist a council or board that represents the people to the government. (Note: they don't make laws so they are not a legislature. They simply ensure fair treatment.)
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Authority is merely delegated power: a condition in which a community of people determines that some person or group has the right to invoke/use the power of the community as a whole. That's as true of religion as of secular governance. religion and political leadership are *legitimizations* of the right to wield authority — in the first case because authority transfers from God to his chosen leaders; in the second case because military power, or elections, or wealth, or some other quality establish the right of the leader to rule.
So, any legitimization of the right to wild authority that you can dream up would work, e.g.:
* Popularity or social media presence (as someone else mentioned)
* Intellectual or philosophical aptitude (according to some measure)
* Beauty, physical prowess, or some other virtue (in the ancient Greek sense)
* Theatrical, rhetorical, or some other performative ability
Anything, in short, that one can make a semi-credible argument that the person who does *this* well is fit to command the power of the community as a whole. For instance, I once worked on a system in which Machiavellianism was considered the highest ideal, so hopeful leaders would spend their lives learning the arts of murder, subterfuge, domination, and intrigue.
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# Society/community
This is *external* but can be very important. Tribal societies do indeed have great reverence for *in general* the society they live in. Spiritual practices are important, as are the leaders, but they will not go against their tribe/village/clan/other societal structure and said societal structure could have at least equal authority over individuals.
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The Banks.
Any sufficiently large banking concern, provided that it could pay for military protection, could form a third pillar of authority.
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Perhaps the science angle could be expanded to include an authority that had meaning to more people and including protection and conservation of nature, organic farming, healthy living, humanist ethics and protection of the world and all its systems. A Secular Naturalism.
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Maybe something that has to do with popularity//fame? Just look at how much it matters to teenagers and young adults. Influencers and celebrities greatly change the way people think. Or you could make it be involved with the nobility, if it was further back, and make them have more power over their people (like landlords and serfs).
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[Question]
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Prometheus, your friendly neighborhood mega corp, has done it: dragged that pesky asteroid near Earth's orbit. Now with a rich source of ore right in Earth's orbit Prometheus is looking to improve its surface to orbital infrastructure.
Prometheus for the past decades have been out phasing the old "rocket ships" of the frontier with newer cargo vessels (nuclear powered space craft). Surface to Orbital transportation is the final sector still dominated by the rocket.
What infrastructure would allow Prometheus to mainly (you'd still have cases of rockets where it makes more sense) out phase rockets? The only requirements are two things: not a fancy rocket and near future preferably.
Note: SSTO (single staged to orbit) are allowed as long as they, well don't look like a plane with a rocket strapped under it
I'm not too worried about a not rocket solution being "inefficient" or requiring construction on a grand scale, that's Prometheus' strong suit after all.
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## [Orbital Ring](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_ring)
**Why an orbital ring?**
In summary an orbital ring is a space elevator for grown-ups and allows the kind of logistical endeavours a true solar system spanning civilisation would face daily better than any other launch asssist concept. Space elevators have a terrible throughput of only about [15 t/week](https://www.quora.com/If-a-space-elevator-was-built-how-much-weight-could-it-lift-and-how-long-would-a-round-trip-to-geosynchronous-orbit-take) according to recent papers and only bring one up to geostationary orbit with a litte push allowing one to bring out stuff to the asteroid belt on a slow transfer orbit. If you want to launch a 150 t space craft it would take 10 weeks to do so. Most other launch assist concepts face similar issues and are inferior to the orbital ring in most points but construction cost and energy demand (this will become irrelevant quickly as the energy cost is mostly upfront and the ring is a great base for off-world solar,
Helium-3 or fissile material import). In terms of scalability, throughput, interplanetary launch assist and general utility no other launch assist method can rival the ring. With that out of the way...
**Active Support**
Crucial to an orbital ring is the concept of active support. Whenever you build a structure you want it to stay stable. Buildings do this by relying on passive support, i.e. their own structure can carry their weight. This approach is limited by the ability of the building materials to resist the force the rest of the structure exerts on them. This is Newtons third law, actio = reactio. Actio is the force the structures weight delivers and reactio is usually the force the material must be able to muster. Yet nowhere it is said that reactio must be provided passively. Imagine a friend of yours is walking over a thin plank, which would break under his weight. The passive support of the plank isn't sufficient to counteract the force your friend exerts. Now you go under the plank and push it up, so that it can hold your friends weight. You are providing active support. The great thing about active support is that you aren't limited by puny compressive or tensile strength, you are dumping energy into the system to keep it stable. And you can dump infinite ammounts of energy into a system.
**Orbital Mechanics**
Secondly some basic orbital mechanics are important for the ring. An object moves through space on an elliptical trajectory corresponding to it's speed. The faster the object moves (i.e. the more energy it carries) the higher it will move. If the object is restrained from moving into a higher orbit appropriate for it's speed it will exert a upward force on the restraint.
**Constitution of the Ring**
Now imagine bringing a stream of orbiting, magnetic slugs in a circular orbit arround earth, lets say 200 km high. They will move at orbital velocity. Arround each slug we have a a metal ring containing electromagnets. The rings are loosely connected and under power. They too move at the same orbital speed as the slugs. Then we activate the magnets, forcing the slugs to move though the center of each ring.
Finally we start decelerating the rings with their magnets. This will transfer their momentum to the slugs speeding them up. The now faster slugs want to move to a orbit higher than their current 200 km. The now slower rings want to move to a lower orbit. But the magnets force both to interact. To be precise the rings want to fall down with the same force the slugs want to go up. Like on the plank with your friend, the situation is stable and the structure stays in place. We continue this until the outer structure sits statically over the earth. The rings, also called stator, sit fixed 200 km over the earth and levitate magnetically over the slugs, also called rotator, which keep the structure in the sky.
At this point you can drop tethers down from the ring to ancor it and to install elevators. One of the rings many advantages is that normal nylon ropes will work for this and that no fancy carbon nanotubes are required. You can send tethers down to everywhere within a ca 500 km distance from the ring.
On top of the ring you install several maglev rails. Since the ring spans arround the planet and the velocity an object can achieve on a mass driver is given by this formula.
$v = d/\sqrt[2](d/(0,5\*a))$
$v$ = velocity
$d$ = distance (track length)
$a$ = acceleration
As the track is circular, $d$ can be considered to be infinite, thus setting the theoretical limit of $v$ to $c$.
**Miscellaneous**
The best thing is, that this subverts the [Tyranny of the Rocket Equation](https://medium.com/teamindus/rocket-science-101-the-tyranny-of-the-rocket-equation-491e0cf4dc6a) and allows for practically free transfer of goods between two planets with orbital rings. Just strap some ion drives on the cargo pods to allow the to adjust their [Brachistochrone trajectories](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/torchships.php#id--Brachistochrone_Equations) to correct for the orbital inclination differences. Regenerative breaking will make this more efficient than any rocket.
This [video](https://youtu.be/LMbI6sk-62E) will give you some more insights and [this paper](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://jenda.hrach.eu/f2/Low%2520cost%2520design%2520of%2520an%2520orbital%2520ring%2520-%25202017-1.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjhp_T1hP_hAhXSEVAKHf-0CTsQFjAAegQIAxAB&usg=AOvVaw29JACKnOuQi8ENUb8C-owD) deals with the construction of the ring base. As soon as such a base has been established the ring can be expanded at an extremly low cost. While the ring can be constructed with current day technology, high or even room temperature superconductors would be nice to have.
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**Balloon-mounted railgun**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/aLyom.jpg)
Getting stuff in orbit means getting it high off the ground and also getting it moving sideways fast enough that when it tries to fall back down to the earth, it misses.
1. It is nice having atmosphere on the ground. But if you want to get going fast, all that gas gets grabby. The balloon hoists the railgun and payload up above most of that.
2. Railgun accelerates payload into orbital trajectory.
3. To descend, internal compressors pump lift gas into holding tanks for later use. Or if it is cheaper, vent the hydrogen and get more on the ground.
4. Back down for another load. Clip a fresh capacitor onto the railgun.
Benefits
1: No moving parts.
2. Hydrogen is cheap.
3. Balloons work well.
4. If you have one of these, people will be very nice to you.
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# LASER-Powered Ablative Propulsion
A ship carries a supply of plastic or other material, probably hard and external, that is vaporised by a groundside LASER turret in a controlled manner, producing thrust. While this requires significant power, all the power generation can be situated groundside, and thus doesn't need to be expensively pushed to orbit with the rest of the ship.
Bonus points: the turret can be repurposed for a combat role by a government or terrorists if your plot calls for it.
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## Space elevator
It's unclear how far in the future it is. On Earth, it's a considerable challenge. On other places, like the Moon or Mars its much more feasible. Experience from building it there, could boost an Earth Elevator.
A mega corp would definitely invest considerable resources into researching and building it. Though its questionable if a single mega corp would have the capacity to build it.
## Laser assisted take off
Sadly, I'm not knowledgeable enough about this option, but I heard/read off a concept about massive lasers pushing payload up into space. It probably wouldn't worth as it would require astronomical energy investment. Especially the further it is from the ground.
## Space Hooks?
Even less sure, if this is possible. Basing it on an idea from a sci-fi book. A massive asteroid in stabil orbit, with a long hook lowered into the atmosphere. Not good enough for the elevator, but good enough to catch a payload which only has thrust to reach that height. I'm not sure if it would be useful, as the most energy are used for takeoff.
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Getting cargo to the surface is easy, drop it. Works really good for metals mined from the asteroid. Box it up in steel, add transponders and guidance and maneuvering thrusters and toss it down the gravity well. Admittedly, not a great way for eggs or people travel if you want them resembling eggs and people later.
Up is a matter of Work and Delta-V, boils down to the same thing. Magnetic accelerators on high mountains could conceptually throw heavy masses into orbit. And the longer the accelerator the lower the acceleration and the more comfortable for transporting eggs and people into space and having them still whole when they disembark at the asteroid.
Another way is similar but its a giant cannon. It fires big hollow bullets straight out of the atmosphere. Using multiple propellant stages to keep acceleration constant, it has same kind of behavior as magnetic acceleration.
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# Airship to orbit.
[JP Aerospace](http://jpaerospace.com/) has been testing scale models for a while now.
Their plan is to use a large airship to carry cargo to a "dark sky station" that floats in the upper bounds of the atmosphere. From there, the cargo is transferred to the ATO which is an aerodynamic airship that spins out of the atmosphere. The faster it goes, the more lift it gets so the higher it can go. the higher it goes, the faster it can get.
The founder of the company believes that he can get enough delta-v to reach Mars. Conveniently, Mars' ground level atnosphereic pressure is the same pressure that the dark sky station will be in over Earth (I don't think he's worked out what to do with surface winds yet).
The trip won't be fast but it will be cheap and will be able to take fragile things like people up.
# BFG6000
Just a really big gun with a long barrel. You wouldn't want to send up anything delicate. But bulk items can be sent into LEO (Low Earth Orbit) fast and cheaply.
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I was working on a side project to design an alien fleet that is wandering in the universe, and harvesting energy from planets for their needs. While I can think of ways to make that happen (geothermal, coal/fossil, "alien technology"), I was actually wondering if it is possible for people on earth to do similar things.
Specifically, I wonder if it is possible for people on earth, with modern technology (21st century), to utilize the kinetic energy from earth by decelerating the rotation?
Utilize here not just mean to help with launching rockets, but more referring to a machine/mechanism that can decelerate the planet rotation, and gain electricity/thermal energy from this process.
If it is not feasible right now, what would be a plan to make that happen, if the technology level is not a hard constrain? Lower technological level is more preferred.
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Actually, it is possible and people do it. [Tidal turbines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_stream_generator) generate power off of the tide rising and falling. This is indirectly generating power off of the Earth's rotation, and here is a diagram explaining why.[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1bko4.png)
The earth has such a massive amount of kinetic energy that tapping into it a little is not noticed, but building thousands of tidal turbines would seriously start to convert the kinetic energy of the earth into electricity.
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Doable, yes. Feasible, no. This shouldn't surprise you, because if it was feasible, presumably Elon Musk would have done it.
This sounds really weird, but as it happens, there's a way to gain *kinetic* energy, which can then presumably be transferred to thermal/electric energy, which functions as a result of using the Earth's movement and slows it down. And the good news is that its possible with today's technology. It's referred to as the [Gravity Assist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist). (Technically, it doesn't actually slow down the Earth's rotation, it slows down the Earth's orbit around the Sun. Fine. But it's a far better system because it takes more energy to rotate the Earth around the Sun than to spin the Earth, so more energy is gained.)
It has some downsides, namely the incredibly large energy expenditure needed to be able to get a ship into position to use the gravity assist, and that the alignment needs to be right, and that you'll accelerate the ship to a vector you don't necessarily want. But if you somehow managed to set up the system, you can use the Earth's movement for energy.
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This is both doable and feasible, even with near-future technology.
As described in David Brin's short story ["Tank Farm Dynamo"](http://www.davidbrin.com/tankfarm.htm) (1983), you can let an orbiting satellite have a large wire loop that interacts with the Earth's magnetic field to produce electricity. This slows down the satellite, making its orbit decline, but it will also slow down the Earth's rotation a tiny, tiny fraction.
A much Larger version of this would be to wrap a wire spool all the way around the Moon, generating electricity as the Moon travels through the Earth's magnetic field, slowing both the Moon's orbit and the Earth's rotation in the process.
What I can't tell is if the energy generated would be of a magnitude to justify the expense, compared to mining Helium 3 and using it for fusion power.
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In 1992 there was a US patent issued for the "Earth Gyro Transducer" which sought to convert the earth's rotation into usable energy with an anchored gyroscope. I've never seen any information on anyone who's actually constructed it. US Patent #:5,313,850.
>
> This specification describes a completely new and different concept... namely:
> the use of a gyroscope to generate output power from the earth's
> stored inertial rotational (flywheel) energy by fixing the housing of
> the gyroscope to the earth and using the rotation of the earth
> relative to the gyroscope's spatially stable rotor/gimbal assembly to
> rotate the input shaft(s) of a power transducer(s).
> <https://patents.google.com/patent/US5313850A/en>
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Technically we already do this with wind power. Wind power means accelerating wind turbines by slowing down wind. By the action-reaction law, this slowing down of the wind also slows down Earth - a tiny bit. I'm not qualified to calculate by how much, but to get a sense of the proportions, here are the masses involved (according to Google):
* Earth: 5,972 × 10^24 kg
* Atmosphere: 5 × 10^15 kg
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In the not so far future a lot of people live inside virtual realities. But there are not only humans living in these virtual worlds but also machines (programs/AI/bots/etc...) on different levels of consciousness. Some of them don't even know that they are not humans. Each of these simulated realities is a city, and I would like to find a way to make them self-governable.
I don't know how democracy could work in this case. If I give everybody/everything a right to vote, then one could exploit the system by creating a lot of bots. Forcing them to solve a captcha before voting is a too low level of entry.
The government does not have to work democratically, but it has to serve the conscious beings living in the virtual world, and care about their well-being.
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Lazy answer: don't do anything. If everyone can create bots, let them, and then no-one will have the upper hand.
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Less lazy answer:
Processing power and storage space ain't free. In fact, depending on the nature of the substrate your virtual reality runs on (how about a colony ship in deep space?), it may even have a strict upper limit that cannot be exceeded, and all the money and influence in the world won't change that; the laws of physics are not amenable to bribery, alas.
So, you wanna create a bot? Great! You can use some of your *own* processing time and space, but that means you're going to be a lot slower, or stupider, or forgetful during your political campaign. You could borrow your neighbours, but they're probably also getting requests from other would-be politicians for exactly the same thing. Suddenly the use of bots as proxy votes is just an abstraction for persuading people to support a particular point of view, and so it has suddenly just devolved into a plain old political beauty contest. One (simulated) brain, one vote!
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> But there are not only humans living in these virtual worlds but also machines (programs/AI/bots/etc...)
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That's not necessarily a problem. If they think they can vote, they can vote. Nothing wrong with that, unless you're some kind of human supremacist...
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> The government does not have to work democratically, but it has to serve the conscious beings living in the virtual world, and care about their well-being.
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Well now. What's consciousness? Can you identify it by looking at the simulated thought processes of your virtual electorate? Do the conscious things have a physical embodiment, like a load of hairy meat with eyes and limbs and *orifices*?
If yes, then your problem isn't even a problem. If you don't have a consciousness-module (whatever one of those looks like) or a physical body with an attached voting right then you can't vote, problem solved.
If you *can't* tell the difference between a conscious and a non-conscious mind, then all bets are off, because by definition you'll never be able to determine if you're solving the best interests of your conscious electorate because you'll never know who they are, and you may as well give up trying to discriminate. You probably can't even think of a good *use* for consciousness, so really you ought to go read [*Blindsight*](https://rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm) and *Echopraxia* and give up all hope. Yay!
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I presumably misquoting this phrase, but anyway:
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> Internet is not a democracy, but an loose federation of petty dictatorships and fiefdoms
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Right now already people are enthusiastically being engulfed in their own echo chambers. Instead of mass media that would lie in crude and uniform way, people right now prefer to hear much more personalised lie, targeted especially at them. Lie? Oh... I mean message.
If the consumer satisfaction is the target, then one should allow people (bots, whatever) to select their own expectations concerning gov to let them migrate to their dream city. You may let them vote, but only for purpose of feeling happy and fulfilled as citizens, not to make any actual decision, as they may damage something. Real decision would as usual as in any working society done by technocracts, this time presumably by AIs.
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**If (some of) the bots don't know they're not human, how do the humans know?**
I'm going to get to the government in just a moment, but this is important. I suppose the software could let the actual humans (and the software would need to know which are humans and which are bots) could let the humans see the bot avatars with a big honking sign that says "I'm a bot!" while the bots, looking in a VR mirror, don't see the sign — but your stronger AI bots would start figuring something out even if you did that.
My point is, in the long run, there's likely no way other than through serious interaction for bots and humans to figure out who's who — and you had better hope they never do, because the one and only way to enact government will lead to a bot-vs-human war that would make WWII look like a couple of school boys having a pissing contest.
Because...
**Governments operate on the threat of violence**
There's no such thing as a nice government. There can be effective governments, possibly even efficient governments,*[citation needed]* but there's no such thing as a nice government — because the only option a government has to maintain order is to take something away from the governed and you can oversimplify the issue by reducing tht "something" to two things: resources and liberty.
Seen through this simple lens, the only difference between a government and a street gang is this: one is considered desirable and the other isn't.
**What sort of government would be up to ~~you~~ the players**
Any form of government that has been tried on Earth could be enacted in your VR environment. In fact, I suspect if you visit places like *[Second Life](https://secondlife.com/)* you'll discover a number of governments operating in different locations. Where there is an economy, there must be a government. However, in the case of something like *Second Life,* the government is inherently overseen by the Terms & Agreements of *Second Life.*
And here's where you get to make a decision. It's your software. Unless you open source the software, the software owner has complete control over the environment and can impose restrictions. In such a case, without serious hacking (see [narrative necessity](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7281/40609)), you know exactly which bots belong to whom and it's trivial to impose a one-vote-per-user limitation.
The problem is if you open source the software or otherwise free the system so that only an in-VR context can be known. Why you'd do that is beyond me, software (like any complex system) and the hardware that supports it must be maintained. It's very much impossible to "set it free" and make the system wholly non-interactive with the "real" world.
*Which brings us back to the threat of violence.*
What can you do to a player/user who refuses to comply with the rules? You can take his/her resources or liberty. Everything from "you can't visit this location for an hour" to "we've permanently deleted your account and the $8,524.23 worth of enhancements you paid for are permanently lost. Obey the rules next time."
**Conclusion**
Before you develop your in-VR government, you need to figure out what the relationship is between the real world and your VR's users. That relationship is the "actual government" because it imposes the harshest restrictions.
After that you can develop your in-VR government, or let your characters develop it, usually in support of whatever economic system has been imposed by the VR's design (remember, you have inside-VR money and outside-VR money, they will touch, and that means your in-VR government has something to do with not only the T&A of your system, but the very real governments outside the VR, too.)
And if you're lucky, your smarter bots won't figure out that they have power to influence the "people" around them, imposing the same mechanics of violence that you permit for the operation of the government to get their way.
*Vive la Révolution!*
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Government is a power structure for manipulating flows of scarce resources. It sounds like you are exploring a post-scarcity environment. It is important to think beyond scarcity models.
If you are exploring 'different' scarcity decide which of your resources are scarce and who the winners and losers will be and then build your logic from there.
It is also worth considering what constitutes crime. There are essentially two types of crime, crimes against the person and crimes against property. Are either of these possible? If so then what would be the consequences? Does your society care and why? There is a lot of story in just exploring these ideas.
As for democracy, why?
Who built the system and why are they giving everyone (anyone) a vote?
Neal Stephenson has some good ideas in Snowcrash.
Charles Stross also looks at some of these issues in Halting State, Rule 34 and some of his other books.
Charles and Cory Doctrow have some fun with it in Rapture of the Nerds.
Ian M Banks takes it a long, long way in his culture novels.
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# Vetting and citizenship system
Don't forget that in the real world, generally voting is restricted to citizens. Underage persons cannot vote either. People can be stripped of citizenship.
And democracy is not necessarily about giving every person one vote. It is about preventing a small elite from maintaining its own power.
So, the system I would suggest:
* people have a formal history (birth records, criminal records, education, career) and those that "appear" with no history are treated as untrusted outsiders
* "citizenship" or voting rights can be earned by a reasonable level of contribution to society (as assessed by a transparent board)
* so if someone creates bots that actually benefit society, then it's not that bad if the bots vote that person's way—obviously not ideal (ideally the bots vote on their own conscience) but what can you do
* rights can be stripped for significantly anti-social behaviour and you might need to be tougher on citizens continuing to contribute to society
* at the end of the day, you have to draw the line somewhere—we don't allow pets to vote because they're not really able to create or maintain a system of government. Entities that are obviously mechanical bots shouldn't be given a vote. If there is no evidence of reasonable comprehension of social institutions then an entity certainly shouldn't be trusted not to be a puppet
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Orgone is the measure of a person's connection with the cosmos. It is the conduit through which the power of the cosmos flows, focused through a sorcerer's will. Ritual practicioners must draw on this reserve of power in their souls to make a magic spell work. Spells require a constant infusion of Orgone through rituals that are performed inside a transmutation circle. These rituals require a number of ingredients and can last anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours depending on the spell. There are five schools of magic that spells revolve around and are taught at universities:
Enchantment Spells – These are spells designed to capture cosmic power within a crafted item, so that its power can be called upon in times of need.
Protection Spells – These are spells designed to ward a user, object, or location against a variety of possible harms
Transmogrifcation Spells – These are spells designed to fundamentally alter or control another living being or creature.
Transmutation Spells - Changing the makeup of different materials or combining them with others to make new forms of matter.
Scrying Spells – These are spells designed to allow a user to perceive in ways that go beyond his five senses.
The idea is to turn these schools of magic into fields, which in turn are broken down into sub-fields, creating many different branches around these forms of magic. I am looking for at least 12 sub-branches from the five schools that I just mentioned. The problem is I am having difficulty ascribing what kind of magic fits into these parameters, as well as how to break them down into various practices.
**Examples**
1. The school of **Transmogrification**: the *biomancy* discipline (focuses on how to mentally control living things).
2. The school of **Transmutation**: the *alchemy* discipline (focuses on how to transmute one mineral into another and the creation of metallurgically impossible alloys).
3. The school of **Scrying**: the *divination* discipline (focuses on seeing into the future).
**Question:** What nine other specializations or sub-fields could be derived from the five listed fields of magical study?
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I think that having clear lines between these five schools of magic is useful, if only to decide where a particular kind of spell falls into. However, with that said, just how knowing about physics can help you in chemistry, [and so on](https://www.xkcd.com/435/), interdisciplinary magic is very possible (even if limited to using one to assist another, for example using an enchanted item to do a protection spell).
So, let us see...
* Enchantment controls※ magic of objects.
* Transmutation manipulate the substance.
* Transmogrifcation manipulate the living
* Scrying hmm...
* Protection spells hmm...
※: "control" meaning "give", "take" or "change".
Alright, the beyond his [five](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Irzmyf52e7A) senses thing is problematic. I will assume that Scrying is not about creating items (magic mirrors, crystal balls, or similar), because that would be Enchantment. Thus, I will assume it acts on living beings, granting this senses. However that sounds a bit like Transmogrifcation.
However, if we follow the example of Enchantment and Transmutation, we could make school all about giving magical properties to living things. Then Scrying is actually a sub-field.
Then we have protection spells... ern... same problem. If we are talking about lucky charms et.al. that is Enchantment. Thus, this must be on the living. That would be another sub-field sibling to Scrying.
This shcool that covers Scrying and Protection needs a name... looking for names for it, "charm", "potentikinesis" and "binding" seems to come close. Those names could be misunderstood... for example one could think that "potentikinesis" covers enchantment. And of course, "charm" and "binding" has other meanings. I'll go with charm here.
Thus, we have only four schools:
* Enchantment controls magic of objects
* Charm controls magic of the living.
* Transmutation manipulate the substance.
* Transmogrifcation manipulate the living.
Do you want a fifth school? Because I have one candidate for you: Animancy/necromancy (I wish I had a good term for the combination of both). Why? Because we have cut along animate and inanimate things. That sounds like something magicians would be interested in solving. And yes, that could make it overpowered... thus, it could be forbidden. If a school is to be forbidden, necromancy is likely to be it.
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Now that we have clean cuts between the school, we can either go thinking about every possible form of magic (see what is out there in other media) and see where it falls, or we can try to think of clever ways to use the schools we have. Another thing you want to think about is what would be the opposite of a given kind of magic, those are likely to be lump together.
With that said, I am ready to suggest sub-fields. I lack some fancy names for these, in fact, consider if the names of the schools are ok with the fields you choose, I'll just go with what you have. This are my suggestions:
* Enchantment
+ Amulate creation: give a passive magic property to objects
+ Weapon enchantment: infuse magic into weapons to make them stronger
+ Orgone storage: creates batteries of orgone to be used later.
+ Creating of divination objects
* "Charm":
+ Scrying
+ Protection
+ Curse/blessing: give a passive magic property to the living
+ Magic interference: use orgone to mess the spells of others
* Transmutation:
+ Alchemy
+ Telekinesis
+ Weather modification
* Transmogrifcation:
+ Shapeshifting
+ Bioaugmentation
+ Healing
+ Biokinesis
For my proposed replacement fifth school:
* Animancy:
+ Golem creation
+ Reanimation (bring back the dead)
+ Death negation (prevent dead, however not by keeping the body healthy, that would be Transmogrifcation instead)
+ Spirtual projection, posession and exorcism
+ Mediumship (talk to the dead)
The following I do not know if they could be fields on their own:
* Using magic to create an object should be in Transmutation.
* Using magic to reverse age should be in Transmogrifcation.
* Using magic to create illusions should - probably - be in Transmogrifcation.
* Using magic to create a field force would either be charm or enchantment depending if it is on an object/place or a living being.
* Using magic to cause things to burst into flames or to make electric currents flow would be in Transmutation.
* Using magic to make a person beautiful and creating sexual attraction are Transmogrifcation.
* Using magic to create drinks with special effects would be in Enchantment.
* Summoning supernatural creatures is - probably - animancy.
* Commanding animals or plants is clearly Transmogrifcation.
* Distinguish if a person is telling the truth... hmm... I guess there are plenty of ways to go about it. It is probably not Transmutation.
Addendum:
- Teleportation could be possible with items via Enchantment. Or perhaps it could be possible to make portals with very, very, very, very advanced alchemy. If it is possible at all depends on the setting.
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Well, that is more than 12. You don't have to do with what I said. In the best case you can remove what you don't like, after all, perhaps not all forms of magic are viable in your setting. And perhaps there are some that they do not teach, or have not been developed at the time your narration takes place (which is also a way to nerf a school, make it underdeveloped).
For example, in a modern setting people could develop technokinesis as a branch of Transmutation... however, in a setting where people are use magic for complex tasks instead of engineering, there probably aren't many machines on with which it is worth do that kind of thing, and thus that field of magic might not have been developed.
Another thing that could happen is a new branch emerging that is dedicated to the mind (read minds, search memories, create hallucinations, communicate thoughts, etc...), it would develop from Transmogrifcation, but combine the use of the others in ways that defy the schools classification, making it a new school.
In fact, You might want to look at the history of engineering. Sure, there is a fixed number of "[schools of engineering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_engineering_branches)", however as technology develops new emerge. For example, electric engineering predates software engineering, and mechanical engineering predates electric engineering.
If my sub-field suggestions are not useful at all, hopefully I gave you some idea of how to go about this.
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**Addendum on the motivation of removing Protection spells as a school**
I am information security specialist, and I bring that up firstly to say that I understand the concept of specializing in protecting things. Thus, if the idea of defense against dark arts appeals to you and you want to keep your protection school you go right ahead.
... And secondly to say that I also did learn how to perform plenty of attacks. So, yeah, my specialization is in defending things, yet I need to understand - and even be able to perform (for testing) - the attacks. Because of this, it makes sense to me to put together defensive and offensive magic in the same school.
Dichotomies have a tendency to not be fact. Instead we often find dualities, or rather I should say, symmetries. For example electrics motors and electric generators are basically the same thing (and thus arguebly a ventilator is a wind turbine). Similarly, [LEDs are solarpanels](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WGKz2sUa0w). However, they are tweaked in such way that they are more efficient being used one way than the other. Their design has a bias, yet they come from the same essence.
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**Addendum on how magicians fit into economy**
Ville Niemi's answer exposes a very good point on how magic fits your setting. You should think about how these school relate to the rest of society.
If magicians belong to a society (they are not hermits), that reveals another aspect to consider: do magicians find it worthy to offer their services to the public?
Four notable cases (all valid, it is your world):
* There could be magicians that offer their services to the public. Although they probably can transmute things into valuables and food. I will assume doing so is generally too costly compared to providing a service for good payment. Universities could be interested in teaching them, similar to engineering. *However, you probably would have to be very wealthy to hire them.*
* There could be magicians that work for the military. They are powerful, thus could be a great form of [power projection](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_projection). The goverment could have special schools for them. *However, it would be hard to ensure they obey.*
* There could be magicians that are criminals. Why bother transmuting rocks to bread when you can steal it, or better yet, enslave people to produce food for you. Probably forming these is not a goal of universities, regardless, I can imagine they might have their own training camps. *However, people are not going to do it better than magic.*
* There could be magicians that live in an isolated communities. They probably do not barter with strangers. Modeling the schools of magic around engineering makes sense here, because they have to do every task necesary to sustain their community (or use golems, if they are a thing in your setting). Yet, I think this is the situation that could lead to more abstract schools, because they might have their own, isolated from the world.
Besides all that, there could be some fields of magic study that are inherent of the world. In which case you can take science as a model (after all, magicians will need research and development or not-orgone-based technology will eventually catch up to them).
[Answer]
I think that D&D has somewhat mislead everyone in this sense. We are used to thinking that magic is divided based on the effects it achieves and that magic comes in different flavors that limit its use. In reality, this is simply a convenience for balanced RPG design of specialized mages.
How would this really work then?
Magic does not have specializations. People do.
We should not let "magic" mislead us into thinking its existence fundamentally changes the rules. It doesn't. The computer I am using to write this runs on eletricity. The generators in hydroelectric or nuclear power plant produce electricity. Does this mean that using a computer makes me qualified to maintain a nuclear power plant in a densely populated are? Or that a person who knows how to design a microprocessor can design a nuclear power plant?
Obviously not. Even if things run on electricity or magic you still need specialized skills for the specific practical applications. People who design microprocessors and people who design generators for nuclear plants both rely on the same electricity and need a solid understanding of electricity but the work they do and the skills they need are quite different.
And even their understanding of electricity is different. A generator does not really need semiconductors and quantum effects. Processors have very little use for induction. If our society collapsed and people started working based on rote application of mystical formula, people very well might think that there is more than one form of electricity with different nature and rules.
And as is obvious that is how magic is treated in fantasy. They use it but they have no real understanding of it. Just lots and lots of rote formulae developed for various purposes. And those formulae would follow different traditions based on which parts of how magic actually works are relevant and which can be ignored. The end result would be "schools of magic" with their own rules and vocabulary of magic optimized for their field. But not really working at all for some other field that requires things its rules do not cover and working very badly for fields that do not need things its rules say are a must.
At this point the two people who read this far must be thinking: How is this related to the actual question? (And yes, I am an optimist.)
Well, the way the larger schools evolved determines how the smaller specializations evolve. Once you understand why the schools exist and what they actually are, you can easily develop more specific schools as needed based on the actual setting.
In short, what you need to do is to think about magical professions. What kinds of magical professions exist in your setting and how they fit in your general framework of magic? What kinds of magicians exist outside that framework? Tribal shamans and foreigners are common examples of that.
The typical evolution is that originally the professions of magician matched your larger schools. Then when people started relying on magic more magicians started specilizing more. Enchanter might specialize on making rings and other jewellery or weapons and armor. Then over time these became their own professions. Magical goldsmith, magical blacksmith and so on. This can go on. Magical blacksmiths could specialize on being magical swordsmiths or magical armorers based on sustained demand.
What transforms such individual specializations (and professions) into schools is established traditions and practices. A good question is: Could my setting have an established guild for this profession? If the answer is yes, it will only take time for the guild(s) have its own traditions of magic different enough to qualify as a sub-school. If not, you might have a master and his students with really cool specialized skill and trade secrets but they would not really qualify as a school.
[Answer]
*You're probably looking for a codified system that would be appropriate for the rules of an RPG. This ain't it. Or, it would be a pain to write into the rules of an RPG. It was fun to develop, nonetheless.*
**Orgone, like electricity, is a neutral power**
There are a great many things one can do with electricity. Motors and generators, radio transmission, semiconducting gates, power transmission, and many others. Pretty much nobody has the ability to master all these disciplines, though all graduating electrical/electronic engineers must have insight into all of them.
Orgone can (and should) be treated the same way. Those who have access to it can access it for any purpose, but there's only so much time in the world and so many rituals to learn! Worst of all, utilizing Orgone is like speaking a language. In fact, it's like speaking a great many languages. Practitioners must actually train themselves to *specifically think* in a desired manner to bring about a desired outcome. Oh, you may need lizard toenails for one ritual, powdered sulfur for another, and the quality of those ingredients *certainly* matters — but if you can't put yourself into the correct "frame of mind," then you might as well be singing a polka for all the magic you'll perform.
So, for your first assignment in *General Magical Studies 101,* "An Introduction to the Accommodation of Orgone," you are required to memorize...
* The Five Magics and their Perspectives
* The Twelve Disciplines and Their Accommodations
* The Forty-Seven Principle Ingredients and their General Characterizations
* and The Seventeen Attitudes
This should be completed with all haste as an in-class essay concerning this material will be required Friday. Those who submit incomplete essays will not be permitted to attend the Intraspecial Rally between the Humans and the Nagat.
**The Five Magics and Their Perspectives**
*Enchantment*
The binding of Orgone within animate and inanimate objects for a purpose, ongoing or drawn upon in times of need. The student must learn to balance liberty and compulsion, focusing the mind toward the perspective of The Other, for it is only by understanding The Other and its nature can liberty and compulsion be imbued within it.
*Protection*
Orgone can be drawn upon to thwart and reflect the undesired intent of others. Where *Enchantment* would be used to bind closed a chest or a lock, *Protection* would be used to thwart magical attempts to open the chest or unlock the lock. Orgone can be used to shield a combatant from physical harm, secure an item or creature from theft, or align a tool to the purposes of the caster and none else. The student must learn to balance selflessness and selfishness, focusing the mind toward the perspective of Intent and the many languages of greed, lust, and jealousy to properly enjoin selflessness and selfishness in equal amounts.
*Transmogrification*
Orgone can alter and control the living creature be it plant or reasoning being. The student must learn to balance the True Name with the Great Lie, focusing the mind toward the perspective of Accountability to properly retain the Name while expressing the Lie.
*Transmutation*
*Transmutation* is to the inorganic rock what *Transmogrification* is to the delicate petal — it is the capacity to wield Orgone to change the nature of minerals, fluids, and gases, to bind and divide, to empower and to expel. The student must learn to balance reality and fantasy, to see within and without! focusing the mind toward the ponderous perspective of Persistence such that the will within can drive the desire without.
*Scrying*
Orgone's most subtle use is perception, the capacity to comprehend, to see beyond the limits of the moment. The student must learn to balance hope and despair, for the knowledge of things as they were, as they are, or as they may yet be can betoken fortune and poverty alike. The mind must focus toward the perspective of Time, both its logic and illogic, lest truth become illusion.
**The Twelve Disciplines and Their Accommodations**
A Disciple is one who devotes their time and talent to the challenge of mastering a specific aspect of Orgone. Interdisciplinary mastery is permissible, but only after the student has achieved mastery in their first discipline and then undergone the Rite of Mustiiken, which will ascertain the suitability of the applicant for interdisciplinary mastery. The consequences of attempting interdisciplinary mastery without the endowment of the Rite of Mustiiken and the inevitable madness that follows will be introduced in *General Magical Studies 205,* "Orgonic Physiognomy and an Introduction to the Medicines of Magic."
The First Five Disciplines you already know, for they are the Magics themselves.
*Mastery of Enchantment*
The Accommodation for this Discipline is music in its many forms and functions, for the mind's adaptation to music is perfectly suited for interweaving the power of Orgone with the base nature of the object, plant, or creature to be enchanted. A simple example of this Accommodation is the mind's comprehension of the melody of a harp that permits the enchantment of a base material (The Other) such as wood or metal with fragrance.
*Mastery of Protection*
The Accommodation for this Discipline is austerity and rigidity in one's life: from a lack of personal possessions to sleeping on hard, flat surfaces and otherwise surrounding oneself with the immutable and the weighty. When the mind becomes focused like the body, Orgone can be used to surround person, place, or thing with that magic that will forbid against the caster's desire. The most obvious example is the focused remembrance of sleeping upon a cut slab of granite with its solid, immovable intent that permits the caster to implode Orgone in the form of a simple, physical shield.
*Mastery of Transmogrification*
The Accommodation for this Discipline is the language of life in all its forms and majesty. What better way to bring a falcon to light upon one's arm than to call out its true name in its own language! Whether the murmur of the susurration of leaves or the expression of odor of a fine stew, Orgone will bend the will and nature of the living object to the caster's will, even allowing the caster to take that form! It is not uncommon for claimants to the Master's Robes to demonstrate this feat by speaking the languages of many things (for only in this way can the caster be accountable for his or her goal) to make life become something never seen before. Such was how the *Chimera* was born!
*Mastery of Transmutation*
The Accommodation for this Discipline is to live apart from life and death, to eschew the ways of men and the charms of animals. It is not uncommon for disciples wearing the Ocher Robes of this mastery to be found living deep within the earth, or among the desolate deserts and lonely islands of the world. For only by setting one's self apart from their base nature can the true authority of Orgone be expressed in the earth itself. No candidate for mastery would debase him- or herself by merely transmuting lead into gold. Such tinkering is childish to the master! But by comprehending the ominous heartbeat of the earth itself, by persistently encompassing the absolute *reality* of what all of life must stand upon, can the master craft, shape, change, and control the essence of the world.
*Mastery of Scrying*
The Accommodation for this Discipline is the control of all emotion, both the emotion of one's self and the emotion of those surrounding one, ensuring all things are in the control of the moment. The comprehension and control of emotion is mandatory for the clarity of vision necessary to truly see past, present, and future. The adept capable of understanding hate, envy, joy, and serenity can see the past without remorse or confusion. The journeyman capable of understanding surprise, anger, panic, and laughter can view the present without doubt or certainty. The master capable of understanding hope, despair, disdain, and anxiety can look upon the fabric of the future without contempt or cowardice and advise the course of kings. But only after learning to control one's self, and those around one.
*Of the remaining seven Disciplines and their Accommodations, it should be mentioned that all are a combination of the Magics. It should be noted that some combinations, though attempted, have never produced great gifts and are therefore deemed unfathomable. For example, none have brought Transmogrification and Transmutation together as their Accommodations are mutually exclusive: the one embracing the language of life while rejecting the languageless natue of the earth, while the other eschews life to encompass the very reality of the earth beneath. Life, said the Master Laedyth, is the fantasy the reality of earth permits, and so never the two may meet. Students should not be tempted to try and extrude new or alternative Disciplines before completing (with a passing grade!)* General Magical Studies 410: *"Paradox and Paradigm: The Essential Nature of Orgone."*
*Mastery of Destiny*
Encompassing aspects of *Enchantment* and *Transmogrification,* the Accommodation of this Discipline is song. The purpose of this Discipline is to redirect the destiny of a human soul, to change a person's interests, desires, and goals such that their fate is substantially altered (beyond what could be believed through luck or circumstance). Adepts often find themselves teasing one another (and unsuspecting strangers, despite *clear rules to the contrary!*) with simple emotional potions such as the ubiquitous love potion or the more practical *Heroic Dust.* But true masters can use Orgone to change the fate of an individual such that their descendants for *generations* become bound to the caster's woven destiny! Songs that bring such nation-changing alterations to pass can be weeks in the singing and often necessitate the help of fellow masters.
*Mastery of the Seer*
Encompassing aspects of *Protection* and *Scrying,* the Accommodation of this Discipline is concentration in every aspect of the disciple's life. The purpose of this Discipline is to see the One True Thread, or perhaps more literally, to Declare the One True Thread in the fabric of the future. Masters of this Discipline are able to enforce the choices of the living and the entropy of the earth to ensure one and only one specific future comes to pass. It is little wonder that this Discipline graduates the fewest masters and rare it is to see the brilliant white linings of the black mastery robes in the courts of the powerful. Disciples have been known to die when vying to enforce their one of the two or more competing futures several masters may be trying to bring to pass. He or she with the greater concentration wins the day (in the most literal sense), necessitating great endurance. And only the most powerful of masters are able to weave the fabric of time to ensure their desired future while not disrupting the fulfillment of some master from long ago. Only one, Master Vadnek, has ever had the fortitude, the endurance, and the sheer concentration, to *rewrite the enforced future mandated by a previous master.* It is said that it cost him his life, but they never found his body....
*Students who are successful in their application to the Seership Discipline are required to complete with a passing grade* General Magical Studies 555, *"The Ethics of Magic and Time." Due to past troubles with students from wealthy families, the final exam will be administered by a tribunal of graduated masters led by famed Master Huclaere, whose integrity is beyond repute and whose judgement will be final. You've been warned.*
*Mastery of Blacksmithing*
Encompassing elements of *Enchantment* and *Transmutation,* the Accommodation for this Discipline is (not surprisingly) blacksmithing. It is the one, dedicated trade the disciple may ever have. While the most common result of this Discipline is enchanted weapons, the most talented masters produce talismans capable of focusing Orgone in ways that generate elemental conditions. This Discipline and *Mastery of Protection* are the most common Disciplines to be brought together in interdisciplinary mastery.
*Mastery of Promise*1
Encompassing elements of *Transmogrification, Protection,* and *Scrying,* the Accommodation for this Discipline is fidelity — complete, untarnished fidelity. The purpose of this Discipline is to bind a living creature to a purpose. Sometimes misunderstood as an *unbreakable vow* or a *perfect covenant,* (and never to be confused with the Discipline of the Seer or the Discipline of Destiny! Both of which can literally coerce an individual or the world to the caster's will.) the art of binding creatures to a purpose does not abrogate their freedom of choice nor interfere with their destiny. Instead, it conditions their choices such that when one choice favors the binding, that choice is easier to make than the other. Further, the Discipline has a metaphysical "area of affect" in that others who may choose to act in such a way as to compromise the binding with, themselves, favor choices that protect that binding. This Discipline is one of the most complex, demanding not simply a perfect recitation of ritual, but perfect timing, measure of ingredients, and an unyielding frame of mind. Masters of great experience have been discovered utterly insane — a consequence of failing to meet the absolute fidelity demanded by this Discipline.
*Mastery of the Dead*
This most feared of Disciplines encompasses *Enchantment, Transmogrification,* and *Scrying.* The Accommodation for this Discipline is Love (a curious byproduct of The Other, Accountability, and Time). The purpose of this Discipline is to comprehend, speak with, even reanimate the dead and is nothing short of the power to reach through the Veil to bring mind, soul, or body of the deceased to the present. Mastery of this Discipline is so feared due to the moral fortitude demanded of the caster — for the dead know great mysteries the living were never intended to know.
*Master Ueklid has developed a new class made available only to successful applicants to this Discipline.* Magical Psychology 522, *"The Riddle of Kerhorum-Lat." Students receiving a passing grade will intern at the Bahqduer medical facility. Students that do not receive a passing grade will intern at the Oorood medical facility on the island of D'urt. Students will learn about both facilities on the first day of class.2*
*Mastery of Clairvoyance*
Encompassing elements of "Transmogrification" and "Scrying," the Accommodation for this Discipline is silence. The purpose of this discipline is to gain knowledge about ideas and intents. It is greatly sought after by kings and nations and though highly valuable for research into the natural world and its wonders, it has an obvious practical application for espionage.
*Admission requirements for this Discipline are very specific and require regular evaluation and justification for continuance during the applicant's early years of study. Students with a romantic notion of manipulating world politics will be screened early and quickly from the program. It is known that some students especially ill-suited for the program enter Master Ghellictks' study for evaluation and never exit.*
*Mastery of Life*
The last of the Twelve Disciplines and their Accommodations encompasses elements of "Enchantment" and "Protection," but curiously, *not* "Transmogrification." The Accommodation for this Discipline is cleanliness: both purity of the body and purity of the spirit. The purpose of this Discipline is to bring health, or the essence of life, to the disciple's focus. With this Discipline the master may animate the inanimate (and it was the interdisciplinary combination of the Discipline of Life and the Discipline of Scrying that master Moammathul was able to create the Kazzari Homunculus, whose prophesies lead to the Peace of Comsant and whose interference brought about the Illun civil war). Lush gardens and bountiful harvests are the basic hallmark of this Discipline's masters, but so, too, are great works of healing such as the Lifting of the Fourth Battalion on the eve of defeat to Emperor Malden II — 500 healed and saved from death only an hour before nightfall, turning the tide of the Inland Ivy War.
**The Forty-Seven Principle Ingredients and their General Characterizations**
Although nearly every element of earth and life may be used to manipulate Orgone, these forty-seven....
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1 *Promise and Destiny look an awful lot alike, but they are applied very differently. Destiny can change generations and focuses on what the individual will become. It completely disrupts the laws of random chance to guarantee that evolution. Promise is far more practical (and harder to control) in that it focuses on a job that needs doing — a result that needs to come about, but the consequences or path taken may not be at all what the caster expected or intended. Random chance is still very much in play with the Discipline of Promise.*
2 *Students who reach this class know too much about the Discipline to be allowed to fail without "proper safeguards." The Island of D'urt has proven a convenient place to... help students ill-suited for this Discipline to... continue their "journey" without additional risk to the world or the dead. Um... yeah. Something along the lines of [Route R2-45](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R2-45), but with a wand.*
[Answer]
To open, I will agree with the parts of answers provided by Ville Niemi and Theraot in that the following points that they have brought up will guide my answer here:
1. People specialize in magic. The system might lead to certain places, but someone will find a way to specialize in what they want to.
2. Economy and Supply/Demand will determine which sub-disciplines see widespread use and which ones are more academic curiosities.
3. Any Sub-Discipline will be derived from one or more of the primary disciplines
## Orgone Understanding
Based on what I get from the question, this Orgone energy is a neutral force that is drawn upon to cast the spells. Making the peoples fall down seems to be optional here.
What I also read is that there are five spheres of magic, each with their own domain of things that they do. There's a game that does something like that in concept: Magic the Gathering. Now these schools of magic do not necessarily line up with the five colours in the game, but it is my guide for how I would think about this problem.
Overall, I would expect that what I have listed as the subschools are in fact the broad categorizations of such as used by scholars and aspiring casters. Single families or guilds might call their craft by a different name, one more specific to the particular task that they are doing.
The other thing I would guess is that there would not be a lot of spells/subschools that are purely of one school and that true mastery of one school of magic will involve at least understanding concepts of the others, even if you can't actually cast from them. As an example in Avatar, Iroh created a technique to redirect lightning based on waterbending teachings. By understanding Water, Iroh enhanced his knowledge of Fire.
# The Specializations
## Enchantment
Capturing cosmic power into a crafted item is the general. It follows that the majority of this school consists of either craftsmen that practically enchant items, or theoretical mages that work on improving the process. While the obvious start are enchanters that are based on what they are enchanting (jewelry, weapons, clothing, etc.), I would posit that the aspects to the process of a whole are the main source of your subschools.
* The discipline of **Capacitance** is around focusing on how Orgone interacts with the crafted object and how to maximize this relationship. It eschews the aspect of making the stored energy do something in favour of just storing more energy. Rin's Jewelcraft from Fate is the inspiration for this -- storing excess personal power into gems for later use (and bigger booms). D&D also has psionic capacitance crysils that hold a certain number of PP.
* Counter to this, the discipline of **Imbuement** is all about the interaction between the item and the effects that are imbued into it. While some of the effects will be actually from other schools, the spellcraft in putting that effect into an items is what is being studied. How to make it more efficient, or the binding require less Orgone than it would otherwise. A master of Imbuement could enchant a ring to do a half dozen things while an apprentice might barely manage a single thing.
* Lastly are the people that would decide to not bother adding new things to stuff and instead enhance what an item already does to its limit, leading to the **Enhancement** subschool. By not only mastering the interactions of Orgone with an object but with its properties, one can enhance what something does without fundamentally changing it. You aren't actually changing the enchanted object, which to me differentiates it from your definition of Transmutation.
## Protection
The warding and defensive school, it is likely that the specialties will be based on what is being warded and/or what the target is being protected from. I would expect a not insignificant number of people using Enchanting to make protective amulets and items based on these spells as well as to make power sources for these wards.
* **Warding** is the obvious first specialty of the Protection School, consisting of defining an physical area and stating what cannot enter the area or what to protect the area from. Many subsections of Warding will exist as warding a house will be different than a town or a patch of land such as a farm or grove.
* Eventually somebody will have the brainstorm to invert the spells of Protection. Instead of keeping something out, they will invert the spells to keep something in, and this is born the **Binding** subschool. Keeping things within a specific area has a lot of uses.
* Applying an Orgone-based protection to a living thing that has its own connection to Orgone is a study in itself, leading to the **Blessing** subschool. This focuses on anchoring a protection to a living thing. While there are likely aspects of Transmogrification and/or Enchanting in this, the core of this subschool is the protection/blessing itself hence it being here.
## Transmogrification
Control over the living is a scary, scary thing if used improperly. And likely its biggest use will be in being used improperly. Druids would be a large component of this school as they deal with living nature and is likely the most benevolent lot along with healers. I also would expect either a lot of theoretical research here (For Science!) or some real crazies delving into things man was not meant to know.
* You have mentioned Biomancy, to mentally control living things. Personally, I would call it the **Domination** discipline, as its point is to dominate the will over living things.
* In the note of improper use of Transmogrification, we get to what I will define as **Biomancy**, where one rituals together two or more (parts of) living beings to create something that should in theory be better than the sum of their parts. For a more successful example, see the Simic Combine from Magic the Gathering. For a less successful example, Full Metal Alchemist. I would expect a lot of theoretic study and few practical results unless there is a desperate call for this. That or this is how there be dragons.
* While some like their people puppets and sharktocrabs, not everyone is so into that kind of thing. The **Lifeweaver** discipline would be controlling the body and the Orgone energy in/around it in order to affect it. The benevolent would use it to heal, restore, and enhance while the lessons could be inverted to curse and debilitate. I would have just called it Healing, but realized that it can harm just as easily. Expect many to call it by more positive terms like Healing, or Restoration and conveniently forget that you can use this to curse your enemies. This differs from Domination in that you are casting a one time spell on a living thing and not tying it to your will.
## Transmutation
Changing the fundamental nature of matter is likewise equally as powerful, and arguably just as easy to misuse in the pursuit of power. I foresee many looking for a quick GP looking to this to transmute base materials into something more valuable. Restrictions as to the use of this school are going to be your friend.
I would expect smiths to be favoured here for material creation and crafters or tradesmen for the fabrication aspects. Mercenaries or inventors might have use here for the more theoretical aspects of the school.
* You mentioned **Alchemy**, the discipline to transmute one mineral into another. It's pretty straightforward. Make sure you have your restriction on the more exotic things transmuted.
* War and strife will give birth to the school of **Evocation**, to conjure effects seemingly from nothing to devastating effect. While your conditions for spellcasting make it suitable for artillery at best, a smaller scale of this could be use to transmute fuel for a forge or to create water. A desert town may rely on this discipline to survive in dry times.
* For the simpler people that don't car about exotic materials and Unobtanium, there is the school of **Fabrication**. Take a magic circle and a pile of raw goods, metaphorically light it on fire with a quantity of Orgone and Ominous Latin Chanting, and poof! New items. This could be the single most valuable discipline if only because crafting things by hand can be hard and time consuming. Plan restrictions appropriately. I think this would be the first practical school of the three here.
## Scrying
To see the unseen and beyond the five senses is perhaps going to be the second most useful ability that your Orgone-based magic will possess if left to a master of it. Based on your casting style, tapping into the Orgone-infused cosmos to learn information about anything seems like a possibility here. Most of these I see being used with a certain tool or focus depending on the person.
* **Divination** as you mentioned would likely be a forever goal. To read the currents of the cosmos and interpret the swirls in the flows Orgone to divine the future would take a lifetime to master.
* **Prescience** turns an eye to the present as opposed to the past. Connecting to the cosmos connects you to everywhere, meaning that you can, in theory, see everywhere. Seeing and hearing what your enemy is up to is a gold mine of information … just make sure that it is an actual gold mine and not one Transmuted to look like one.
* **Necromancy** would be the spooky side of the school. Unlike the undead raising that we normally associate with the word, in this case we use the dictionary definition of *communication with the dead* as our guide to this. Perceiving the dead would require senses beyond the conventional five and thus the basis of this subschool falls here. Spirits of the deceased would be a trove of information about the past, and may be talked into spying for applications in the present. Also good for solving crimes.
## Combining Schools
Combining schools will be largely a matter of taking a concept from two (or more) schools and mixing them together. When combining effects, it is important to note not only what a combination of schools would be capable of, but what they are incapable of doing together.
* Combining Transmutation and Transmogrification could result in the **Animation** subschool, which revolves around giving a living property to something unliving.
* Enchantment and Protection would be a more common combination and would be responsible for most of the protective jewelry out there. Mastery in both would allow one person to do more with less.
* Scrying and Transmogrification could combine into the **Familiar** Discipline. While not one a lot of people specialize in, the ability to perceive through the animals of the world can be useful. Most would likely restrict themselves to a single animal or type of animal.
* I would expect a **Metamagic** subschool for theorists if you have any form of organized academy of magical learning. Tied to no one school in particular, they are the ones that study Orgone itself, trying to comprehend the relations between Orgone energy, and the components for spellcrafting. While they might not advance magic in the sense of creating a new spell, it may be that their research is what spawns a spike in new magics.
[Answer]
This might be poorly formatted/answered, I'm new here. I had a few suggestions for each school and fleshed them out a bit to show their distinctions and their possible uses as occupations.
# Enchantment:
**Practical Enchantment: Finery and Adornments**
A school of enchantment focused on wearable enchantments that wouldn't be seen in a duel or on a battlefield, mainly focused on simple things that make life easier outside of battle.
Example: Necklaces that improve eyesight, a shirt that makes you more appealing to look at, gems that turn you briefly invisible.
**Practical Enchantment: Munitions and Armament**
A warlike focus. Enchanters in this school go on to join armies or work as private contractors to rich families who need cosmic enhancements to their weapons and armor. This only pertains to inanimate objects.
---
# Protection:
**Corporeal Orgonic Protection**
Protection rituals that defend against physical threats. This spans from typhoid to an axe being swung at your head. These are rituals that affect a living being, they cannot be used to protect inanimate objects.
Note: Although you may be able to prevent disease and infection, you cannot cure it with this school of magic.
**Metaphysical Orgonic Protection**
Protection against threats of Orgonic origin. The rituals of this school are able to block magic or reduce its effect, based on how strong the ritual and cosmic flow is for the individual doing the protection. This school is only useful against magic and Orgone itself.
---
# Transmogrification:
**Biomancy**
Mental control of living beings. Teaching Biomancy that works intelligent life is banned due to ethical concerns, but the study of non-intelligent Biomancy is allowed. The rituals between intelligent and non-intelligent life have a minor overlap possibly, maybe leading to an underground Biomancer fraternity.
**Theoretical Orgonics**
The theory of how Orgone is used, what it is, how it can be harnessed and how the magic of orgonics can be pushed forward. While other schools research the past, the Theory of Orgonics students think of the future and how magic will change. It's mainly theoretical due to the energy being cosmic and they have no access to it's source, possibly?
**Biological Supplementation: Living**
The magic school of Biologocial augmentation, healing and physiological discovery. This school gains knowledge of the living, catalogues it, magically augments it, etc. The subtitle of "Living" could be a holdover from the past when there was a school of "Biological Supplementation: Dead". That would have been the necromancy school, but due to their gravedigging ways the school of magic got banned from the University.
---
# Transmutation:
**Alchemy**
Metallurgy with no limits, the alchemists have rituals that combine metals or minerals into combinations not achievable by physical smelts. Alchemists generally go on to become famous jewelers, known for their precious and unique gems, or high-class metallurgists possibly?
Note: These alloys require a magician, who studied in the school of Practical Transmutation, to smith. Non-magical smiths will find the alloy impossible to shape or sharpen.
**Practical Transmutation: Smithing**
Thought of as the blue-collar magician, transmutational smiths are required for the smithing of Alchemical alloys. The rituals learned in this school are required to shape any alloys or cut any gems produced by the Alchemists, it's a codependent relationship between the two schools of Transmutation.
---
# Scrying:
**Ethereal Augury and Divination**
The study of reading the future through Orgonic rituals, but also through Orgone's effect on the living world. The school studies how the future can be predicted through the patterns that Orgone's connection to the physical world creates. Anything from cow formations in a field to the gender of a regent could determine the future. These students could go on to become political advisors or cult leaders, depending.
**Practical Geographic Detection**
This is also considered a blue collar school, it relies on patterns of weather and the celestial bodies to determine locations. This could be used to descry your lover, or a vein of gold. Students from this school could also go off to be bounty hunters, or assistants to bounty hunters if the GPS life ever got boring.
**Practical Telepathy and Clairvoyance**
Students learn the rituals of Orgonic communication and "blind sight". The students learn to read the ebbs and flows of the cosmos to be able to sense what isn't there, or what can't be seen. They use the knowledge of the Orgonic flow to communicate, or more frequently observe the minds of anyone connected to the energy in the cosmos. This should be the most prestigious school due to how tough it is to grasp the practical components, however many telepaths are essentially pay phones for regents and nobles to communicate with eachother.
[Answer]
**Scrying school**
1. Divination of bowls, nature works, tea reading, birds flight and
droppings, and smoke
2. Ritualistic offerings and sacrifice – for church, kingly reign
securing, ect c.Cooking – this sub group prepares concoctions
for rituals, readings, and communing services
3. Summoning, communing, and channeling with spirits of mankinds souls,
planet listening, beastly souls, and spiritual energy of the
otherworld
4. Death speak – you don’t raise the dead you sit with and listen to
them
5. Death care – a subgroup that takes care of dead dressing them,
feeding them their spiritual food, ect could be an intake
facility to prepare the dead to speak as they may need time to
gather the slow energy that was their former back so the living can
also prepare to speak with them both parties are fairly drained
after the event for different ways and the speaker givers some of
their own energy for the food to maintain the dead.
6. Astral projection and cosmic walking – this allows for people to
experience more from the desired reading some one sick? Well
leave yourself and speak directly to their aching soul to learn
more about it. Having issues with a curse? See if you can go to
space and see if an asteroid is passing by that is harming the
person in question via changing the harmonics of this person or
the planet.
---
**Transmutations**
1. Metal transformation – specializing in only metal
2. Wood transformation – specializing in wood only
3. Dirt, sand, ash configuration – this while working with these things
can see overlap from the metal workers wanting a dual skill for
smithing purposes.
4. Inanimate objects glass, wood, ect e.Water and liquid only
---
**Transmorgrification**
1. Animal only – as working with human is a bit more complicated
2. Human bending and ritualistic studies – a group that learns how to
morph the human body for good and ill via prisoner live practice at
somepoint you just need living people
3. Necromancy human only – again a bit complicated as ones got to get
something useful into them a human soul, a dead soul, or rig one up
to make a barely functional puppet maybe by implanting animal souls?
4. Necromancy animals only – dealing only with animals but this doesn’t
mean they can necro a pet back healthy more like pet cemetery
they’re grouchy but controllable to the summoner.
5. Mind bending, mind mapping, and psychology of beast and man – a good
and ill practice and probably a subject taken across the board by
all students
6. Bone bending – a thing that teaches how to manipulate the bones of
animals and humnans for both good and ill.
7. Ritualistic and practical binding and servitude – a way to stop
people or animals from harming or putting them to temporary use
doing something they may not.
8. The art of speech, cohesion, flattery, and word power – teaching how
the written and spoken words can be used to morph others into spells
as well.
9. Enthralling – teaching how to insert connections into the brains of
humans or animals and nurture that to make suggestions that people
will want to follow over time.
---
**Protection school**
1. Architecture, pillar stones, blessings and cursings – this has
students understand not just what makes a building work and how to
form it (so part construction knowledge here) they also learn how to
make pillar stones using charms or entombing people or animals into
a main support beam that will keep the building up by its sacrifice
(old rituals) and they also learn how to help or harm buldings with
spells, charms, or through utilizing specific tools and construction
methods that harm the building on an atomic level rotting or
reinforcing it over time w/o more spells and rituals needed to be
done.
2. Political armament – this allows for common spells, wardings, and
safety measures when it comes to rulers and elite people your kind
of like a magical secret service agent here.
3. Repelling and attracting ghosts, blessings, and curses – to
understand how to repeal one has to learn how to attract so both are
known to this grouping
4. Ward of the home and hearth – this deals with common buildings not
grand scale buildings like A it allows for one to be more familiar
with what ales a normal home and how to keep and bless or curse
those areas as the materials are a bit different.
5. Charm, rune, and potion making – they can have this too but its to
prevent, help, or harm people in the context of their overall class
type.
---
**Enchantment**
1. Charms, rune, salves, advanced – expanding beyond protection spells
they cover more here then one thing
2. Infusing metals
3. Infusing woods
4. Infusing the body and soul of man – difficult
5. Infusing the body and soul of beasts
6. Capturing ghosts and how to retool them – its like soul gemming them
7. Harnessing natures power – taking energies within nature and soul
gemming them
8. Psychology of beast and men – if one is taking things involving
these two things this is probably a must take.
9. Ritual tapping – how to take some but not all energies from things
and soul gem them via ritual.
] |
[Question]
[
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---
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>
> τὸ κακὸν δοκεῖν ποτ᾽ ἐσθλὸν τῷδ᾽ ἔμμεν' ὅτῳ φρένας θεὸς ἄγει πρὸς ἄταν
>
>
> evil seems good, soon or late, to him whose mind the god draws to mischief
>
>
> *[Antigone](http://classics.mit.edu/Sophocles/antigone.html)*, Sophocles
>
>
>
When the Gods set their sights on the destruction of a presumptuous man, the most potent tool in their arsenal is madness. This madness often manifests as a loss of reason or memory:
>
> While the word was in the king's mouth, there fell a voice from
> heaven, saying, O king Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken; The
> kingdom is departed from thee...The same hour was the thing fulfilled
> upon Nebuchadnezzar: and he was driven from men, and did eat grass as
> oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were
> grown like eagles' feathers, and his nails like birds' claws.
>
>
> [Daniel 4:31-33](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Daniel%204&version=KJV)
>
>
>
Other times this madness can be a frenzied bloodlust, a boon to the noble hero at war that turns to curse at home in peace:
>
> But now that he hath accomplished the labours of Eurystheus, Hera is
> minded to brand him with the guilt of shedding kindred blood by
> slaying his own children, and I am one with her. Come then, maid
> unwed, child of murky Night, harden thy heart relentlessly, send forth
> frenzy upon him, confound his mind even to the slaying of his
> children, drive him, goad him wildly on his mad career, shake out the
> sails of death, that when he has sent o'er Acheron's ferry that fair
> group of children by his own murderous hand, he may learn to know how
> fiercely against him the wrath of Hera burns and may also experience
> mine
>
>
> *[Herakles](http://classics.mit.edu/Euripides/heracles.html)*, Euripedes
>
>
>
Assume the Gods are bound by the laws of physics, our knowledge of science, and the biology of Man's brain. They must then, I suppose, have [access to advanced technology](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SufficientlyAdvancedAlien) (WARNING: TV Tropes Link!!!) to explain how they became gods in the first place.
Using their advanced knowledge of human biology, how can the Gods drive to madness those that they wish to destroy? The madness must be perceived by the victim's fellow man of antiquity to be of uncertain origin; i.e. no kidnapping and lobotomizing and returning the victim to society with a weird scar on his or her head.
>
> Whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad.
>
>
> *[The Masque of Pandora](http://www.hwlongfellow.org/poems_poem.php?pid=2088)*, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
>
>
>
[Answer]
Meet the [Salema porgy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salema_porgy), also known as the dreamfish. It's a rather unassuming fish, found in the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean. It can be seem near the water's surface, and to an untrained eye, in dim lighting, can look similar to its delicious (and oft-cooked) cousin, the [gilt-headed bream](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilt-head_bream).
This meek little porgy, however, can cause hallucinations that have been compared to LSD, with effects lasting for up to a day or two.
If you're a god, with sufficiently advanced technology - or, honestly, just someone who knows someone who knows a chef in the right restaurant - it shouldn't be any problem to substitute in a Salema porgy for a gilt-headed bream on someone's dinner plate. You can also choose from [a number of hallucinogenic fish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogenic_fish), if you want to go after someone from outside the Mediterranean.
Honestly, the same thing works with other organisms (Sasugasm mentioned [one of a number of mushrooms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claviceps_purpurea) that can do the same). Hallucinogenics aren't too uncommon, and very accessible for a god. They might look quite similar to any edible cousins they have. Simply slip the right substitute into someone's food, and you can produce hallucinations for days.
[Answer]
Your two first quotes have the answer.
**WORDS**
The god speaks to the king. The king does as the god told him so. Everybody thinks the king is mad; or, king really goes mad because the god tell him to do things that are awful.
The god can be [Gaslighting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting) anyone. Kill your son, kill all sons, kill your wife, order your wife to kill your son. It can be god himself as a voice in king head, burning bush, it can be god through a prophetess, it can be god in form of small animals that spell "kill", a lucid dream, a whisper in the dark.
You either go mad because god told you to kill your family because they want to kill you and after that you realize what have you done (*Orestes* in Aeschylus drama) or you go mad because you can't stop gods from telling you to kill everyone (As per Dr. Gregory House definition on *when god talk back*). And god can make a second feel like a thousand years. A thousands years that god can spend on telling you things you don't want to hear.
[Answer]
# Mercury
The gods increase the amount of natural mercury in the soil near those they wish to destroy. The people inhale the vapors, they go mad.
[Answer]
No need for poison or advanced technology, all that is needed is to baffle them with bullshit.
People focus on what's immediately in front of them. Increase the trivia they need to sort through everyday. Eventually, they'll focus so much on the trivia in front of them that they'll forget there is such a thing as the big picture.
Next, control the data they're seeing. Carefully, move it gradually away from reality. Eventually, your victim will end up with a world view sufficiently divorced from reality that everyone else will think they're insane. This, in turn, will drive feelings of paranoia, as the victim believes they are proceeding in an entirely rational manner; it's everyone else that isn't seeing the world properly. Given enough time, the victim will simply disregard all opposing viewpoints as stupid or tainted with propaganda.
The rest is history. All you need is a handful of people with an agenda, no sufficiently advanced technology or poisons or anything extraordinary.
[Answer]
Sanity is based on a pretty narrow range of responses to sensory input. By making someone consistently receive different sensory input, or skew their responses to sensory input, you can make them insane.
## Drugs (Psychedelics and hallucinogens)
There are a great many psychoactive drugs that someone could be subjected to. A continual low-grade dosing seems best (could be snuck into food, or could be injected as a device that has a slow-release mechanism to the bloodstream, or a genetically-modified parasite that produces psychedelic drugs as a metabolic byproduct).
## Brain Modification (EM)
Transcranial Electrical Stimulation is a known technique that, effectively, stimulates or turns off bits of the brain via applied EM fields [sort of. This will do for our purposes].
Sufficiently advanced science gods could perhaps achieve precise effects (say, increased anger, lower inhibitions, lust...) using a remote antenna array aimed at an unfortunate soul's head.
## Brain Modification (Chemical)
Emotional states are partly controlled via hormonal signals. Hormones could be thrown out of whack with methods that either supply a hormone directly, or that modify the human body to continually over/under-produce a particular hormone.
Science methods here can be genetically-engineered germs or parasites that produce the hormones (or a counter-agent that binds a particular hormone if you want less of it), or which alter a gland to change its hormone output.
Simple examples might be to have the hero permanently flooded with adrenaline like they are being chased by a bear, or to induce waves of lust at inopportune moments.
## Change Reality (technology)
Something like small speakers that facilitate voices speaking to the hero out of nowhere could be used to continually push them in a certain direction, or make them doubt the reality around them. Move advance tricks could use holograms and full audiovisual simulations.
[Answer]
This is a case of a pseudo-god. Gods do not kill their subjects, gods work in mysterious ways, not boring shallow manipulations. Gods test, but do not kill. It is humans who kill, when they misinterpret their purpose in life. And I would think gods do not sit around worrying about how to control others. That is a trait of some type of inferiority complex, or personality disorder - not of a god.
Trying to find ways of diabolical killing is probably the nature of an insane person.
[Answer]
The gods could spray the mortal humans with hallucinogens, such as LSD, and then perform minor miracles such as projecting a hologram of a volcanic eruption to convince that mortal that he is a prophet of the coming volcanic apocalypse.
] |
[Question]
[
No, I am not talking about space ships, I am talking about water-based ships sailing the oceans on planet Earth.
What would be a plausible cruise speed and maximum speed for what would be the equivalent of a modern destroyer after about 100 more years of technological progress? Please assume that the human civilization manages to continue on as it currently does without any large-scale disasters or society collapse slowing down the speed of technological progress.
[Answer]
Conventional surface ships will likely continue to sail at around the same speeds as today, simply because the laws fo physics are not going to change. A wet navy monohull ship today is approaching the maximum possible hydrodynamic efficiency, and there are good reasons to suspect the monohull form will survive into the 22nd century, since it is well developed, has a considerable volume for equipment, fuel, and other consumables, is stable even in high seas and can provide persistence (the main reason to have a navy in the first place: the ship can remain on station for weeks or even months, something aircraft, orbiting spaceships or may other potential systems cannot do).
Looking for the ability to go faster would require firstly defining the parameters of how fast the ship should go, how long it can sustain flank speed and "why" it needs to go so fast? There are a number of ways to go about this.
Sustaining a modest increase in surface speed can be best done by minimizing the friction between a ship and the water. The ship can inject air or some sort of slippery polymer between the hull and the water in order to minimize friction. The amount of speed that you can gain might be limited, especially by the amount of energy needed to inject the "interface" fluid, and the amount of fluid carried if you are not using air. [Research](https://gcaptain.com/finds-bubbles-significantly-reduce/) is ongoing today, and it is a relative to the Prairie/Masker system used to reduce noise on US Navy ships.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/bhsn8.jpg)
*Air lubrication system*
For higher speeds, we need to lift the hull from the water entirely. Hydrofoils, lifting bodies and surface effect systems use different means to do this. Hydrofoils are essentially wings, and lifting bodies are similar, but larger and likely more robust than foils, although the large size may result in lower potential top speeds. Lifting bodies also have the potential to lift larger displacement ships.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/W1awP.jpg)
*1970 era test hydrofoil [HMCS Bras d'Or](https://infogalactic.com/info/HMCS_Bras_d%27Or_(FHE_400)) on display today*
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/q3R4a.jpg)
*Sea Flyer, a modern experimental vessel using lifting body technology*
[Surface Effect Ships](https://infogalactic.com/info/Surface_effect_ship) are forms of hovercraft, using the body of the ship and "skirts" on the bow and stern to trap air (usually injected by a powerful turbine engine) to lift most of the hull out of the water. The advantages are Surface Effect Ships are more efficient than hovercraft, but like hovercraft, are very power hungry.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/01x5q.jpg)
*SES 200 test bed*
The SES series of test ships achieved speeds of 100 knots, so transit and dash speeds are very impressive, and when the air cushion is off, the ships can still remain on station like a conventional ship.
Beyond the 100 knot speed, we need to leave the water entirely, and are now in the realm of airplanes or Ground Effect Vehicles. One intermediate step is to use wings to partially lift a ship from the water, in effect inverting the idea of a hydrofoil ([Aerodynamically Alleviated Marine Vehicle](https://infogalactic.com/info/Aerodynamically_Alleviated_Marine_Vehicle)). This has not really been demonstrated to date.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/dkExA.jpg)
*Aerodynamic alleviation concept*
Of course, a true flying boat provides the ability to fly to deployments anywhere on the globe, and then land and float on water to provide persistent presence. The apogee of flying boat design is likely the [Martin "Seamaster"](https://infogalactic.com/info/Martin_P6M_SeaMaster), a jet powered flying boat roughly the size and performance of a B-52. This should qualify as a true "boat" once at sea, and provides a high subsonic speed performance as well.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/RZw2t.jpg)
*Martin Seamaster in the water*
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/UnWm7.jpg)
*Seamaster in flight*
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6lJfc.jpg)
*Amazingly, the Seamaster is an amphibian!*
I would suspect that by the 22nd century, most wet navy vessels would actually be some form of flying boat, to make the force as versatile and rapidly mobile as possible.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/yn6VY.jpg)
*Blended wing body flying boat*
[Answer]
If you look at the last 200 years, the top speed seems to have levelled off because aircraft (manned, unmanned, or missile) will be faster than watercraft, so trying to win the sprint race is pointless. Watercraft excel in range and endurance, not speed.
* 1899, [Bainbridge-class](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bainbridge-class_destroyer), 29 knots.
* 1908, [Paulding-class](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulding-class_destroyer), 29.5 knots.
* 1914, [Tucker-class](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucker-class_destroyer), 29.5 knots.
* 1917, [Wickes-class](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickes-class_destroyer), 35.3 knots.
* 1934, [Mahan-class](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahan-class_destroyer), 37 knots.
* 1936, [Benham-class](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benham-class_destroyer), 37 knots.
* 1941, [Fletcher-class](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fletcher-class_destroyer), 36.5 knots.
* 1958, [Farragut-class](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farragut-class_destroyer_(1958)), 32 knots.
* 1972, [Spruance-class](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spruance-class_destroyer), 32.5 knots.
There are several things to keep in mind regarding destroyer speeds. There is the difference between trial speed on the measured mile and top speed on the open ocean, plus possibly for modern craft military secrecy. (For decades the US Navy declared that their subs did more than 20 knots. True, but they did *much* more than 20 knots.)
But the tendency is clear. Destroyer speed has stopped to rise.
[Answer]
**Ekranoplan.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/bsiHu.png)
<https://www.pinterest.com/pin/854628466758762209/?lp=true>
Needing speeds to rival those of aircraft and without the need for armor, future destroyers will be massive ground effect vehicles with hovercraft capability. These vehicles leverage ground effect to achieve efficiencies better than aircraft and because they ride just over the water, are much faster than draggy conventional ships. Ground effect vehicles ("sea skimmers") exist. The sweetest is the ekranoplan.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-effect_vehicle>
>
> Some manned and unmanned prototypes were built, ranging up to eight
> tons in displacement. This led to the development of a 550-ton
> military ekranoplan of 92 m (302 ft) length. The craft was dubbed the
> Caspian Sea Monster by U.S. intelligence experts, after a huge,
> unknown craft was spotted on satellite reconnaissance photos of the
> Caspian Sea area in the 1960s. With its short wings, it looked
> airplane-like in planform, but would obviously be incapable of
> flight.[5] Although it was designed to travel a maximum of 3 m (9.8
> ft) above the sea, it was found to be most efficient at 20 m (66 ft),
> reaching a top speed of 300–400 kn (560–740 km/h; 350–460 mph) in
> research flights.
>
>
>
740 km/hr is good and fast and is only a little less fast than a modern passenger jet. That was 1960. Your future can be the past: a destroyer size ekranoplan made of titanium and carbon fiber with an aircraft like drive system moving it at 1000 km/hr.
[Answer]
using [Supercavitation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercavitation) you can remove most of the friction from travelling through water. This seems to be designed much more to work with submarines, but I have seen designs to apply it to the front of cargo ships to reduce fuel consumption.
Currently it's mostly used for torpedoes but there are plans to scale it up for larger vessels allowing speeds of up to 100 knots
From the Wiki page:
>
> The submarine's designer, Electric Boat, is working on a one-quarter scale model for sea trials off the coast of Rhode Island. If the trials are successful, Electric Boat will begin production on a full scale 100-foot submarine. Currently, the Navy's fastest submarine can only travel at 25 to 30 knots while submerged. But if everything goes according to plan, the Underwater Express will speed along at 100 knots, allowing the delivery of men and materiel faster than ever."[14]
>
>
>
EDIT:
I found a surface ship project working on this concept, [Ghost](https://www.xconomy.com/boston/2012/06/21/juliet-marines-ghost-ship-emerges-from-stealth-startup-gears-up-for-war/?single_page=true%E2%80%9D), the capabilities don't seem to be public, but rumoured to be capable of around 100knots,
>
> “We’re basically riding on two supercavitating torpedoes. And we’ve put a boat on top of it,”
>
>
>
Scaling this up to destroyer size would probably be very difficult, but you have plenty of time to work it out for 22nd century
[Answer]
After invention and successful miniaturization of fusion plants 100 years into the future ships will just fly. They will anchor and refuel on water (there is a lot of deuteruim in oceans). but will fly to move. There would be little reason to move in water when everything they have can be put in air because of very light and cheap energy generation. As not really aerodynamic they will be able to easily reach 900 km/h and probably be able to go faster than the speed of sound for short amount of time. Computers will be faster and will be able to correct all pilot errors.
Just look at "Back into the Future". They installed a fusion power plant instead of the main engine and made the car fly.
ITER (fusion power plant experiment) will generate energy in 2035 (planned). DEMO (next fusion power plant experiment) will be able to generate electricity in production scale in 2060 (planned). After the explosion of fusion science in 2070 (expected as fusion is supposed to lead to enormous cheap power generation) and focus of all countries to build fusion plants the technology will be optimized and miniaturized until at the beginning of the 22nd century a common fusion power plant will be the size of a car engine.
[Answer]
Well over 100 knots plausible.
The most significant speed limiter of a boat hull through water is frictional drag. That is the result of wetting properties and adhesion forces at the hull/water boundary. As nano-scale material science progresses it's plausible that physical nano-scale structures could be applied to the surface of ship hulls that greatly limit the ability of water to wet and thus adhere to them making them effectively friction-less. This would have an effect similar to supercavitation without the additional complexity, and it should be noted that since the 1970s there have existed supercavitating torpedoes that can exceed 200 knots underwater. For ships, the limiting factors at that point would be aerodynamics and the system of propulsion (the torpedoes are propelled by solid rocket engines). Turbo fans would be a natural choice.
[Answer]
Since a ship can be made from different materials that would affect their ability to interact with the water. a lighter weight vessel should go faster. Consider the concept of a hydrofoil craft that today achieves fifty knots with a sail and the use of a magnetic hydro dynamic engine. By the 22nd century the addition of gravity manipulation might allow a sizable ship to achieve over one hundred and fifty knots
[Answer]
If civilization continues on as it currently is, warships would become pointless\*. There would be no adequate power source, as fossil fuels will be exhausted and nuclear would be unacceptable (per the "current course" requirement). Furthermore, small drone missiles would easily destroy them.
\*Even today, their only real use (other than nuclear submarines) seems to be aircraft carriers, and that in instances where the opposing force does not have practical capacity to reach the carrier. Otherwise they tend to be sitting ducks. See for instance the sinking of the General Belgrano in the Falklands war.
] |
[Question]
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So, I'm currently toying around with the idea of a hypercarnivorous sapient race on a planet in my universe, and I'd like to make them scary, but without abiding only by the "rule of cool". (Also note that the science, especially biology, involved in building this world is **more important**, to me, than the story)
A recent idea of mine regarding these sophonts is to have increased adrenaline (or an alien analogue of adrenaline) production dramatically speed up the transmission of signals inside the brain, and therefore (If I assume correctly), increase the creature's intelligence.
So, my question is: **could an increase in adrenaline production cause a wholly noticeable change in the perceived "intelligence" of a species, and if so, how would this work?** When I say "intelligence", I'm not really obeying any strict scientific definition; what I mean is that the creature would *seem* more intelligent in its behavior.
If I recall correctly, during intense moments (such as car crashes), and therefore times when you'd get an adrenaline rush, you take in much more details about the environment. Obviously, the sensory feedback would have to be processed, so perhaps something analogous to this does occur in reality; however, I'm looking for a **noticeable** difference, perhaps even as drastic as a chimpanzee suddenly thinking like a human.
I'm not (currently) asking if this kind of system could evolve naturally, but that's something I'll definitely be looking into in a future question.
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You don't need adrenaline, you need heat radiators and more blood supply.
Adrenaline doesn't actually speed up the process of thinking, it acts as a switch to give your brain the fuel it needs to run faster.
From [Your Hormones](http://www.yourhormones.info/hormones/adrenaline/):
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> Key actions of adrenaline include increasing the heart rate,
> increasing blood pressure, expanding the air passages of the lungs,
> enlarging the pupil in the eye (see photo), redistributing blood to
> the muscles and altering the body's metabolism, so as to maximize
> blood glucose levels (primarily for the brain).
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Our brains could actually run faster than they normally do but they would run out of oxygen and fuel and they would overheat.
So, if you can provide a steady amount of fuel and get rid of the waste heat faster, you can get the effect you want without adrenaline.
With a better heart, bigger lungs and a thicker neck (for more plumbing), you could have supply enough blood to give the high speed mode a longer run time. You could also pack an organ in or near the brain that stores oxygen and fuel (a sort of bio-capacitor). That capacitor would allow the creature to go high speed until it is empty. Then the capacitor could be recharged over time through blood flow.
For extra safety, have the bio-capacitor isolate the brain from the rest of the blood supply. This would protect the brain from diseases and toxins even better than our blood/brain barrier. It also means that even if you destroy its heart and lungs, it can still be killing things until the bio-capacitor runs out of oxygen and fuel.
The downside is that all of this will produce a lot of heat. Our brains produce a lot of heat. That's one of the reasons why it is in our head (a fairly vulnerable place) so it has more surface area for heat radiation. You will need radiators to get rid of that heat. If you go with the totally isolated brain, the radiators need to be in the head. If the brain can dump the heat into the blood stream, you can put the radiators on the body.
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Adrenaline does help the brain function, but it is more about faster reactions (i.e. faster information processing), not about improving reasoning capacity.
Moreover, adrenaline triggers fight-or-flight mode in the brain, which is not exactly helpful for things like developing new tools, or planning hunting strategy, since they require calm and slow thinking. Still, adrenaline can help a creature find a crafty way to escape, or attack a vulnerable spot.
Moreover, adrenaline turbo-charges entire body, and continuous elevated level of adrenaline will [wear it out](https://www.promises.com/articles/what-are-the-negative-effects-of-adrenaline/). Kind of like how Nitrox makes a car go faster, but wears out the engine.
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I would expect the exact opposite to occur, actually.
If you think about what the purpose of such a neurotransmitter would be, its job is to help you operate in environments where rapid decisions and adaptation is vital. This is the opposite of what we want for intelligent thinking, where we want time to mull over complex interactions.
If you wanted a creature to appear to be more intelligent in these adrenaline-pumping situations, make the creature hide its intelligence. Make it even more intelligent than it appears, but have it intentionally hide that intelligence. Then, in adrenaline-governed situations, it falls back on these intelligently created mental structures to make decisions. This would make it appear to be less intelligent in normal situations (when, in fact, it was far more intelligent), but in rapid shifting environments it reveals its intelligence. This makes it appear more intelligent in these adrenaline-junkie situations, when, in fact, it was actually less intelligent in them.
The effect would be like playing a Chess game calmly until move 24, in a position that looks dead drawn, when things suddenly get exciting and they make rapid moves, responding to you almost as fast as you can move the pieces. By move 30, you're in checkmate. It looks like they got smarter when they started moving faster. In reality, they had already checkmated you by move 24 (or perhaps even move 20), you just didn't know it.
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**Adrenaline's effect is temporary and would not help your hypothetical race.**
Adrenaline does not allow you to take in more details during a stressful event. It only increases recall of such events after the fact.
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> Extensive evidence indicates that stress hormones released from the adrenal glands are critically involved in memory consolidation of emotionally arousing experiences.
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Further, the effect wears off:
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> Do stress hormones also enhance memories of experiences that are not emotionally arousing? The findings of recent experiments suggest that this may not be the case. As discussed below, we recently reported that the endogenous glucocorticoid corticosterone enhanced memory consolidation of object recognition training when administered to rats that were emotionally aroused by an unfamiliar training apparatus. However, the treatment had no effect when administered to rats that had extensive prior habituation to the training context in order to reduce novelty-induced arousal.
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[Adrenal Stress Hormones and Enhanced Memory for Emotionally Arousing Experiences](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK3907/)
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In my story, there is a villain who has very powerful magic on his side. Basically, he has his own dimension, where he keeps dragging parts of the earth into, piece by piece. It kinda works like the [bombs](http://supersmashbros.wikia.com/wiki/Subspace_Bomb) in Super Smash Bros Brawl's Subspace Emissary, with the additional effect of not just concealing the location that is missing from the world, but also making everyone in the rest of the world forget about that location, along with anyone who was unfortunate enough to be at that location when it was pulled into the dimension.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ELEg0.png)
The memory erasure part of the magic is needed to keep most of the world clueless, however, the people of the world should still somehow be able to find out something is wrong. One way I thought of was to make the memory erasure flawed: it removes all references of the location, but not **indirect** references. Suppose the villain somehow managed to swallow an entire state from the US for example, someone at some point will probably ask "Hey, why does the flag have 50 stars instead of 49?" Similarly, if someone from a football team was pulled into the dimension, someone will ask "Hey, where is player number 4? ... Wait, did we ever have a player number 4? Huh... that's weird..."
So with that setup, are there any other ways humanity might slowly figure out over time that the world is missing pieces, while circumventing the memory erasure somehow? Changes to how the memory erasure works are fine as long as it manages to keep the rest of the world in the dark for a long time.
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This is a very good question, you have a couple options here.
**People having habits pertaining to the stuff**
In your picture, you show a house. When the villain sucks a house into the dimension, people will forget about the house. However, when someone is at work when their house is absorbed and they drive home at the end of the day, they will become very confused. They will say "wait, where do I live?". Then they might go to the city board and say, "Please tell me where I live." The board will give them their address and they will say, "That house doesn't exist." The person will know all of the neighbors on the street, and the house number won't exist.
**GPS**
With random parts of Earth disappearing, GPS will get really confused. Anyone using a physical map or a GPS will notice that when they pass a certain house, their location jumps to the end of a non-existent street. GPS will also be affected as a whole because all of the points on it will be shifted over by a little, which could have global implications.
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There's a traditional solution to this. The most famous example is probably series 5 of the renewed Doctor Who (although they kind of complicated things by having three solutions at once).
Amy's parents are gone, and neither she nor anyone else thinks it's strange that nobody can remember her having parents. But someone from another town, who never met Amy or her parents and therefore weren't made to forget anything, is going to think it's strange that nobody thinks it's strange that Amy has no parents.
The ducks are gone from the duck pond. Nobody remembers ducks ever having been there. Even the old people who used to hang out and feed the ducks don't remember doing so, and somehow just have a different routine now, and nobody wonders why they call it the duck pond when there's no duck. But someone from another town is going to ask.
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OK, so far, this is just your solution: second-order effects aren't handled. So, the world will catch on way too fast, and you don't have a story.
But people's brains confabulate, to fill in the gaps in their memory. You can even make the villain's Somebody Else's Problem Field amplifies that tendency. So, if I just ask Amy why it's called the duck pond when it has no ducks, without even pausing to think about it, she tells me it's a stupid old joke from before her time, and now it's tradition, and that's completely believable, so I don't catch on.
But if I ask the same question to Rory, who wasn't around when I asked Amy, he tells me that actually it's named after a guy named Mr Duck. If I ask Jeff, he tells me the town planners intended to have a duck pond, but for some reason never put any ducks in it. And now I notice something odd is going on.
Nobody's going to notice for a while, because really, how often does a new guy come to town, independently ask three different people the same question, notice that they all made up different answers, and decide to investigate.
But it will happen occasionally.
And, unlike the Mandela Effect crackpots, once you start looking around, you're not saying "everyone but me believes the same thing, but I'm not crazy, so reality must be broken"; it's "everyone, including me, believes different, contradictory things, and they can't all be crazy, so reality must be broken". Which is a lot harder to dismiss.
So eventually, the world (or maybe just your heroes) will figure out there's definitely someone screwing with the world, and figure out a workaround to cope with it so they can fight back.
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Obviously, your villain doesn't *have* to have this weakness. You could write a story where his magic takes care of second-order effects, so suddenly everyone remembers the same false cover story. Or you could set it in a universe where (like Doctor Who, and Hitchhiker's Guide), reality is just like that, so noticing the problem doesn't immediately lead you to the villain. But if you *want* him to have this weakness, it's pretty easy to handle, and it solves your intended goal.
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I think that schedules would play a big role in people figuring it out quickly. For example, 10 of Bill's friends get together at Bill's house every Monday evening for beer and competitive knitting. 3 of his friends are pedantic schedulers, 4 of them depend on google maps so much that it predicts where they're going to go each Monday, and the rest of them have regularly refused appointments on Monday evening to make sure they don't miss out on any of that yarn action.
The week that Bill's house disappears, 3 of his friends go to the address and bump into each other. It's a significantly odd coincidence that they all made the same mistake, had the same wrong address with the same imaginary person written onto their calendar with the same time and date. These three would figure it out pretty quickly.
The 4 who depend heavily on google maps will get an update about the traffic on the way to Bill's house on that day. Maybe one of them will check his phone history and find that he had navigated to that area regularly.
At least one in the ten might stumble onto their group chat, wherein they talked about the meeting each week with simple messages like "still meeting at Bill's this week?", and "You bet! Remember, no tie dye yarn. I'm talking about you, Fred!". If I were that person, I'd put something in the chat, and be like "Hey, does anyone know what we were talking about all this time?"
The rest of them might just be momentarily confused about why they don't know where they're gonna meet for knitting.
In any case, that's just Bill's house. If this was happening often, there's a solid chance people will figure out that something's going on within a few weeks.
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It would take a couple weeks of house stealing for someone to catch on, maybe months if people are careless. Basically, people will notice missing numbers while looking for adresses. Phones will have contacts for people you don't remember, and conversations that you don't remember having. Hell, maybe you remember having the conversation, you just don't remember who you were having it with. Mandella theory enthusiasts would probably catch on quickly, and social media platforms where people are likely to mention strange happening like missing street numbers, like 4chan or imgur would probably be flooded with similar cases soon after someone started posting about it.
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Each element on Earth has a myriad of relationships with its surrounding. Even though one can take hide that element, all the relationships will have a broken link, which will point to something missing.
I.e. for a house think of all the supplies it gets: electricity, gas, water. You might remove the house, but the lines will still be there, the databases of the companies providing the above to the use will still maintain a record, whoever used to visit that house will keep the memory of that.
All in all, this is not going to happen slowly. Unless it is some very remote location. What might take slightly longer is the realization that this is happening worldwide, but again it's just a matter of waiting the right spot to disappear. Think of the White House, for example, or the Big Ben or the Golden Temple.
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## They can’t if the villain doesn't abuse their power
If they just make a few houses far apart from each other disappear, it would be difficult to notice. The disappearances would be more noticeable if the power was abused or overused.
If the villain “steals” all the schools in a city, someone will note that something is wrong because there aren’t **any** schools for all the children of the city. Or imagine they steal the half of the houses in a city, Urban Planning will (or at least should) note that the ratio between commercial (shopping), industrial (workshops) and residential (houses) zones is wrong, since there are too many places to work but few people to fill those jobs.
The same can be applied to other things: “The tectonic plate stops suddenly right here, but there should be here a whole continent here!”, “Our country doesn’t have any capital, how does it operate without leadership?”, “Why there are missing house numbers on this street? Shouldn’t Urban Planing fix that?”, “It seems to me or we don't have any bank, jewellery, gold shop nor a fashion shop in the city?”, “I thought America was colonized by people, why aren’t there any buildings or humans here?”
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I think you do have the right setting, using inderect references.
You could think of your setting as somehow manipulating [parallel universes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_universe_(fiction)) : Your villain turns the whole universe (present, past and future) from a universe with 3 houses into one with 2 houses. There was always 2 houses in that road, that street is numbered "..., 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, ...", nobody lives in number 13 because it never existed, and the road has always been mapped with those numbers.
Of course, the question is "Why does the villain not choose to turn into a street with number 13, reordering every numbering?" The answer could be simply that he cannot. Maybe it's too hard to think of all the changes needed, or even not possible due to some limitation in his magic.
But, let's assume your villain is an actual genius. He knows he can't control all indirect references, but he still want to remove some parts. What can he do to avoid detection?
Well, let's take house number 13. Why did he choose that house? Because there are [many places where number 13 is already missing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_floor). Yes, they are missing because he made it so, but people still think it is normal. How many ships were [totally lost](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missing_ships)? I guess the list could go on on stuff already "missing" on our real world, without raising actual suspicion of an evil mastermind, except for some crazy conspiracy theorists.
So... Your villain does exist in our timeline, and some people did figure it out, but everyone think they are conspiracy theorists. Or maybe there is no villain, and they are just mad people!
I think it could make for a great fantastic setting.
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My thought is that it will be people who "see" the world differently who will notice issues first, for example someone with OCD might notice that the number of steps from their front door to their local mall changed, or the blind would equally notice changes in distances or routes that they follow routinely. Neither knows that X has disappeared, they don't care, they just know that their world has been disrupted in some strange way.
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In this world, witchcraft is practiced openly in society and is a respected institution. There is a tradition among witch covens to occasionally meet at gatherings called sabbaticals. There, practitioners discuss recent business, newly discovered spells, poltics, and other recent events. Banquets and celebrations are also a part of these sabbats, with sex sometimes playing a role.
Witches use mana in order to conduct magic. Mana is life energy that allows the body to function. Although males cannot use magic directly, they have hundreds of times more mana than practitioners. A man can share this energy with witches in order to fuel powerful spells that they otherwise couldn't perform on their own.This is done through sex, where a certain amount of this energy is transferred from the male during...release. The witch then absorbs this energy and combines it with her own to later add power to a spell. She can also use it to conceive, which is considered to be the greatest form of magic due to it creating life.
This form of magic can make an individual powerful in a short amount of time through the simple act of copulation. I would like to introduce a cost to prevent this from happening. What costs or limits can i set on a magic system that can use sex to power spells to prevent practitioners from becoming all powerful?
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> This form of magic can make an individual powerful in a short amount of time through the simple act of copulation. I would like to introduce a cost to prevent this from happening.
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There is *already* a cost. Even with the most possible work done by the male, and with a stable of ready males available, the witch will still need to invest a substantial amount of time in the copulation, and she will tire somewhat.
Regenerating stamina through magic simply negates the advantage, or it just isn't possible.
And the more extraneous *mana* a witch is holding, the more it "leaks" - you can only hold to it for limited amounts of time.
Another possibility is that the life force acquired from one male is likely to clash with the one acquired from a different one. So if you mate with say five guys in a row, the fifth's contribution mostly goes in battling the previous four's. The witch ends with nothing to show for her efforts, and she may even get sick, and that is what makes the "Sexual Leveling Up Technique" unattractive.
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If I may suggest a slight tweak which would provide more room to place natural limits on the process, instead of making the energy available during male orgasm, make it available *before* orgasm. Permit the witch to collect energy generated through copulation up until male orgasm, which then severs any meaningful connection.
This has some connection to real life tantric sex practices. Taoism in particular had a concept that a male only had so much *jing*, which is an energy substance which is released along with semen (it also is used in non-sexual situations, so don't be surprised if you see it in other contexts). When you ran out of jing, you died. Their sexual practices were designed to hold onto this jing for as long as possible. In this case, it's less about holding onto the life energy, and more about how much can be shared, but the fundamental pattern and balances are the same.
This would lead to a natural balance for the witches. One could acquire mana faster with more excitement, but the experience will be shorter. You can make this aspect of your story as involved as you like.
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As magic is tied to the life energy of the person who created it, absorbing another person's magic can cause physical changes to the person holding the conflicting magic. If a small amount of external mana is stored it can be suppressed by the Witch with no negative effects. Larger amounts can be stored if there is a strong emotional connection between the person donating the mana and the person storing the mana because the conflicting magic doesn't fight back as strongly.
If, however, a Witch wants to juice up her magic by sleeping with the whole football team at a drunken frat party, the chance of developing male pattern baldness, a beard, going on roid rages, or having her magic snuffed out due to massive out of control male mana running rampant through her body, might cause some pause.
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**Pregnancy precludes other magic. And witches are crazy fertile.**
Sex with a man gives power for a witch. It also almost always results in conception. The generation of life is viewed as the highest magic for the witches and so any precautions to avoid conception or abort pregnancy are anathema. If you are a witch and you have sex with a man you are going to get pregnant. If because of age or illness you can't get pregnant, you are not going to get any magic power either.
The generation of life is the highest magic and as such pregnancy takes precedence over any other magic endeavor the witch might otherwise want to do. Once she has conceived that is where her magic is going to go.
The witch, after having sex, has between a few minutes and a few days to use the magic powers she has gained before her pregnancy takes ownership of them for the following 9 months.
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Someone above mentioned Tantric sex practices, and I think that could be an interesting route to take: the 'mana transfer' is incredibly powerful, but equally inefficient. However, it becomes less so the stronger the emotional connection between the partners is.
Let's say that semen has an enormous amount of magical energy no matter what, but the... uh... 'chaotic' nature of its acquisition means that it's something akin to a Nuclear Fission reaction: Huge amounts of energy released, but only a small fraction of it actually ends up in a state that's usable. That fraction becomes larger and larger the stronger the emotional bond between the witch and her partner, thus incentivizing witches to strong monogamous relationships more often than not.
Of course there's plenty of wiggle-room here: Some witches are callous and don't really care much for romance, so they just keep a pen of near-strangers that they fuck in rapid succession whenever they need a pick-me-up, others seek out their soulmate and maximize the energy they draw from one single partner, and still others practice polyamory; three, four, six, ten boyfriends, all of whom have a romantic attachment, but none ever has the amount of time required to really get as much as a husband-and-wife type pairing.
The aforementioned Nuclear Fission allegory extends further in that there could be an element of 'wild magic' to having sex with strangers: massive quantities of mana explosively released in a short amount of time means there's a risk of, oh, I dunno, the bed you two are sharing suddenly transmogrifying into a man-eating plant, or the walls to your room becoming smoke and dropping the roof on you, or just things exploding, etc. etc. The risk of something truly dangerous happening would have to be low enough that some witches still go with casual hookups, but real enough that it acts as a deterrent for most of them.
Obviously all of this lends itself to character-driven writing pretty easily: bad fight with your husband means weaker magic for a while, emotional trauma or mental disorders (both of which could be common side-effects of heavy magic usage, as they so often are) make some witches have difficulty with their relationships and therefore their practice, Sabbaticals might consist of 1 part practicing actual magic, 1 part wild sex party, and 1 part couple's therapy. There's a lot that could be done on the character, personality, and relationship side of this to create more organic limits on spellcasting than having a hard-and-fast physical/mechanical limitation.
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Given your mention of "release", the limit is pregnancy, but not as others are envisioning it. Rather:
1) *Why* does the man have energy in his semen? Because it's the power source that gets them to the egg!
2) How does she obtain this energy? Her uterus is capable of drawing energy from semen in it.
Thus: Barrier contraception is out of the question, if the semen doesn't reach her uterus she gains no energy from it. Hormonal contraception is unknown, her body is going to release an egg every month.
Thus her only means of contraception is ensuring that the sperm inside her are not viable--she must drain **all** the energy from it before any of it reaches the fallopian tubes. She can't store energy, what she obtains must be completely used promptly--not only for her primary purpose but she must continue to use minor magic to absorb the energy of sperm that were a bit slow in finding their way to the uterus. She also has no way of knowing how much energy she's going to get from any given sex act.
Note that this means a witch may temporarily become quite a bit more powerful by engaging in a lot of sex with the price being pregnancy--and while she's pregnant her uterus can't do it's collecting job so she's powerless until delivery.
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They can only use one man's power at a time, and it dissipates at a rate proportional to its amount. So the more you have, the faster it dissipates. This way more virulent men can still only give a witch a certain amount of power until it dissipates faster than he can uh... regenerate, and it settles into an equilibrium even if he does it as much as possible. But just doing it once can cause a nice boost to a witches power that can be saved for a period of time before it decreases too much to help in casting.
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### Put a cost on *processing* mana.
You can add a cost to *processing* the mana; and make this at the speed of a biological growth process, like growing hair: once she has sex with a man, it takes her body six months to increase her power by X. Having more sex doesn't speed the process up. Her body can only store so much unprocessed mana, and the fastest she can grow her power is by having sex twice a year.
Note that I am presuming the mana, though released with ejaculate, is not the same THING as ejaculate, it is just conveyed by attaching to the life force of spermatozoa. It is actually a magical force absorbed into the cells of her body, which do the processing. But if her cells are already full, the mana has no place to go and just magically vanishes.
Just like typically all of the hundreds of millions of sperm in a single ejaculate will die if they do not win the race to merge with an egg, all the bits of mana that cannot find a cell with room for a bit of unprocessed mana will also die by being reabsorbed into the universe.
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Why don't you just write it so that there are diminishing gains?
Hamburguers and pizzas have lots of calories, which are a measure of energy. That energy does not become kinetic energy for most people who eat fast food - it becomes fat. So just see some answers to [a similar question you asked before](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/128107/21222) and apply the same ideas to magical sperm.
You can even make a formula for it. Maybe the amount of mana in sperm is proportional to the sin of its volume in degrees, up to 90cc, times some constant. So it grows fast at the begining but very slowly by the higher end of the function.
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**TL;DR:** Ditch the magical sperm, focus on lust.
Ditch the fixation of release and ditch the male power fantasy that sperm is a sort of magical superfuel, focus the magic on shared lust (I also advise listening to "I'm so excited" in the Le Tigre Version or to Patti Smith "Because the night ..." when writing the story).
Sex grants magical power to women if and when they genuinly enjoy the experience and when both partners are in the right headspace to really let themselves go during sex. This requires genuine mutual lust. This does not mean that both need to be in love, depending on how folks a wired a shared domestic life may even take away some of the extra spice required.
The fact that sex only works it's magic when it's *good* sex actually makes it quite hard: On one hand, the witch needs to time her bed-time with her actually requiring and making use of the extra mana, but during the act she really needs to forget about everything but herself and her partner.
A stereotypical male behavior (I don't recommend it and I hope it's mostly a stereotype, not really common) during sex is to be really controlled, not allowing oneself to grunt and to be too excited - concentrating on multiplication tables to prolong the action, instead of on ones partner. The opposite of magic.
So the man (if you insist on inherently heterosexual witchcraft, more to that below) needs to be able to really let go and loose himself in the moment *while knowing that it's also about power*, and while knowing that afterwards his partner could rip him to shreds with a thought thanks to all that mana.
So if the magical part of sex is in the minds of the lovers, not in penises and ejaculations, it becomes hard to use sex magic strategically. No witch can ever *count* on that power boost when they need it. Also the sex is less like a bad porn movie.
I would also question if the partner always has to be a man - it could be the people either have powers of witchcraft themselves, or lots of mana, never both, most witches tend to be women mostly for reasons of tradition. Maybe the witches see that many positions of power are held by men and decide to keep magic out of male hands. This would open sex magic to all kinds of couples. It also allows you to easier integrate trans, intersex or non-binary folks into your magic system. Even if you don't want to write your erotica so inclusive, some your readers will enjoy exploring more possibilities in their headspace.
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I have a short story in the making where two young men go hunt a troll for an old widow. I have some ideas for what they could be carrying, but am aware that messing up something as fundamental as their hunting gear would invalidate the whole narrative, so I'd thought should check the logic of the situation.
The biggest factor in weapon choice is the trolls. In this setting, a troll is a result of a fungal infection. Once a creature gets infected, the fungus warps their body to make it more aggressive and give it various anatomic augmentations to better acquire easy protein (meat). Not only that, but the fungus just wants the troll to gorge itself until it is killed or drops dead so it can turn the corpse into a spore factory, so fear is basically not a factor in a troll's mind.
The biggest problem with killing a troll, however, is *regeneration*. All trolls can heal from wounds at an incredible rate, so fast that vital organs might as well be unessential. Acts like the destruction of the heart or removable of the head is no more imminently fatal to a troll than cutting off its arm.
That being said, there is a way to kill a troll: starvation. Even with their moderately-physics-breaking metabolism, trolls need calories to survive and regenerating burns a ton of them. In short: keep it regrowing bits until it essentially eats itself to death trying to make repairs. Only real problem with this method is that trolls get more and more aggressive the hungrier they get, so it doesn't take long for them to charge whoever is damaging them and try to eat them.
So far my only idea has been shotguns loaded for bear, since shells are better at quickly removing chunks that bullets are. That being said, the fact that trolls are very prone to charging makes me think these alone wouldn't be good enough. Ammo is finite, reloading is tedious, and trolls don't mind sprinting though gunfire to get at the source of it.
**What man-portable weapons would be effective at killing these regenerating trolls?** While I am sure that Arkansas has machine guns and rocket launchers laying around somewhere, assume these hunters don't have access to military hardware. Also, while shotgun alternatives and emergency weapons are what I am concerned about, you're welcome to point out any flaws with my shotgun-over-rifle assumption.
Some other information:
* Cutting a quarter of a troll's body mass off will cause it to stave to death pretty quickly. It's still very dangerous, but can be considered killed at this point. Just back away and let it die.
* Burning a troll is done after it gets killed to prevent spores from spawning.
* Trolls are not harder than the creature they were, but might be stronger and faster due to not caring about overtaxing their muscles.
* Sudden blood loss will slow a troll down. Not only that, but they have high enough blood pressure that they can lose a good amount of mass in this fashion (provided the would is big enough to not instantly regenerate).
* While calling one or two more friends isn't out of the question, the police, rangers, wildlife control, and army are either out of the picture entirely or busy doing something else. This is a local matter between neighbors.
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**The Ideal Plan**
The optimal strategy for this is fairly obvious: if you have guns, get 10 - 20 guys together and pelt it from range and kill it before it closes the distance. You would want shot-gunners using slugs, and rifleman using hollowpoints for maximum damage. Given modern day, this would be the most straightforward and logistically sound way to do it. Granted, this all depends on how post-disaster-y you want your story to be. If you limit the amount of ***stuff*** they have available to them, the answer becomes much more interesting. With less tech available, and with fewer people, I imagine a troll hunt would look something like this:
**The Actual Plan**
A group of at least five hunters would spend several days tracking the Troll to it's lair/area. They would then set up camp just out of earshot of it. Three of the hunters would take out their hatchets and begin working, while the other two would post up near the Troll to keep an eye on it. The hatcheteers would create several thick, sharp spears to deal with the troll, and a large stack of firewood for what comes after. The spears themselves are essentially siege weapons. Too heavy and bulky to be practical for taking all that way into the field, but just small enough that they could be maneuvered by a strong man or two. They would be entirely wood, optionally with spear heads the hunters could have brought with them fitted onto the shafts.
Once the weapons and firewood were done, they would all prepare to engage the troll. The two keeping tabs on the Troll are the only ones of the group with guns. If the Troll began to wander off or worse - towards the camp -
their job would be to open fire and draw its attention, kiteing it around and keeping it busy. Any shots fired would be close enough to be heard by the camp, so they would have advance warning that something was up, without the need for radios or cellphones. With the weapons done, the gunners would lure it back to the camp. The hatcheteers would set up a 'front line' with the three of them holding spears out or having partially driven them into the earth. The gunners would position themselves behind them, and shoot the Troll enough for it to pick up sufficient speed. The Troll's nature in mind, would run directly onto one or more of the sharp spears, impaling itself. The gunners would then aim for the Troll's eyes, not trying to kill it but to limit its ability to fight back. Once blinded, they would try to bring it to the ground, using nets and chains. One of the men would try to maintain the spear, keeping the Troll impaled, with the other four trying to pin the Troll down. Once they were reasonably sure it wasn't going anywhere, they would start going to town on it with their hatchets, doing as much damage as possible. With point blank rifle shots, and axe wounds, the Troll would soon begin to starve. Once it died, the hunters would don their crude masks to limit exposure to spores, and start shifting firewood to its corpse to set it ablaze. With a tiny bit of fuel or gas, they could get the fire started fairly quickly before the spores got out of hand, retreating upwind and waiting for the Troll to be completely destroyed by the flames. They would then leave the wooden shafts behind, and return back home a job well done.
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Flame thrower.
As mentioned in another answer, fire is the best way to go here. Considering you want to destroy the spores at the same time, it really is the best way. Strength doesn't really matter when you're burning; the troll's muscles are going to stop working really quickly. Military ones use a flammable liquid which is what you're going to need. Shoot it at the troll and use something that burns really hot. Forget regeneration, the troll is going to fall apart quickly enough.
Once it is dead, the fire will destroy the spores anyway, sterilising the corpse. It's worth noting that fear of fire is hard coded into all land animals too. If there's anything left of that in the troll, it isn't going to run into a swathe of liquid fire. Even if they do, not caring about pain isn't the problem. They might overtax their muscles but if they're close, they won't *have* muscles to tax. Not to mention they'll have no oxygen and massive internal burns in their lungs. That'll damage performance.
If flamethrower isn't an option, still use fire. Get something that burns hot and trap the troll in a confined place. A pit would work, or inside a building. Bonus points if it's a wooden building that will collapse on the troll. Extra entrapment and it'll prevent any surviving spores from spreading easily. Plus the resulting fire will burn for a while and incinerate the body completely.
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It depends a little on what kind of animal it used to be, of course... But here are some additional ideas that come to mind.
A boar spear. It's cheaper, low-tech, and requires little to no planning (although this route would be a little more dangerous than setting a trap). These cross-shaped spears were designed to kill enraged boars, as you could set them in the ground against a charging boar and let it impale itself, and the cross-guard would keep it from running down the length of the spear, protecting the hunter. In theory, this should work perfectly against a troll. You described them as hyperagressive and lacking self-preservation instincts, so they would be even more susceptible to this attack than a boar. And the troll can't exactly heal a wound if the spear is still stuck in the wound, meaning it eventually bleeds out.
Improvised explosives. We are assuming these troll hunters don't have access to proper military gear, but improvised explosives are still quite possible. Furthermore, explosions are probably the fastest way to remove biomass, and that seems to be the main weakness of these trolls' healing factor.
Poison. Accelerated healing is not the same thing as accelerated toxin filtration, and poison could continually harm the organism in a way that is very hard to heal from. Some possible approaches: Your characters would probably have access to potassium chloride, which rapidly causes cardiac arrest when in the bloodstream, denying the troll's hyper-metabolism the oxygen it needs. Alternately, an overdose of a strong narcotic would primarily harm the troll's nervous system (which is notoriously difficult to heal), and might prevent a berserk phase before death. Something like chloroform or ether has the added advantage that they readily form a vapor. Alternately, you could combine the poison approach with the boar spear...
Fungicide. Similar to poison, but specifically geared at killing the fungus, instead of killing the host organism (although I'm guessing the host organism would probably die along with the fungus). If your fungus can be repelled by the immune system, it is probably also susceptible to the right fungicide, and the creature conveniently has a circulatory system that can pump any fungicide you have throughout it's system, potentially wreaking havoc on the fungus.
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What the hunters need is a trap. Get a backhoe, dig a pit that a troll cannot climb out of quickly, camouflage the pit and place bait in the centre of the camouflage. Lure the troll into the vicinity and let it go for the bait and fall into the pit. If you can get it close to the pit then knock it in with the backhoe. Once it is in the pit, dowse it in whatever accelerants are available and set it on fire. Keep it burning until dead and the spores are incinerated. If it tries to get out of the pit then knock it back in with the backhoe or long spears.
The tricky part of the operation is locating the troll and luring it to the trap. However, given that the wording suggests that this is set in contemporary times, use a drone to do the location, then lure the troll in by dropping a trail of bait from a trail bike or pickup truck - the hunters should not do this on foot. The only real purpose of firearms is to slow it down if it is catching up too quickly or to annoy it into following the hunters from a long way away.
I realise that a backhoe is not man-portable, but it seems to fit the spirit of the question (resources available to civilians in a contemporary rural setting). The point is that whatever is used needs to fix the troll in place so it can be burnt/exhausted to death. If a backhoe to dig a pit is not available (and shovels are very slow) then a snare made of steel wire rope would be second choice as an immobilisation agent.
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## Trap it in a confined space
Hyper-charged aerobic metabolism is going to require hyper-charged oxygen input, which means that if a troll gets stuck in a confined space (such as a manure pit or a well) they're going to be going through whatever oxygen's there in a big fat hurry relative to a human. Never mind the potential for asphyxiants (CH4) or even toxic gasses (H2S) to be present already, as well as drowning hazards...
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The first thing that springs to mind is fire- molotov cocktails, to be precise. Simple to use, easy to make, and low tech.
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I'm going to be assuming that working pre-disaster technology is rare, so hunting trolls will have to be done with what can be made by a blacksmith and carpenter. In other words, just wood and metal.
First, crossbows using bolts with heads designed to carve flesh. Relatively easy to make and extremely powerful.
Once the troll comes into range, boar spears. And you want the head and cross-piece reinforced by metal. Once you've got the troll held by spears from all sides, then you can toss explosives or fire at him. Or you can carve the troll up with polearms designed for the task.
Explosives. Improvised explosives are relatively easy to make. Put some on the end of a stick with a "shield" behind the explosive for two reasons: one, it will deflect more explosion towards the troll, and two, it will save the person holding the stick.
Traps. Primitive man hunted mammoths by either running them into pits or running them off a cliff.
After the troll is helpless, make sure that you burn it.
I find it odd that the authorities, such as they are, wouldn't help. One troll loose could grow faster than exponential. Quite frankly, I don't see why they haven't killed everybody already. You've made them extremely powerful and fast-breeding. My suggestion would be to make it extremely difficult for them to spore.
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This could be rather meta question itself, because you can allways say: *Public domain*. Yes, I am aware, that most of sci-fi movies have to pay intellectual property fees, so having your crew enjoy something what is in [Public Domain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain) could be nice workaround.
But still, crew enjoyment of [classical music](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_music) goes Star Trek Beyond (pun intended)
My personal guess is, that [2001: Space oddysey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(film)) became space meme itself. That movie was first to introduce [The Blue Danube](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Danube) song to accompany [docking procedure in space](https://youtu.be/xyjOjT8d8RI)
However that barely explains almost all popular works - wide obsession with classical music.
So, is there any other explanation for almost all crew members to enjoy really old music?
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**The old masters spoke to the world**
I've never met a musician who didn't appreciate (if not enjoy) classical music. Even punk musicians appreciate classical music. It's layered, addresses emotion, it's BIG. It was an era where a precious handful of people were so honking creative and fabulously *capable* with the instruments that it produced a sweeping array of sound that affected the entire world.
In all the centuries since, very very few artists have attained either the popularity or the recognizability of the classical masters.
Will everyone on a space ship *prefer* classical music over, say, classic guitar, Jazz, blues, country, Acid... That's unrealistic.
But if it was the only music available? Some would get bored with it, but honestly, humans get bored all the time. How many of us float through our day permanently wired to our tunes? My own playlist is about 200 songs long and there are days that I'm sick of listening to them.
But, ignoring the question "why couldn't you bring other music along?" (by the time we're sailing through space in elegant starships the Beatles will be in the public domain), why only classical music?
**Even at it's most explosive, it's not raucous.** You can't really head-bang to the 1812 overture. I mean, you could... There's cannons, after all... but it's just not the same. You can't lose your self control to classical music like you can other genre.
**It's rarely played loud.** Some people are more interested in the beat than they are the melody. These are the people who, despite their car windows being up, can be heard a mile down the road with enough force to pound nails into the asphalt. I've had days when I turned the volume of classical music up, but to claim that it's *loud* would be a lie. This is important on a ship where you will meet the same small group of people every morning for breakfast for months if not years.
**It's common to us all.** Humans tend to find things that divide us (*"I'm a little bit country... I'm a little bit rock-and-roll"* sang Donny and Marie Osmond). Classical music is such a common part of our shared heritage that it tends to have a binding effect rather than a divisive effect (my perspective). How often do you see biker-vs-cowboy fights in the movies? OK, how often do you see Bach-vs-Mozart fights? You get my point.
And, last but in no way least...
**The captain likes classical music.** We like to think that the world is a democracy, but starships aren't. ("This isn't a #\*@%! democracy!" screams Matthew McConaughey in *U-571.*) And if the captain loves classical music, then you better keep our ipod full of Reggae and Bubblegum Rock under your pillow.
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## No Lyrics
Most other genres of music are based on lyrics. Whether you love or hate the music itself, pop, country, rap, etc. are all dependent on lyrics. Some people like a particular song (or even an entire genre) "despite" the lyrics, but the lyrics can't simply be ignored.
Your starship crew all speaks English professionally, but they come from around the world and in small groups they speak Spanish, Chinese, Swahili or whatever they are most comfortable with. Similarly, they all would prefer to listen to songs with lyrics in their native language. But the ship-wide Muzak system can only play one song at a time - hearing the background music change as you move from one room/deck to another would be incredibly distracting. So the ship system plays classical music - well-known (if not loved) by all, with no lyrics. Lyrics in general are distracting anyway, and the crew needs to focus on their mission. They can, of course, listen to whatever they want on their iPods when off-duty (can't even play out loud in their quarters because the ship is cramped (this isn't Star Trek) so only senior officers have private quarters) but everyone gets used to classical music.
To clarify a little - the playlist need not be exclusively "classical" in the modern European tradition (Bach, Beethoven, etc.) but it would be predominantly classical. If there is popular instrumental from other genres - and particularly from other cultures represented in the crew - then that music could be included as well. But nothing with lyrics, all "real" music, and nothing super-distracting. So if the crew is predominantly 21st century Western (i.e., Europe, USA and similar) then the result is predominantly "classical" music.
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The classical pieces we think of are those which **stood the test of time**. There were many more compositions during the era, rightly or wrongly condemned to dusty archives or not even surviving to this day. A realistic assumption would be that a few 20th or 21st century pieces will join the canon of the *classics*, as a 25th century listener would know them.
But which ones? The Beatles? Michael Jackson? Elvis Presley?
And note that I just mentioned performers. Take a black and white TV recording of the King, have an AI color it, extrapolate to a high-resolution 3D hologram with decent sound, and what do you get? Pixeled artifacts and flat sound. Would having someone else perform Elvis' songs for modern recording devices (or a computer simulation) be the same?
By contrast, Beethoven's symphonies were always *supposed* to be played by an orchestra, so it is no cheating to get modern conductors and orchestras.
Consider 500-year-old plays which are still performed to large audiences, and 100-year-old movies which have become a niche interest.
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**Royalty-free.**
In the future, there are no ads, and no-one can purchase creative works. It is all pay-per-use. Persons on starships who listen to music (or are within the broadcast area) must pay royalties each time for anything recorded after 1901. These add up. Classical music is royalty free and so to avoid having the royalties garnished from their wage.
The lack of royalty payments for old music also explains why classical music is popular for TV and movie fiction.
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The crew of the [Starship Exciting Undertaking](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/63587/why-are-there-no-toilets-on-the-starship-exciting-undertaking) view music as another form of mental exercise. Mental cataloguing of parts, memory exercises on certain bars and musical signatures, deductive reasoning for predicting the next part of the piece, all are valuable mental activities to help hone the mind.
Now, I’m not saying certain forms of popular music are simplistic and derivative, but you just can’t get the same mental workout from two guitars, a bass guitar, drums and vocals arranged in verse-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus as you can running through Kivlork’s ninth symphony for full orchestra, Murblorpian harp ensemble and assorted triangles.
And so everyone on a starship listens to complex, deep, layered (typically classical) music.
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Classical music is easy to refer to. It's part of our cultural roots. It is universal, majestic, involving, wherever you go. I never liked it when I was a kid, but after loving a cover of the 'Royal Fireworks' for a hair dryer spot, I fell in love with the original piece and JOY! My brother had the vinyl disc! And after that, I discovered a world of very interesting pieces.
Classical music was written to narrate stories, orchestras were theatrical stages for private and public performances back when there was no recording instrument. it survived because it left a print in our society for centuries.
Let's face it: pop music would sound really silly in a sci-fi movie or TV show -with a few exception of course, like "Hooked on a Feeling" and other pop pieces used in "Guardians of the Galaxy", for example. But in such cases you must build a character or a story fit for that moment.
With classical music, you can have something you understand, something that can be thoughtful, or epic, light up your imagination. That is why, even in movie soundtracks, like for "Star Wars", you must go to that level. The first time, the *very* first time I listened to that intro, the music seemed to *explode* from the screen. On the other hand, the opening for Disney's "Robin Hood" was cute but nothing that would survive the test of time
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Common conception is that Classical music is appreciated by intelligent and cultured people. Crew of a starship would be intelligent and many are also casted as cultured, self controlled and disciplined. While the above are also true I think it helps create the impression of the intelligence etc of the crew members. Quite different if they were cranking deathmetal.
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One of the commonest depictions of elves are as incredibly long-lived humanoids, sometimes utterly immune from death of natural causes. They are also more graceful and more coordinated than humans, and incredibly good at archery.
These last two depictions could be related to their long lives. After all, spend enough time doing anything and you're bound to become excellent at it, and that includes putting an arrow through someone's visor at three-hundred feet. Even assuming that, it seems like not-dying-of-old-age would result in a significant population advantage and a superior ability to manage information and history.
Basically, **why wouldn't un-aging elves be the dominant species in settings with humans?**
Examples of this situation from other works would be appreciated.
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If you mean dominant in terms of having the largest population:
Fertility and longevity are closely related in most animals - we can compare different species within the same genus and see a relationship between number of offspring and health/longevity. Producing offspring is very energy-intensive and stressful on the body, leading to shorter lifespans. This should be easily incorporated into building a fantasy setting with elves so long-lived that they rarely have offspring, and total fertility may not be any greater than replacement (total number of offspring over the life of the female may only be 2, with rare examples of third children). Long lives make their population seem extensive as so many generations are alive at once, but in terms of total fertility they are barely replacing their losses.
If you mean in terms of technological/political domination:
As Max Planck once said - science advances one funeral at a time.
Long lives allows elves to get stuck in their ways - fixed in their views, beliefs, and methods - even when the world moves on. They simply cannot adapt to changing circumstances due to harboring old prejudices, clinging to the outdated understandings they grew up with, not adapting to shifting landscapes (geographic or political), or merely failure to incorporate new methodologies. This leaves them like a picturesque ancient rural village - sure it is pretty, and a restful place to retire to, but no significant economic activity is taking place. Every elven village is like this being *exactly* the same as it was a thousand years ago... including the residents. Some well-traveled outsiders may know of them as quaint places to visit, but they have no meaningful impact on the world.
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Elves breed slowly and humans breed quickly. Orcs breed quicker still.
An elf couple might have one child every twenty years or so and takes a hundred years or so to become an adult
Humans simply out breed them.
Sure the elves might kill 100 humans to every elf lost in battle but they cannot afford to lose a single one as where humans can sacrifice hundreds and twenty years later replace the losses.
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**The instinct to dominate is human**
Out-breeding and conquering other tribes is what humans do. You can't expect other sentient species to have our same motivations.
If you are good looking, rich and live for ever, why would you risk fighting with a bunch of savages over a patch of dirt. A human that fights risks maybe 60 years, and hopes to gain wealth, land and women. An elf that fights risks eternity and hopes to gain... what, exactly? Unless their backs are completely against the wall, it does not make sense for them to fight.
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Late to the party I know.
Maybe you've read Brave New World. There is a chapter where they mention an experiment to take several thousand *Alphas* $-$ humans genetically engineered to have genius level IQ $-$ and populate the island of Sicily as a test civilisation. The experiment was a spectacular failure. Each person was too creative and individualistic to form any sort of coherent society. Thus the decision to populate Brave New World with a population of *Alphas*, *Betas*, and all the way down to *Semi-Morons* which are ape-like humans who handle unskilled labour and have negligible free will.
Why is this relevant? It suggests a simple change to make to the elves' mental makeup that prevents them forming large cities: **Elves are genetically hardwired to value freedom over safety**.
It is virtually impossible for an elf to hold down a nine-to-five job or live in the same house for a decade. Thus they are incapable of 'working together' to maintain large cities. Since most technology was invented to solve the problems that come from living in cities, elves have low technology. These two things combined make them easy pickings for invading humans.
Note you don't have to program, for example, a respect for nature into your elves. This will come about naturally from them having a sparse population. So they need not have the holier-than-thou attitude of some elves. I think this is more appropriate for the semi-fey trickster type of elf than the Tolkienistic one.
This change also allows for more variation in the elves. Some villages will be hugely different from others. They might be more advanced. But their neighbors will feel no need to copy their technology because it might impinge upon their freedoms.
You also don't need to hardwire them to be particularly intelligent like the Alphas. Though it might link in nicely to their extreme skill in some areas. But that can also be explained through having lots of time to practice.
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## Probably like humans interact with dogs
For dogs we must look like an eternal being, they usually are at our side for their entire life without alot changing from our part.
We even take care of their own pups and teach them how to behave within the pack and inside our home, just like they where schooled at the beginning.
Our *magic* is something they can't comprehend but accept it and stay at our sides without a second thougth.
From our side we can look at them in many ways, friends, tools, little fluffly kids, depending in our own needs and desires. They wouldn't be aware of their function and just be happy with some attention.
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A long life span would certainly give advantages in a struggle for dominance. But there are plenty of other factors that could give one group or another an advantage. It's not at all clear that long life span would inevitably outweigh everything else.
As James says, maybe the elves' world view simply doesn't put much value on dominance. There are many human beings in the world, I'd guess a substantial majority, who have no particular desire to conquer and subjugate their neighbors. Personally, when I fantasize about my ideal life, the first thing that comes to mind is not "beating my neighbor senseless and forcing him to bow down to me". It's more like, "being able to sit quietly at home, play computer games, write books, and have the company of a pretty girl". Of course there are people who enjoy dominating others for its own sake, whether by beating them up physically, having political power over them, manipulating them psychologically, or whatever. But not everyone is like that. It's not unreasonable to speculate that elves have even fewer such folk.
Elves may have some skills but not others.
Elves may, for example, not have the mechanical aptitude to build and maintain machines. In a war between side A, who have honed their skill at archery to a high level, and side B, who are mediocre at using their tanks and machine guns and nuclear bombs, my money would be on side B.
Elves may be great archers but terrible strategists.
Elves may not be good at managing large organizations. Maybe they're all too independent.
Etc.
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*I miss the part where that kid screams in agony as the vaporized water in his cells cause small bits of him to violently explode.*
In my story, future's warfare extensively uses laser weapons both in infantry and vechicles, as energy supply is no longer a problem. \*
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## Information: Laser weapon types
There are two types of laser weapons, but we're only going to look at one type:
**Impulse laser:**
* Mainly used by the infantry.
* They are capable of producing short, intense laser pulses.
* They however, have a "recharge time" : before shooting with it, the lasers created in the separated parts of the magazine must gain enough power, before getting relased.
* They are more suitable for causing smaller explosions, via thermal shock, than heating up the target.
**General attributes:**
* the line of sight must be kept between the target and the weapon until the end of the interception / attack (in impulse weapons this means: until one impulse is delivered into the target).
* Both of them can change their spectrums.
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## My interests
*The following list contains the things, I want to know the effects of the lasers on.*
**Environment:**
* Covers
* High ground
* Collateral damage
* Explosive objects
* Small areas such as rooms
**Soldiers:**
* Body armor
* Suppression tactics
* Wounds
* Snipers
**How would these change?**
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It seems to me that your future infantrymen will have access to [Pulse Energy Projectile (PEP)](http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ground/pep.htm) lasers. If so, let's examine how these weapons would be deployed, employed, their effects, and their limitations. All of these will have effects on your primary questions.
Energy source aside - and unless your universe has some wonderous, handwavium metamaterials - Directed Energy Weapons like the PEP are generally heavy and bulky. This is because it requires a lot more components for it to generate a shot than current technology projectile weapons (we're not talking about miniature mass accelerator a la Mass Effect here). As such, even at the infantry level, these weapons will either be mounted on tripods to be carried around by its crew (hence the moniker 'crew-served weapons') or mounted on vehicles.
Only the [PHaSR](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8275-us-military-sets-laser-phasrs-to-stun/) (Personnel Halting and Stimulation Response Rifle developed by the USAF; yes they actually called it that because of course) is somewhat man-portable, and that's a non-lethal, non-PEP device.
So for your PEP, I think the most realistic way it would be deployed is at the Platoon level as a specialized support weapon, either by a crew on a tripod, or mounted on vehicles. Everyone else will still use projectile weapons (advanced ones, of course, but essentially the rifles and machine guns we have today).
Onto your questions.
## **The effects of your PEP on the battlespace.**
**1. Cover**
According to the literature I read, the PEP 'involves the emission of an invisible laser pulse which, upon contact with the target, ablates the surface and creates a small amount of exploding plasma.' (this is per [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulsed_energy_projectile), so keep that in mind I guess). While current technology PEPs are meant to be non-lethal, it's easy to see that if you scale this up, you can use PEPs to disable and/or destroy all manner of things that can be disabled and/or destroyed through exploding plasma. This includes vehicles (as they are currently looking at developing a counter-UAV PEP), buildings, etc.
Basically, the PEP is a very fast, long-range weapon that fires explosive projectiles without the kinetic energy transfer at the target. So if you fire a PEP at people hiding behind, say, a brick wall, well the wall will explode like its hit by - say - a 30mm shell (this is pure conjecture, by the way. I failed to locate sufficient data on how powerful the PEP plasma explosions are). The PEP projectile will not, of course, penetrate the wall, but shrapnel from the wall exploding might ruin their day, so it balances out.
The advantages of this system are that the projectiles travel at the speed of light; the PEP gunner no longer has to incorporate a lead to his aiming solutions for moving targets. The projectiles also travel in a straight line over long distances. Current technology PEP is effective up to 2km. This means that there is no ballistic drop for the gunner to compute and offset to as well. Basically, within its effective range, you can hit what you are aiming at almost instantaneously with an explosive projectile. That's an attractive thing for grunts.
*Edited to add*: The PEP is also an excellent point air defense system against missiles and low-flying aircraft. The PEP's advantages outlined in the paragraph above makes it an ideal system of choice - especially coupled with an automatic/autonomous target tracking and engagement guidence system like the AEGIS in US Navy ships.
There are several disadvantages as well: Laser Pulses can be dissipated through smoke/fog. Adversary forces will develop special counter-laser smoke grenades (say, containing particulates that reflect and/or disrupt the pulses) that their infantry can deploy to basically negate the effects of your weapon on target. Unlike physical projectiles which can punch through the smoke like nobody's business, that PEP projectile will just stop at the smoke. Funny thing about war is, the countermeasure is almost always cheaper than the systems they are designed to counter. So your PEP crew served might cost you USD 1.5 million per unit, while that smoke grenade probably costs the adversary USD 150 a pop. That's a bargain. Grunts love that too.
They are also heavy and bulky. A PEP team would consist of a gunner, an assistant gunner to set up and load the weapon, and an ammunition man to carry extra batteries, ammunition (whatever your PEP uses for ammo), etc. If they move, the gunner will hump the PEP gun, the a-gunner will hump the tripod, the ammo guy will hump his rucksack. Add to their loads their armor, personal weapons, supplies, etc. That is not a happy team. That is also not a fast team.
**2. High ground**
Well, since there are no ballistic calculations necessary for the PEP, then the high ground will have no effects on the PEP - other than if you're stupid enough to silhouette yourself on the crest of a hill, some guy with a PEP 2km away might take a potshot at you.
**3. Collateral Damage**
The PEP is highly accurate. You hit what you are aiming at. While the nature of the explosion can potentially cause collateral damage (exploding walls or vehicles, you know), the chances of it hitting something the gunner isn't aiming at is negligible at best.
This means that if you have to talk to the village elder to apologize about that goat that your PEP laser exploded, then your gunner was aiming at the goat.
**4. Explosive Objects**
I'd imagine that since the PEP creates exploding plasma on the target, then if the target is explosive, it would explode.
**5. Small enclosed area**
Well, two ways to see this. One, unlike traditional explosive projectiles, the PEP projectile itself does not generate fragments. So firing a PEP projectile into a room through a window, for instance, will just cause the PEP projectile to generate exploding plasma at whatever wall, object, or person it hits. The effect on the room is dependent on what object it hits. If it hits your buddy, you'd probably be covered in blood. You'd be unhappy, of course, but you'll generally be fine. On the other hand, there is that secondary effect. You fire a PEP projectile into the room, aiming for the back wall. When it hits that wall, it explodes, taking chunks of the wall with it, probably showering the occupants of the room with sharp brick fragments. The level of dismay and anger directed at you by the occupants of that room is directly proportional to the level of protection/armor they were wearing at the time.
## **The Effects of the PEP on Soldiers**
As we have established above, the PEP is a support weapon. A highly specialized support weapon among other support weapons in the company. Remember: the PEP fires straight. This means that you can't use it for indirect support. It also doesn't have any kinetic energy, you can't use it to punch through walls or armor. It will, however, ablate armor and create plasma explosions, which you can use to disable or destroy vehicles, walls, etc. Combined with its lightspeed projectile and flat trajectory, the PEP is a pretty decent support weapon.
However, to gauge its effect on infantry equipment and tactics, several things must be considered.
**1. Armor.**
Here's how you design infantry armor: You figure out what the most casualty-inducing weapon on the battlefield is, then you design armor that lowers the risk to your infantry to acceptable levels. Note that I did not say 'protects your infantry against this threat.' That is because this is impossible to do (unless we're talking about HALO/WH40K level power armors here).
Armor has to balance protection and mobility. Safety and comfort. The more comfortable your guys are, the longer they are combat effective. Add mobility, reduce protection and vice versa. Up to as recently as the late 90s, artillery is still the number one infantry killer. As such infantry armor up to the 90s was designed primarily against this threat (see the [PASGT system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personnel_Armor_System_for_Ground_Troops) for US Forces, for instance).
It is only when the US started to get into all these fights with guys who generally only have small arms and not a lot of artillery that the focus of armor shifted, somewhat, to defeat direct fire ballistic threats (with the development of the BALCS/SPEAR system for SOF troops, that trickled down to GPF troops later on for instance. And the SAPI/ESAPI ballistic plates of today).
Back to your question, having established that the PEP laser is a specialized support weapon, and, due to its limitations, most other weapons are still ballistic in nature (from bullets to artillery shells), then the armor your troops wear will be designed to defeat those threats. A combination of soft armor to defeat fragments and pistol caliber bullets, and hard armor plates to defeat rifle rounds. So, no change there.
There will be individual, vehicular, and area counter-laser systems, though, such as the smoke dispenser/grenade we discussed earlier. Or maybe some reflective panel add-ons to vehicle armor.
**2. Suppression tactics.**
This is where the PEP's rate of fire comes into play. You don't have to have a fully automatic system to suppress. You just need something that can fire accurately enough (no problems for the PEP), and quick enough to render the enemy combat ineffective within its beaten zone. If you can fire PEP lasers fast enough to keep the enemy from going anywhere and/or doing anything effective to you, then you're suppressing him. If not, then you're not. In any case, suppressing an enemy with direct fire weapons (which is what the PEP is), is pretty much that. It's really quite similar with suppressing the enemy with your carbine. Except that the PEP generates plasma explosions on the enemy's cover. Probably negating it after a while like hitting them with explosive projectiles.
The enemy will try to suppress your PEP crews like they would your other support weapons too. So, again, not a whole lot of difference.
**3. Wounds**
The PEP wounds by a pressure wave that stuns the target and knocks them off their feet, and electromagnetic radiation that affects nerve cells causing a painful sensation. (again, [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulsed_energy_projectile)). You scale this enough, then I suppose you have overpressure wounds and burns on human targets.
**4. Snipers**
Can the PEP be a sniping weapon? Well, yes. It hits stuff it's aimed at 2km away, that's precise enough to be used to snipe folks. Is it practical? No. It's a support weapon. [This is not to say that no one has ever sniped with support weapons before](http://www.military.com/marine-corps-birthday/carlos-hathcock-famous-marine-corps-sniper.html). As we discussed, it is heavy and cumbersome. So no sniping PEPs, at least none that was designed to do specifically that.
On the other hand, PEP crews are prime sniper targets - as support weapon crews generally are. Support weapons are force multipliers. Taking out its crew at critical points in a battle may very well change the course of the fight.
So TL;DR: Your PEP is a specialized support weapon because it's not practical enough to be man-portable, and it is inadvisable to replace the versatility and simplicity of projectile weapons on the battlefield.
[Answer]
Effect of laser weaponry upon:
**Covers**
By this, I assume the conventional *taking cover* tactic to avoid or stop incoming small arms projectiles. You have not specified how powerful your infantry laser weapons are and what are their capabilities for melting or boiling away metals and rock. I am inclined to *assume* that taking cover behind buildings and rocks would still provide pretty much the same level of protection as it does now. However, taking cover behind a tree would be a bad idea as exploding out some parts of the thick branches overhead would result in the branches breaking and falling on the person taking refuge under them.
**Collateral damage**
What do you mean what impact would laser weapons have on collateral damage? Shooting your own team mates isn't fun, no matter you shoot them with rocks, bullets, cannonballs or laser beams!
**Explosive objects**
Explosive compounds are already not stored in barrels, stacked by the walls, outdoors, as depicted in movies and video games. You might employ a quick tactic tough. In the absence of remote controlled explosive devices, you could just place a grenade near the target zone and shoot it with the laser from far. It will get you the explosion you desired, even without a proper remote controlled explosive device.
**Small areas such as rooms**
Rooms will continue to remain rooms (I guess?). No laser weapons (or any weapons for that case) are known to convert rooms into something else. How safe rooms would be, depends on whether your laser weapons have the ability to destroy a major portion of a wall with a few laser shots or not. Even without laser weaponry, you could easily summon the demons of hell on the inhabitants of a small room with a vehicle mounted machinegun. A few RPGs would do the trick, too.
**Body Armor**
Will be rendered useless. Considering that your weapon shoots a light beam, you can easily shoot very precisely on your target. Body armor does not cover the face or the neck, so just take a couple seconds to aim for the face or neck, and shoot.
**Wounds**
Will continue to be debilitating and painful. Even getting shot with a normal firearm (bullets) can be easily fatal. Getting hit by a laser beam on the leg or the arm will *perhaps* be more painful and debilitating than a bullet wound though. Something like getting shot by a machinegun round. It could end up severing the limb.
**Snipers**
Will be much more successful, considering that you wouldn't have to count factors such as wind speed, coriolis effect, elevation and distance. You only have to aim and shoot. A fairly good sniper would have a 90% success rate while a good one will easily have a 100% success rate for all his shots.
[Answer]
**Covers**: Laser weapons are most effective against optics (biological or electronic) and living tissue (because it contains water that explodes upon being heated). Other things can be also destroyed by heating. Anything that is resistant to heating and melting (such as earth) will provide very good cover. Laser travels in a straight line, obviously. Your infantry will still need mortars and grenades to be tossed over cover. Fog, smoke, and dust will also provide very good cover and will be extensively used.
**High ground:** In modern warfare, this is less important since your infantry probably won't be bayonet charging uphill. Still gives you a better view if you do not have drones overhead.
**Collateral damage:** Since the "projectile" travels instantly (well, at the speed of light), you are only hitting the thing in your reticle.
**Explosive objects:** Can easily be made to explode with the laser, very vulnerable.
**Small areas such as rooms:** Depends on how small you can make the laser rifle. Also, your soldiers will not want to be waiting for the rifle to recharge with an enemy 3 meters in front of them. They would probably have their conventional firearm drawn in close quarters. Hand grenades remain the workhorse for clearing rooms.
**Body armor:** Eye protection will be of supreme importance. A high powered laser shot to the eyes will permanently blind and instantly incapacitate. Laser reflective materials are available and will be used on body armor. Perhaps something akin to the smoke grenades that tanks use for cover.
**Suppression tactics:** Since the "projectiles" are invisible and make no noise, and your version of the laser rifle seems to have a horrible rate of fire, you'll probably have to use something else for suppressive fire.
**Wounds:** No exit wounds. Horrible burns. Blindness.
**Snipers:** Laser rifles probably not well suited for this application at very long ranges due to blooming and dissipation but if with your technology you can miniaturize something that the US Navy is using to an infantry size weapon, there are advantages: Not effected by wind or gravity, instant hit, no muzzle flash. At mid-range, snipers will probably use your version of the sniper rifle but switch to a projectile weapon for long range.
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On collateral damage, poor civilians. Laser beams will be invisible except the target itself will have a small dot. This means it's impossible to see a laser fight taking place except when looking at the targets.
This makes it hard for bystanders to know what's happening. Any beam good enough to kill a person will absolutely completely fry your eyes. So imagine fighting in an urban environment. Hit a metal street light post, a window, the side mirror on a car or motorcycle. The laser will reflect in unexpected ways. Bystanders will be blinded.
Your soldiers will obviously wear protective goggles but even those need to be calibrated to the right frequency. Blocking all will simply make them to dark to see through.
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Laser would differ from projectile weapon in one aspect only - speed of delivery. While bullet would spend travelling whole second to the target a kilometere away, the laser gets there immediately. As soon as there is a line of sight between an attacker and target, the target becomes a sitting duck. That is not because the target is not fast enough but because of Einstein.
Attack by means of projectile could be countered, modern tanks shoot back at the incoming missiles, aircraft may maneuver or shoot back.
We could divide the attack into two phases - targeting (spot the enemy, make decision to engage, pull the trigger) and deployment (hit the target). The second phase gets zeroed out when laser is used.
That leaves us with the possility to optimize the speed of targeting and decision-making. Which again means that in high-tech warfare it will not be human pulling the trigger. The battle will probably play out in the course of milliseconds and the quality of algorithms will have important role.
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There is one big other factor involved here.
Does Thermally super-conducting material exist? If so is it feasible to make armour out of it? (Weight/Cost)
If so, any hand-held laser is likely to be useless, since with a thin thermal superconducting layer across the target, you will cause the majority of the affect of the beam/pulse to spread across the target. Only the very biggest weapons would be able to cause the normal plasma affect, the rest of the heat would spread across the entirety of the material too quickly for it to heat up to plasma temperatures.
The 2nd major factor (other than the weapon tech itself) will be reflective materials, the major problem with energy weapons are that most forms of energy can be effectively reflected or dispersed with much more ease than a projectile round can. Laser weapons are only effective if the targets struck can't reflect the majority of the beam.
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One thing that I have is: it's a laser and you think with infantry.
Let me get one thing straight. It's a friggin laser! Laser range is far superior to be used by infantry. Because infantry have human eyes and they are pretty bad compared to laser.
So with introduction of a laser you make infantry obsolete. You just combine laser with thermal/movement/shape recognition and you can start Skynet.
You shift war/battles from close combat to long distance robot skirmishes. That's what people wanted from the start. To kill others from as far as possible with lowering the chance to die to zero.
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[Question]
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Using my desk-top buddies as inspiration, I am building an elite group of four inch high miniature soldiers, created to be air-dropped into a situation of dire danger to perform feats of daring espionage and destruction....
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/E6rwy.jpg)
The first task I have is how to arm these guys to enable them to go into battle. Obviously, scaling down real-world assault rifles just won't work for a variety of reasons (small projectiles, big air resistance).
So, what can I arm these guys with to give them some effectiveness when infiltrating and dealing with human scale installations and enemies?
Background: These are living, breathing miniature men, scaled down to roughly 4 inches high. They are not overly strong or have special abilities. The illustration above is only my inspiration. The method of the guys creation/miniaturization is outside the scope of this question.
Intended mission profile: I have a strike force of 100 of these guys that I airlift within reach of their target from a drone and then airlift them back out again in the same way. They're the ultimate in stealth attack.
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If you want immediate results, equip them with mini syringes filled with some really nasty stuff. Any kind of neurotoxin should work, the ammount needed to kill a human is miniscule (see [poison dart frog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poison_dart_frog)). Some high-tech dartguns propelled with CO2 or similar gas would be perfect for the task. My problem with this approach is that it uncovers your little fellas preety fast, and once you know of their existence, they are not as dangerous.
Personally i would go with less direct approach. The small guys would be perfect for espionage and sabotage. Equip them with USB Killers, mini-cameras etc. Hack computers, take incriminating photos, deliver some [Polonium-210](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_polonium#Polonium-210) to someone's tea and be gone before he even notices. This way noone will even know they exist. ([I mean it could just aswell be KGB Agents.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvinenko))
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I'd go with poison.
Since they are very small, they cannot do much harm with conventional weapons, shrunk equally.
So I'd equip them with bows or crossbows and poisoned arrows / bolts or knifes.
Similar to the sting of a wasp on an allergic person, the poisoning can work pretty quick.
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As per the above answers, your best bet would be using their small size for stealth, and avoiding direct combat.
However, if they do need to protect themselves against people in case something goes a bit wrong, then how about a miniaturised anti-tank weapon? You probably couldn't have much explosive in it (if your men are 1/17 scale, then that's about 1/5,000 by weight). But a payload of several grams is more than enough for Ricin poisoning or similar, and by using a guided rocket the weapon can be kept relatively small and lightweight.
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Miniature men with training can be extremely deadly and subtle assailants. In infiltration and destruction of human installations I would suggest small, compact but very powerful explosives. Similar to C4 they can be detonated remotely and if each member of your miniature army possesses one of these explosives, I imagine it can easily take down any building and kill every one inside. This won't be discreet but if you detonate them after you are airlifted and no one notices them during the operation, it doesn't matter.
In the assassination of 1 specific individual, poison would be most subtle and effective. To kill a person, you only need a couple milligrams of ricin, even less of Botox.
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Wondering how to use your [Small Soldiers](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0122718/)?
I'd focus on sabotage, espionage, and causing paranoia.
Directly damaging weapons don't fit their size - at best, a single-shot thing, but even as a smart bomb they wouldn't use their potential best that way.
They could overthrow governments using stuff that is forbidden by various conventions.
Of more PR-friendly gear, can't go wrong with melee.
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Various mischiefs:
* [lubricate the brakes of a train known to go downhill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bernardino_train_disaster)
* inject a corrosion promoter under the protective layer of the cables of a [major suspension bridge](http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Bridge-designer-fears-leaks-are-damaging-main-6548506.php) - or just drill enough holes and let the water do the rest
* get into the switch-board control room (using AC vents, of course) and [switch down a power line](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Southwest_blackout#Events). Bonus point if you can switch off [9 of them](http://www.darkreading.com/threat-intelligence/project-gridstrike-finds-substations-to-hit-for-a-us-power-grid-blackout/d/d-id/1323788)
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Are these miniature robots...if so, they could carry high explosives and do a lot of damage, and never be discovered.
Small bullets wouldn't do much damage, but some well placed charges on volatile stocks would cause a chain reaction that could decimate an entire army base.
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[Question]
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I have a situation when a kingdom is invaded by two armies. The king leads the bulk of his army (10,000) against the main invading force, and sends his son with 4,000 light cavalry to harass and slow down the 2nd army.
The king faces one enemy army (of 15,000) and barely wins the battle, paying with heavy casualties. But it turns out that main enemy army (with 40,000) is the one the King's son faces. His son pulls off an insane underdog victory paying only light casualties.
The king doesn't like his son and neither does the majority of the population. Is there any way for the king to hide or minimize the degree of victory his son accomplished?
I want the king & people to doubt the scope of the son's victory. Something like 'you might have won that battle, but there's no way you were outnumbered 10:1'.
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How many of those 40,000 were soldiers, really? That was a feint, a barely trained peasant levy reinforced by camp followers. Of course they broke against our fine cavalry, nothing surprising about it. All the good enemy troops were with the main force.
And those 20,000, who counted them? Light cavalry. Not a honest knight among them, just hunters and borderers. Nothing wrong with their courage, of course, as long as they have proper officers to keep them in line, but none of them can count to 20, not with their boots on. Let alone 20,000.
So the prince defeated 10,000 light troops. Well, I fought 30,000 heavies out of the 40,000 total enemies. (Everybody knows there were 40,000, and surely as many got away from my battle as we've slain.)
Make the kingdom great again! Who cares about facts, except for those nit-picking chroniclers. Off with their heads! And that ungrateful prince, too.
---
*Follow-Up for John and Root:* So you fought the battle for the prince? Splendid, man, splendid. Did you get any valuable loot from the battlefield for yourself? Capture any nobles who could be ransomed? Well, here, have a shilling and buy yourself some ale. A gift of the king.
Say, did you hear about the scout who captured a dozen of the enemy spearmaidens? He had only one arrow left, but it seems none of them wanted to be the first to die. Either that, or well, I hear none of them are maidens any more.
* Admit that the prince's soldiers fought a battle.
* Honor the soldier for fighting it.
* Question if it was all worthwhile *for him*.
* Change the topic and churn out lies.
[Answer]
**1. Immediately re-call the Prince's force.**
By direct order, have the Prince gather his troops and return to the capital. No pursuits, no SSEs (Sensitive Site Exploitation - basically gathering intelligence like maps, documents, etc from dead enemy officers), no taking EPWs. Tell the Prince that the force escorting the messenger who carried the order will deal with the prisoners. Of course as soon as the Prince is out of site, the prisoners are butchered.
**2. Send in another force to police the battlefield.**
These don't have to be trained troops. Matter of fact, these shouldn't be trained troops. The King orders some of his most trusted Generals to raise a levy of peasant troops. They don't know what's going on. Send them in, have them gather enemy bodies, horses, arrows, discarded equipment, and other detritus. Burn the majority of the bodies and dead horses. Destroy most of the equipment. Clean up as best they can. Then leave.
**3. Break up the Prince's force and redeploy them far away.**
The King then re-organises the Prince's army. Battalions are broken up and companies are redeployed to reinforce the furthest reaches of the kingdom. Have them man border forts, reconnoiter remote areas etc. This will reduce the possibility of them coming into contact with the population or the majority of the army, further slowing down the spread of their stories and allowing the King to establish his narrative.
**4. Have agents and 'experts' spread the King's story in as many pubs, bars, brothels, social gathering, and bath houses in the capital.**
This to make sure that the dominant narrative among the population is the King's.
Of course rumors will rise. Troops garrisoned with the Prince's troops will hear the stories. But this is the medieval. It's not like those troops can just log into Facebook and tell their side of the story and have people share their posts. It can take months for that story to reach anywhere important from the border areas, during which the story will be altered and distorted by retelling.
Meanwhile the King continues to reinforce and establish his narrative. And buys himself at least a year to deal with his son.
The interesting part is this opens the possibility of these troops being disenchanted with the King and begin to plot an uprising to install the Prince. Or maybe the Prince himself plans this. So I guess that can at least be a part of your story.
[Answer]
**Surprise background on the army of 40,000:**
This army's nation had been allies of the kingdom for many years, dating back to the king's father's father. Their nation however, had fallen upon poor times, their agricultural capacities having been severely limited by a drought. Growing food had become impossible and the ground water was drying up, rendering wells unproductive.
In trying to feed their people, this other nation had attempted, after years of suffering, to strike a deal with the nation who's army was smaller (army faced by the king's men, not the son's). They were promised food and water clean water.
One week after the larger nation's aide had begun arriving, the larger nation presented the recovering nation an ultimatum: "Help us overthrow the kingdom, or we will besiege your nation until every last one of you have starved to death."
Seeing little option, this smaller nation begrudgingly accepted. The larger nation was to send 4,000 men to ensure that every man, woman and child took up arms, and fought to the best of their ability (the larger nation, seeing a nation of 36,000 farmers who were only just recovering from starvation, felt that 4,000 would be more than enough to keep the weak and primitively-armed smaller nation in line).
Already weak from lack of nourishment and marching through treacherous winter conditions, with 80% of this newly amassed "army" suffering from pneumonia and frostbite, the men of the nation approached the 4000 soldier contingent of this "army", asking to allow the women and children to return to the village. The response: a swift and heartless "no".
Upon seeing this 40,000 person army amassed just miles from the kingdom's walls, the king's son zealously and indiscriminately slaughtered all 40,000 men, women and children among their ranks, not recognizing them as the humble, hard working member of their neighboring nation. A nation that once helped feed the kingdom.
The basics (if you're trying to further cement the population's hatred of the son): grant the son the glory of having killed them all with his light cavalry against insane odds. But then announce, in front of all the people and the king's soldiers:
"Though you may have slaughtered your opponents on the field of battle in the face of 10 to 1 odds, you've failed to realize one thing. That is, 9 of the 10 foes your men slaughtered... those were our neighbors, our friends, our allies, our fathers' allies. And worse, the women and children among their ranks. You and your men are certainly brave and powerful warriors.
Tomorrow, YOU and your cavalry will lead us into battle." (Just doesn't seem like medieval days were the days where you wanted to first into battle).
The End.
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I would suggest placing the battle somewhere far away from population centers, and use snow for temporary coverage or landslide for the permanent one.
If 4,000 horseman were present at the battle and most of them survived they will talk. Everyone of them will tell tales in every tavern how they heroically saved the kingdom, trying to impress the ladies and get free drinks and meals from the awed patrons. And I'm sure they all get some souvenirs from the fallen enemies to prove their tale like: standards, rings, weapons, jewelry.
If you want to stop them you should probably send them somewhere where they will unable to do it, perhaps send them in counter offensive, and betray them so they will be ambushed and killed.
[Answer]
>
> Today we stand triumphant. Our enemies and their 50,000 soldiers were defeated by the hands of our 20,000 brave brothers
>
>
>
Your highness, I hear that the prince's force did most the work
>
> This is no time to care about who gets credit. Need I remind of our thousands of deaths? The orphaned children are what we should think about.
>
>
>
Yes, but did not the prince overcome some 40,000 troops with a force of 4,000?
>
> The enemy troops were divided into two legions. I've trained and prepped a force of several thousand to fight one legion, while personally commanded the fight against the other legion at our home. Once me and my troops won the first and crucial battle and won the battle for the momentum of the war, the road was paved to beat the second legion, and we did.
>
>
>
Can't you say anything about the prince?
>
> I did and I will commend every soldier that fought in this war, and the families of the ones we have lost.
>
>
>
---
If everyone dislikes the prince, such spins would be accepted easily. After a while no one would remember that which no one wants to remember.
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[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.
Imagine someone from the modern day somehow gets transported back in time around the same time of WW2 without warning ahead of time. He has with him a laptop, graphing calculator (and a hand full of backup batteries), a smart phone, and a digital watch. He wants to show of and use his technology, however, with the exception of possible the watch the all have limited battery life. I want to now how difficult will it be to find ways to charge these devices without damaging them safely?
For the sake of this question presume that the time traveler is *not* a hardware engineer, EE major, or otherwise has training that would help him to personally know how the electronic devices work or how to jerry rig power supplies himself. However, he has enough smarts and basic understanding of physics/electronics to have a vague idea that there could potentially be an issue with power that needs to be addressed.
He will also be quick to find those who recognize the importance of his hardware and would want to make sure they are safe, thus he will likely have the aid of people from the WW2 era who *were* trained in electrical engineering, hardware, and the like who would want to try to help him find a safe way to power these devices. These folks only have WW2 level knowledge though, and won't know specifically what type of power (voltage, current, fluctuation tolerance etc) the devices are configured to handle unless it's written on the device or they can reverse engineer it somehow. The only thing the traveler would likely be able to contribute is that wall sockets use AC power and batteries us DC, that's about the limit of his knowledge of specifics of the hardware.
So how hard will it be to jerry rig a safe power supply to charge his devices with the expertise available to him, and how likely is it that a miscalculation could accidentally damage or destroy the device in question?
I listed a bunch of standard electronic devices, but I don't expect any one answer to necessarily touch on all of them. I'm most interested in the laptop, but listed the rest both in case someone can provide feedback about them as well and because it's possible having them may allow more information to be derived before trying to rig the laptop power to ensure that one is safe.
I'm would be most interested in the situation in which the traveler does not have a charger for the laptop or cell phone available. However, if it turns out that having a charger makes it significantly safer (ie less likely to fry the hardware) it's okay to presume one or both exist.
Side question if anyone wants to answer, if the traveler didn't realize the risk how likely is it that he would destroy his hardware by trying to plug it in to outlets of the time?
[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.
AndreiROM is correct. It would be very simple for any WWII era electrical engineer to set up a power source based upon the information on the charger cord for the device. They could even use their WWII era tools to test for resistance and voltage properties of the charger cord in the absence of that labeling.
The actual question is what value would these devices provide to a nation during WWII?
Modern computers components are so small that they are beyond WWII level technology to comprehend.
Sure its processing power is great, but unless the person teleported back is a programmer and has the development package installed there would be no tools on the system to be used.
It basically is a fancy paperweight that points out some applicable theory’s that might focus some research and development. However in WWII they were using cathode ray tubes and mechanical computers. Save the lap top until the 1960 -1970s to get its biggest boost.
Unless this computer has some amazing software and or scientific works stored on it there won’t be much to gain.
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**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.
If you just have a modern lithium ion battery, it could be a bit tricky. Lithium ion batteries can be trickier to recharge than other rechargeable, so you'd need to make sure you brought a charger with you.
However, other devices should have no trouble at all. Nearly all devices actually print enough information on the to do the trick.
Beyond that, you'll find many wall warts are "one size fits all." Its common to see a wall wart labeled "120-240V 50-60Hz" which means it works with anywhere between 120V and 240V, 50Hz to 60Hz. This covers basically all power grids in the world.
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**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.
If he has the power bricks for the devices with him then I expect their input requirements could be supplied without too much issue. By world war 2 the mains electricity standards we use today were already in use in some parts of the world.
Plus the input requirements of modern power bricks are very lineant. The things usually have a *nominal* voltage range of 100V-240V and are designed to accept a tolerance band either side of that. So anywhere from about 90V to about 264V AC would work. Frequency on the label is usually shown as 50-60Hz but again that is a nominal range and there will be wide tolerances either side of it. Many bricks will even run on DC though I would consider it risky to try that on an unknown one.
If he doesn't have the power bricks it would be harder and there would be a greater risk of an accident frying something.
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Stories about people somehow landing in WW2 are popular in Russia for *reasons.* Now, reciting a minor subplot of one of such stories, NKVD (the guys that would be KGB later) obtain a CD/MP3 player from 90s, a bit broken during the erm... acquisition.
Having realised that they deal with some exceptional tech and not some fancy spy radio, as thought earlier, they summon best engineers and sound recording scientists. They manage to save what is saveable and to reproduce the broken parts with local tech. The report and demonstration of the device to the higher-ups looks something like this:
>
> * The device features sophisticated tech based not possible for us tech level, that, however, bears similarity to the solid state research done in our lab in XY.
> * The device possesses a huge computing power, that appears to be used for a very dumb goal, to play music.
> * The music is recorded on this shiny disc in a way we do not comprehend. It is read with a very *bundled* light ray, generated in a way we do not comprehend, but done very akin to a gramophone in a very sophisticated and futuristing manner.
> * The device was confiscated from person XY, who was arrested as a spy-suspect. It got damaged a bit during the arrest. The power source and sound amplifier broke and were replaced with our technology.
> * Last, but most importantly, the recordings on this erm... shiny gramophone record, are in legible and understandable Russian, and... Sir, you need to hear this yourself!
> * \*60s music about WW2 plays\*
>
>
>
(I am abridging and translating the scene as I remember it, as I don't have the book at hand.)
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The graphing calculator will be trivially easy to power -- AA batteries already existed at the time; they were invented in 1907. Source: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AA_battery>. A coin cell for the watch likely would not have been available, but if you're okay with some wires dangling out then regular battery(s) should be able to power it.
I would say that your premise that "[they] won't know specifically what type of power (voltage, current, fluctuation tolerance etc) the devices are configured to handle unless it's written on the device or they can reverse engineer it somehow" won't be especially relevant, because almost all electronic devices have their power requirements written on them. This is required by various certifications agencies (some details here: <https://www.digikey.com/en/articles/techzone/2015/aug/efficiency-standards-for-external-power-supplies>)
Assuming that the power supply for the laptop was brought along, it will very likely be one of the universal-input types that are designed to accept mains power input in any country (as Peter Green mentions). Most likely you'll be able to plug into whatever the local power grid is supplying and it will work fine. In any case, the label on the power supply will certainly tell you what it's designed to work with. Most say something along the lines of Input: 100-250VAC, 5A; Output: 19VDC 8A.
Provided you got the laptop charger to function, the USB ports on the laptop can then be used to charge the phone. If not, cell phone chargers are also usually universal-input so you may be able to use that directly as well, though you may need a magnifying glass to read the label.
If none of these methods work out, your best bet is to find an electrical engineer from that era to assist you. They would be able to remove the battery from your laptop, measure its power output, and construct a suitable replacement using the electronic equipment available in that era (which will likely be bigger than the entire laptop, but functional!)
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Sorry if this sounds stupid and/or messed up.
So I'm writing this goofy splatter story in which my protagonists are fighting zombies. I'm trying to make the fighting as over-the-top and ridiculous as possible. So at one point, one of the heroes reaches down the throat of a zombie, rips out its spine and uses it to impale another one. [Basically, this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JO33a5-PhtQ&t=7m10s) [NSFW-ish, it's an animation though].
So, is this possible? Is a human spine sufficiently solid and pointy at the end that you could use it to stab/impale someone? If not, would it become somewhat realistic if the protagonist instead stabs the zombie in the eye and/or we assume that the zombie is decayed to some degree which makes it's body more susceptible to damage?
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Well, first there's the whole "reach down his throat and pull out his spine" bit. If the hero can wrap his hand around cervical vertebrae, it's pretty clear he can simply punch through the neck and snap the spine of any zombie, so it's hard to see what he'd get out of using a spine. Frankly, I'd suggest he go for a femur and use it as a club. Thigh bones are pretty durable.
Pulling out a spine is one of those great images that doesn't seem terribly realistic (you think?). The problem is that if you can pull hard enough to disarticulate the 24 ribs attached to the thoracic vertebrae, it's hard to see how the vertebrae themselves would stay attached to each other. Nerves aren't noted for their strength. As for the idea of using the coccyx as a point, you'd need to disarticulate the sacrum from the pelvis, and that joint is very strong. Again, I can't see how you could manage it without ripping the spinal column apart.
The flexibility of the spine is not very great, but I suggest that the compressive strength of an unsupported spine is not very great either, and I'd worry about the spine buckling on impact.
So, you're pretty much stuck with magic, I think.
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Wow, gory!
I think you'd find it challenging to do so. The main issue is that the spine, itself, is flexible. The instant you rip it away from its musculature, it would be limp and useless as a stabbing weapon. You would need to somehow detatch it from the zombie with all of its muscles intact (perhaps you get lucky with how a zombie degenerates?), and then you'd have to deal with the fact that muscles wont stiffen if they don't have stimulus. However, given that it is a zombie, perhaps the spine can still act on its own a bit, using whatever magical locomotion animated the zombies in the first place.
The spine is pointy, though. The tailbone (coccyx) is pointy enough that if the magically animated zombie muscles spasmed just right, it would look like a spear tip.
In all, though, you're going to rely on magic to make it happen. In reality, it's impossible. Fortunately for you, you're working in a world where something quasi-magical reanimated a bunch of corpses, so you may be in luck!
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The spine is not a single bone, even if you could rip it out of your first victim you'd end up with a floppy piece of sinew and tendons with some bits and pieces of bone in the mix.
Even were that pointy enough to break skin, you could never impart enough force on that pointy bit to actually do so and drive it through far enough to cause any serious harm. You'd have more luck cutting down a tree with a herring.
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During during the 17th century AD, a high reward is given to anyone who can successfully capture a serial thief who is known to be able to travel in and out of any shadows on any surfaces. The moment he or she touches the shadow or any physical contact he or she is immediately teleport into an alternate dimension that mirrors reality.
**About the wizard's power**
* Teleport between reality and shadow realm is triggered solely by will and physical contact of good shadow on any surfaces.
* Upon teleporting no time is lapsed.
* Staying for prolonged periods of time exceeding 10 minutes is fatal to anyone inside the shadow realm.
* Despite everything in the shadow realm is simply a mirror reflection of the real world, the wizard cannot be hurt or contained.
* The shadow realm can only be accessed if and only if the wizard allows and have met all conditions stated above.
* The wizard cannot move any faster regardless of which dimensions he or she is in.
* As long as there is a sharp drop in the density of photons with wavelength falls within the visible light spectrum and the surface area marks by such sudden drops is bigger than a penny is considered a good shadow.
* The wizard cannot cast shadow and this phenomenon extends to object that comes into physical contacts with his skin and such effect is temporary.
Also shadow casts onto fog or the likes cannot be used to reduce the complexity. Remember light bulb didn't invent yet, best answer explains how to track the target and then take him or her into custody.
**How to capture this serial thief with the ability to move between dimension through shadows?**
[Answer]
As some commenters have said, depending on what it means by "quality of shadows doesn't matter", and ignoring the obvious logistics of him casting no shadow, there are a few possible options.
**One:** If there is a certain threshold for which a shadow "counts" (e.g. requires a certain amount of surface area (removes the use of microscopic bumps) and is required to be a certain darkness (removes the use of very faint shadows), but assuming he can move to ANY shadow once in the world (even if it's not connected to the entry point), the obvious solution is to trap him in a room and fill it with a brilliant light before he can react. Since he casts no shadow, he will be unable to enter the shadow realm, if nothing else is in the room. He is now trapped.
**Two:** A slightly roundabout solution. If shadows need to be connected to the entry point for him to move around, eg. he needs to stay in the original shadow mass, lure him into a room and shut him in there. Light up the outside of the room, and make sure there are no gaps to slip through. He can only step into and out of the shadows in the room, and cannot get outside. Then, use a light source to shrink the shadow, until you can cover it with a box, then carefully close the box. He is now trapped in the darkness inside the box.
**Three:** Fight him with an energy-based, magic being, like a fire elemental. A fire elemental produces light and casts no shadow for the thief to exit into, and will illuminate the room to eliminate any other shadows. Knock him out, wear him out, something. He's now trapped.
Personally, his powers are most plausible if quality *does* matter. Even if it's a mild distinction, his abilities likely would need to be at least limited by the darkness of the shadow.
[Answer]
One very simple way, which is predicated on the 'as long as there is a sharp drop in the density of photons' condition:
**Trap him in the dark**
Set a light-tight box in such a way that it seems well lit. Once the wizard steps inside, extinguish the lights and close the door. If you do it fast enough there will then be no light inside the box and hence: no shadows.
Feeding the prisoner will be tricky, and best undertaken by blind gaolers, but it's possible to keep the wizard in an utterly black situation (figuratively and literally) and thus prevent him from jumping.
If you treat 'shadow' as 'any place that is dark' this answer doesn't work, but as you noted a drop from light to dark in your question: I think it might...
[Answer]
**Option 1:**
*Step one:* Put something shiny and valuable inside of an opaque sphere of some sort.
*Step two:* Wait til Mr Magic Thief goes inside the sphere.
*Step three:* Light up fires in 360 degrees around the sphere
*Step four:* Fill said sphere with hundreds of arrows. Locking this guy up will not be worth the effort.
**Option 2:**
*Step one:* Shoot him in the head when he isn't looking.
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Knock him unconscious when he isn't aware (or poison his food to put him in a long sleep, something like that. That is the step to "capture" him. I don't think there's another simpler method (A good frying pan hit to the head and it's done).
Then :
1. Put him to the side of a cliff (nail him for a more dramatic effect). If the thief tries to escape, he'll drop in the ocean to an almost certain death (If you can provide a cliff that would give a 10 minutes downfall, you're in business). Since he can't fly, he wouldn't be able to do anything but fall. You can still feed him by dropping food from a rope. If the thief was to take the rope to go up, the person above would just cut it.
2. If you have access to more drastic means, trap him in an iceberg (That would require some magic). I've never been trapped in an iceberg, but I don't think you'd have any shadow since the ice refracts the light.
3. Keep him drugged 24/7 so he's never awake. Good luck to flee in that case.
4. Dismember him. Without legs or arms, he won't travel far in 10 minutes.
5. If the mage travels with whatever makes contact with him (like his clothes), you could melt metal to his feet (painful, for sure). This way, even in the "dark world", the metal would still be in contact with him and he couldn't move.
(There's a lack of science behind my answer, my apologies but I'm no scientist)
[Answer]
*Trap him in the middle of the ocean.*
If everything in the mirror realm is simply an image that cannot harm or contain him, then the moment he gets out of the boat he is in, he'd simply plummet hundreds of feet to the ocean floor and be unable to get back up.
Failing that, 10 minutes of shadow swimming is not going to get him terribly far. The transparency of the ocean would mean there are no sharply defined shadows to use.
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In a setting I'm working on, a creepy fungus-based ecosystem exists in a cave network below the Earth's surface.
I don't know how/if this is an answerable question, but -- how many miles (I don't need anything specific -- just an order of magnitude) of subterranean caves could exist (specifically under North America and the Pacific Ocean, if it matters) before it started to have a notable impacts on other systems (geological, water, whatever) that could lead modern scientists to discover there must be huge caverns down there?
There are small entrances to the surface world, but these would be a non-factor for the most part, as the caverns are home to a fungoid race who would kill intruders.
If there's no way to make this work realistically in a modern scientific framework, I'll just go high fantasy, but I'm curious about if there's anything realistic about the idea.
[Answer]
There are caves everywhere that are completely unknown - or at least unmapped - by humans... miles and miles of them. However, caves are very rarely particularly large, usually no more than a few hundred meters across at most, and typically only a few metres across or less, and when they are located underwater, they rarely if ever are dry and not filled with water. A cave beneath the pacific ocean would realistically be filled with water, and *salt* water at that.
Completely underwater caves are often larger than dry caves, because the buoyancy and pressure of the water reduces the tendency of large caves to collapse.
I suspect that the OP wants large dry caves under the oceans in which to have their fungoid race live there. I would doubt that any caves that large could exist in reality even if flooded. It's probably best to make them a fantasy element, and drop a casual line from a scientist who says that he or she never thought that such a place could exist. Fantasy caves for a fantasy fungoid race would be fitting.
[Answer]
In general we don’t have a lot of high-resolution data about things under the ground. The only ways to “see” underground features at any depth are by measuring tiny variations in the Earth’s gravitational field (gravimetry), or by setting off explosive charges and measuring the reflected shockwaves (seismic surveys).
Both of these are mainly done to search for new oil and gas fields. Seismic surveys have better resolution (tens of meters), but cover a relatively small area and are expensive to do. Gravimetry can cover a wide area – it can be done from satellites, though I don’t know if any useful scans of the whole planet have ever been done – but the resolution is even worse, and the data is complicated to interpret.
As I understand it, most places on Earth have never been surveyed in enough detail to detect even large cave systems. Even if the survey was done, it would be proprietary data, so no one would hear about it unless it looked like there was oil there, or if the data were unusual enough that someone could raise quite a lot of money to investigate. And the survey wouldn’t happen in the first place if oil companies didn’t think there was oil there, or if they couldn’t drill there because it was a populated area, for instance.
As you note, caves can be inferred in other ways. In the Mendip hills where I used to live, water is known to circulate underground (scientists can track this with marker isotopes and such), and there are lots of known caves, so it is reasonable to assume there are other, unknown caves. They could be huge and connected, or maybe there are thousands of tiny pockets; there’s no pressing reason for anyone to spend huge amounts to find out. If there weren’t millions of people using water in the area, we wouldn’t even know this much.
One thing I would point out, though, is that if there was weird life in those hidden caves, that *might* be detected, and attract investigation. Unless the cave biome was completely sealed, and I don’t know if that’s feasible, the water coming out of it would contain spores and metabolites and stuff, so you’d have unusual ecologies around springs at the surface. (But this could still go undetected in a remote area).
[Answer]
So it would seem that the only means the surface-dwellers have of detecting these caves is if they caused (a) geological changes (eg: sink-holes) or (b) unexplained reduction in surface water supplies.
**Regarding (a):**
I would hazard a guess that the maximum sub-terranean cave volume that can be accommodated without impacting the earth's surface will be determined by the factors that civil engineers and mining engineers are familiar with. Full disclosure: I am not either of these.
My guess is that these factors will include:
1. Cave volume vs depth below surface. At a given depth, there will be a maximum permitted cave volume before it begins to impact the surface. I am informed that this value increases with depth.
2. The geological profile of the cave location. Locations with dense igneous rock will support bigger caves than those with sedimentary rock, for example. If the cave system covers a large area then the rock will also vary across the extent of the cave formation.
**Regarding (b):**
Again, mining and civil engineers may be the best sources for opinions on this, and since this is regards to water perhaps add environmental scientists/engineers to that list.
If the changes to the surface water volumes was sudden, then the surface dwellers would notice and possibly investigate. However, their propensity to investigate in a scientific manner will depend on their technological capability, and the political and cultural circumstances - for example, a religious society whose leaders explain the sudden loss of water as "an act of God punishing a sinful people" would be less likely to pursue and fund an effective scientific investigation. This threshold for a detectable rate of change of water supply is therefore highly dependent upon the social construct of your fantasy world.
**Existing Cave Complexes**
Here is just one example of an existing cave system that is very large: the Cappadocia region of Turkey. At least 200 substantial cave systems have been found, many of which can accommodate a human population numbering in the thousands.
<https://www.easternturkeytour.org/underground-cappadocia-land-of-mystery/>
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**~50 million miles.**
The [Mammoth Cave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammoth_Cave_National_Park) in Kentucky is the world's largest dry cave. It's [700+ km long](https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/exploring-the-worlds-longest-known-cave.htm) over an area of 214 km^2.
This gives a ratio of 3.5 km/sq.km, allowing about 80 million km or 50 million miles of caves to potentially exist under North America.
Such a cave system would not go completely undiscovered with modern technology, since underground mapping by various methods is being done all the time in search for oil and other resources. For a maximum size that might go unnoticed, pick the largest area you think no one would ever look for oil, gas or ore under, and plan about 5 miles of cave per square mile.
Maybe there could be an explanation, e.g. if some piece of land was left to the natives. Say, an alt-history, where Alaska never sold, conquered, or developed, and was relegated to the Inuit as a compromise.
All caves below the ocean floor are fully flooded. There is no realistic mechanism or explanation that would allow naturally formed undersea caves to stay dry. Even caves under dry land tend to fill with water during the rain, and only stay dry if they are above sea level and able to eventually drain.
There are small pockets of air in some underwater caves, and a cave can stay partially dry under shallow and scattered bodies of water, such as pools, shallow lakes, and rivers. Large bodies of waters, such as lakes, inevitably seep into the cave below eventually.
A large well-known dry underwater cave used to exist under [Lake Peigneur](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Peigneur), although the cave was man-made. There are similar known incidents. In all cases, the water bodies above were shallow.
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I was watching this Minecraft Animation video based on a scientific concept about what would happen if we froze the Sun - **[What happens if we Freeze The Sun- Portrayed by Minecraft.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csgaOClMuq4)**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/buYXn.png)
In this video, some guy freezes the Sun. This scenario causes the Earth to freeze over, causing drastic changes to life. Finally, the protagonist unfreezes the Sun by blasting it with a Ray-Gun powered by the Earth's Core.
Obviously, this scenario has a lot of ridiculous loopholes. Since the Sun is so massive and there is a gargantuan amount of pressure at the Solar core, even if we brought down the Sun to a sufficiently low temperature, such that thermonuclear fusion stopped and we froze the Hydrogen-Helium mix of the Sun (very close to absolute zero), the compression of such a large mass due to cooling would cause it to heat up rapidly and reignite within maybe just a few years or even months, ruining the **Everybody-Freezes-to-Death** scenario. The Sun is way too massive, and as soon as it froze, it would again reignite and carry on as though nothing happened. Also, even if we managed to keep the Sun frozen, the amount of energy needed to thaw it back into a star would be too much, making the **Geothermal Ray-Gun** in that scenario utterly impossible.
So, inspired by this video, I worked on a story with an alternate scenario:
# Alternate Scenario
Let's say we have this really low-mass star, let's call it Eridanus. It's characteristics are:
* Mass - 0.0898 M☉
* Radius - 0.1192 R☉
* Bolometric luminosity - 0.000553 L☉
* Age - 6.8 BY
* Temperature - 2600 K
Eridanus is an ultracool, low-mass red dwarf, that has just one planet orbiting it. Let's call it Taurus.
Here are few details about Taurus I could work out:
* Mass - 2.4 Earth masses
* Radius - 9,780.83 KM
* Gravity - 10 m/s2
* Axial tilt - 19.8 degrees
* Mean Temperature - 12.8°C
* Day length - 23h 39min
* Semi-Major axis - 3,200,000 KM
Let's handwave away tidal locking for now, and assume that the planet is rotating perfectly normal, despite it orbiting a red dwarf (which have a notorious reputation for tidally locking planets within their habitable zone)
Let's assume that some evil Worldbuilding wizard decided to freeze Eridanus to wreak havoc on the orbiting planet's life-forms.
SNAP!
Eridanus has been frozen. It is no longer a star, but now a ball of solid hydrogen-helium with traces of heavier elements. All nuclear fusion has been stopped due to the fact that the star has been frozen down to nearly absolute zero.
Since light travels at a finite speed, it would take based on my calculations about 10.6740673534 seconds for the residents of this planet to notice that something has gone horribly wrong with their parent star.
The residents of this planet, called Villagers (named because this story was inspired by the Minecraft Animation about freezing the Sun mentioned above), soon detect that their skies are now suddenly dark, as if somebody "turned off" Eridanus. It doesn't take a long time for the Villager astronomers to realize that their parent star "Eridanus" has been frozen to absolute zero by some unknown force. This means that plants will die out very soon and animals will either resort to cannibalism/hunting other animals or starve to death. This also means that oxygen levels will plummet very quickly and sooner or later they will suffocate.
The Villager astronomers calculated how much time it would take for Eridanus to heat up and restart fusion reactions, and to their horror, they found out that since Eridanus is a small red-dwarf star, it would take nearly 100-10,000 years for Eridanus to thaw out and again initiate fusion reactions.
The Villagers are not stupid, they know that they are incapable of producing enough energy to again "artificially" thaw out Eridanus, no matter even if they used all of their energy resources (hydrocarbons, nuclear fuel, solar, hydro etc.) So, instead of foolishly wasting their time on searching for a solution, the Villagers use this plan to make sure they survive long term- "U-238 reactors"
Although Uranium-238 isn't fissile, it sure does produce heat. In fact, according to this *[article](https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/introduction/what-is-uranium-how-does-it-work.aspx#:%7E:text=U%2D238%20decays%20very%20slowly,to%20warm%20the%20Earth%27s%20core.)*, it produces nearly 0.1 watts/tonne as it decays. Since Uranium-238 is really abundant on Taurus, it is really easy for the Villagers
By using [WolframAlpha](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=10%2C000%2C000%20tonnes%20%2F%2019100%20kg%2Fm3), I can compute the amount of Uranium-238 required to generate 1 MW of heat, about 10 million tonnes. The volume of such an enormous mass of Uranium-238 is about 523,560 m3, or about half the volume of the Empire State Building. Such a large mass of uranium-238 can reach scorching temperatures due to its own radioactive decay.
First, the large quantity of U-238 is stored in an underground chamber, either natural, or hollowed out. Although Uranium-238 releases little energy due to radioactive decay, since there is nearly 10 **MILLION** tonnes of uranium clumped together, the intense heat produced causes the Uranium-238 to melt into a red-hot liquid. The Villagers position a boiler over the molten uranium. Water is then pumped through the boiler, which turns into steam and is used to spin a turbine, generating electricity.
The Villagers use this electricity to heat up their colonies, lighting for plants to grow and livestock rearing, and also most importantly, keep the atmosphere from freezing and falling to the surface as snow.
**Will the U-238 reactors function for 10,000 years, after which Eridanus thaws out, and becomes a star once more?**
**Notes**-
The technology of the Villagers is nearly the same as that of Humans in 2023, with a few advancements. Average use of electricity per Villager is about 12 KWh. They are not exactly a spacefaring species, but they do have a few active space stations, comparable in size to the Mir space station. The Villagers also use predominantly satellites for broadcasting and radio technology (Wi-fi, Portable Radio, phone calls etc.) They don't use photovoltaic cells for terrestrial power, due to the dimness of their parent star Eridanus, except in satellites. Formerly, wind and hydel was the predominant energy source for the villagers, but following the **Frozen Star**, they now use U-238 heaters for powering their homes.
The U-238 heaters do not need a constant resupply, as U-238 has a very long half-life of nearly 5 billion years.
My question is asking about, would they function for 10,000 years, without getting disrupted due to other factors such as leaking out of my reactor, or simply detonating its reactor due to the heat produced.
I am not asking **How long the fuel will last?** but **How long will the REACTOR last?**. I am not concerned with the fuel, as Uranium-238 is very abundant on Taurus, but I am concerned whether my "reactors" (which are nothing more than underground chambers storing molten U-238) will last, without blowing up/melting/leaking or any kind of damage.
[Answer]
Non-fissile decay of radioactives (including uranium and thorium in natural isotope ratios) is believed to be the primary source of internal heat for rocky planets like Earth (or, presumably, Taurus, since they have lots of U-238), accounting for about half the total 44 TW of internal heat flux from the Earth.
In other words, the Taurans are *already sitting on* this reactor and it's already producing heat (what we'd call geothermal); they just need to harness it via either Peltier junctions or by pumping water down into the ground and using heat exchangers to run steam turbines. The expected lifetime of such a "reactor" is around ten billion years (though by the time there's complex, industrialized life on the surface, roundly half of that has elapsed).
[Answer]
From Wikipedia about [Uranium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium-238)
>
> Around 99.284% of natural uranium's mass is uranium-238, which has a half-life of 4.468 billion years.
>
>
>
The above means that your decay heat will practically be stable on the time span of 10 thousand years.
However, there is no man-made artifact which has lasted usage for even a fraction of those 10 thousand years.
Archeological findings are found because they are buried underground and that protects them from wear and tear. Turbines, operating at high temperature and high stress, will not have the same luck. They will need frequent replacement, together with all the parts related to the power plants.
But before that, one might question if a civilization will last for 10 thousand years to maintain those power plants operative. Roman aqueducts and roads have sometimes being used until recent times, but those do not require the same level of maintenance and technology of a power plant. Once the knowledge is gone, you will have a hard time keeping things running.
[Answer]
#### Uranium 238 is Fertile
People still do not consider that modern nuclear technologies are very primitive. Current fission reactors extract only a tiny percentage of the energy available from the nuclear fuel and then throw it away as a nuclear waste.
Uranium 238 is a fertile material which can be turned into fissile by bombarding it with neutrons. It can be done in a fast reactor coupling it with other fissile materials. Or, it can be done with a particle accelerator. If the accelerator is done with modern technologies the energy required to generate the neutrons will be less than the energy released by the bombarded uranium. Another option would be a neutron gun made coupling a material like beryllium and a low grade nuclear waste.
So, the answer is yes U-238 can be used in a way or the other.
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[Question]
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I have conceptualized a disease that rapidly kills cells in the human body and replaces them with modified copies over a period of 7-10 days. After this time, every cell in the infected person's body should be replaced with altered equivalents that confer biological immortality. Since the "disease" is actually caused by a certain entity's biology-warping powers, the immune system is unable to protect against it.
My question is this: What would actually happen to somebody whose cells were rapidly dying and being replaced like this? I'm afraid that the results might be catastrophic, and I'm not sure it would even be possible to survive the process. My current most dire estimate is that the symptoms might resemble body-wide necrosis in every organ, or extensive radiation burns throughout the body's tissues.
I am hoping that the reality is not so severe as this, since I can at most afford for the external symptoms to be about as severe as a mid-level sunburn (and preferably not detectable at all). But if that isn't realistic, I may have to rethink the timeframe of the infection or invent an alternative.
[Answer]
## Bootstrap to immortality
@Halfthawed raises a fascinating point that I'd like to run with.
The concern is: since it sounds like this is all being accomplished via the body's normal mechanisms, you'll need to take into account what it looks like when all those mechanisms run at ludicrous speed™️. That means: each cell will require a ton of energy and nutrients, and produce a lot of waste. Presumably it's the same amount that occur during normal replacement, but what's special in this case is that every cell is doing this near-simultaneously.
Following that train of thought, I'd expect that the kidneys will be put through hell trying to filter that much waste from the bloodstream in such a short time. Maybe that's fatal, maybe not. Other systems will face similar challenges.
So I think your entity will recognize that it needs to *bootstrap* this process: upgrade specific organs in a particular order to accommodate subsequent steps of the metamorphosis.
I can't tell you what order is best: perhaps gut + kidneys, then heart, then lungs, then liver & pancreas... I really don't know. But, I think *that* is what will dictate the symptoms, and so it will present as a kind of roving malaise accompanied throughout by significantly increased appetite and diarrhea.
Another way to accomplish this would be grow additional organs temporarily which are designed to bridge the gap, and which get absorbed back into the body after the metamorphosis is complete. That would probably manifest itself as a tremendous appetite during growth, and possibly some mild physical discomfort that's hard to pin down because the body is now [stuffed full of organs](https://mtv.mtvnimages.com/uri/mgid:file:http:shared:mtv.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Invader-Zim-7-1459367854.gif?quality=.8&height=265&width=358). Then during the metamorphosis proper, that part of the body would probably be unusually warm because of all the blood flowing through it.
[Answer]
>
> rapidly kills cells in the human body and replaces them with modified
> copies over a period of 7-10 days. After this time, every cell in the
> infected person's body should be replaced with altered equivalents
> that confer biological immortality.
>
>
>
**This is cancer.**
The modified copies of cells are modified to enable them to reproduce quickly and not die. They are malignant cancer cells. Through a variety of methods the proliferating modified cells starve out or otherwise kill the native cells. The problems is that the modified cells lack the specialized functions of the cells in organs that keep the whole organism alive and when these organs fail the modified cells die with the organism.
Unless they escape the organism. [Hela cells](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa) for example are such cells, and these are alive and well in the world. These immortal cells escaped their host 70 years ago and are maintained artificially in many sites around the world. Hela cells escaped with help but transmissible cancers escape and propagate from host to host on their own - [transmissible clam cancer](https://elifesciences.org/for-the-press/664e1cb7/how-a-contagious-cancer-spread-among-clams) being a frighteningly weird example.
[Answer]
I'm no biologist but I will answer your question to the best of my ability.
**In short:**
Because cells are growing faster, you will not only produce friendly cells but also dangerous cells. Your immune system might not be able to fight those dangerous cells off quick enough. And that way you might get diseases. *(e.g. Cancer)*
**Long 'explanation'**
As long as the overall rate of cellular biosynthesis (production of biomolecules or anabolism) is greater than the overall rate of cellular degradation. You should be fine. Though keep in mind, that normal cells get 'corrupted' sometimes, which means that your body sometimes just screws up. If that happens the body might make cells that aren't good for you (for example cancer.) Normally you wouldn't have to worry about that. Because your body can defend itself against that, But if too many of these 'corrupted' cells are created the disease might grow and your body will not be able to defend itself.
Now Because cells are growing really fast in this scenario 'corrupted' cells are created much faster. Therefore your immune system would need to work faster and harder, Most humans would not be able to do that.
[Answer]
If the new cells are advanced enough to both perfectly mimic the function of the old cells, **and** slurp up the remains of the dead ones so that it doesn't have to be excreted through the body's normal cleanup systems and could, instead be used to fuel further transformation, then theoretically this could be accomplished with little outward sign at all.
Of course, a cell type that advanced would probably confer far more than just biological immortality, first subverting and replacing the immune system with something amenable to resculpting the body, and then replacing everything with a maximally functional copy... Kind of like the concept behind Captain America. And the intelligence level of the genetic programming necessary to pull this off would also open the door to rapid healing, among other things. And if you're going to mess with someone like this, not doing all that while you're at it should, at least, draw a little criticism from any other deities/angels/sufficiently-advanced-technologists for a waste of an opportunity.
Alternatively, since your goal is biological immortality, there's not much reason to replace the cells at faster than their normal replacement rate. This process would take years, but so what? All the tissues with fast turnover tend to be the ones which start to show signs of age first, and they'd be replaced quickly. And if it takes ten years for the last scraps of bone to be replaced... Who's going to notice? Inject a few immortal stem cells and make them a tiny bit more aggressive about moving in and taking over and the person's outward appearance of aging will effectively stop within a couple weeks, and fully stop for practical purposes within a year or two.
Your third option is to just do it fast enough that the person calls in sick, isn't responsive for a couple days, and then is back like nothing happened. Harden the skin into a chrysalis so nothing leaks out when you melt everything but the brain, heart, and lungs into raw, nutrient soup for a while, and they just feel icky, take some cold medicine, fall asleep, and wake up three days later hungry and dehydrated but seemingly fine with no memory of what happened aside from fading nightmares.
[Answer]
**You Would Be Better Off Using Machinery**
If you are wanting to avoid hand-waving of unbelievable amounts of nasty puss and other necrotic and biological waste materials plus a ridiculous amount of fever heat, you need to have this handled by machinery.
This process requires a great deal of energy input to rearrange DNA, create corresponding body systems for long-term structural maintenance and repair as well as handle the immense amount of energy needed to fund the transformation plus the waste heat.
That machinery could be an enclosing coffin-like affair, nano-tech or something like a transporter that analyzes the person at the molecular level, transmutes them to energy and then back again to matter in the new form. Regardless, it's a lot less, well, yucky, than the alternative.
As others have suggested, a cocoon would be a way to do the equivalent of the first machine in biological form but it still needs to provide for mass energy input and waste heat disposal somehow. Maybe a dragon-like creature that eats people and excretes the new version?
To poop thou becomest and from poop thou returnest?
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[Question]
[
I'm writing a story about an angel, demon hybrid, and I wanted to know about the required maintenance of Angel wings, or in this case Dangel wings (what I call demon/angel hybrids). Since his wings are more similar to an angel's [or birds] but has the color scheme of a demon [dark colors]. Any suggestions?
[Answer]
**Dust baths**
One interesting thing birds do (which I learned from Big Bird) is take dust baths. They kick up a lot of dust on the ground and it helps remove excess oil from their feathers which makes it harder to fly. It's hard to imagine angels rolling around in the dirt, but maybe they have a satchel of angel dust (no, not *that* angel dust) they carry around for this purpose. Maybe it has other magical properties too.
**Fashion**
Humans spend a lot of time and creative energy styling their hair and clothing. Maybe angels would do the same for feathers. Perhaps dying, or small cosmetic clipping that doesn't hinder flight. Maybe there are even some angels who prefer radical but impractical styles, like human mohawks.
[Answer]
Well, if you're wondering about how wings are maintained, and since your character's wings are more akin to that of a bird's I'd look up stuff on bird behavior and how they clean their wings. However, I can provide knowledge that birds clean their wings by combing their feathers with their beaks. Therefore, maybe your character might have some sort of comb to brush out his wings with.
[Answer]
#### You Preen My Wings, and I'll Preen Yours
In [another world](https://cbbforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=182702#p182702) where winged folk called Denê figure prominently, one of the first relationships a youngster learns to cultivate is that of preening partner. This friend is someone that you've come to like and get along with and is ultimately a relationship of trust. This is especially true for boys, whose wings grow rather longer than girls', but regardless of one's persuasion, there are always those bits that can't be reached by nimble fingers or crafty tools in one's own hand. And anyway, it's so much nicer to have someone to chat with and who can do a proper job of feather maintenance!
**Scratching the Itch:** Probably the most common action is that of scratching an itch. Notice how the fellow in the illustration is scratching parallel to his feather shafts. Unlike hair, which is relatively soft and pliant, feathers are rather harder and more rigid. Scratching vigorously across the shafts can pull feathers out and cause irritation.
Most parts of one's wing can be reached with one's hands. To scratch the ventral wing, just rotate your hand the way you would to scratch your shoulder. To scratch the dorsal side, simply cross your arm and your wing.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/GlrlJ.jpg)
**Preening Partner:** Most aspects of wing maintenance can be done by an individual on herself, but it's much more convenient and comfortable, not to mention social, for a friend or lover to do this for you.
Just sit down next to your partner, spread your wings, maybe do a nice arm & wing stretch, and wait for your partner to get to business.
Just jab him in the ribs if he doesn't wake up right away!
Usually Denê will take care of each other's backs first. This way they can save the face-to-face preening for last. They have psychological, spiritual and social reasons for preferring face-to-face communication that your winged folk may not share, so they might choose a different order.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/mk2W8.jpg)
**Tool of the Art:** Fingers are really good at quick, basic, and emergency preening. They can smooth ruffled feathers, pick out debris, pluck severely damaged feathers, assess damage to skin, muscles, and bones underneath. But your Angels will probably also have tools specific to the tasks at wing.
A *carman* is a kind of all-purpose preening tool. It is a nicely carved piece of wood with a handle and a tapered, slightly curving end. Kind of like a single toothed comb. These come in a variety of sizes and are useful for straightening larger feathers, scratching itches, digging out long strands of yarn that your little sister tucked up around your feathers whilst you were asleep, and the like.
There are many varieties of *carman*, some serving special purposes like resetting the barbs while others are general purpose. One of the author's own *carman* is pictured here. It was made from an old cooking fork and is about nine inches long.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Rsrtb.png)
**The Big Picture:** Preening one's friend involves more than just a simple task of resetting out of place feathers. Combing out the hair and perhaps setting it in plaits or braids or tails, applying basic body paint, applying decorations in the hair and feathers --- these are all things friends and partners do for each other.
It's kind of up to each individual, partnership, or friend cohort as to what, if any, order arrangements are made in. One common order for preening the wings is to begin with That Spot in the middle of the back that's so hard to reach. On a Tana's body, this area is a little chaotic: there are tertiary wing feathers, thoracic feathers, thoracic hairs all converging in one area. Special care has to be taken here, especially if hair gets tangled around feathers. Usually a smaller *carman* will do the trick!
Moving along the upper wing-arm the alar tertiary feathers are addressed next --- in the first image, this is the part of the wing-arm that is angled slightly downward. Then we'll move along to the the lower wing-arm and take care of the alar secondaries. The tertiaries and secondaries are generally fairly short and smaller tools are appropriate. This is the part of the wing-arm that is angled upwards. The wing-wrist signals the transition from wing-arm to wing-hand. It is here that one finds the long primary feathers. In boys, these can grow two to three feet long. Even so, deft hands and ordinary tools can sort out the worst preening issues that rough and tumble games, fights, duels and other activities can punish one's wings with!
Lastly, if, like the Denê, your Angels have alulae, the wing-thumbs, it's really nice to have a preening partner who can clear out any debris, smooth off any chipped bits or rough edges, sharpen & shape the talons, and apply an appropriate tint to its surface.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Dejs2.jpg)
**A Note on the Molt:** One thing all Denê have in common is that feathers do not last forever! They periodically undergo a rather uncomfortable and socially awkward stretch of time where everything itches, their feathers fall out, and tempers can become a bit touchy.
An understanding partner or friend with some cooling and calming salves is a real godsend! Especially if he can corral said little sister away from poking at sore spots and tickling the already ticklesome itchy spots!
Feathers make nice cat toys and other useful articles, but the harvest is a true pain!
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/jjaOV.png)
**A Note on Anatomy:** Depending on the anatomical structure of your Angels' wings, some of the above information may vary. A Tana's wing anatomy closely mirrors that of his arms and legs, as you'll see in the final image. The wing is divided into three parts, just as are the other limbs. The proximal and distal wing-arm comprises the single *axla* and the parallel *siphon* and *calalmelus*, which like the radius / ulna and tibia / fibula rotate along a common axis.
Last comes the wing-hand with its *gonials* and *phalanges*. Denê have two long digits in the wing-hand corresponding to the fingers and toes of the other limbs and an *alula* that corresponds to the thumb. Their wing-thumbs are rather mobile but relatively short and are hensile in nature.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/W2t7M.png)
[Answer]
**Preening**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6ojQ3.png)
Dark feathers is no problem -- there are already many dark feathery things on the planet, and they maintain their wings the same way as the light feathery things.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/aJ1Bz.jpg)
This is called preening. This is when you take any bugs or parasites out of the skin, rearrange the feathers into optimal flying conditions, and smooth out the layer of oil that coats the feathers. Usually the oil comes from a gland on the bird's back:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Rj3NO.jpg)
Part of preening is to spread the oil in a thin layer over all the feathers. Sometimes dust baths are needed to prevent clumping. The oil is waterproof and makes the wings better for flying.
You have a layer of oil too! If you have ever scrubbed your hands red with some chemical like bleach, alcohol, or too much soap, what has happened is the oil has rubbed off.
Birds preen in pairs, because they have no arms and cannot easily reach every part of their own body. Your Dangels have an easier time with their arms and opposable thumbs.
But perhaps they have trouble preening the base of the wings. Get your best bro to help with that. Wait you mean you have no bros, are the only Dangel in existence? Daaamn bro that's harsh.
[Answer]
**Do they really *need* wings?**
You're a new contributor, so I'll explain that sometime you'll get an answer that's labeled a **Frame Challenge**. That's a nice way of saying "Can we think a little more about your question?"
In your case, I'd like to remind you that in the Bible, angels don't have the appearance of winged humans. As I recall, they were varied and often non-human looking. The winged-human image began with, I believe, Renaissance painters or something.
My point is, if you're asking about wing maintenance because you want Dangels to have them, that's fine. But if you think it's a problem any such creature **must** have, remember that angels can any power God wants them to have -- shapeshifting, teleporting, or anything that obviates the need for wings.
As for a angel/demon hybrid -- it could have any power or physical characteristics you want. Spiritual creatures don't have genes, so they wouldn't be bound by genetics!
[Answer]
## Angels' wings do not require maintenance
Angels are divine creatures created by a deity for the express purpose of worshipping that deity. Their anatomy is dictated by that deity, not by some base evolutionary process.
An angel is essentially a soul given form. Angels may *look like* humans, but they are not humans. Angels may have wings that *look like* the wings of birds, but they are not birds' wings. Angels may be able to fly, but the mechanism of flight is not aerodynamic in nature, i.e. they do not flap their wings for the purpose of generating lift.
Thus, angels' wings do not require any care whatsoever.
For the same reasons:
* angels do not need to brush their teeth
* angels do not emit unpleasant body odor
* angels do not require food or water (although they *can* eat & drink)
* angels do not eliminate
* angels do not get muscle cramps
* angels do not get liverspots
* angels do not get diabetes
* angels do not get cancer
* angels do not get kidney stones
* angels do not get hemorrhoids, have to ride the bus to a proctologist's office to get a prescription and one of those torus butt-pillows, and buy Preparation H from the pharmacist
* angels do not get eczema
* angels do not get COVID-19
... and so on.
Angels *do* sneeze. It's weird, I know, but I don't make the rules.
[Answer]
# **Spiritual, not physical, maintenance is required**
The angel/demon hybrid suggests you're approaching this from a species/genealogical angle (heh) so this may not be applicable, but here's an alternate idea:
**God has angels.** These angels are higher beings (winged, immortal) meant to watch over and protect humans. Their faith/good deeds maintain the integrity of their wings (and immortality).
**El diablo/Satan/Beelzebub/etc has demons** who are also higher beings. For them, ill deeds/mischief/wickedness maintains their wings.
Sometimes an angel or demon "switches teams". Their new liege maintains their wings/immortality, and this may be reflected by physiological shifts (ex: wing color change).
Occasionally, an angel or demon may decide they can't really be bothered with all this good/evil and decides they want a bit of that *la dolce vita*. Neither entity wants slackers, so they eventually lose their wings. Maybe holy lightning / unholy fire smites them after their descent/ascent, maybe they become human and mortal, maybe it's Maybelline something else
**This system doesn't account for the angel/demon hybrid's wings? Of course! They're an anomaly!** They could be calculatingly playing each side just enough to maintain their wings, or they could be an unholy/holy (choose as appropriate) abomination! It's not common—this makes them an interesting figure in your world.
This answer draws from the generic western "cloud god with holy angels" trope, but it could just as well be adapted. Maybe there's more than one "team" (i.e., not just one god vs one satan). Maybe it's not cut-and-dry good vs. evil (instead of good/evil deeds it's just acts that further their patron's aims). Maybe "gods" are akin to nobility and what we have is metaphysical warring houses. It's your story!
This answer has drawn some inspiration from
>
> the Brazilian TV show "[Nobody's Looking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobody%27s_Looking)"
>
>
>
(mentioning it constitutes a spoiler, I suppose), which could also provide you with some inspiration.
[Answer]
I'll be starting with the second part of your question - "would they even need to?":
I think it's important in character building, when creating characters that are based on pre-existing mythological ones, to decide early on how much do they differ from the original ones, if they do at all. Of course to do that you need to understand the original sources and how these beings are classically depicted first. Since we're talking about angels and demons maybe you could do a bit of research first - I'm not suggesting you go through all the Bible and scriptures as that would take ages, but you could look up some research done about angels and demons specifically. - Start maybe by looking up "Angelology" and "Demonology". There are a lot of sources out there.
Okay, now, need of research notwithstanding, let's try to give you some specific help. I did do some bible studies because when you're Italian you basically grow up doing catechism after-classes up until you finish middle school. And there's Religion that is taught in high school too so...
To give you the basic, classical, universally understood nature of angels as we studied it:
God created them first, and he created them to be perfect - because they're so, they're finite, and their nature and resolve/ideas do not change once they choose a path, be it to be in service of the Lord or the opposite, to fight against Him. The reason why there's no forgiveness or redemption possible for the Demons and Satan is because being angels (even tho "ex" ones) their resolve is not malleable or changeable as that of humans, they're eternal beings much like the earth - not immobile but pretty much set on its path.
Of course with them being as close to perfection as the Lord could manage (apparently with a few hiccups along the way if dear Luci is anything to go by) they don't have the same necessities other creatures have: they don't need to eat, sleep, they feed off the glory and light of the Lord and all of that. They don't get old, fatigued or dirty either. It goes unsaid that a classical angel would not need to "mantain" its wings or any part of its body.
Also! Keep in mind that the image you have of angels (basically very beautiful humans with white wings, halos and superpowers) only applies to the *lower ones*. Anything below a Cherubim can have those characteristics, but the more powerful an angel is (Cherubim, Seraphim etc) the more... weird it looks. We're talking wheels of fire, multiple wings with eyes, three-faced creatures and more. The "classic" angel look would apply to archangels, lower angels, Guardian ones and not much else.
Of course, angels as well as demons can take on any form they wish. They can look like any kind of human or animal when they need to be around mortals. It is also stated that a human could not look directly at the true form of a "superior" angel because the vision would drive them to madness or they would simply not understand it.
To wrap this up, thus is the classic version of the angels. When we're talking fantasy books, movies etc, literally *anything* goes. Once you get the original understanding of these beings you can change them however you like. My favourite manga had angels who could not survive with their wings being cut off because they would become mindless monsters if that happened. So really, you can do anything you like. You could have angels with different wing colors based on their rank or powers or whatever. Your fantasy is the only limit here!
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[Question]
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I am continuing to evolve my [neo-feudal America](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/227018/origins-of-the-feudal-lords-of-america) after it falls from superpower status, [basing this evolution on political science research](https://web.archive.org/web/20120319221311/http://kms1.isn.ethz.ch/serviceengine/Files/ISN/96894/ichaptersection_singledocument/D52C839B-6A34-48DD-98E1-BE33926FCE17/en/chapter14.pdf) which links such an evolution to the privatization of security.
The theories in that research form the premise in my world, they are canonical. They are immutable in the story. Answers claiming “it doesn’t work like that” relying on competing political theories may as well also say Peter Pan can’t fly. It does in my story, because he does in his story.
In essence, a “Lord” is a security provider who is providing a polity essentials which the State can not or will not provide. Specifically, these are family empires or dynasties in my story. In the story, the State also lacks resources (tax dollars, manpower, and equipment superiority) to police the reforming second-world nation.
After removing one pillar of democracy in that other question, my current problem is how to physically gather the general public around the Lords, disadvantaging self-sustaining and independent communities (without making them wholly impossible).
I am planning to do this by placing housing out of reach of the common man (assuming that I have already mostly removed the middle class in the other question).
# What mechanism can give neo-feudal Lords in a post-superpower America a large advantage in providing general housing?
Free access to energy and information can both be variables in my world, but I would prefer only one of these handicaps underlie an answer.
**Note:** In my research I have found that there is a growing opinion that [South Africa has formed a neo-feudal state today](https://www.newgeography.com/content/006689-feudalism-and-stagnation-south-africa).
[Answer]
As a variant on the answer proposed by The Square-Cube Law, if the Lord is the security provider I assume he also acts as law enforcement. Very cynically, law enforcement is just a monopoly on force that allows the state to enforce their rules. The Lord is the head of law enforcement and by extension the head of state.
Now rather than just doing anything he wants, he may be able to maintain moral high ground by pointing to a set of consistent rules that are claimed to protect the citizens. Those rules may be the laws of the old United States, but they can also be "community rules" that he basically made up, or had a community assembly create.
Now, a collection of laws can accomplish the Lords monopoly on housing. For example:
1. The Lord has somehow legally acquired all property in the Stronghold (whether through confiscation, purchase or any other law, which may include laws he made himself for that purpose). The borders of the "Stronghold" is the borders of what the Lord owns. Depending on how fractured the situation is and the power of the Lord, it might be a section of land, a city, a county or larger. But anyway, to live in a Stronghold is to live on the Lord's land and to live under his protection, as his security apparatus upholds the laws against murder, theft, etc.
2. Living outside a stronghold in the Hinterlands makes you an outlaw. As in "outside the law"; you do not have the protection of the law (I.E. a Lord).
3. Depending on how things are outside the stronghold that might be an incentive in itself with bandits preying on people. These bandits may or may not be welcome to trade their ill-gotten gains at a Stronghold, or might even live in a Stronghold. People might gather together for protection out in the Hinterlands, but if anyone rises to power in such a community they basically become a Lord themselves. Though a minor one.
4. If things outside the Strongholds are not inherently dangerous, the Lord might make them so. For instance, a law might state that outlaws are inherently criminal. Why else would they live outside the reach of the law? So the Lord's patrols will range out into the Hinterlands and chase out these criminals and burn down their dwellings.
5. Lords might also allow some people to live outside their Strongholds. If the Strongholds are the centers of commerce due to their security and law enforcement, then farmers might be allowed to live untouched outside the Stronghold, as they'll have to come to the Stronghold and be pay the sales tax in order to sell their produce.
Of course, an important part is probably also that the Lords are not a monopoly. Some might own all the land and chase out freesteaders. Some might be genuine security providers. Some might welcome the presence of a neighbouring democratic city state while others would abhor it.
[Answer]
### Out Price Real-estate
The situation you are describing sounds very close to the state of what is happening in Egypt right now.
In Egypt, the average working class income is equivalent to about 148-2615 USD per month with 400 USD being considered a good income, but in many areas, the average cost of a home is over 1 million USD. Their housing market became inflated like this because of the number of wealthy immigrants and upper-class tycoons who can afford buy these outrageously priced homes, but when native Egyptians started not being able to afford homes, the government stepped in and started providing government owned homes through massive subsidies... which further inflated the housing market to the point that no normal person can make enough in a lifetime to buy a home.
Because there is so much incentive to sell or rent overpriced housing to the government, it is worth it for the rich to invest in real-estate without actually having to be held back by real market forces. This also gives the nobility easy access to the state coffers. If they can build a home for 10,000\$ and sell it to the government for 1,000,000\$ then you can redirect a vast portion of the tax budget directly into the pockets of the wealthy. This makes it almost impossible to loose money as a wealthy person or to profit if you don't already have money.
So for your Feudal USA to work, you should start by crashing the economy causing working class income to plummet. Then blame the crash on the current trend of Keynesian economics. This will cause the people to sway in the direction of Austrian School Capitalism to avoid deficit spending. Since popular demand will create laws that prevent the government from abusing fiat deficit spending to fix the problem, they will need to turn to private investors for bailouts. This will give the wealthy a LOT of pollical influence as leaders are forced to accept more and more biased deals to get the funding they need. So, these investors will be able to push for laws and programs that advantage them in exchange for keeping the government running. Over time these laws and programs will establish the rich as an undisputable nobility and allow them to create an outpriced real-estate market like you see in Egypt today.
[Answer]
>
> (...) America (...)
>
>
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# Guns
True to feudalism, every square foot of land belongs to a lord. They will be constantly checking who is building what on their turf. And if you pull a little pig and build your own cot somewhere without their permission so you can live without paying rent, you will get a visit from the big bad wolf. Only instead of blowing your house down with with his own breath, he is going to blow your house down with bullets.
If you want to keep your subscription to life you can only live in places and buildings approved by your feudal lord.
[Answer]
## **New American Belief System: Houses are handed out by God. People building their own house are heritics.**
**Priests replace central government**
I'd introduce religion. Your central entity "America" should at least have *some* power, maybe symbolic power, to fit the ideas Marina Caparini advocates. Part of her conclusion is this reasoning,
>
> This chapter has underscored that the empirical reality on the ground –
> i.e. the multiple actors now engaged in producing security – must be the
> basis of any attempt to coordinate or control security governance. There remains a vital role for the state in providing security, but it
> is also clear that this is no longer an exclusive role; many other
> actors are now acting as security providers in developing and
> developed states, and can contribute to oversight and control. The
> state remains a vital actor in the governance of security and in
> defending the public interest.
>
>
>
Now in your scenario, the American state has lost control completely. It has no money, land or power. When you'd allow that, your Feudal Lords will become independent warlords, like Somalia or (indeed) Haiti. How to resolve this, to maintain Caparini's ideas, without sacrificing the rest of your story by introducing a strong federal government?
You could give a priest cast or "bishops" the coordinative task Marina Caparini advocates. They would symbolically unite the Feudal Lords under one banner, the New American Belief System.
**Houses are God's property**
In the medieval analogue: all *formal* land ownership resided with the king and the church. In your scenario, there will be Feudal Lords who own the land, sanctified by the priests. These Feudal Lords will "lend" the houses and agriculture parcels to the people, with God's blessing. Part of the new American Belief System would be, that God owns all the land and all the houses. And whoever obeys God is entitled to inhabit a house.
**Heretics**
Of course, the priest cast would decide who obeys God.. and they will defend the interests of the Feudal Lords at the same time.
Now suppose the "lending" of house, or agricultural land would be denied to anyone who wants to live far away from the Feudal Lord. These people could be designated heretics and prosecuted. Such people do not want to "borrow" a house from God, they must be non-believers.
**The church services will be in, or near the Feudal Lord's house**
This will enforce it further. A community would form, centered around the Feudal Lord's house, because people go to church there. If attending these church services would be obligatory for every American, people living far away will have a problem anyway. The middle class is gone, no one can afford a car.
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***NEO AMERICA 2077***
most of security & governement power getting in the hand of a wealthy elit? sound pretty cyberpunk to me, it's alway a question of how do you frame it. but beside joke, here are some the thing you can do to force people to live under those new lord
[I would recomand watching this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTN64g9lA2g) which is a tought experiment of how you would have a feudal society coming from off the wall capitalism. it does go a bit up there toward the end, but it would probably help you in your reasearch
**no acess to the grid**
Water and electricity acess are extremly important, but the state either won't provide those anymore, or at least won't do the construction work itself to bring you those amenity. And the cost of those infrastructure is just way to high for any individual.
even if you could build a home yourself (which you can't really for anything more advance than a log cabin).
**But is it that different from today situation**
in a sens, it's honestly pretty much like today: you only have acess to a home by either paying a landlord or having a bank giving you a loan. you are forced to bow to welthier forces to get acess to hom already. just make it so you can't get a loan to buy anymore and voila
**Straight up warfare**
if the state won't do any of the security work? then it's not hard to see said lord pretty much destroy by force any settlment not under sufficient protection. depending on how evilish you want them to be, it could be common knowledge they do it, they can invent convoluted law explaining that settlement even if not on "their" propriety is still impacting their value therefore they have the right to, or for an extra degree of deniability pay under the table some mercenary to harass them, play dumb to it
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**Corruption**
You want a large group of Lords who form independent from the government and take over some of their responsibilities.
The Lords were originally a coalition of businessmen who became politicians, in order to support their business. For example they fiddled with the tax rates, or had the government only buy from their business and not their competitors.
Eventually they got so good at this, they transferred some of the governments responsibilities back to their business collective. They gave their companies exclusive security rights in perpetuity. Then they dismantled the military and police force and sold their second hand equioment to SecuriTech for peanuts.
Even if the leaders of the government are also the CEOs of SecuriTech, they want the job done privately, since there are fewer legal restrictions that way.
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All housing grade lumber is genetically modified to only grow under some conditions the lord controls., high tech options: radio waves, nanobots
Lowtech: fertilizer bees
Peasants get an allotment of these usable materials.
Other woods aren't strong enough or rot.
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# Welfare State
The Lords of America provide a big welfare state, but they want things in exchange, one of they is that you must obey the rules of the "good morals" of the Empire, and server the lords of protection.
If you have a House without the authorization of the Lords of Protection you are harming the welfare of other, thus you will be punished.
# Edit in request of the OP
First of all is necessary to recall that the definition of Socialism is
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> Public ownership of the means of production (Ball et al., n.d.)
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## Feudalism is a type of socialism
If you want to avoid Marxism without losing realism you must have clear what is Feudalism.
Is necessary to notice that an on-command economy (e.i. a planned economy by the planners) requires *de-facto* socialism. This is because for the planner to be able to execute their plans, they must violate private property rights, therefore making the relevant means of production *de-facto* state property, and state property is at least a form of public property.
Feudalism existed in the times before the existence of the economic sciences, at age where was thought that there is no way of gain something without harm another, as Mises reflects in this quote
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> None of the great modern inventions would have been put to use if the mentality of the pre-capitalistic era had not been thoroughly demolished by the economists. What is commonly called the "industrial revolution" was an offspring of the ideological revolution brought about by the doctrines of the economists. The economists exploded the old tenets: that it is unfair and unjust to outdo a competitor by producing better and cheaper goods; that it is iniquitous to deviate from the traditional methods of production; that machines are an evil because they bring about unemployment; that it is one of the tasks of civil government to prevent efficient businessmen from getting rich and to protect the less efficient against the competition of the more efficient; that to restrict the freedom of entrepreneurs by government compulsion or by coercion on the part of other social powers is an appropriate means to promote a nation's well-being. British political economy and French Physiocracy were the pacemakers of modern capitalism. It is they that made possible the progress of the natural sciences that has heaped benefits upon the masses. (Von Mises, 1998, pp. 8-9)
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In the feudalism no one can start a business because it will harm others, unless the feudal lord approves it in the grace given by their „divine right to rule“.
Feudalism is (at an significant level) on-command economy thus a veriety of Socialism.
By your other post I think that the historical form of feudalism is no far-away of your conception of neo-feudalism.
## Marx's fundamental contribution of to socialism in general
Is Important that denote that Socialism was in most practical ways refuted by the Classical Economics on the word of Ludwig von Mises
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> The great upheaval was born out of the historical situation existing in the middle of the nineteenth century. The economists had entirely demolished the fantastic delusions of the socialist utopians. The deficiencies of the classical system prevented them from comprehending why every socialist plan must be unrealizable; but they knew enough to demonstrate the futility of all socialist schemes produced up to their time. The communist ideas were done for. The socialists were absolutely unable to raise any objection to the devastating criticism of their schemes and to advance any argument in their favor. It seemed as if socialism was dead forever. (Von Mises, 1998, pp. 73-74)
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The qualitative contribution made by Marx for the entirety of socialism was to deny reason. In the word if Ludwig von Mises
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> Only one way could lead the socialists out of this impasse. They
> could attack logic and reason and substitute mystical intuition for
> ratiocination. It was the historical role of Karl Marx to propose this solution (Von Mises, 1998, p. 74)
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This fundamental contribution towards socialism by Marx can be prevented by either denying knowledge to the public, double-think, or accept the contribution of Marx in the denial of reason.
## The differentiation of Marxism from another Socialism
The characteristic idea concept of Marxism that distinguished it from another forms of Socialism is that Marxism alleges to the class division of the „Proletariat“ and the „Bourgueis“. Claiming that the „Bourgeois exploits the Proletariat“ so they must rebel against the „Bourgeois“. This class divide is the more distinctive trait of Marxism.
There is also alienation a very hard to even understand concept that, but that their principal objective is attack the traditional values, and replace their with socialism.
The Encyclopedia Britannica appears to agree that Class Struggle and Alienation are the most important traits of Marxism.
## Welfare without Marxism
You just can prevent you of class struggle and alienation characteristics, and you would have avoided the most characteristic traits of Marxism.
Certainly Welfare State no is necessary something Marxist. As the fact that the Welfare State in the German Imperie (Stolleis, 2013).
You could made the lords of America to give a minimal welfare state (e.i. they give the minimal needed so that the populous no doubt they, after the obvious today the ration of chocolate is 10g is one gram more then the yesterday ration of 11g), where pre-capitalistic economic thought is the norm.
Other possibility would be make a cult around the Lords of America that makes their affirmations given as if they were direct gods, so they no doubt the pretext that they give by their activities. (This also is one form of enforce the previous possibility)
You said that „Free access to energy and information can both be variables in my world, but I would prefer only one of these handicaps underlie an answer.“. Certainly if you want to force pre-capitalistic economic thought you need the cult of before, restrict information or a Big Brother.
I think that force pre-capitaistic economic thought by the means of information denying is perfect for your world.
# References
Ball, T. and Dagger, . Richard (Invalid Date). socialism. Encyclopedia Britannica. <https://www.britannica.com/topic/socialism>
Stolleis, M. (2013). Origins of the German welfare state: Social policy in Germany to 1945. Springer.
Von Mises, L. (1981). Socialism: An economic and sociological analysis. LibertyClassics.
Von Mises, L. (1998). Human action: A treatise on economics. Ludwig Von Mises Institute.
**PD:** You are very unrealistic thinking private companies can grow bigger than any state can protect.
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I'm writing a mental health dystopia set in the not-so-distant future. I've included hovercars, but I'm looking for another transportation means that is faster and not as cliché. The ideal system should be a network with the capacity to be hacked (this is integral to the storyline). I've considered teleportation, but I'd prefer something scientifically probable and not too complex to justify. Anything with psychological basis would be helpful as the book has a strong theme of psychology.
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**Hyperloop**
The hyperloop system are transport pods to transport trains in tubes. One of the most energy consuming parts of travel is resistance from the air. To remove this as much as possible, the tubes are sucked to practically a vacuum. This allows for incredible speeds of travel. Although currently speeds between 1000 and 1300 km/h (about 700 to 800 mph) are quoted as maximum speeds, a lot depends on the propulsion technology as well as how sharp the bends are. In a futuristic setting, they might go much faster. They are meant to be (near) fully autonomous, able to communicate with each pod in the tube and move accordingly. In the future there might be some leeway to have tubes split so they can go high speed into different directions, allowing for further travel options.
The hyperloop would be for travelling great distances in short time, but you still need to go to the station as well as your final destination with different transport. You could make the pods themselves able to go out of the tube and be fully autonomous driving pods on the normal road, driven by computers/AI. Autonomous cars are definitely the future, able to communicate with each other and autonomously move over the road, removing the need for all traffic lights and other traffic regulation measures, with possible exceptions for pedestrian crossings.
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**Downloading**
It is impossible for humans to travel at lightspeed. No matter how much we try, doing so would cost more energy than exists in the universe and we would go slower than light speed. However, if we digitize the human consciousness then we can instead download into new bodies at the speed of light.
**There can only be one**
To ensure there is no duplication and there is continuity, once the process is complete, the old body has all the information deleted. If you travel from your body your main memory is made so it doesn't form memories.
**Are you sure you want to delete the file You.conciousness?**
However, this creates a problem, if you fail to download properly, but send the "download complete" message, then the old body deletes the data. This means the most current version is the only reliable version, even if there is packet loss. This means that if it is hacked you can kill, or do major mental damage, to the person in transit. Because of this the "download complete" message is incredibly secure. It is basically impossible to forge the message.
**Two solutions**
1. The message is not as secure as we thought
2. Duplicate hack
**The message is not as secure as we thought.**
A flaw in the security system is found and now download complete messages can be sent by man in the middle attacks. Because of this people will either die or suffer from memory or other cognition loss.
**Duplicate hack**
While it is impossible to forge the message it is possible to ensure that the message is not received, and interfere with checksums on the data transfer. At this point you have two options, have two duplicates walk around or suspend both person's activities. In the best case scenario this would minorly inconvenience a large community for a day and then a month until the problem could be fixed. in the worst case scenario some people would use months or even years if the person who downloaded couldn't be confirmed to be fully downloaded.
**Downloading is fast, easy, and convenient**
Just don't lose your head.
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You might want to check out "The Roads Must Roll", a short story by Robert Heinlein. [The Roads Must Roll](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll)
He describes a transportation network based on moving walkways, but walkways moving at speeds up to 100mph.
A variant on @Graham's idea would be individual air transport, where rush hour traffic is guided by swarm intelligence and forms, well, a swarm, or a [murmuration.](https://www.lancswt.org.uk/blog/charlotte-varela/starling-murmuration-facts#:%7E:text=What%20is%20a%20murmuration%20of,above%20a%20communal%20roosting%20site.) I can imagine an ambulance or a renegade driver driving through the middle causing not chaos, but synchronous patterns across the sky as each member of the swarm reacts to the movements of its neighbours.
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Hive mind drones.
Drones are finding more and more applications while still depending, in most of the cases, on a human operator, and if they are given sufficient computing power to autonomously manage their flight and flight plan with respect to their surrounding, they would start behaving like a swarm or a flock.
Now you can imagine what would happen if somebody messed up with those computers: Hitchcock's the birds 2.0
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## Gravity Folding
I think that the obvious solution here is to use gravity to fold space to make two points one. Public stations would be available which would consist of a series of sending and receiving booths so you could dial your destination, hit a button and you would be instantly there as space itself is folded over.
This removes the messy conundrum of "Aren't we just dying every time we use this thing?" you get with transporters. You are actually physically moving there in your own original body. It's instantaneous and energy efficient.
Now, mind you that you have to wear your sensory deprivation helmet and make sure it is sealed and the white noise generators active, as well as the farraday cage being properly maintained since the shortcut through space sort of leads through Hell as shown in the documentary Event Horizon, but that is a small price to pay for cheap, environmentally friendly instant transportation right?
Surely the fact that even if everything goes right you are surrounded by a plain of infinite suffering and evil every time you pop on down to work wouldn't weigh on people. And certainly the corporation who gets their bid accepted because it is the lowest wouldn't cut any corners on the construction of the safety equipment. Why, they'd get a fine if they did that!
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**Self-driving mid-capacity buses**
I'm going to go with a less futuristic answer than others, though still of a near-future type.
The most efficient transport within a city are likely going to be self-driving vans or small buses that respond to an Uber-like app. This will allow doorstop-to-destination functionality for a cost quite similar to current bus fare.
This gives you a system that is that has the potential to be hacked (either the app itself or the self-driving network). It also gives the potential for a someone to have psychological issues with turning over your safety to a machine.
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### Adaptive cruise, road trains and "platooning"
[Adaptive cruise control](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_cruise_control) allows your car to follow the car in front and adjust your speed to maintain a safe distance. This was conceived in the 1980s or earlier as an obvious application of radar principles, but the technology to apply this in mass-market cars did not catch up until the 2000s.
After its conception though, people immediately realised that it was possible to use this to create "road trains" of many vehicles travelling in the same direction, all maintaining a distance from a lead vehicle. This is commonly also called "platooning", since the phrase "road train" is also used to describe long tractor-trailer rigs.
On the road today, cars have to maintain a separation which allows the adaptive cruise to react to any action of the car in front. If the car in front is driving automatically though, it can broadcast a notification of what it plans to do *before* it does it, allowing all the cars behind it in the platoon to take appropriate action. With this system in place, cars can travel at the maximum legal speed virtually bumper-to-bumper. [This New Scientist article](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22272-out-of-control-driving-in-a-platoon-of-hands-free-cars/) 9 years ago describes it pretty well, albeit that the cars in their platoon were still allowing more space than could be possible in the future. The article of course also predates the recent development in self-driving vehicles by Tesla and others.
I note that you do ask for "faster" than flying cars. Cars are generally slower - even something as basic as a Piper Super Cub has a cruise speed of 115mph. However cars can maintain that speed largely regardless of wind strength, whereas any aircraft flying into the wind will have their ground speed directly reduced by the wind speed. Modern speed limits are also set at a level which reduces casualties from the inevitable human inability to maintain perfect concentration over long periods. Fully autonomous vehicles have no such lapses in concentration, so it could be practical for them to be allowed to drive much faster.
Fuel/energy consumption is significantly better on a car too - a Prius will give you 50mpg at speed, whereas you're looking at 25mpg on the Super Cub. Cars could also be designed for platooning to improve slipstreaming, which would further boost their efficiency. If you're looking into the future, energy usage is likely to be more of a thing. Flying has many benefits, but energy efficiency is not one of them.
The implications for hacking should be clear here. It only takes one vehicle to do something unexpected, and several miles of road become a nose-to-tail mass of twisted metal as all the vehicles in the "platoon" go down like dominoes. Hack everyone at the same time and the entire road network dies instantly, along with a decent percentage of the people on it.
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If you want to get the chance for something "futuristic" but unique, take a look at the trend.
Cellphones got smaller and far more powerful. Say you contract your hover cars until they are fancy boots.
There is nothing more dignified than wearing your ride.
Knee-high repulsors. Everyone with a driving license uses the Fly-Assist. Hack the network and now everyone is grounded or unable to fly to certain destinations. Their own boots led them astray.
Have the heroes try to fly without assist! It should be illegal and beyond dangerous! Suicidal even!
That makes for juicy adventure :-D
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## Parabolic tunnels
One proposed future transportation method I've heard of is making underground tunnels in the shape of a parabola. Vacuum out the air out and put in maglev or whatnot (all of suggestions in @Trioxidane's hyperloop answer still apply), but the advantage of the parabolic tunnel is that you could essentially just *drop* a train car on one end, letting gravity do most of the work, and the momentum it gains on the way down is just about enough to bring it all the way back up the other side. Such a vehicle would require almost no energy, and could be incredibly fast - I've heard estimates of going between New York and London in 1 hour.
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It seems that if magic and technology are not mutually destructive (Arcanum) and the magic is not powered by a random number generator to produce inconsistent dangerous results, some form of magitech and magiscience are to follow, since mages are already a kind of scientists if you'll squint your eyes.
But I'm writing a world that should be with magic in it (Well, technically, ancient alien klarketech networks that can be "queried" to do things - but for all intents and purposes it's fantasy magic), but also a relatively grounded realistic steampunk society in the middle of the industrial revolution and the plights of the wild unrestricted capitalism - basically Victorian England. Magic is there, but while it can make some relatively impressive feats, it shouldn't affect the society (power is authority, if you can shoot lightning bolts from your fingertips, your kin **will** become a ruling class) or technological progress (If you have healing spells, why develop medicine or pharmaceutics? If you can create balls of light from thin air that last for days, why bother with the electricity?) and it should really take the "exotic with the tint of mythical" seat in the narrative.
So far my broad solution was: there are no spells and no mana. Magic is accessible through the various ancient artifacts that only can be found in the world and not made, and most of them can do only a specific thing or set of things, and overall they're a finite resource, there's only that much of them out there. At the first glance, this seems to fix a lot of issues by making the magic to be impossible to industrialize yet still be reliable and useful.
However, this solution poses a problem that the governments and rulers will naturally seek the artifacts to keep it to themselves, and will outlaw their ownage to keep their monopoly on power. This also returns to the problem of making the people in power to be essentially jacked-up supermages who can only be challenged by other supermages, but it seems this would be a thing with any kind of magic. Any kind of restrictions putted on who can use the magic seemingly only restricts the pool of ponential rulers but doesn't eliminate the basic fact that it's way easier to usurp the power when you can lit whole city blocks on fire at will. While "all mages are royal tyrants" is a fun idea, I'm not sure it's a direction I want the story to move in.
Also, while this helps with putting the magic into the "rare and mythical" camp, it is possible that eventually and relatively soon all artifacts would be locked away in the treasuries of nobles and kings, essentially removing them from the world at large. Maybe one solution would be for the kingdoms to fall and be abandoned periodically, which would allow for their treasuries to be sacked and looted over time, returning the artifacts into "circulation" (with the side effect of creating all those treasure caches and lost cities that those adventurers are always seeking out and escape daring traps within), but I'm unsure about how well that would actually work.
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## Humanity already has the ability to heal naturally, so why invent bandages?
Humanity can, in fact, do a lot of things. We can talk to each other over distances by shouting. We can write on paper. We can run. So why invent telephones, typewriters, and automobiles? Because there's always a reason to do something faster, better, or for longer periods of time, etc. Magic might (maybe) slow the march of science, but it wouldn't stop it unless your magic is godlike — but that's really boring and you seem to want a story that incorporates both magic and science.
So really, it's all about developing a consistent magic system that has practical limitations: such as humanity's ability to heal not being particularly good at fixing compound fractures or the desire to develop vaccines because the natural method requires a honking boatload of death before immunity sets in.
**1. Just as using your muscles tires the muscles and using your mind tires the mind, using magic tires the magic user**
Your magic system requires a method of exhausting the magic user. Why develop agriculture in its most primitive form if a wave of your godlike finger provides all the food you need whenever you need it or shields you from climate when it becomes inconvenient? That way-too-overused concept of "mana" helps us conceptualize the consequences of effort — but you needn't be so detailed if you don't want to. All you really need to do is create a basic chart of spell complexity and spell consequence vs. level of exhaustion. And remember, human muscle use leads to needing food, water, rest, cleanliness... it has *several* consequences that all represent some form of consumption necessary for restoration. A well-designed magic system will do something similar.
**2. Magic shouldn't be magic, you really can't do everything with it**
I'm fond of Tolkien's *Lord of the Rings.* Who isn't on this Stack? But there are lessons to be learned. None of the magic users or magic-using species could do *just anything.* Using only Gandalf (much less the Elves, etc.): he couldn't build buildings or just kill the Balrog or feed his troops or guarantee anyone's safety. He was presented as incredibly powerful, but also incredibly limited. In fact, the more mundane the task, the less likely his magic has any significant benefit at all.
Your magic system should do the same. Frankly, every magic system must do the same. Remember, godlike characters are boring. Nobody can relate to them and there's no way to develop a serious crisis around them. Why do you need shovels? Maybe it's because magic can't form a trench in anything resembling a straight line.
**3. Who wants to stand around for hours while others use the consequences of magic?**
I've once thought that the most valuable use of a superpower that opened portals to other locations would be to get a job at FedEx. Think about it. You'd be worth millions... *billions...* saving time, maintenance, equipment, fuel... what an asset you'd be. And then I realized that it would be the most *boring* career you could possibly have. I mean, you can open *gates to other places...* and what are you doing? You're sitting on a chair sipping protein shakes and Red Bulls day in and day out while forklifts move pallets of boxes to and fro. Blech.
Perhaps more to the point, why would you invent a telescope? Because asking a magic user to stand there for hours losing sleep while you look at the night sky might cost you more than a couple of beers. And if you could use the magic yourself, then you're concentrating on that spell while you're also concentrating on using that spell and scribbling down your findings. *Headache!*
**4. Everyone cannot use magic equally.**
Humans all have muscles, so why invent pallet jacks, dollies, or wheelbarrows? The obvious reason is to move more material more conveniently than any muscle-bound Adonis with rippling pecs ever could. But tools such as those are also *equalizers.* They allow people of many levels of strength to accomplish the same basic task.
In reality, your magic-using peoples won't be capable of using magic equally. It's entirely undesirable that they could (godlike...). Children must learn skills while talent grows. Adults may be proficient at one type of magic but not another. One individual may be capable of moving the proverbial mountain while another has trouble pushing a spoon. That diversity of capability will drive the desire to develop science that equalizes what people can do.
And that assumes that you don't have some people who simply have no skill for magic. My sister can play the piano. The got her college degree in it. She's amazing. While I... I've either been taught or taught myself to play three times. It doesn't stick. I have no natural creativity behind what I do and can't use the skill for any practical purpose (or even an impractical purpose... other than to make people laugh, maybe). You'll have magic users in these kinds of groups, too.
**5. Magic has an ecological price**
When you're a young society plowing the ground with horses and clearing trees with axes you don't need to worry about the fact that you're the reason the soil is eroding with every rainstorm and being depleted of nutrients with every crop. You don't realize that a herd of wild cows periodically culled by wolves doesn't poison the ground with too much dung but keeping dozens or a hundred head of cattle in one spot all the time does. I'm not a fan (or an advocate) of the "Bad Human!" political agenda — but I'm not a fool, either (at least not often, I hope).
Newton's third law has an amazing number of applications. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. *For every effort to rise above nature there's an equal and opposite consequence to nature.* Agriculture leads to erosion. Animal husbandry leads to soil poisoning. All of it affects the natural carbon cycle. Etc. Most authors never bother to mine this potentially useful consequence of magic to fill their stories with purpose — using magic to overcome nature ***negatively affects nature.***
Obviously the more impressive the magic the more disastrous the effect, and you'll need to develop your magic system so that there are a variety of effects great and small (if you're thinking, "Star Trek warp speed limitations!" you're on the right track).
**Conclusion**
Magic has limitations. It must or your stories will be two-dimensional and boring. Your characters will feel like cardboard and be unrelatable.
And because it has limitations — there will be science.
*Necessity is the mother of invention.*
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If you squint, this sounds like the Strugatzky' brothers Wayside Picnic - inscrutable aliens visit the earth and leave wrecked zones behind, in these strange artifacts can be found. While the governments try to monopolize these zones, a semi criminal culture of stalkers exist who sneak into these zones to retrieve artifacts. One reason the govvernments fail to monopolize the zones is that being near or in them takes a toll on anyones mental health (most stalkers would agree that they are not entirely normal, but don't see it as a bad things. They just love the zone), while normal people have a harder time understanding these zones. Read the book, it's good! Or watch Tarkovskies movie version, very slow and a bit puzzling but also very good.
How to transplant these ideas into your setting?
* Artifacts are discovered in heaps and troves, every now and then a a new bunch is discovered over the period of a few years or decades and upends the political power structure. Or rather your story or game is set during interesting times.
* Artifacts work better for people, or are easier understood by people who are somewhat ouside rigid power structures: It turns out 'magic' is more an art than a science and requires a creative impulse
* this is so because the artifacts are not endowed with intelligence, but with a sense of taste and aesthetics, both of which change.
* alternatively, sane people are just plain bad at magic, and the type of insanity it takes to be good at it makes it hard to take and hold power for long - if you trust yourself to do neurodivergence justice in your writing.
Now that I've written this, im 99% sure there's an urban fantasy with a witch who does Abramovic style performance art out there, somehwere.
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## Horrible side effects
Magic has a cost. Namely, using the artifacts and, to some extent, merely being close to them harms you. Notably, the harm does not necessarily have to be obvious to the users. Perhaps the alien magitech artifacts run off of highly radioactive power sources or have a similar but different effect that fits your story better.
So you will have certain people using magic for some purposes sporadically, either because they don't know better or have a purpose that outweighs the costs. But these won't be very powerful people for long because they will die an unpleasant death sooner than later. There won't be a hereditary class of powerful magic users, because even limited magic users who stopped using magic will be infertile at best or have dead or dying children killing the mother as well. And you won't have select few people collecting all the artifacts, since one artifact is bad but many of them together are much worse.
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You could make all the artifacts have a level of intelligence. They would die if they don't get used and don't think of things as right or wrong. I.E if they weren't being used they would kill their masters and run into the wild or to someone they think would do better. As an added layer you could make it so some people can use the artifacts better than others so it would make it feel better about staying. This way the government wouldn't have the artifacts because they wouldn't show them love, or they wouldn't have them for long before the artifacts grew restless.
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Artifacts have minds of their own. Apparently. Alien, inscrutable minds.
If they aren't used by a wizard, they do their own thing. This may entail walking through the walls of your treasury -- even without feet. This may just be seeking out a wizard, but may be the start of magic that just is insane, not particularly useful or harmful -- your roses turn blue, random pathways are longer or shorter than they should be in Euclidean geometry, rain falls up occasionally.
Likewise they accept only certain people as wizards and perform only certain types of magic for them. Perhaps they were meant to be lowly, commoner artifacts -- all the royal and noble artifacts got destroyed in war -- and will do only mundane things, useful, but not for power-mongering. Perhaps royalty and nobility consider using them to be like *going into trade*; you might even be stripped of your noble or royal status by becoming a wizard. Still, you need some wizards around to channel this artifact before it turns wayward.
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Some easy rules for your scenario come to mind:
1. **Artifacts interfere with each other.** Trying to use the Staff of Power while wearing the Ring of Awesome will cause one or both to backfire. So no one person can become all powerful. Your tyrannical rulers may keep a particular nasty artifact for themselves, but they must also employ armies of goons to have widespread influence.
2. **Many artifacts in close proximity interfere *dangerously*.** Trying to fill your vault with a bunch of artifacts and at some point, they all explode or otherwise cause some terrible catastrophe. Authorities trying to store them away will have to do it many small vaults, which makes the job much harder. There is a much higher chance that thieves will steal them, and a higher chance that the authorities will try to keep them safe by putting them in the hands of their agents for active use instead of a vault.
3. **New artifacts are found frequently, and from many sources.** So while government expeditions are trying to find them, freelancers will too. So artifacts end up on the free market whether the government wants it or not.
As an aside, I'm not fond of "magitech" or "magiscience". It's magic to us here in reality, but if casting lighting from your hands is a real thing people can do in your fictional world, then that's not "magiscience" to the inhabitants, it's just science.
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I think, that technology developement would have problems only if magic can do everythig cheaper, more reliable and there is enougth of magic for nearly everyone.
So if there is something, at which magic does not work better, then technology can address that. If there are some limitations to magic, technology can complement it.
If magic items are of many different kinds, but not actually destructive, there is no reason for making me king, if I have one and somehow discover a way to use it at least for something.
Say I have "magic artefact" which is "solar powered cellphone able to reach even celphone-less peoples" - I can use it just for few hours total a day (then need to recharge it more hours on sun), I can talk to distatnt people all over the world (but I have to know their number, or just try some random and look, where I got connected). Soon I would have address book of lot (randomly placed) people, I can connect with and send messages there. Now there should be some couriers to get the message to its intended recipient in the city. Local wired phones, telegraphs of flag signalling would be good technology to get more use of this artefact. And if I have some battery left, but none actual customer, I could "poll" my contacts in distant cities, whether is there some message for our city waiting, to get more use of todays energy. Which means to build post-offices around people I found numbers for.
Also if there is a lot of similar "phones" (so it is not exclusive), there is no reason for king to own and guard each one, instead of having me to make the work with building the whole net and just tax me for the money I get and had right for priority servise anytime.
If I get the same target when I somehow "dial the same number" (maybe it needs some magic words like "Hey Siri call this number!" and as it is alien technology, I am not able understand the number system and my pronounciation is not perfect, so the artefact have to guess, what number I am trying to spell ...) but the target have to be awake, somehow accept the call (no thinking "it is the spam again for sure, I reject it") and be in relatively silent place and not hard working, to uderstand me - it looks more like magic and may prevent me from scanning all numbers. (And if there are millions of numbers, I could not discover all in my life anyway).
There could be unlimited number of types of artefacts, each working some different way (and maybe even one artefact may work different way for different users, as the activation spells depends not only on sound - which nobody repeats in totally identical way on full spectre from infrasound to ultrasound - but also on some other quality of user - say brainwaves, or some sound in heartbeat or who know what - so what is cellphone for me may work as colorfull torch for my brother - because of our difference it hears something more like "Hey Siri, glow with this color!" - and somebody else could be able invoke even two totally different effects).
Maybe I could use this artefact only for few years, and then it would wait for another user. (Technically something in my body changed over time too much and it no longer can uderstand me what I am trying to say - which would usually "degrade in reliability" before definitivly stop working).
Also not all artefacts look the same way and work the same way - and even similar artefact can have different sensitivity for all they degraded a little in differnt ways over millenia.
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This way you can
* have lot of artefacts
* which are not hoarded by nobility (or make nobility of their owners),
* which do not suppress technology (even in fields near their use) but even inspire its grow to complement that.
* which do a lot of spectacular or usefull magic
* in some locally consistent way
There can be many totally different effects some small, some bigger ("Hey Siri, start a rain!" which works only if there are clouds near, but incredible for farmers - as well as prevanting rain when is time to collect crop), just "sadly" no fireballs so far was discovered.
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Most answers are along the lines of somehow nerfing the power of magic/the artifacts. That's really the way to go so that people still have a reason for pursuing technology and not just hoarding what magic there is. If the magic can be counteracted with technology then there's even less reason for it to be hoarded.
Some more suggestions to add to the pile:
* Magic doesn't play well with iron, or some other easily accessible material. Sort of like the DnD principal of putting anything you want to keep hidden in a lead box to make it scry proof. I legitimately know people who always make sure the character has a lead box, just in case they want to keep something hidden from magic detection. To expand this, some artifact may make you invisible but walking through a loop of silver will break the invisibility. So now basically every building where there is any reason to be concerned about security will have thin silver wires embedded in the door and window frames. Its a known issue with a widely implemented solution, making your invisibility artifact largely useless in many instances.
For a more historically drawn example, medieval people thought cold iron didn't play well with magic. Hence putting horseshoes over the doorframes, wearing necklaces made of iron nails, etc.
* They're only situationally useful/usable. An artifact is really powerful, but only works on the night of a full moon. Or must be wielded by a prepubescent girl/a blind man/whatever. It requires some ritual or a specific list of components to work, which take forever to get together. If the circumstances have to be just right for it to be usable then people are going to start looking for alternatives that require less hoops to jump through. There's also little use in hoarding a thing that you may not ever be able to use.
* Magic is not good for you. In one of her novel's Kresley Cole had a ring that granted wishes. It was really good for about 3 uses, and then it started going into monkey's paw rules. The wish was still technically granted, but you wish it hadn't been. You've only got a few uses of the artifacts before things start going wrong. Or magic may just legitimately be bad for you. In BioShock the Lutece field and tear device can do amazing things. And its overuse caused Comstock to age rapidly and become infertile. Since these devices are alien in origin it may work similarly. You've maybe got a few free uses, after which your health starts to decline. Ditto for anyone around the artifacts being used. Ergo not something you'd want to pull out all the time and quite possibly not stored anywhere near you out of fear that even inert proximity may be shaving years off your life.
* This last one would be tricky to implement (by which I mean it'll mean more work building it into the world) but you could have a societal or religious reason for people reacting like the things are infected with cooties. The major religion says the things were made by demons and you forfeit your soul by using them. The tools were widely used by a culture that the current dominant culture views as abhorrent for whatever reason (ranging from perfectly reasonable to plain bigotry, whatever) and therefore magic is something those [insert slur]'s use. Or there's a prevailing belief that they cause insanity, because there were in fact some famous examples of people who used them going coo-coo for cocopuffs. In reality it was unrelated, but the general populace doesn't know that. General misinformation and/or flawed conclusions can create plenty of reasons people wouldn't want to risk it (Like people not eating tomatoes for a long time out of the mistaken belief that they were poison). All this wouldn't deter everyone obviously, but there would be enough societal pressure that people would think twice about using or even openly owning these things.
I hope one of these ideas can work for you.
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# Credits System
I'm taking this answer from a real life equivalent used already in the electricity industry. Each power plant is given a certain amount of "carbon credits," that is, permission to produce a certain level of pollution. There are a finite number of carbon credits allowed by the government, but businesses can buy, sell, and trade credits to compensate for their pollution. As more and more plants are added, the amount of credits available to each gets smaller and smaller, thus forcing businesses to pollute less. Electric providers hold auctions to buy and sell their credits, which end up functioning as a type of unofficial currency...
...So to tie it to your story.
Since there are a limited amount of artifacts, the market for artifacts would work in generally the same way. At first there might be a couple supermages who hold the artifacts. But the artifacts are also valuable- for instance, an alchemist who can make 1000 pounds of gold from lead is going to be happy to exchange his power for 1001 pounds of gold. He might also be willing to give a smaller spell, let's say immunity to fall damage, which he doesn't use often, in exchange for the lead he needs to make gold. As technology increases, the amount of people with the resources to be able to trade for artifacts will also increase, creating a virtual currency, where magic and technology can be traded equivalently. As long as your story doesn't include a dictator who holds all the magic before technology can catch up in terms of value, your magic and technology become a glorified barter system, and magic merchants or technology brokers become a valuable resource separate entirely from mages themselves.
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With the potential for an impact event to trigger volcanic activity on the opposite side of the planet, what is the largest plateau of flood basalt physically capable of forming on Earth, post-impact?
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Well, the maximum *possible* would be about 510 million square kilometres, eg. the surface area of the earth:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/lAkL5.jpg)
The hypothesised [Theia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theia_(planet)) impact would have probably resurfaced much of the earth.
The largest flood basalt actually found would be the [Siberian Traps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_Traps), a mere 7 million square kilometres. The problem is that no-one is really sure quite *why* [large igneous provinces](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_igneous_province#Large_igneous_province_formation) form, so there isn't really any useful theoretical work on their potential scale. The Siberian Traps look to be the largest that formed in the last 500 million years or so, and may or may not have been triggered by an impact event (the cause of the [Permian-Triassic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinction_event#Impact_event) extinction event hasn't been pinned down as yet). The fact that the traps are substantially larger than any others suggests that they represent an upper limit of possible flood basalt sizes... this of course isn't *guaranteed* to be true, but it does seem relatively plausible.
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The largest surface available on Earth is, of course, the entire surface of the planet.
An impact with enough energy to melt the entire crust would create a planet wide plateau of molten lava.
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I'm designing alien creatures for illustrations, and I'm just sketching some that might live in areas with a lot of geothermal activity. So basically, animals that live around geysers and hot steam. I know that land animals have some pretty amazing coping mechanisms when it comes to heat, but I couldn't really think of any when it comes to water creatures.
I was wondering, how I could (more or less) justify fish living in almost boiling hot water? Does anyone have an idea how fish or fish-like creatures could live in such hot water, given that the atmosphere contains a lot more O2 and there's still some in the water for the fish to breathe? I'm not a scientist but an artist, so please forgive me if I overlook something important here. :>
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The big problem is heat rejection. Cellular biology has similar constraints as heat engines, so for energetic creatures there needs to be a way to dispose of waste heat. At the temperatures of boiling water, proteins actually start changing form or denaturing, which is why a raw egg looks and behaves differently from a hard boiled egg.
For a fish, this might be dealt with by having a small surface to volume area, so the fish does not absorb too much heat, and having some sort of organ or structure which acts like a heat sink. When the fish approaches the maximum heat load it swims away from the volcanic vent and radiates heat into the cooler waters. Such a fish might look more like a beach ball or rugby ball than what we think if as a fish.
This could provide some interesting adaptations; the fish might have extensible structures like fins which act as radiators in the cooler water, shedding heat faster. Predators might lurk near the thermoclines, searching for mobile hot spots which allow them to zero in on prey. Creatures might even evolve like giant squids, with tentacles or similar structures to "fish" for prey or edible materials from the cooler areas outside the vents.
So in terms of illustration and design, you need to think of how the environment will affect the creature, and what sorts of adaptations will be needed to deal with them. A plump, football or rugby ball shape provides minimal surface to volume, limiting heat absorption. Large size actually helps since the interior volume increases as the cube of the size, while the exterior area only increases as the square of the size. The large interior mass could act as the heat sink. Once it swims out of the hot zone, it spreads large fins to radiate the heat (or maybe elaborate structures like a lionfish), but will have to contend with potential predators evolved to seek out hot spots in the water. Spines, poison, powerful jaws or even sheer size are all common defense mechanisms in the wild. Poisonous creatures often have very bright and distinctive colour schemes to announce to potential predators that they are poisonous.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/T16iV.jpg)
*Square Cube law*
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0n2Bq.jpg)
*Large size vs predator*
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/RSpb5.jpg)
*Lionfish. Large extensible fins, poison spines and bright colours all in one*
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/NZweL.jpg)
*A giant squid. This creature could lurk around the edges of the hot water vent and reach in to grab prey*
So think about the environment, and have some fun with it.
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There are a lot of such organisms right here on [Earth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrothermal_vent). Undersea volcanic activity produces hydro-thermal vents. These are places where water is heated and then rises out of the sea floor. Typically this also brings with it a wide variety of chemicals that are ordinarily not available in such quantity in the ocean water.
And there are organisms that find these chemicals tasty, and the temperature in the vented water quite comfortable. There is a huge variety of life, and a surprising total biomass. Though mostly it's not fish as such. For example there are tube worms that do a kind of filter feeding.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/kBbHE.jpg)
This picture is from [here on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrothermal_vent#/media/File:Riftia_tube_worm_colony_Galapagos_2011.jpg).
Mostly the life forms in these vents don't wander very far from the vent. They are adapted to the temperatures and feed on the chemicals that come out of them. If an entire ocean were as hot as these vents then likely there would be life forms more adapted to travelling around.
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Have you looked at the creatures that live on and around the [black smokers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrothermal_vent) on the mid-Atlantic Ridge? Many of the creatures there thrive in water that would flash to steam if it was at sea-level. They freeze to death if they get too far away from the 900°C water pouring at of the volcanic rocks. Most of these creatures are crustaceans though I'm not sure about the presence of bony fish in these ecosystems.
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Might I suggest you consider [armour-plating](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placodermi). The armor plating would enable the fish to swim into the super-heated water to feed off the bacterial matting/crustaceans/tube-worms then move-out to the slightly colder water to cool-down again. The plates themselves would be the equivalent of [Ganoid Scales](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_scale#Ganoid_scales) - a bony substance that continues to grow in plates or scales throughout the lifetime of the creatures.
The placoderms in the link above were primitive by the standards of modern fish, but then again the creatures living next to Geo-thermal vents may well have been there since the times of the origin of life.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6wUBA.jpg)
Attribution: Zhi-Kun Gai et al. / Dimitris Siskopoulos 2019 Sci-news.com
The above picture, a jaw-less primitive armored fish Rhegmaspis xiphoidea was recently discovered (as a fossil) in China.
They came in all sorts of forms, big and small, jaw-less and jawed.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/pctv1.jpg)
Attribution: First found, deviant art Oct 2013, artist "Hontor".
There are still examples today, but the adaptation would be for other reasons than protection from heat:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/WHrcY.jpg)
Attribution: SWNS.com, Daily Telegraph 18 July 2019.
For example the above picture of an armored sucker-mouth North-American catfish, found in a waterway in the UK.
Or another example, the "[Robust armored-gurnard](https://www.fishbase.se/summary/11665)", found in the waters off Sumatra:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ayRQR.png)
Attribution: duniabaru.com 2015.
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In my world, there is a monster that materializes as a childhood nightmare (nothing specific, just this general fear children feel when they are alone in the dark). I wonder what would be a nice way of defeating it? Light (which works for children in reality) would be too obvious and easy.
In this case, I am looking for an offensive measure that would still be somehow symbolic.
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# Distraction via Good Memories
If a child's fear is what materializes the "monster" then the lack of fear is what will defeat it (duh face palm answer down voted). Working with children in the past I have found that not reacting to what is causing them fear but staying calm and even talking about something off topic to be very helpful.
I was able to keep a child calm after he had fallen and his arm looked like a squiggly Tetris shape. He was crying and holding his arm being like a champion walking towards the building when my coworker saw his arm and started freaking out about calling an ambulance and .... after that the child was lost to his emotions and fear.
Breaking a child's focus on the danger / fear and giving a calm rock to feed off of will help dismantle the monster. (This is also dependent on a strong relationship between the child and the adult)
In terms of story having adults ask children to play, dance, bake a cake, ... anything to get the child to stop thinking on what is causing them fear. Every child who might be a target would have an adult tasked to keep the child's mind off of the monster.
Option 2: If the fear is just to intense then drugs. Just find a drug that prevents user from feeling fear. I heard that cocaine makes you feel god like maybe something similar or a completely made up one.
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**Rubber mallet.**
I have used this method successfully (n=2). Children feel defenseless in the dark. You don't want to give them a shotgun or a Bowie knife. You can give them a rubber mallet. A rubber mallet is not a toy. They are big, hefty tools. Even a kid can deliver a wallop with one should something need walloping, but she is unlikely to hurt herself by accident.
It is an empowering feeling, holding a rubber mallet in your hand, ready to whack something. Even for an adult! Also the rubber is grippy, and the mallet will stay put under a pillow.
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[Lucid dreaming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_dream)- through composure and self discipline, the child can be trained to become aware that the nightmare is a dream, and gain control over the dream's narrative. This could allow the child to actually fight back against the monster.
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# Cats†
Have you ever wondered why cats will sometimes stare, or even vocalize, at seemingly nothing? Suddenly dash across the house like a madman... err, mad-feline. It is because they can see these monsters forming. Or their fading remains. And cats are supernaturally gifted with claws and fangs that can shred the shadows of terror as easily as drapes. They can fit easily under the bed to reach the monsters. And like to curl up next to sleeping children to keep them safe.
Which is why you should never declaw your cat.
*†Or dogs if you must*
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## Blanket over head
I can't recall where I read the story (but it was probably an old one) and it's author or title, but there was a sci-fi short story that involved materialization of your fears - a chemical that made you see hallucinations that felt real enough that if the hallucination would kill you, you'd die. When the two protagonists understood the principle, they remembered the secret weapon against each of the monsters they had invented during their childhood - some were vulnerable to a water gun, some to loud noises, some feared mirrors, etc.
But then they encountered a horrible monster whose special power was that no secret weapons work against it... until they remembered what gave them invulnerability back when they were children which was to hide under a blanket - if you're shivering together with your buddy under a blanket with a flashlight, you may be scared, but none of your childhood nightmares are actually going to get you.
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A not serious answer, but if you want a more comic tone you could find it interesting...
You could try to trick the monster. Since it thrives in the dark, it hasn't good sight, so you could disguise a brave full-grown man (maybe a short one :) ) as a kid and let him in the child room with the lights turned off.
When the monster tries to manifest itself to frighten the child, the man greets it with a laugh and makes fun of it saying it isn't that frightening...
The poor monster, discouraged, flees in tears and won't be heard of anymore!
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1. Since some monsters come from under the end of the bed and grab your feet, I suggest a footboard combined with a guillotine. This will chop the monster's arms off while leaving the child's feet safe.
2. For monsters that are merely lurking under the bed, a simple lever that causes the bed to drop to the floor will effectively both flatten and trap the monster. The noise will alert the parents to come to the rescue.
3. Wardrobe monsters can be dealt with by placing a mat with razor-sharp spikes in front of the doors.
4. Monsters cannot get through glass (especially double-glazing) so a simple window-lock will suffice.
5. The usual bucket of ice water will stop a door monster in its tracks.
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Less lethal versions of the above can be made with a little ingenuity.
A little known secret is that monsters cannot abide rosewater so a couple of squirts from a simple spray bottle will send them running.
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Children are afraid of the dark because it is an unknown and they lack the confidence to take care of themselves. On the other hand when you become an adult you start to carry keys around with you. It is a symbol of taking your security into your own hands, leaving the house on your own and being responsible. The monster may hate the sound of jingling keys, which is why it usually flees when adults start to approach with keys jingling in their pockets.
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According to Susan (daughter to Death himself) an iron poker does wonders. The nastiest boogie woogie becomes remarkably compliant when beat over the head with an iron bar.
Terry Pratchett - The Hog Father
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Most science fiction stories and movies (from Star Trek to Close Encounters of the 3rd kind, ET, and many many others) assume one day we will eventually be able to contact **physically** the alien entities.
I mean: we can touch them, they can touch us, and we can interact freely inside the same physical space.
However (and even if they don´t talk about that in those stories), to arrive to that scenario, after the first encounter with a new alien civilization a "quarantine period" must have been established to confirm they have no pathogen microorganisms that may affect us (or vice versa). So my question about that matter is:
How long should be considered "enough" for a quarantine period before letting the aliens physically enter in our ecosystem?
Consider here on Earth we have diseases that have incubation periods of hours (Cholera) or even 10 years (the Kuru disease for example).
Please note I am not asking for the specific method of finding if they are dangerous or not. Perhaps the tests will be performed exposing bacteria to samples of their tissues, or exposing lab rats perhaps. I would like to know (independently of the type of tests) how much time should be invested in the "waiting to see if something happens".
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Frankly, unless we have an already perfect knowledge of trans-planet viruses, diseases, and the like, the *Safe* *Answer* is simple: **Indefinite**.
*But* humanity is impatient, so more likely it will be in stages of risk, whereas for one example, more and more people are allowed to interact with them every 10 Earth1 years. So if it turns out a certain problem takes 30 years to reveal itself, then by that time even under this method, relations can still be salvaged and humanity not wiped out.
Note: The *chosen* humans are kept in quarantine away from the others humans who have not yet been exposed to these new lifeforms, to prevent possible spread of unknown problems.
*So at very minimum 10 years, a reasonable time would be 100, and the safest would be never.*
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## It depends on how similar they are to us
The ideal situation is actually that their biochemistry is a little bit different but not completely incompatible. Let's look at the two extreme cases to see why that's the case:
**Case 1: Their biochemistry is identical.** An example of this would be that a thousand years ago an advanced alien race took samples of humans and spread them throughout the galaxy. Then when we encounter those now-extra-terrestrial humans, we can assume that any diseases they may be carrying, we would be susceptible to. In order to be safe, the quarantine period would have to be as long as the longest-known disease incubation period.
**Case 2: Their biochemistry is incompatible.** If the aliens required cyanide in the air they breathe, the quarantine period is forever - you will never be able to freely interact with them without dying, as they would be giving off cyanide even through their skin to make any physical contact a bad idea.
The sweet spot is where we can survive with the same atmosphere, temperature, etc. without being immediately lethal to each other, but our biochemistries are still as different as possible. My reasoning for this comes from [a previous answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/50710/6781) I gave. In short, there are lots of bacteria and viruses on Earth, but only a small percentage of them are capable of making us sick. They are able to make us sick because they have evolved to be able to get around our bodies' defenses. With different biochemistries, it will be very hard for their bacteria to adapt to us, and for our bacteria to adapt to them.
In my opinion, the initial quarantine isn't the big problem. The big problem is what happens 100 or 1000 years down the road, when we have been living together with the aliens for so long that their bacteria have had a chance to adapt to us. That's when you need to be worried about a plague sweeping through humanity.
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OK, let's look at two of my favorite shows.
* From [War of the Worlds (2005)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Worlds_(2005_film)) we hear the indomitable Morgan Freeman intone the phrase:
>
> From the moment the invaders arrived, breathed our air, ate, and drank, they were doomed. They were undone, destroyed, after all of man's weapons and devices had failed, by the tiniest creatures that God in His wisdom had put upon this Earth. By the toll of a billion deaths Man had earned his immunity, his right to survive among this planet's infinite organisms. And that right is ours against all challengers, for neither do men live, or die, in vain. ([Source](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JT8iWtH9DAc), sorry for the lousy audio)
>
>
>
* And from [Warehouse 13](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warehouse_13), a paraphrase from Artie (I honestly regret not having access to a youtube of this quote, I about died laughing when I first saw it):
>
> Would Thomas Edison have just picked it up? NO! He would have stuck it in a box! He would have wrapped it up and put it on a shelf until he was absolutely sure it wouldn't hurt him!
>
>
>
Therefore, there are only two plausible answers.
1. Our medical technology is sufficiently Clarkean in nature that we don't need a quarantine.
2. We never, ever, allow contact with an alien world, or ever allow anyone who'se visited an alien world to return to Earth. Never, ever, ever. And we put any aliens trying to visit our world in a box. Yup, and store it on the moon. Under moon rocks. And then we throw nukes at the moon rocks and aplogize to the alien diplomat via long distance communication later. Much later.
The one thing about H.G. Wells' *War of the Worlds* that no one ever thinks about is that all the humans would have died, too. The Martians would have brought their "tiniest organisms" with them.
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Answer to this question needs to take into account the context: while the visiting aliens might be aware of the sanitary risk (unless they are still stuck with the "pray and you will avoid sickness" sanitary method used by the westerners while exploring the Americas), it's not feasible to keep them put for ages waiting to be sure that they carry no diseases.
Also a similar concern would apply to them for themselves, with the addition of no world to back them up. So I imagine that the contact would take place in an environment set up to limit cross contamination as much as possible (no hugging and kissing, for example).
Based on this I would establish two separate classes: those who can come in touch with the visitors, and those who won't be allowed any contact.
The first set would then follow a progressively less strict isolation regime:
* first 40 days after the contact of complete isolation in a strictly separated environment, to rule out quick onset diseases.
* following 5 to 10 years of restricted contact with a limited set of non exposed people and frequent monitoring, to rule out slower onset diseases.
Meanwhile they could be monitored for "oddities" in their micro biome and health parameters, so that they could be released for public contact.
To be kept in mind is that 100% security can never be achieved, and a certain degree of risk has to be taken.
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It all depends on too many factors, so let me offer another view, not mentioned yet:
* There is another inteligent, skilled and ethical rase Threasan living on Thrae just couple of LY from Earth.
* They live long, so they can wait for light-slow communication. The problem is, they use some other unknown to us kind, not radio, so they did not hear us, we did not hear them, even when our respective signals reach the other party long time ago, it was not noticed.
* They have vaguelly similar biology as we have, so Earth was considered "habitable, but probably unhabitated" planet by them (and vice versa)
* FTL travel is possible, but it is way expensive to enter "hyperspace" and moreover it is more like firing gun - nearly all energy is spend on the start and the fuel undergo some kind of chain reaction affecting all fuel in chain-range like thousand miles around - so it is one way extra expensive ticket now, but they can get a lot of baggage with them on the fly for not so big additional cost.
* There is no exact evidence, that Earth is really habitable and usable for them
* Sending lot of automated sonds would be too expensive (in planetary range too expensive) and their Artifical Inteligence is not as good as their natural inteligence (especially in unexpected conditions)
* But they can send, say, about 10 Threasan (of both sex) and like year supply of food, air and such. And there is like thousands volunteers to one-way ticket (on the Earth would be for sure), willing to go even if they would die, but they would be HEROES and STARS, not mentioning all kind of possible scientific gain, they can collect there.
* There is even chance, that the Earth would be habitable, in which case they can survive lot of years and wait for next colonist and establish "new Threa" here (and live to their natural death seeing their grandchilds colonise new word)
* Also there is chance, that Earth would have a lot of unobtainium, so Thrae would send extra big and extra expensive second ship which could bring complete fuel factory and separated materials to compose fuel for way back and establish "both-way trade route"
* and third, it is even possible, that the special fueld can be found on Earth in easily collectable (and processible) form, so they could return on their own eventually.
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So one day with sound BLIP the Threasan ship pops out somewhere near Earth orbit (or not too far), with 10 aliens on board. They realise, that there is a lot of satelites, cities visible from orbit and such. They even found, that we try to comunicate, and while our radio technologies differs, we can use light reflections, pictures on ground (Nazca), or maybe lasers (not to cut them, but to direct light only on their ship), communication is somehow established. And now there is a problem what to do:
* They can just orbit Earth for year, comunicate and heroically die, maybe even ask us to help direct their ship (and our support ships too) into the Sun, to evade possible contamination. Nice, but they will die near big source of fuel (say salt water, 1 cubic mile needed) in their reach (quarantine==infinity).
* They can land somewhere anyway, hope to be able somehow work out secure contact and do not destroy any race. (And now it is on us, if we would cooperate, or if we just nuke them as invaders - and their next ship too)
* Thay can colonize moon instead, we would supply them with some food, air, etc to sustain them there for life long, even helping them establish colony there. Our scientist (well morsels first) would travel (one-way ticket for start) there and make another colony near them, with third colony in between.
For start the third colony would be one-way-in for both parties, they would send their food and their morsels the, we would send ours and if both morsels survive for a month both parties coud send more food and one or two volunteers. If even they survive and be seen as healthy by both ours and theirs medical technology (and we can microscope all kinds of microorganisms their for both parties knowledge), then more volunteers can go in and mix both technologies and materials and food and such, in relatively safe way.
After couple of months of human/Threasans living in third colony without any (unsolvable) problems. As humans food (or other sources) shows to be eatable by Threasans, they can survive for life long, joining third colony and theirs (so far uncontamined) for more space and comfort at (small) risc of long term infection. Also more screw for our colony and more volunteers for co-living. Eventually our colony (still uncontamined) would split to part, which would return to Earth and part, which would join common living space.
With our resourses and their knowledge and preparations there would be small long term colony living on Moon.
After some time (and I would think about two or four years) when no ubeatable infection would detected by any medical technology it would probably be safe to create colony on Earth, in something like Area 52 (or Section 9) as well as create similat colony establishment on Noom orbiting Thrae. Their ship would refuel, (and as we know, that their food is basically eatable by humans too,) then without reserves for a year, but only for a days there can stuck a lot of humans and some Threasans for heroic return to their Noom colony to continue on discovering our mutual compatibility (now hosted by Thrae).
If after 20 years nobody in Area52 is hard alien/mutation-infected, it is probabely safe, as it means that we can live together long to have childs, living long to have childs and so on.
Also if there are some problems from start, we can work together on vaccination for that, as there are already both parties, one of them allready immune and having developed resistance, so there are many ways, how we can together fight the bacteria and make the affected party immunised too (or at least found how to suppress the spread of the bacteria).
If any deadly infection is detected in the way, that nuking Moon or even Area52 is still possible, but the longer, the more it would be probable, that nobody dies from infection, so even if there would be some, which would target some untested population (say those with some unusual genes combination), then there would be also big part population naturally imune (or able to be vaccinated against) such infection.
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Well that is based on good will and cooperation of majority of Earth population, so it is sci-fi after all probably, but at least it could work there.
The main point is, that Thraesans, while having FTL are not having it so much to be able effectively overhelm us near Earth and humans not having FTL are not able overhelm them at their home.
On the other hand being in close contact with inteligent beings, just on Moon (or later on Noom) would lift a lot burdens of long time quarantine, making it only long time work at distant place, but still relatively free and surely not alone.
[Answer]
* First, consider just how similar the alien biochemistry is to human biochemistry in your setting. [Silicone biochemistry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemistry#Silicon_biochemistry) is being debated hotly -- would a silicone virus be able to thrive in a human?
* Even on Earth, it is rather unusual to find a disease that can [jump species](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoonosis).
* Next, assume that there is an bacterium or virus that is [endemic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endemic_(epidemiology)) in the alien population which **could** infect humans. There would be a [virgin soil epidemic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_soil_epidemic) that should be noticed pretty fast.
* Last but not least, if biochemistries are compatible there is the chance that an infectious organism might be involved in [horizontal gene transfer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer) -- an alien plague and a benign human bacteria (or vice versa) might swap genetic information.
So I'd say a couple of months initial quarantine, followed by an increased risk forever.
[Answer]
>
> How long should be considered "enough" for a quarantine period before letting the aliens physically enter in our ecosystem?
>
>
>
# Why do you think we get to choose?
Naturally-evolved organisms capable of interstellar travel will be aware of the risk of infection. **When they land and make contact, they'll already be confident that *they* are not at risk**. They will either *intend* for us to be infected, so as to ease colonization, or they will have *already* experimented and felt confident that the risk of contagious disease was minimal.
Either way, ***our* policies on the matter won't enter into it at all**.
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[Question]
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If a humanoid had a second pair of vocal cords or similarly functioning structures under the primary vocal cords, what would be the effect on the voice? Would this allow the humanoid to sing with two voices with the proper nerve placement? Would there be no effect at all? I am aware that a syrinx would provide the effect of two voices, but I am wondering about the effect of two pairs of vocal cords.
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I just got scoped by ENT and I am born with two sets of vocal chords second set below first.. I am also the Guinness World Record Holder for lowest female vocal note. I have been recorded scaling down to E0 at 20hz and up to C10. My first set of vocal cords are also thicker so I have a very deep, rich low voice and can imitate many voices and animals. I am very petite at just over 5'1" around 110 lbs. and do not have a thick neck or noticeable adam's apple or thickening that is visible on the outside. I also sound like a normal female talking voice, not deep at all (my niece seems to have inherited the trait as well). Looking for more information on my anomaly. Is there anyone else like me out there? Joy Chapman
[Answer]
**What would be the evolutionary advantage to this?**
A wider range of sound frequencies may (maybe) allow for a more complicated communication ... but we already have languages that range from very simple to unbelievably complex. So, while I provide some insight with my answer, please bear in mind that this evolutionary development doesn't actually make sense.
**I can envision a second set of chords systemically in three ways**
*Series:* The two vocal chords are in series, meaning one immediately follows the other in the tracheal path. This solution means the second set of chords modulates the first set of chords. I imagine the result to be little different from passing an audio signal through a sound post-processor. You can easily obtain a [drone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_(music)) effect (one or more harmonic tones in the background of the primary chord) or produce secondary effects such as shifting tone, producing reverbration, or maybe even the vocal equivalent of a cosmic wah. You could make yourself sound like your own [talk box](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_box).
*Parallel:* The two vocal chords are in parallel, meaning the tracheal path splits to deliver 50% of the air to each chord, which ostensibly could be actuated independently. I imagine this could give rise to two independent frequencies, **but only insofar as those frequencies are not shaped by the hollow of the mouth and throat, which are common to both vocal chords.** This could give rise to a very rich voice, capable of providing its own contrasting harmony. Note that I do not believe this would achieve the idea of singing with two voices. It would only add depth to the single voice and complexity to communication with distinct secondary frequencies following a primary frequency. For example, English-speaking humans ask a question and usually raise the frequency of the sound as the question comes to an end. A parallel-chord being could add a second frequency to the first, providing more information about the nature of the asked question.
*Integrated:* An integrated dual vocal chord is a single voice box in the trachea that contains two separate sets of chords — or, perhaps more obviously, it has twice the number of "chords." I'll be honest with you, I'm not sure how this would sound, other than to provide a greater range of frequencies (adding chords to the same basic space requires the new chords to be smaller, suggesting a higher frequency range).
**Consequences**
* More air needed to vocalize, suggesting that we would all speak more quietly. (That would be nice....)
* More space is needed in the throat, suggesting necks would be bulkier.
* You just doubled the ability for something to go wrong (e.g., laryngitis), and I'm not sure if biologically having two sets of chords means the two sets would ever be 100% independent of one another. In other words, if you lost your voice in one box, you'd sound like a frog regardless.
**Conclusion**
There would be a difference, but I don't believe it would be a great difference. Talented singers would produce richer sound and our communication would be more nuanced, but in general, it wouldn't be a dramatic difference.
On the other hand, the price we'd pay to get that minor difference is very high with a much more complicated throat structure and all the possibilities for problems that would go with it.
[Answer]
There are ways to use other throat / mouth structures as additional sound generation organs analogous to vocal cords. You can get an idea of what your 2-vocal cord creatures might sound like by listening to cats and overtone singers.
Overtone singing. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overtone_singing>
Tuvan throat singing is the most famous of these styles. The link has sound clips example. The singers align structures in the throat (or mouth) such that they vibrate with harmonic frequencies of the main note produced by the vocal cords.
Most of the throat singers you find on the web sound like metal dudes. But the sounds this lady makes do not sound like human sounds.
<https://youtu.be/2kzPek5XbUg?t=266>
[](https://youtu.be/2kzPek5XbUg?t=266)
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Cats do something like overtone singing when they purr.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_communication#Purr>
>
> The mechanism of how cats purr is elusive. This is partly because cats
> do not have an unique anatomical feature that is clearly responsible
> for this vocalization. One hypothesis, supported by
> electromyographic studies, is that cats produce the purring noise by
> using the vocal folds and/or the muscles of the larynx to alternately
> dilate and constrict the glottis rapidly, causing air vibrations
> during inhalation and exhalation. Combined with the steady
> inhalation and exhalation as the cat breathes, a purring noise is
> produced with strong harmonics.
>
>
>
Your being with 2 sets of vocal cords would need to run them both off the same airstream. One resonating structure (like one guitar string or one set of vocal cords) can produce one tone at a time. Your creatures could use them together or one at a time. As with overtone singers the second set could vibrate according to a harmonic of the first. Or, like cats, the second set could be used to produce vibrations with a different tonal range than the first.
[Answer]
@JBH's answer is great; it deals with questions of biology, and it sets out the different possibilities for parallel/series vocal cords. However, it's confused around what series vocal cords entail. Here I'll take a purely acoustic perspective to flesh that out.
## Short answer
With vocal cords in parallel (ie. one for each lung, with the airstream combined further up), your humanoids could speak/sing with two pitches at once. Since they still share the same articulators (everything in the oral cavity, etc.) they couldn't speak or sing different words, produce different vowel sounds, or anything like that. But they could sing, say, a major third interval. So it depends on your definition of voice, but basically yes.
With vocal cords in series (one after the other in the trachea), they could still produce more than one simple pitch, but not in such a straightforward way. If you've ever [sung into a wind instrument](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AewEj44rtWE), you'll have noticed that the note you sing and the note you're fingering on the instrument combine in a weird way. The pitches of the two vocal cords would combine in the same way as that. In fact, these humanoids might end up sounding like [**Daleks**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGLgnshYSWQ)!
So how exactly do the pitches interact?
## Long answer: summing vs. modulating
All the answers so far have expressed some intuition that the vocal cords in series do something different. @Willk says it'd be like overtone singing. @RonJohn says they'd interfere and block each other. @JBH goes as far as to say that they could achieve anything from wah to reverb. Actually @RonJohn comes closest in saying they interfere. More precisely, they *modulate* each other, though this is more productive than he suggests.
When two people sing an interval( or if two sets of vocal cords with different pulmonary sources vocalise into the same downstream air passage) the pressure waves are **summed**: that is, at every point in time the value of the output is the sum of the values of the inputs. That's because the airflow through each is independent of the other, so each just contributes some air pressure to the common passage at their output.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/2Kn5L.jpg)
When we talk about a signal having two frequencies in it, or when we talk about *mixing* two sounds, that's always a sum.
So what happens in the case of vocal cords in series? Here, when one vocal cord is constricted, the other can't produce any sound, so the amplitude of one *modulates* the other. When both of the oscillations are at audible frequencies, this is called [**ring modulation**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_modulation). Rather than being summed, the signals are *multiplied*. Note the differences between the above and below graphs. In the above, it's as if the faster wave rides along the path of the slower wave. In the graph below, the faster wave is *enveloped* by the slower wave. (Caveat: unlike the electrical signals graphed here, acoustic signals are unipolar and so the multiplication would look a bit different.)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/QB1ls.jpg)
## So why does it sound different?
The result of ring modulating two frequencies is the so-called 'sum and difference' of those frequencies. That is, the frequencies you get out aren't the ones you get in, and crucially, any harmonic relations between the input frequencies don't necessarily hold in the output frequencies. Harmonic relations (one frequency being an integer multiple of another) are very important to our perception of sounds (it's why we like harmonic intervals, like thirds and fifths), so this *inharmonicity* sounds weird, and can even make it hard to resolve a pitch to the sound. All the more so for the complex signals produced by vocal cords.
So this is a bit whackier than the suggestion of overtone singing, which involves your oral cavity forming a resonator that picks out and amplifies one harmonic frequency from your voice so much that it's perceived as a separate tone. But it's not quite as whacky as being able to achieve reverb effects.
## On a final note
Ring modulation is unintuitive to us, and thus hard to control. However, control will come naturally to these creatures. Most examples of ring modulation used in sound effects (such as Dalek voices) involves a constant tone modulating a complex signal, or (in the case of the flute singing example) two melodies a constant interval apart. If the bivocal humanoids had mastery over dynamically varying both vocal cords at once, I'd imagine they could create all sorts of interesting polyphonies.
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[Question]
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A galaxy wide civilization with starships. Would a single planet benefit from supersonic submarine trains to go from continent to continent. Supercavitation makes them faster than planes, but would a starship just be easier?
[Answer]
We need a little bit more detail on the specific circumstances. Let's take this question back one level in the world building process.
Would people from a galaxy-wide civilization *settling* on a planet decide to build supersonic submarines despite the fact that they have perfectly good air craft and space craft?
Probably not, because what they have is good enough to move people and things from point A to point B. There could be some wealthy citizens or government officials who are interested in submarines and decide to invest in the development of the technology. Submarine travel has a different set of challenges to design for (more on this later).
Would people who built or joined a galaxy-wide civilization decide to maintain their existing supersonic submarines despite the development of advanced aircraft and spacecraft?
Probably, people like novel and old things. The submarines could have an important place in their history and culture, a reminder of where they came from. Once a technology is perfected, it can take some time to replace it with a superior alternative. We still use foot peddled bicycles when motor bikes have been around for about a century; and we still use motorcycles when cars are arguably more comfortable and safer.
Either way, it is not specifically necessary to have the submarines. Science fiction authors like to come up with neat ideas like this, and readers like me enjoy seeing some variety and richness in the worlds that are created.
## Consider these things about submarine travel:
The terrain and currents along the route need to be taken into consideration more so than when flying. A plane can take a direct route relative to the curvature of the planet, where a submarine will have to navigate around islands, reefs, underwater mountains and continents.
At least on Earth, we have abundant sea life that tends to be several orders of magnitude larger than our bird life. Hit a sea gull while flying, usually will only need to touch up some paint. Hit a whale while piloting a sub, that might leave a dent and start a fight.
If something goes wrong, it is easier to bail out of a plane with a parachute than bail out of a submarine with a life vest. Space ships and submarines are more comparable, both might have lifeboats in case of such emergencies.
A submarine traveling from say Brazil to France will technically have a shorter path than a plane flying along the same route, because that is how linear distances and circles work. Shorter radius, less distance per rotation.
## Now for some ways to justify it:
If you want to say that this planet has submarines for a specific reason, design the planet so that submarines are considered the best / only way to travel to places of interest.
* Dangerous or unpredictable weather patterns make travel through the atmosphere significantly more risky.
* Environmental hazards such as radiation, toxins or particularly nasty fungal spores are on the surface, but being underground or underwater is sufficient protection.
* There are rich mineral deposits or abundant food sources underwater, and that is where it was most logical to build few cities, mining outposts or research stations.
* The skyways are so congested with traffic that submarine trains were built just to reduce the load.
* There are effectively two civilizations on the planet, one lives on the surface and reached for the stars. The other is comfortable living underground, and built submarines to cross oceans quickly. They can be at peace and have mutually beneficial trade agreements, though one will own virtually all the mineral rights.
[Answer]
Let's scale the problem down to our planet: we have airplane (the equivalent of your starship), yet we use cars or bikes (the equivalent of your submarine trains) to commute to work. Why are we so naïve?
* Infrastructure 1: you can park a car or a bike in a far smaller place than a 747 and you don't need massive facilities
* Infrastructure 2: as a consequence of the above, you are more flexible in where to go and also when
* Cost: below a certain distance big transports are not economically viable. Also the crew size is different, and this again impact the cost of exercise.
* Cost: on a train you can add or remove some carts to adapt to the load. On a starship you cannot remove or add volumes. And you don't want to carry around air.
[Answer]
I suppose the answer depends on what assumptions you're making about the civilization's technology.
Barring some radical new technology, like teleportation, it takes a great deal of energy to get something from the ground to space. So ground transportation would almost surely be more efficient than launching into orbit, circling the globe, and then dropping back down. Whatever economic system you suppose they have, energy will still cost something, because it takes natural resources, human time, etc. Perhaps the society is so rich that this cost is negligible.
For some trips, the time required to go into orbit and come back down would be more than the time it takes to travel on the surface.
Like, today we have airplanes, but people still routinely use cars. Why? Because travel by air is more expensive than travel by car. And for short trips -- like a few miles -- you can get there faster by car.
If somehow this civilization has made space travel very cheap, and there are only a few isolated outposts of civilization, I could believe that it's cheaper and easier to travel between them by spacecraft than to have trains. For example if there are only two cities, and they are on opposite sides of the globe, the cost of going to orbit and coming back down might be less than the cost of maintaining a railroad that goes around the world but only has two stops.
[Answer]
Depending on the surface weather this could be a very viable mode of mass transit between enclaves. A planet with high winds or a corrosive atmosphere could still need to be colonized to get access to rare elements or something. Staying deep under a body of water can minimize the impact of this atmosphere, which would be difficult for airborne vehicles to negotiate. Even a planet bathed with high levels of radiation could benefit, as the water (or whatever fluid these trains are travelling though, the supercavitation principle applies to all fluids I believe) would be protected from this as well.
A place like Europa, with oceans under ice, would definitely use this tech.
If there is not a well developed marine ecosystem these trains could move around with relative ease, but if there are established alien or transplanted Earth species, especially larger animals, then there will be significant ecological and humanitarian (such as it applies to non-human organisms) impact since these vehicles will be quite disruptive.
[Answer]
# Yes
>
> Would a **single planet** benefit from supersonic submarine trains to go from continent to continent.
>
>
>
## When the Cost-Benefit of supersonic submarines exceeds that of starships, it'll benefit the planet to use supersonic submarines.
Specifically, when the cost of using starships to transfer goods between colonies, stations, and other points of interest on a given planet exceeds that of using supersonic submarines, the latter becomes the cost-effective solution.
**Where would we see this?**
### 1. [Ocean Planets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planets_in_science_fiction#Ocean_planets).
Despoina in Mass Effect (where the leviathans live), Atlantis, etc...
Cost-benefits will favor submersibles when the civilization is not only spread across the ocean's surface, but also makes use of submerged colonies or stations, and/or mine resources at the bottom or beneath the ocean floor.
### 2. Subocean Planets
Enceladus, Naboo
This is fairly self-explanatory. This includes planets with a thick surface crust that hides a subterranean ocean or planets with large quantities of subterranean seas and oceans like that seen in Star Wars Episode I's Naboo. In such cases, spaceflight and atmospheric travel is either unfeasible or may be more costly than a direct trip through the subterranean oceans.
### 3. Oceanic Planets with frequent storm activity.
Kamino in Star Wars Episode 2.
Oceanic planets with frequent storm activity will pose a problem to starships and atmospheric flight in general. While small storms may not be an issue, particularly larger storms such as Hurricanes, Monsoons, Tropical Storms, or super-storms as we've seen in films like The Day After Tomorrow, or in [Stargate Atlantis' The Storm](https://www.gateworld.net/atlantis/s1/the-storm/) will present logistical or physical obstacles. For civilizations such as Star Trek and Star Wars where spaceflight is cheap and powerful employing high technologies such as deflector shielding and/or antigravity, this can be limited to eliminated. For galaxy-spanning civilizations without such robust technology (such as Mass Effect) this will not be the case. In that case, development and use of supersonic submarines would be of some or great interest to inhabitants. This would be proportional to the severity of the storms experienced, be it tidal waves that disrupt landing platforms, electrical activity in the upper atmosphere (lighting releases X-rays for example), wind speeds that make air-travel difficult, or air-pressures that make flight impossible (Day After Tomorrow).
### 4. Planets that otherwise disrupt starship activity.
Miller's Planet in Interstellar. The gravitational tidal waves from the nearby blackhole are extremely powerful and are liable to destroy starships entering or leaving orbit that do not take care. Additionally, the time dilation effects of going in and out of the atmopshere would pose issues to inhabitants on the surface.
Oceanic planets with an atmosphere similar to Venus, or a magnetosphere similar to Jupiter would also disrupt space travel extraordinarily. Typically, it may become cost effective to limit trans-atmospheric flight in favor of ground and water transportation. If the planet is also of an oceanic type, then water and submersible becomes far more effective.
# No
## When the Cost-Benefit of starships exceeds that of supersonic submarines
Specifically, when the cost of using supersonic submarines to transfer goods between colonies, stations, and other points of interest on a given planet exceeds that of using starships, the latter becomes the cost-effective solution.
**Where would we see this?**
Typically on worlds where starship travel is not disrupted. More importantly, this becomes much more present in galactic economies where **starship travel is cheap**. As we saw on Kamino (Star Wars Episode II), that is the case; but, as we see in Stargate Atlantis or Mass Effect, that is not always the case for civilizations that encompass a galaxy.
A galaxy wide civilization with starships. Supercavitation makes them faster than planes, but would a starship just be easier?
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**Note: I'll provide more links to examples later today.**
[Answer]
Simple:
A supercavitation train would create intense shockwaves in the water and destroy, disorient or deafen the underwater wildlife in a large radius.
Think about the whales...
Environmentalists will shut it down, perhaps even eco-terrorists will bomb the thing.
Also you would have to put the train inside a tube, because hitting a whale or any other fish at these speeds means a lot of very dead passengers...
But if it's inside a tube, then the internal media can be vacuum! (like in one of Elon Musk's crazy plans).
This wouldn't work either, due to being immensely expensive...
If it's a galactic civilization, then they would find it very easy to use an orbital plane. It's just a small spaceship, you probably can buy one at the dealer down the street. No air resistance, so it would be very fast.
[Answer]
## Not realistically.
It's much easier to go supersonic through air than water.
Now since you said "train", I presume you are talking about some sort of fixed guideway. And here's the point that laid the passenger railroads to ruin --
**Airplanes don't need a roadway**.
When you have starship-level energy sources, it becomes a simple matter to have an airplane that is somewhat more ICBM than airplane, and flies to an appropriate spot where it ballistically blasts out of atmo' and then controls a re-entry in some way, possibly with engine thrust.
There's just no reason to drill through thick, sticky water. Doing so will make a LOT A LOT of heat, which could also cause problems for the ecosystem.
[Answer]
What's the hurry? Even with present technology, there's no real need to travel from continent to continent, except tourism. (Pretty much everything else can be done on line.) So if you're a tourist, why not take your time and enjoy the trip?
Second factor is that the time taken for actual high-speed travel is only a fraction of the total, as we could see with the Concorde. You still have to get to the airport, go through security & boarding, the plane has to taxi for takeoff... At the other end, you reverse the process, going through customs & immigration, picking up luggage, getting from the airport to your ultimate destination - and that's if everything goes perfectly.
[Answer]
No. If you need to do anything, it would be easier to do it via a Matrix like virtual world or a remote telepresence.
Technology is already gearing itself to reduce the need for physical travel.
[Answer]
Yes! Because they're awesome.
Nobody needs to hang-glide, or play video games, or run electricity through guitars.
Any sufficiently-advanced civilization will have jet packs, supersonic underwater trains (in tunnels, I'd guess, for the sake of the whales), and sex bots, and many other nice things.
This does not establish why they are *necessary*, only why they will exist. But once they exist, they will become an integral part of someone's business model. You don't think of semi trucks being indispensable, and they're probably not, but it would be an economic disaster if they all disappeared tomorrow.
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Middle Ages/Fantasy era
There's an order of couriers who carry messages between the rich and powerful. The world is dangerous and there are many bandits so any message that needs to get to it's intended recipient must be sent with a large contingent of troops or use their services.
However these messengers can and will refuse to carry any message that violates their ethical code (orders to assassinate an innocent etc.)
I'm looking for ideas on how they could correctly or mostly correctly identify messages they found unethical. Magic is OK but I'd prefer to avoid just hand-waving everything with a spell that "knows" if a message is evil or not.
[Answer]
Rather than have the couriers read and approve messages, or use magic to fathom the purpose or intent of the message, have the couriers carry *verbal* messages.
Using verbal messages you also eliminate the potential for the message to be intercepted and altered, lost or damaged by natural mishaps (running ink from sudden torrential rains?), or just plain stolen by the bandits.
Since it appears you're willing to apply magic to the situation, you can have the message "locked" by a specialized spell, making capture and torture of the courier pointless as well. If you add in having the couriers as part of the troubadours in the realm, their random travels become *normal*. That makes knowing if and when a message is being carried nearly impossible as well. This further protects the message, and the courier.
To further safeguard the messages, and the couriers, it can be part of the service's methods that the initially contacted courier passes the message to another courier, possibly in a relay of couriers, before its final delivery. This has the additional effect that, for all practical purposes, the entire service could know the secrets of anyone who has entrusted them to the couriers. The ethics of the couriers, and possibly the magic spell, preserves
those secrets, but they are available to the couriers if need be to use in reparations for violating the limits of what messages can be carried, and as retribution for violating the person of a courier.
You can then add in other services, such as safeguarding testaments, wills, and other *official* information. These could be verbal or documentary since others wouldn't even know of the existence of such, until it was needed - such as the announcement of the will upon the death of the one who made it.
Look into the [Vestal Virgins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestal_Virgin) of Rome for some other possibilities for sanctity of the couriers and the potential for influence the couriers might gain.
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They would have to have rules for what messages they would carry. Primarily, they would have to be unsealed - Or, at the very least, the transporting courier would read it, verify it, and seal it.
Because a properly coded message will always be able to get through, there needs to be punishments in place for those who disregard the rules. A fine, perhaps, for lesser offenses. For greater ones, a refusal of service even for valid messages.
The political power an organization such as this would have would be immense, so there needs to be a way for people to be willing to use them. Again, they need to be proactive in punishing offenders - This time, within their own ranks. Anyone found to be tampering with messages, accepting messages against the rules, or otherwise making the organization less biased than they want to appear needs to have a public punishment.
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Use magic on the person who writes the letter themselves to determine intent
The courier could use some sort of truth telling magic to ask them a set of questions:
* Will this letter lead to someones harm?
* Will this letter violate someones rights?
* etc, etc
Or the all inclusive:
* Will this letter lead me to violate my code of ethics?
If the person says no to all questions, then the letter can be carried.
If the person says yes at all, then don't carry it and blacklist the person.
If the person is unsure, then its not their letter to send, send that person away.
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If magic is OK, you can made them telepaths.
This could explain both why they are so good in delivering messages (telepathically send message to order member in other place) and how they know if the message is unethical (read unethical intentions from the customer's mind).
Depending on the story, other people might or mightn't know about telepathic abilities of order members.
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I actually read a similar thing to this in a novel: there were regular note carrying couriers, and also ridiculously expensive couriers (although cheaper than sending a contingent of troops) that would be told their message and carry it in their head, rather than on paper. They were specially trained to remember long messages perfectly.
If they were ever captured, they would swallow a poison pill to ensure that no one could ever torture the message out of them.
If ever the courier didn't return to their central headquarters in time, they would dispatch another in their place with the same message. This would repeat until the message was sent.
Anyone found intercepting or killing messengers would be blackballed from ever using their service again, and efforts would be made by the courier faction to actively undermine anyone who attempted to ever intercept their couriers.
Eventually, everyone knew to simply leave the couriers alone, as the only incentive to killing anyone's messenger would be to slightly delay the message, and the consequences would vastly outweigh any benefits, as the courier faction was pretty powerful.
As they are an independent faction outside of politics, it wouldn't be such a stretch to adapt this system to have them only carrying messages that aligned with their own ethical responsibility, and didn't harm their own interests.
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I'd suggest a more subtle form of magic: Couriers are born lie detectors with abilities that are (or seem) magical, and they are highly intelligent to boot.
(You can have other people born with this ability that do not become couriers; but being a courier pays very well and is a highly respected position. Their own ability lets them test and recognize fellow couriers, and those born with the gift, without error.)
There is no magic object, amulet, rope or ring; it is *the courier* that is magical, and any sender must tell the courier their message, and why they are sending it, in private if they wish. The courier can question them as long as they wish. If the courier detects a lie, they will not bring the message.
They take various precautions before such an encounter: Other couriers know where they are going, it does no good for a king to kill the courier if they detects his lie. If a "Carry" is turned down; the courier immediately notifies the Courier community; so in this culture the very act of **attempting** to deceive a Courier may cause a penalty to the King of no Carry service at all, either for some period of time or permanently.
The Courier is free to reword the message however they wish. There is no secret code or marks or secret keywords or hidden messages inside of pictures.
If a picture or map is necessary; the sender can explain why (with full Lie Detection enabled for the Courier), and the Courier can then reproduce the essence of the picture upon arrival. In this way messages cannot be stolen or taken by force or torture: Give the Couriers the ability to wipe their own memory of any messages, past or present, at will in the event of capture. In fact, that can be part of their service, once a message is delivered, the Courier will only retain the message for about a month before intentionally forgetting it.
Of course non-delivery of the message is always a risk for senders, Couriers can be intercepted and killed or captured like any other person; but at least the senders know their message was not revealed.
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A very simple option is that the couriers cannot read the entire message because of magical protection, but they CAN magically test if the message contains certain words or phrases or expressions.
This creates an interesting dynamic in which people may want to try to cheat the couriers by using very indirect ways of stating their thoughts - kind of like people in my country of origin avoided the communist's censorship (dig around eastern europe communist censorship in XX century, it's a very fun topic).
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It is widely accepted that nudity is not functional at all. Clothes not only protect us from inclement weather and prevent us from getting hurt, but it also provides a status.
So, I've been thinking, there would be any plausible reason for a society to be nudist? This is: why don't they get cold or hurt?
Some notes:
I'm building a world other than ours so, although this society is more or less human, your answers don't have to stick to any strict "real life conditions" (i.e. in a warmer world humans could have never needed clothes, or they could have evolved a tougher skin).
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A similar answer about "paranoia" is above; but instead of a government, consider it more of a cultural bias: Honesty is paramount, nakedness proves you have nothing to hide. And it isn't a matter of not inventing clothing; there are still such things as protective clothing for firefighters, soldiers, explorers in the ice and snow or other extreme environments: but that comes off the minute it is no longer necessary; kind of like a gas mask in our own world. You don't mind seeing workers cleaning out asbestos covered head to toe in a bunny suit and wearing goggles and a full breather gas mask, but you don't expect them to walk into a restaurant that way.
You can even add religious overtones: God made you naked and considered that perfect, and your mother wrapped you in a blanket to warm and protect you --- not to hide your nakedness. Trying to cover your nakedness is challenging the wisdom of God in making you that way; a form of blasphemy that would get you shunned.
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Paranoia is a great motivator for nudity.
If an oppressive government rightly fears its people, then leaving them without pockets in which weapons can hide, is one way to limit how dangerous those people can become.
It wouldn't matter that their nudity leaves them vulnerable to environmental dangers, since such a government isn't very interested in their safety in the first place.
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I don't understand what's the difficulty here, provided the author allows the fictitious society to be primitive or barbarian enough and to live in a warm enough climate. There were plenty of human cultures / societies in which people went about with very little in the manner of clothes -- basically, just the bare minimum needed from a purely functional point of view to protect the overly sensitive bits. Even today, some primitive tribes go naked and they are not ashamed -- search for "first contact tribe".
Examples, if possible with purely scientific pictures:
* [Pygmies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmy_peoples) -- see [the picture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmy_peoples#/media/File:African_Pigmies_CNE-v1-p58-B.jpg) of a pygmy family.
* The [Khoikhoi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khoikhoi) people of sothern Africa, formerly known as Hottentots.
* [Ticuna](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticuna) people -- the most numerous Amazonian tribe in Brazil, says the fount of all knowledge.
* [Aboriginal Australians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Indigenous_Australians) -- famous for being the only large human group who managed to regress *below* the stone age.
* The [Kaurareng](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaurareg) people of the Torres Strait; no pictures, but Wikipedia says that "Kaurareg men were long-haired and went naked, save for as belt".
* The indigenous people of the [Futuna](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futuna_(Wallis_and_Futuna)) island; again no pics, but their morals...
* The [Guaycura](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaycura_people) people indigenous to the Peninsula of California.
And so on.
Closer to our culture, Greek soldiers in classical times used to go naked into battle, save for their military equipment (shield, shin protectors, helmet), and Greek athletes competed naked at the Olympic Games. (For the athletes that's certain. For the soldiers, it may be that the cultural expectation was to represent them naked, while in reality they weared some sort of minimal clothing; the vast majority of images of soldiers we have from before the 4th century BCE show them mostly naked. Going about naked all the time is impractical in Greece except maybe in summer at low altitudes.)
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[This website](http://www.primitivism.com/nudity.htm) reviews historical and primitive cultures with traditions or social acceptance of nudity. The author appears to be a nudist. While I suspect that hers is a somewhat selective reading of history, I am willing to accept the basic facts she presents.
All of the cultures are tropical or semi-tropical. Some of them are primitive, such as the Yanomamis, modern-day natives of the Brazilian rain forest. Some of the nudist accepting cultures are just cultural different from us, such as the Ancient Greeks, Egyptians, or Indians. These cultures seem to condone occasional nudity, not an all day every day lack of clothes. Most of the examples given are of philosophers and nobles who would not be out in the fields every day getting abrasions and sunburn.
History is inherently selective. Illiterate peasants don't write things down for historians to read later. Just because I can't find any examples of everyday working class nudity, doesn't mean there wasn't any. That being said, I still think there probably wasn't much. I think this lack of everyday nudity is because clothes provide protection that human skin does not. Fantasy homonids with leathery skin, scales, fur, or other natural protection would probably have less desire for clothes.
It is worth noting that humans with insulating fur would lose some of the adaptability that allowed us to take over the world. You can strip down to a loincloth, but you can never take off your fur.
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## Clothing makes your humans sick and/or unattractive
This a purely biological scenario, something they couldn't change even if they wanted to. Your version of humans have vital biochemical processes going on in their skin which need (sun)light. Think somewhere between real-life vitamin D and Superman's solar powered-ness.
Spending a few hours a day outside in the nude makes them strong, healthy, shiny heroes that are always warm and heal from scratches and wounds very quickly. Covering their skin too much or for too long makes them weak and sickly. A warrior might put on some armor pieces when preparing for battle and a princess might wear expensive translucent veils, but as soon as the covering is not needed, they take it off.
A second way clothing may interfere is that your humans naturally secrete pheromones (like humans) but ones that decay rapidly. Any clothing will start to *reek* within an hour, making it unpleasant to be around that person. If someone wears the same clothes for a day, they smell like a corpse to their neighbors.
When faced with the choice of washing 12+ changes of clothes per day or going nude, your people made the obvious one, or rather, never adopted clothing.
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You just need to **make clothes have a high cost** too. Perhaps their natural materials available attract **diseases, parasites** or even just that the humans on your world are **allergic** to it. As long as there are no treatments available to stop these no one would think it was a good idea (don't see anyone going around wearing stinging nettles as clothes).
There are a lot of ways you can do this but if you provide them with no viable source of clothing then they won't start wearing it and, as a society, accept it as normal.
You would probably see some jobs where clothes were worn but they would be taken off as soon as possible (a black smith with an apron to protect himself or a baker with oven gloves).
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**What do I need from clothes?**
I don't want to be arrested. --Don't have that law. (in fact my district doesn't seem to have it)
I don't like to be too cold or hot. --Make them be at home in their environment. Or give them easy refuge from it. (in fact my area rarely gets above 100F or below 30F and I spend most of my day inside)
I want strangers to know I'm worth something. --Use something else. (in fact tattoos, hair styles, stance and choice of hangout seems to do a reasonable job of sorting people in my area.)
I like having my hands free while carrying stuff in my pockets.
**What have I got in my pocket?**
I carry things to convey my status to strangers, and the tools I expect to want in the course of a day. (A phone and a wallet. Probably I'll be able to ditch the wallet one of these years, and I really wish I could ditch the phone sometimes.)
**How else can this be handled?**
Moving small tools around might not be common. To work on a farm you use big tools and you lock up your shops tools in the shop. If the tools you need to do something are generally kept where you do it you don't need to move them often.
If there aren't objects to convey status you don't need to carry status objects. Say almost everything a person might carry could easily be duplicated so no status object could be trusted. Or Communities are small enough to know everyone and strangers are treated all the same.
**Armor**
If there are weapons about it would be nice to be protected, and that probably means covering most of your body.
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Put your humans in a stable environment, without weather effects. This could be an extensive cave system, especially one near geothermal vents to provide a bit of extra warmth, or it could be an artificial environment like a space station or colony. You'll probably also want to make them fairly sedentary, since moving around a lot would require some kind of foot wear.
As a bonus, living in dark caves would also remove a lot of the decorative aspects of clothing as well, since nobody would be able to see your swanky new threads.
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It would be reasonable if the people lived in a blissful paradise, ignorant of those outside of their own community.
If that were the case, not only would there would be no need for clothes, but the people would probably lack weapons, live in harmony with the wildlife, be vegetarians, etc.
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# Alien Technology
A mostly-benevolent and godlike alien race installed orbital devices that, through some unknown and indistinguishable-from-magic way, vaporize all worn clothes every 2 minutes--excepting only shoes, and packs or bags of a sufficiently small size that are worn on the back, sides, or rear.
The environment of the whole planet is very warm and tropical, but with heavy cloud cover and a thick enough atmosphere to protect from sunburn. There are no parasites, dangerous animals, or much reason to farm or hunt as there is a riot of protein- and fat-rich food copiously growing everywhere.
There are few mountains and landscape features that would encourage people to take risks climbing.
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I've been thinking of imagining a world and am currently decided whether its gonna be science fiction, science fantasy or fantasy.
However unlike the first two, fantasy is very hard to make immersive (for example like The Elder Scrolls and Dragon Age). To test if a world is immersive, i ask myself. Can a normal person live a normal life in this world if he wanted to? If the answer is yes, mission complete.
I take games as inspiration and look at the world they play in and a setting like Dark souls might be cool as hell, but just look how many enemies of different sizes there are, all getting destroyed by a small knight. Besides if i was a normal guy in that world, i most likely wouldnt be able to survive there.
So i think **size** restrictions must be there. (Skyrims giants are smaller than many other fantasy fiction illustrates them)
So, what restrictions do i have to set, to make my fantasy setting immersive?
What tips do you have for me?
PS: It should have a feel like
- The Elder Scrolls
- Dragon Age
- Dark Souls
- Bloodborne
and similiar which i cant remember atm
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A few things to consider:
**1. The existence of a stable society**
Elder Scrolls does this pretty well. You are the adventuring hero, but many are not. Ordinary people living ordinary lives, depending on you/the king/the army to defend them.
Dark Souls, by comparison, takes place in an apocalyptic medieval-age city that is inhabited solely by violent and formidable creatures. Presumably, somewhere, there is an actual civilization responsible for rounding up the Undead in the first place.
Having a stable society that defends itself from outside threats is crucial for the existence of "normal" laborers and business owners, as opposed to just roaming adventurers. Which leads us to:
**2. Monsters that can be defeated by sheer (overwhelming) force**
The Chosen Hero is usually unique in some way that allows him or her to prevail over threats no Mere Mortal would challenge. But for normal society not to collapse utterly, common men need to be able to defeat them either through sheer numbers or training or some manner that isn't unique to a Hero. Alternatively, there could be comparatively few violent and aggressive beasts, or they only live in certain areas that normal humans can avoid.
**Basically, in order for normal people to have a shot, they need to be able to band together and fend for themselves against the outside world, independent of the goodwill of any roving Heroes.**
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So, I would consider Lord of the Rings to be high fantasy. I'm going to say Harry Potter is low fantasy. These are my baselines.
Size restrictions seems like a strange place to start on your part, but I can see where you're coming from, in an Attack on Titan world, a normal life would be fairly difficult. I will come back to size in a minute.
# Sharkn8do's guide to the "normal"
As pop culture has told us for the past two decades, normal is a fantasy... I would presume a low fantasy, but a fantasy nonetheless. I'm going to assume what you mean by a normal life is the ability to have a chosen profession: farmer, shopkeeper, guard, etc, without needing to interact with the insane fantasy that the protagonist will in movies and video games. This is done in a number of ways, so let's look at them all.
## Tropes
There are a couple classic tropes in movies and video games that explain how the dragonborne can shout skeletons across rooms, but people are disabled by taking arrows to knees. Because tropes require specific examples, I'll be pulling from everything, and will be looking at all fantasy, not just high.
### Bloodline/Race/Chosen one
I lump these together because at the heart, they are all the same trope. One person or group of people is special. Whether this is because of their bloodline, their race, or they were chosen by a deity or higher being. This is your skyrims, your harry potter, or basically every superhero movie ever, where others can't do what you do because you are special, and that's the way it is.
### Skill/Education
Sometimes, it's not because you're different, it's just because you're smarter, or have put in more time, or whatever it is. You trained real hard to do what you're doing, and others didn't. Anyone could do what you can, they just don't put in the time to do it. This would be like metroid, or assassin's creed.
### Oblivious
Maybe they aren't aware of what's going, and don't care to. You saved the world and did all the magic, but no one really knew what happened. They know what the world might hold in the realm of magic, but you've seen it. This would be your lord of the rings, your supernatural, that kind of stuff.
### Combination of any of these
Maybe they're oblivious and didn't get the education, maybe you're special and needed to be trained (Jedi), but for whatever reason, they don't interact with fantasy worlds in the way you do, and that's okay.
## World Characteristics
There are a couple ways you can build your world so that you don't necessarily have to play into any of these tropes, but can still explain why donkey is having making drankey babies with a dragon, and you're making gingerbread.
### World segmentation
The grass is always more magic on the other side of the fence. All the good stuff happens over there, and Joe the mechanic is okay with that. Bilbo had to walk this way to find the magic happenings, while the shire was okay with doing their thang. You can do this fairly easy in a world without mass transportation methods. Just make it so all the good stuff happens over there, and all the normal stuff happens over here.
### Town sanctity
For some unexplained reason, the towns in skyrim, shovel knight, and all that good stuff tend to be unharmed, while right outside bad things happen almost constantly. Whether it be a big old wall, or just dragons don't like towns, you can do this fairly easily.
### Disregard Fantasy, Acquire Currency
Sometimes a group of people just refuse to do anything about the magic, or the war, or whatever. They set up shop in the middle of a wasteland, and don't care about what's going outside of their world. The fantasy might blow through every now and then, but then they go back to their thing. They have a farm to plow, so they're gonna do that till they die.
## Restrictions
Now, there are things in your world you can't have if you want to maintain the plebeian population. You touched on size, you can't necessarily sit in your shop and sell discount produce is you're 3 feet tall, and you have 50 foot behemoths regularly stomping all over your discount produce. That is one example, there are a couple others I can think of.
### General population
If everyone's super, then nobody will be. If we all do the magics, and there's a constant threat of dying or world destruction, you're probably not going to feel the need to put in that 9-5.
### Economy
You will need a central economy to motivate commoners to do the commoner thing. If people can pull all their needed things out their magic pouches, why would anyone do anything? You need that realism of "hey, I want to eat, where do I get that food from?"
### Tribes
The best example I can think of is Avatar. Nobody did anything lame in Avatar. Everyone was awesome, and all they did was braid each others tails and fly on things. You can't have that, joe is now sailing birds and eating fruit out of the air, he's not going to be writing you a paper check for a mortgage.
### Three dimensions
This one is going to seem weird, and that's because it is. But, you know, we exist in the third dimension, so somethings have to exist in the 2nd or 4th dimensions. You can't really have that daily grind when you're an nth dimensional being who is everything always.
### Routine
This one can be overlooked as well, because we are such creatures of habit. But, if your world is constantly getting blown up by vogons, or you have monsters coming out your closet on the reg, chances are you're not going to be doing anyone's taxes anytime soon. You'll probably be dead, or looking for gay monsters.
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# Summary
So, unfortunately, as awesome as it would be to have your universe be an acid trip on the fourth dimension, you need to have a decent amount of realism. If you want a crazy world, add some realism, does it make sense that dragon's attack very few towns? no. but Bethesda decided to allow the poor people of white run not die every two days. Hopefully this helps.
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Take a look at the [Codex Alera](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Alera) series by Jim Butcher.
In it, everyone has *some* magical talent. Well.. Everyone but the protagonist of the series. But since everyone has some talent and almost no one has *a great deal* of talent, it becomes a part of the society. And those with more power tend to more political power as well... so the pieces all intersect well. Also, this world is not D&D like at all. There are certainly fantasy creatures, but not hordes of dungeons to crawl through and dragons attacking the villages and such. The fantasy creatures are few and far between at the beginning.
Also, look at modifying the standard tropes. *Dragon Magazine* once had an article in which the author basically said if magic and dragons were a commonplace, real, thing, *then castles as we know them wouldn't exist.* They are useless defenses against a dragon, or a handful of high powered wizards. While the validity of that assessment is arguable, the idea behind it is solid: if magic/fantasy elements are commonplace, things would develop along very different pathways from the real world.
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1. Define normal
2. Make normal places
3. Define the edges of the normal places
4. Graduate how close things get, the further from the normal places, the worse the things you'll meet
The army keeps things like dragons and giants far enough away from the major cities that people who stay close to the centre of the civilisations will hear stories of wolves in the night, but won't be out after dark away so they'll never see one. Anything else will be legends of far off places. Remember that this is the job of a standing army, not a job for roaming adventurers. If a dragon has a hunting range of 20miles, then the army must go 20miles into the badlands and make sure there are no dragons nesting within that range of the normal places. Maintain an army that can deal with dragons, giants etc, as needed.
If you're going high fantasy with elves, dwarfs etc, then each race can have its own way of dealing with things that go bump in the night, but in any given case, your average farmer should never have to deal with anything worse than a stray wolf.
The adventurers can go out into the wilds for whatever reason and face the beasts on their own ground on their own lookout, but it shouldn't be for protection of the normal.
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You can easily push the fantasy level higher the more dystopian you make the world. Dragons raiding villages and sorcerers changing the laws of physics every morning? That just means more people living desperately on the edge, barely trusting anyone outside of their immediate clan, expecting death at every turn. You want ubiquitous magic? That just means more people heavily armed and many of them thinking they're good enough to get away with it. Or it means a draconian police force that will reduce a 10-year-old to a slime mold if he or she casts a single spell without permission ("There are rules against underage wizardry, Harry. Looks like Longbottom will be the Chosen One.")
Basically, civil society requires rules and limits on individual action. Magic removes those limits. So you either abandon civil society or you raise the rules to such strength that magic cannot overcome them.
Or you choose a species other than humans. A bunch of peacenik elves who think a swift response is one you only contemplated for a century, for example.
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Remember that Dark Souls "place of happening" is very small section of the whole world. Even in the first one levels are designed in a stack format rather than spread. And it's a one castle with a borough. In second part it's castle and it's surrounding commune.
And to be there you need to first go to Asylum (first part) and THEN travel to story place. So if you don't want to you don't go there.
The rest of the world just live in this medieval world with people who are cursed. And that's just all.
But to incorporate the size I use a modern metaphor of Chernobyl. A place where things mutate to large size and nowhere else. Also they can't survive anywhere else because only there they can find giant cows to feed on.
In your world it could be some unrefined magic source or an old mage tower where he gathered artefacts and over time they started affecting surrounding.
For the best IMHO "low fantasy" story read *Umberto Eco "Baudolino"*.
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Although very old and difficult to find any more, Gene Wolfe's "Book of the New Sun" is perhaps the finest "High Fantasy" setting which would follow your strictures. The setting is actually hundreds of thousands of years in the future, and "magic" is (by implication) the result of high technology and biological engineering from previous civilizations that have remained or continued to function throughout the ages.
In this regard, we can also think of this as a reversion to very ancient Pagan environments, where every object has a spirit or *anima* controlling it or providing it with some sort of life force. When the trees and flowers can inform you of the local environmental conditions, buildings complain about being old and infirm unless they get needed repairs and so on, I'd suggest that you are living in a "high fantasy" world.
Two other suggestions. [Karl Schroeder](http://www.kschroeder.com/) has written a series of books (Virga) set in a vast 3 dimensional 3D construct in free space. The fact that everything is in freefall and you must think and work in 3 dimensions adds a sort of dreamlike fantasy element to what is otherwise a straight up science fiction setting. He also wrote an essay on what he called the "[Rewilding](http://www.kschroeder.com/weblog/i-am-the-very-model-of-a-singularitarian/?searchterm=rewilding)" which expands on the sort of ideas the Gene Wolfe had built into "The Book of the New Sun".
The real art comes from making the assumptions of your high fantasy setting seamlessly integrate with all aspects of your constructed society, so you don't get inadvertent clashes of ideas or setting which take the reader out of the story going "huh? Where did **that** come from?"
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Due to a thick cloud layer(at approx the same heigh as Earth's) surrounding this planet, it's plants have evolved to stay above the clouds so that they can absorb sunlight from their nearby star.
Is this possible and how would it in that case manifest? A few ideas I have are plants that can float above the clouds somehow, absorbing water from the clouds, and simply very tall trees sticking out of the ground, do these have any merit?
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There are plenty of plants that survive just by absorbing nutrients carried by the atmosphere. A Bromelliad, *Tillandzia*, is routinely seen growing in roofs, high tension electric cables, nets and fences. It absorbs humidity of the air, and probably nutrients carried by rain water, storing them in their leafy rosettas. A lot of Orchids also acquire their mineral nutrients through their aerial root system from the air. There is also a type of vegetation called nebular forests, typically seen way high in the mountains, that acquire their water trough condensation from the clouds that form in the early morning, since they live above the clouds.
A tree tall enough to reach above the clouds would probably spend way more energy transporting nutrients throughout its body, as has been mentioned before. The tallest trees, giant redwoods, reach at most 100m (around 330 feet), and they are really pushing the envelope there, absorbing water from the atmosphere through aerial roots to supplement their water intake. I think your best bet would be very small airborne plants, with air sacks to keep them buoyant way up high. The hydrogen idea is neat, but probably very impractical biologically. The biggest metabolic expenditure a plant makes is to acquire a reserve of reducing power in form of NADH coenzimes, which basically allows them to store solar power in chemical form, so I can't see them just wasting that much energy to keep them afloat. Maybe a different, less energetically expensive gas? Here is a different thought, maybe they can regulate the temperature of the air inside the airsacks, by any number of means (some plants evolved tiny silicate lenses to enhance their luminous input, that is a nice trick to regulate heating from light) to effectively control their density, allowing them to keep afloat.
Also, keep in mind that there are plenty of autotrophical organisms (that make their own food, basically) that don't rely on visible light. Some can harness infrared, as thermal energy, some can use chemical sources, like the sulphur acids liberated near deep oceanic volcanoes, etc. Maybe plants evolved to harness these sources of energy deep in the shadowy realms? Plenty of soil there, I imagine, and probably water too.
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The clouds are very high, a plant cannot grow that high, the expense of energy required to move nutrients and water from its roots to such a height would be higher than the amount of energy it could absorb from the sun. It would also collapse under its own weight.
Plants floating above the clouds are equally impossible because (besides the floating), they'd need water and nutrients. The nutrients are in the earth below the plants and the rain only starts at the cloud level, which is below them.
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Well let's bring in some science, according to this [paper](http://treephys.oxfordjournals.org/content/27/3/433.full.pdf) the maximum height of a plant is roughly the height of a redwood (120m). So this can only happen if conditions are different. The issue is not the strength of wood but rather the efford required to bring water up to the leafs. Part of the problem being that photosynthesis requires water and if the energy requirements of bringing water to the leafs (using osmosis)exceed the energy production of photosynthesis then the tree cannot grow.
This can be helped in several ways: higher humidity and air roots, lower gravity or simply lowering the height of the clouds
For [example](http://cdn.c.photoshelter.com/img-get/I0000yP_n83Pc4r0/s/880/880/rainforest-dipterocarp-cloud-dawn-mist-0646.jpg)
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While I see no way for plants to evolve in this situation I see how you could have plants:
The heart of the plant is a large hydrogen gas bag, the hydrogen being produced by disassociation of water. It has one or more roots, mostly a very tough fiber many miles long and arranged in a loop. Unlike traditional roots these do not draw up nutrients. Rather, there are nodules along the root that collects water and nutrients. The plant slowly draws the fiber around the loop, the force needed is only that needed to lift the collected material as other than that the two sides of the loop are of the same weight.
Yes, this is energy intensive, the plant will obtain materials very slowly. It will have to be very good at not wasting anything drawn up from the roots. Cactuses would have a lot to learn from it and anything that can be obtained from the atmosphere will certainly have to be. Nitrogen can be had from the air, if it can keep it's moisture inside the biggest need from the roots will actually be hydrogen. (Unfortunately, probably drawn up as water due to the energy demands of separating it.)
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I doubt if this scenario of plant life above the clouds is feasible for an earthlike planet. Apologies if this deviates from your earthlike environment starting point. It's just that there are other possibilities worth considering.
However, there might be autotrophic, photosynthesising aeolian or windborne organisms drifting above the cloud layers of a hot jupiter. Organisms of this type might be not quite plants as we know them, but closer to metazoan versions of volvox species. Creatures that have plant-like stages in their life histories or which may revert to plant-like phases due to environmental conditions. While they have animal-like phases at other times. Sort of plant-animals. The volvox reference is for comparison to something similar here on Earth.
Hot jupiters would have the winds to support soaring or drifting lifeforms. Plus they would be close enough to the primary stars for lots of sunlight.
The light and heat conditions on a hot jupiter should produce huge quantities of prebiotic molecules to kickstart the evolution of life there. Probably, more than enough for a rich biosphere. Life will colonise every available niche. This will include the atmosphere and winds above the clouds.
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How about alien plants growing **over the top of high mountains**?
In Earth, there are mountain peaks high above clouds, but [don't have rich fauna due to cold climates and lack of moisture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_line). If your alien planet is warm and moist enough, (maybe that could explain the thick clouds,) variety of plants could grow on over-5000-meter peaks.
And **floating all over the clouds could be their seedlings**. Each individual peak must have been an isolated environment, unless these alien plants spread their seeds and spores on the wind. Because the planet is not like Earth, maybe not just seeds but youngster plants. Saplings won't survive midair well, but that's how seeding works: spread as many seeds as possible and some will settle somewhere and take root.
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Going back to basics. An earthlike planet with dense cloud cover and yet there are plants above the cloud layer. They can be either floating or extremely tall trees. Trees on our Earth have grown to the limit that natural trees can. So we can rule out super-tall trees. Although alien biological engineers might bypass those limits with some unexpected mechanisms.
Let's assume a form of airborne algae has evolved on Cloudland (my name for your planet). It should be able to flourish up there. More sunlight, better photosynthesis. Gradually evolving over hundreds of millions to fill all available floating plant niches above the clouds. Conditions will be generally cold, icy and dry. They stick close to the clouds for moisture. Plants need nitrogen for growth. Perhaps there are acidic clouds to supply that. if there are acidic clouds, then there must be something to produce them. Volcanoes? Volcanoes usually eject sulphates and sulphuric acid. Not what we want. Of course! Lightning and lots of it. That will make nitric oxides. Add water and you have nitric acid. Might be better to have your plants absorbing nitric oxides direct, but able to handle nitric acid droplets.
There will need to be some mechanism to get the airborne algae above the clouds. A stormy atmosphere? Definitely as Cloudland's atmosphere needs lots and lots of lightning to ensure the floating plants get their nitrogen.
What still worries me is the possibility that floating plants need to have densities of aerogels, therefore capable of floating or drifting easily on the wind, and yet might need to be structurally very strong. Perhaps that was a thought I had about your very tall trees. Floating plants might resemble masses of thin fibres as they will need to maximize their surface area to catch moisture, nutrients and sunlight. Rather like thin green netting instead of a bush or tree. This would also reduce their mass per area making it easier for them to sail on the wind.
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Oh man... You would not believe how long this took to think of. I spent all dinner discussing metal qualities. Anyways, here it is...
* THE METAL TREE\*
The giant of the forest reaches high into the clouds. Given our planets ridiculous amounts of non corroding/rusting titanium the trees have bark completely made of this metal. Like any other plant these giants need water. They are able to use it in the same fashion as redwoods.(look it up!) It reproduces like grass with shoots as no seed would have enough resources to support growth past the clouds. This tree is also able to support a diverse ecosystem in its leaves.
There, that was a lot of fun to think up. Good question. :)
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I don't think a plant would be able to reach high enough to get sunlight from above the clouds. In order to grown and evolve, they had to still start well below the cloud layer. Plus, a plant that extended miles into the sky would have to have some kind of incredibly ridged support structure to hold itself up. Especially when it has to fight the planet's winds and storms.
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I have talked about [collective consciousness](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/45184/is-the-idea-of-a-collective-consciousness-realistic). The basic run down is that a collective consciousness species replaces cells, tissues and organs with ants, specialized ants and groups of specialized ants (or really any small colony animal; termites, bees, wasps, etc). A large problem with this design is that they are basically immortal, the 'cells' simply are able to endlessly reproduce, allowing the creature as a whole to never age. There is also the problem that since the creature is made of many other small creatures, I cannot think of a way for them to reliably die of unnatural causes either.
This of course creates the problem that overpopulation would be reached very, very quickly. So, how can I avoid this species overpopulating their world? How can I make sure that they are guaranteed to die eventually without involving aging?
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I can't address immortality as a problem. I'm too far from the cradle to ever see more life as a problem. I can however address the issue of overpopulation.
Why can't your collective consciousness practice birth control? Make it smart enough to determine whether there are enough local resources to feed more cells. If there are, it can choose to spawn or assimilate enough new cells to match the available resources. If there are not enough resources, it can choose to practice safe sex with itself and kill off any would-be assimilation candidates.
If the amount of available resources unexpectedly declined, leaving your collective consciousness with too many mouths to feed, it would do what all living things do in such situations. It would starve. Cutting off supplies to a part of its component parts would never even be considered. That would be like a hungry man chopping off his arms and legs so that his brain can get more of the remaining nutrients in his blood. It is a thought that would remain un-thought, no matter how hungry those brain cells got.
What a staving collective consciousness can do, which mono-bodied victims cannot, is spread out. If resources are scarce in one area, it can send parts of itself in all directions in the hopes of finding food. Those parts which find food would guide all the other parts to it and those parts which dies along the way to their next meal, would be mourned as a starved man mourns the loss of the strength and vigor which he enjoyed in pre-depredation days. It wouldn't be a conscious thought that led some parts to die, just an inevitable result of a situation which might otherwise have been fatal to all.
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This is simple and complex question, at the same time.
* but overall, what you describe as small small aliens, keep together is ordinary multicellular live
Environment and lack of food will kill them efficiently, without limitations, but if you wish just limit colonies by size.
In case queen, which is only one who reproduces and because of that she is bottleneck for growth(eventually at some point, speed of how much units it may physically make, will be equal rate of death), is out of equation by *'cells' simply are able to endlessly reproduce* , but it still may be a moderator of that collective consciousness, with limited range by distance as example, size of living place, or by size of colony literary. Bees not only enjoys queen smell in general - but they transmitting smell by touching each other and queen. Queen have escort they touch queen and redistribute she's smell among others, escort also rotates one bee come other go. And such way they are able to determine size of colony, which triggers bees to make places for new queens, divide family and so on.
* let say group have one source of tokens of some sort. Size of that token may be known, or may be not known. Aliens have believe, law etc - which says you may keep that token for year and gods(who else) are happy if you reproduce in that year, but after year you have give that token for any random member (as they are dumb, they can't distinguish members and falsify results - it will be some random member). If it needs 100 of aliens to build that source and it is limited in production rate - this will set some population limit.
Swarm logic algorithms working in determination of sizes, no one have to be smart there for doing it.
So any cell outside the reach will let's say loose will to reproduce, and probably this will itself and ability to, have to be triggered by belonging to that collective consciousness, and presence or queen or such.
In real live, with bee's as example, situation is reversed, they all have ability to reproduce(except drones, which usually is small portion of them, for short time), but they do not do, until queen not dies or flies out from hive.
Queen is produced not as ordinary unit, and it needs collective work of may bees, it needs more resources from bees, comparing to ordinary units. That means just single bee is not capable to make new hive.
It not only needs more resources, but they just not capable to make it to happen without cooperation of many bees. Just because few bees not capable to build place where queen have to be born
* actually they can't build anything without cooperation - that's long story. But as example how they determine vertical lines to build honeycomb(they have to be vertical because honey is fluid and if they do that horizontally it will flow down, and they have to build twice more to store same amount of honey) they use them self's swarm as level, they making hanging group of them self, and that determines vertical direction.
To make system more robust, they have to be depended on each other - it's made by specializing types of work one units can do or by their size and such, or by age, or just because they really can't do something complex alone from things that are vital for them. As example bee do different critical tasks at different ages - and that helps them be small and dumb, they are just too dumb to be able do different tasks in same time and it makes them be more efficient and allows to learn stuff first etc etc.
* I would say like humans, same stuff here
In real live with bees there is nothing that happens just because or for fun - literary anything is done because of some important reason, and there is a lot of such reasons, but goal of them is one - survive and prosper.
All that reasons forming system of equation which allows them to stay one hive, work as hive. But this is also weak point in their adaptation mechanism, it's very hard to solve that system of equation in another and same time useful way.
* single unit important for coordination, it do not makes orders, it is just signal : All Quiet in Baghdad
* vital living structures, which can be build together only
* reproduction rate of one unit may and can be regulated according food availability and size of swarm or swarm needs, system needs
* differentiate specializations
* fight other colonies (star systems planet etc)
* if no wish to fight, just feel boundary of other hives, it will be border of expansion.
**as note** any multicellular organism is perfect example of system which regulates itselfs, it's just a question of implementations of negative feedback to the system and it's members. And being collective consciousness does not mean absence of such regulation. And it's not important made this regulation naturally by evolution or vitro. As Ultimate factor for resticting size is just lack of energy and matter for growth.
Determining size of hive does not need one center-queen-etc, it can be done p2p style.
But if they can reproduce until natural boundary, there is no reason, at least at space stage, for them to limit themselves. On planet stage may be, it may help selection work faster, so for speedup reasons, but space stage not really.
Make hive be not a one big homogeneous structure, but collective consciousness from collective consciousness - binary tree, grid, p2p - it will help to optimize structure as whole
* like human society do.
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What you could do is make a slight change for your colony. Changed it to a hive mind and not a collective. You may wonder what is the difference is let me explain.
In a collective there is no single individual that severs as the collectives "brain" instead the each members brain serves as piece of a collective "brain". In a since it would be like if your brain was scatter along every cell of your body. Odiously a collective can't die of old age, but a hive mind can.
A hive mind unlike a collective has one central controller or "brain". picture your hive mind like a body. You have one member of the collective that serves as the brain and the rest sever as the arms legs and mouth. In in the case of the hive mind if the central controller (the brain) grows old and dies the rest of the colony will also die like a body with it head cut off.
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Hope it helps in finding ways to kill immortals.. ;)
Being a collective consciousness the first priority of the species will be its survival rather than reproduction. Being immortal as explained in the question only means just able to survive long without any physical damage. Psychological damages can still apply.
Assuming each organism can enter or leave from the collective consciousness, we can simply limit reproduction to the organism outside the collective consciousness. Since those within the collective will think of themselves as a single individual.
Those who are not a part of the collective consciousness won’t be able to survive for long due to the food/water/resources gathering will not be effective/possible as the collective. And those who are a part of the collective will be able to survive long but no longer due to psychological stress involved in it.
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Given that your collective consciousness is an anthill, the "cells" are *not* able to endlessly reproduce; indeed, they are not able to reproduce at all. Only the queen can reproduce, and that certainly limits the number of ants the colony can produce in any given time. Therefore the size of an ant colony is already naturally restricted.
Note that this is very much unlike multi-celled organisms like ourselves, where indeed every single cell is able to reproduce, and it can only work because they have evolved to have an *explicit* mechanism limiting that growth. The failure of that mechanism is known as cancer.
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You really only have 2 options here;
1. Culling. If the ant-hills feel that they are overpopulated, they either exile the weak, old and ill or they kill them.
2. Resources. Newborns born in a area whose resource-population limit has been reached die naturally.
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At the current pace of technological advancement, when would humans be able to build an interplanetary telescope array?
This telescope doesn't have to be that huge; building one spanning Earth, Moon and Mars would be enough to call it a day.
Bonus question: how would such a project fare against the Webber space telescope in terms of usefulness?
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## We can do it now
We could in theory do that now.
The problem isn't one of capability, it is cost and time.
## Solar Focus Mission
Solar Focus Point:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/XSDM1.jpg)
Even better, we could theoretically fly a mission to the [Sun's focal point (about 550 AU) and use the Sun as a giant telescope lens.](http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=785) It would give you a [200 meter resolution at Alpha Centauri.](http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25498/the-sun-as-a-gravitational-lens)
Even using a nuclear powered craft (such as [nuclear pulse propulsion](http://jim2b.blogspot.com/2010/11/the-case-for-space-viii-nuclear-pulse.html)) expect the mission to take decades. For conventional/ less practical propulsion (chemical, solar sail, etc.), expect it take centuries.
## TAU
[The Thousand Astronomical Unit (TAU) mission](http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/T/TAU.html) would be similar in scope and cost to the Solar Focus mission. It would be a great trial run for an interstellar mission and you would fly through the Solar Focus.
The ship would not be recovered.
As with most space related projects, the hurdle is not technological, it is the tremendous cost of these ambitious programs.
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**Let us consider how incredibly useful such a telescope is**
The maximum angular resolution of a telescope is:
$$\theta =1.22 \frac{\lambda}{D}$$
where $\lambda$ is the wavelength of the light, and $D$ is the diameter of the telescope.
For our test, we place a banana (fruit, 20 cm long) on Pluto (not fruit, on average 39.5 AU away)
The wavelength of [a bananas colour](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow), #EFFA00, is approximately $580nm$, and the diameter of a Moon telescope is $3476km$
[Angular size of a banana](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=asin%2820%20cm%2Fpluto%20semi%20major%20axis%29): $3.386×10^{-14}$ radians
[Angular resolution of telescope](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1.22*580nm%2F3476km): $2.036×10^{-13}$ radians
**Not even close.**
Let us upgrade to an Earth sized telescope, and a [banana with a larger blue shift](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Banana).
[Angular resolution of an Earth sized telescope looking at a blue banana:](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1.22*470nm%2F12756km) $4.495×10^{-14}$ radians
**Close, but no cigar**
But, we can do better. You said the Moon, Earth and Mars? Turns out we can combine those telescopes with [astronomical interferometry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_interferometer). Surprisingly, it is as simple as just combining the diameters of the individual telescopes.
[Resolution of wasted terrestrial planets telescope](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1.22*470nm%2F%28Earth%20diameter%20%2B%20Mars%20diameter%20%2B%20Moon%20diameter%29): $2.495×10^{-14}$ radians.
**Finally, no pixelated blue banana can hide on Pluto.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DE68I.png).
Given a telescope building economy comparable in size with the [current market price of bananas](http://www.bls.gov/regions/mid-atlantic/data/averageretailfoodandenergyprices_usandmidwest_table.htm) (0.58$/pound), times the total world production of bananas (139 million metric tons), we have a budget of 178 billion dollars to build telescopes for.
The cost per area of a telescope array is a bit tricky, but the [one hectare telescope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Telescope_Array) seems to end up at approximately 80 million dollar.
That results in a total cost of covering a hemisphere of Earth with telescopes of $2×10^{18}$ dollars. (we just need one hemisphere, the other one can be used for say, growing bananas).
Divided by our budget, that is 11.2 million years of building time. From a geological point of view, that is not so bad.
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The only issue with spreading telescopes across the countryside (or solar system) is while interferometers can have the angular resolution of a telescope the size of the baseline, the light gathering is still limited to the size of the mirrors on the actual telescopes.
In principle, you could raid Toys'R'Us for a bunch of telescopes suitable for introducing children to astronomy and create an interferometer the size of the United States by placing one in each state and combining the inputs. You could do even better by going to another store, making a deal with SpaceX and placing the extra telescopes on the Moon and Mars (as in the opening question).
You now have a fantastically powerful interferometer, but the light gathering of even several hundred children's telescopes would barely match a single mirror on a mid sized observatory.
So if you are going to all the expense to create a planetary or even interplanetary interferometer, then the individual telescopes need to be as large as possible, given the resources you can apply to the project.
Of course, one good thing about creating an interferometer is you can build it in stages. Even starting with two large telescopes in the Western Hemisphere already creates a continent wide "mirror", and you can add incrementally add telescopes around the world, and in LEO, HEO, the Moon and so on as budgets allow, gradually improving the power of the device until (as Hohmanfan says) even bananas on Pluto become clearly visible.
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So here's the premise:
We have an Earth-like planet, with a civilisation at roughly the same state as ours today. Scientists have been monitoring the atmosphere for centuries, what with forecasting the weather and the whole debate about greenhouse gasses, and all that. So far nothing unusual.
But now they have suddenly noticed something strange, and quite scary: The levels of oxygen in the atmosphere are dropping.
At first the scientists don't make a fuss about it, just trying to work out what's going on, but as the levels continue to drop, the news becomes public and the population starts to panic. We're not at a stage yet where everyone's suffering breathing difficulties, but if things continue it will start getting serious within about a year.
Nobody knows what's causing this or how to fix it. It's only oxygen that's affected, no other gasses. There's no obvious changes in global plant activity, no unusual volcanism, no unexpected melting of the tundras... what can be going on?
So, what *is* causing it? My favoured cause is that the planet is passing through a belt of hydrogen gas in space. This is being collected by the planet as it moves through space and is reacting with the oxygen in the atmosphere to form water.
Is this plausible? If so how will civilisation save itself?
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Your premise with interstellar hydrogen causing decrease in oxygen in atmosphere is NOT plausible.
**TL;DR: Forget interstellar hydrogen. There is plenty of hydrogen in solar system. For bonus oxygen elimination, you can burn some iron and sulfur, it is plentiful too.** Anything which oxidizes would do. But you need to burn **huge amounts of material,** and the arrival of that material to atmosphere will be most likely visible.
Full answer:
Because of solar wind, **no interstellar hydrogen will be able to reach the Earth orbit** (even if there might be a cloud of hydrogen in interstellar space).
BTW interstellar space is extremely empty, see [density](http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/DaWeiCai.shtml) of [interstellar medium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_medium). "Dense" is 10^6 molecules in m3. Atmosphere on sea level is 10^19 molecules per m3. Good man-made vacuum is 10^10.
[Voyager](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program) only now, after decades of flight, left outer area of solar wind influence and is really out in interstellar space.
Earth is safely tucked in [heliosphere](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere), no interstellar gas can reach us that easy.
As [TimB](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/35828/687) calculated, you need **a lot of hydrogen**. To get such amount of hydrogen to planet so quickly, no obvious natural process is plausible. Geological changes work on geological timeline (millennia).
If you are in such a hurry, use aliens. They may hurdle small (hard to detect) balls of frozen hydrogen to planet's orbit, to eliminate oxygen which is poisonous to them. They are alien-forming this planet to their liking. [Kuiper belt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_belt) might have enough hydrogen-based materials for that. Build a factory on [Sedna](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/90377_Sedna), extract hydrogen, ping it down the Sun's gravity wall toward Earth. Fun has been had by everyone involved.
Kuiper belt might have mass up to 10% of mass of Earth, most of it being hydrogen. Then there is more nearby hydrogen in [Oort cloud](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud) - more than in any random interstellar hydrogen cloud, even if much farther and even more dispersed.
If you go this way (aliens alien-forming Earth), Jupiter's moons [Europa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_%28moon%29), [Ganymede](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganymede_%28moon%29) and [Callisto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callisto_%28moon%29) have lots of water too, and are closer to Earth. [Io](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Io_%28moon%29) has lots of tasty sulfur which aliens prefer over the oxygen :-) But then they might just like Venus as it is now.
Of course hydrogen balls from moons would have to escape Jupiter's gravity, but because they are on the Jupiter's orbit it should not be too hard.
You would also have to slow down photosynthesis (which converts water back to oxygen). One way would be to put lots of sulfur to atmosphere (as I mentioned from Jupiter's moon IO), to start runaway greenhouse effect like on planet Venus, with high temperatures and dense clouds (preventing light reaching lower atmosphere) acid rains.
Another way to bind a lot of oxygen is iron. Iron is pretty common too. Small iron meteorites. You want them small, so they will burn in the atmosphere and do not fall down to the surface. Thousands of tonnes per day. This will be more obvious - planet's surface will be covered by red dust (rust).
Iron, hydrogen and sulfur bombardment will make beautiful night view: lots of falling stars. To avoid this (make it more sneaky), you can create iron and sulfur dust, mixed in frozen hydrogen for delivery.
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Your problem is mass. There's a LOT of oxygen in the atmosphere.
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**Hydrogen needed**
For each $O\_2$ you need 4 hydrogen atoms.
Our atmosphere has a mass of approximately: $5.15×10^{18} kg$
By mass 23% of that is oxygen (by volume it's 21% but we're interested in mass).
That gives oxygen: $1.18\*10^{18} kg$
Combining Hydrogen and Oxygen gives water. $\frac2{18}$ths of the mass of that is Hydrogen. The ratio of Hydrogen to Oxygen is $\frac2{16}$.
So: $$1.18\*\frac{2}{16}{\*10^{18}} kg = 1.48 × 10^{17} kg$$
of hydrogen would be needed to combine with all the oxygen.
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**Hydrogen available**
The densest nebula (clouds of gas in space) have a density of $10^4$ particles per $cm^3$. Even if that was pure hydrogen that's a mass of $1.67 \*10^{-23}kg$. Per $km^3$ that's $1.67\*10^{-8}kg/km^3$
The earth has a radius of $6,371 km$. Even if we say it's gathering in hydrogen up to $10,000km$ away that gives a capture area of $3.14\*10^8km^3$
Lets say this is an interstellar cloud, our solar system is moving at a speed of $220km/s$ relative to the galaxy.
So in that time earth covers a volume of $6.9\*10^{10}km^3/s$
This means it gathers $$1.67\*10^{-8} \* 6.9\*10^{10}kg/s = 1152kg/s$$
That's right, all that movement and density gives us just over a metric tonne of hydrogen every second. Sounds like a lot?
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**Conclusion**
We need $1.48 × 10^{17} kg$ of hydrogen.
$$\frac{1.48 × 10^{17} kg}{1152kg/s} = 1.28\*10^{14} seconds$$
That's $4~056~162$ years
So the earth flying through one of the densest nebula we know about with a very unlikely speed difference and the nebula being made purely of hydrogen...would need 4 million years to gather enough hydrogen to react with all the oxygen in our atmosphere.
In other words you need some way to make the nebula not just a little denser but a million times denser than any known nebula and you would then have enough hydrogen to convert 25% of our oxygen into water per year.
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While plausible, the reaction between hydrogen and oxygen is somewhat violent, think rockets engine...
I'd go with a reverse cyanobacteria mechanism, but I don't know how or if a civilization can (with a really big if) save itself in such a short time. For humans to just go down from 21% to 18% had some consequences. If in a year the oxygen level goes down from 21% to about 10%, humans are dying in less than a year. This is assuming that the missing oxygen is replaced by a non toxic gas.
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Without intelligent intervention of some kind, whether technologically advanced human, alien or divine, this simply isn't possible. Oxygen is highly reactive, and thus any substance that was available on the Earth to react with it and take it out of the atmosphere would already have done so. And there's a *lot* of oxygen in the atmosphere, so it will take a correspondingly large effect to remove enough of it on your desired timescale.
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Common fantasy trope is, that members of one fantasy group hate members of different group. For example: Elves hate dwarves. But in most fantasy setups, it is never shown that dwarves would hate another members from same group.
For scope of this question, lets define terms:
* **Racism:** A belief that quality of different member of a society can be determined by color of the skin of such member. Also a belief, that basically says: "My skin color is the best"
* **Shapism:** A belief that member of one group has different qualities than member of another group. Simply put: "Mine race is the best."
Now imagine that I would like to have "fantasy people of colour," in meaning that any fantasy race can have members of different skin colors.
So, **how can you form a mindset where you do not see the skin color, but see "shape" of that person?**
For basic setup, assume classic fantasy world, no magic. Assume a place where all races meet, and all skin colors are present (A city which is used mainly for trade)
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Racism is a symptom of tribalism. People tend to want to band together into groups of similar individuals to collectively protect their interests. While now, in the USA, racism is the big divider, a century ago the Anglo-Saxons hated the Germans and the Italians and the Irish. Since all of them are now considered "white" peoples, modern-day racist Anglo-Saxons ignore them, because they are part of the tribe.
To answer your question, simply make it so that color is not indicative of geographical location. If a white elf comes from a land that also contains black elves and brown elves and has friends and family members who are black and brown, they likely will not associate skin color with tribal belonging. However, if elves have to compete with dwarves for food or land or resources, shapism will quickly take root and turn violent. And once such a conflict has started, the prejudices will take root and affect cities and countries outside of the struggle as the toxic ideas spread through trade and gossip.
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There exists an Arabic proverb which goes something like, "I, against my brothers. I and my brothers against my cousins. I and my brothers and my cousins against the world."
In a sufficiently contentious world, members of the same species would cooperate despite skin color differences, as shape would be seen as more important than color.
Of course, if one species became dominant, so that the other species were no longer seen as a threat, the instinct for drawing lines and excluding "the others" would probably cause racism to rear its ugly head.
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Color blindness, sir.
Or a society that lives in near-dark levels of light, where people/beings don't see many details, which means that a distinguished shape is a significant marker of race/affiliation (like height or breadth).
BTW, we already have some shape "discrimination" in our society. Height, fatness/skinniness, details of face etc. make for lots of "shapism" biases. I dare say that if we had fat short dwarves and tall skinny elves they'd be at each other's throats for the sake of shapism alone.
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You can rig your species' genetics so that close relatives can have different colors. For example, a litter of kittens can contain red, black, and calico members. It's really hard for a sentient black cat to believe in black supremacy when his mom is a calico and his son is red.
(Quick science: gene on X chromosome controls red/black. Black male gets black X from mom. Red male gets red X from mom. Red female is rare because the red gene is less common and she needed to get it from mom and dad. Calico gets red X from one parent and black X from her other parent; male calico only happens when there is some deviation from genetic simplicity. All other cat colors involve other genes that modify the basic red/black colors.)
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In the *Shadowrun* setting this is a briefly touched on topic. The Magic returns to the world, and a number of humans are changed into fantasy races (orks, trolls, dwarves, elves) while still retaining their skin-color and ethnic race traits. I'm not too familiar with the earlier *Shadowrun* lore, but in the recent PC releases of *Shadowrun Returns* and *Dragonfall*, ethnic racism is almost nonexistent since fantasy race has more real world impact. If anything, that setting has replaced ethnic racism with fantasy racism.
That's one interpretation of the question you're asking, but then it has some differences since *Shadowrun* is a future setting rather than a medieval setting. Still, a lot of the same conclusions can be drawn in either scenario.
To sum up my conclusion for why fantasy racism would be more common than ethnic racism: the difference between elves and dwarves is so much more than, for example, between Asians and Black people, that ethnic race wouldn't be seen as enough of a big deal to get angry about. A Black elf and a Black dwarf would have less in common than an Asian dwarf and a Black dwarf.
In the real world, it's generally accepted that ethnicity doesn't have very much real world impact on a person on a biological level, rather it's more of a factor for social impact.
In a Tolkien-inspired fantasy setting though; fantasy race makes a huge biological difference to an individual. Elves live longer, dwarves are stronger, humans reproduce more quickly, orks are more aggressive.
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As Volossya very well stated:
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> Racism is a symptom of tribalism.
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Your solution could be simple, make every race of the same species belong to the same tribe. So both dark, high or sylvan elves are citizens of the same state, share the same culture and pray to the same gods. Cultural differences are bigger and more noticeable than racial differences, Rome was stable because despite racial differences, they all shared Roman culture.
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I've never been satisfied with how this has been handled in any sci-fi story I've read, watched, etc. It always seems to get handwaved away with "we have sensor packages of various powers" and "they have stealth capabilities of various effectivenesses". I want to get much more specific than that.
Try to keep this within the realm of basic plausibility and Clarke's Third Law. I want technology in this future warfare to be advanced, but still basically within the realm of what we currently know to be plausible.
This is what I've been able to come up with:
* **Visual sensing**; video collection and analysis comparable to modern day techniques, like what guides the FGM-148 Javelin. In space there's no ambient light, which already presents difficulties with shadows cast by planets, moons, and even other large ships, which would effectively create blind spots unless searchlights were used (which would immediately reveal the craft carrying the light). Add to this that warships will almost certainly be painted matte black, and I don't think visual sensing will be a reliable means at all.
* **Thermal sensing**; works like visual sensing, but with the benefit that spacecraft will emit this naturally (blackbody radiation), so there's no worry about shadows and such. Ships could theoretically defeat this with cooling systems built into their hull plating, but my concern would be that supercooling the hull enough to appear invisible against the black background of space would severely compromise its structural integrity, especially if it includes complex elements like reactive armor. Protruding sensory packages and weapons, and also engines also wouldn't be able to be cooled in this manner without losing all functionality. The best countermeasure I can come up with for thermal sensing would be dispersing a wide cloud of superheated gas around your craft to disguise it (like an IR smoke screen), but I can't imagine this would last long; the cloud would either disperse or cool rapidly, and would need constant renewal to remain effective.
* **Radar**; similar to the current technology. Although we currently have the means to almost completely defeat it (our only current barrier is cost, and this will likely vanish in the future), I'm not certain how the detection could also evolve in the future. In any case, sending out radar signals would probably also allow the detected craft to see the source of the incoming signals, and would compromise the position of the broadcasting craft.
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# Gravity
Your ships spew out mini nanodrones that just float around in space, broadcasting its' location on an encrypted frequency.
Since everything distorts spacetime and has gravitational attraction, your nanodrones will naturally be attracted to larger masses. You might get "outlines" of larger ships this way.
When these masses move through your drones, your drones will also be displaced, and as such you can detect the "holes" in the droned areas.
The added bonus for using these nanodrones is that you can program them to identify parts of what it's sticking to, or composition, or w/e. For example, if some happened to be on the Engine, it could broadcast that it detects heat - if some were near missles, it could broadcast that it's detecting radiation from nuclear weapons or whatnot. Perhaps it's actually on a space rock - then it'd just be a slow moving mass of cold rock and report it's speed so that the mothership can confirm if the rock is really a rock (Is it accelerating with no apparent cause? If so, it's probably not a rock...).
**Countermeasures:**
* periodically throw emp waves out to disable the drones in a large area while you travel through that particular sector
* antiminidrone drones
Option 2: Use the stars. There are millions of them in the sky. I expect a future civilization capable of space warfare to have some decent star maps. Literally, just look outside the bridge and see which stars are blocked by something. It's probably a ship if it's not supposed to be blocked.
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The best two sources on the internet for discussions on Space warfare are the "Atomic Rockets" blog <http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/index.php> and "Rocketpunk Manifesto" <http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com>. I might also throw in the Unwanted Blog <http://up-ship.com/blog/> for a bit of out of the box thinking.
While you can spend hours parsing the details of various systems and ideas, there are a few fundamentals about space warfare that Hard SF will have to take into account:
1. There is no stealth in space. Since the background is so cold, any energy emission from the ship will stand out like a bright beacon. Even refrigeration will not help; the refrigeration unit must eject the waste heat. Ships will not only emit thermal radiation, but most practical spacecraft capable of operating in deep space will need nuclear energy (fission or fusion) to power their systems, which means they will also be emitting neutrinos. Even hiding behind a planet won't block neutrino emissions from the spacecrafts power source.
2. Space is really, really big. So you can see the enemy Stardestroyer from the edge of the solar system? What practical steps can you take? Firing a missile, torpedo or even a Ravening Beam of Death isn't going to help; it will tai anywhere from hours to years for a weapon to cross the Solar System. By that time the target will have moved, the political situation may have changed and any number of systems failures may have disabled the weapon. In a practical universe, most engagements will probably be limited to one light second (just under the distance from the Earth to the Moon) so the targeting systems can acquire the target, take a shot and adjust based on the results.
3. Practical space combat is going to be very energy intensive. Being able to "jink" your spacecraft will take a massive amount of energy, and the rocket equation will mean carrying fuel for combat manoeuvres requires even more fuel to carry the fuel...space warships will be the size of supertankers. Generating a Ravening Beam of Death (RBOD) might require a linear accelerator a kilometre long to generate an x ray frequency laser that can hit a target a light second away and deposit enough energy to do serious damage at that range. Space warships will be huge, like ballistic missile submarines or aircraft carrier size rather than X-wing fighter sized. Even missiles will become huge ICBM sized devices to accelerate their busses and warheads to as high a speed as possible (the ultimate weapon would be a missile travelling at relativistic speed, which would be essentially impossible to spot, coming right behind it's own light cone, and delivering tens of thousands of Gigatons of energy on impact).
4. Successful space combat means filling the sky. Filling the sky with sensor drones in a one light second diameter array to get fine grained 3D targeting information. Filling the sky with tens of thousands of coke can sized "Soda Cans of Death" (SCoD) kinetic weapons. Filling the sky with laser energy (the higher frequency the better) to take out the carrier ships with all the kinetic warheads and sensor drones, and the various drones, missile busses and SCoDs as well.
Space warfare will not resemble air or sea combat at all. On the Rocketpunk site, one description of space warfare was a majestic unfolding of a "constellation" of ships and systems, much like a mobile Vauban style fortress. If you use different starting assumptions, you may end up with a different outcome.
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## Cosmic Rays
Or rather, the absence of cosmic rays.
A target of any considerable size is likely to be [shielded from cosmic radiation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_threat_from_cosmic_rays#Shielding). If your targeting system can sense the field of cosmic radiation, and then see a "hole" in that radiation, then you have a potential target. Naturally, you'd probably want some other targeting system in addition to this, to help distinguish friend from foe from asteroid.
**Countermeasure**
Periodically drop your shielding, or rotate your shielding through different parts of your ship. Or perhaps drop your ship's shielding altogether when battle becomes imminent, and put your crew up in shielded suits, to reduce their footprint.
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Note that I am not an astrophysicist and this may all be junk science. I have not done deep research to see if this is plausible, nor do I have the time right now. Please feel free to correct me if this isn't a practical answer.
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Might be considered necro-posting, and there has been an answer accepted, but this is my favourite subject, so here goes.
Sensing(finding the location of the enemy) and target acquisition(getting the information needed to shoot) can and should be regarded as different matters. As others have remarked there is no stealth in space. And that is true, in general terms. But as any military theorist knowns there are levels of stealth, and all can grant a significant advantage.
So while there are no effective countermeasures against long range observation - aside from pretending to be someone you're not - there are a number of methods for both detection and stealth. I'm talking about while the spacecraft is actually in combat. You will have incoming projectiles that are trying to hide, and active homing ones will be countered by incorporating stealth and countermeasures into the ship.
Radar is pretty simple. Make missiles and KE projectiles have a minimal RCS to make them hard to shoot, and cover them with radar absorbing material. The ship will want to disrupt radar used for ranging, as without that information an accurate intercept is difficult. Also, if the ship can hide its orientation the incoming missiles cannot predict the direction it is about to accelerate. The missiles could also use radar decoys like those used by ICBM warheads.
Thermal is much the same. KE rounds could be supercooled before firing, and are small enough to make them almost invisible in practical terms. Missiles could be cooled by compressed gas, use cold gas RCS thrusters, and have a large 'skirt' of cooled material blocking the target's view of the missile's incandescent drive plume. For hot projectiles thermite charges could be deployed at the larst second as a destruction.
Then there is the option to blind sensors with lasers or particle beams - even at ranges where they cannot cause structural damage they can burn out receptors. A nuclear detonation could dazzle sensors, as could reflected sunlight. A spacecraft close to the sun(between the sun and its target) is harder to spot with visual and optical equipment, as would its projectiles be. I *think* it even disrupts radar to some extent, but I'm not sure. Just remember that space is big and spacecraft are small. At multiple tens of kilometres per second closing velocities even a small inaccuracy will result in a miss. So while there is no 'stealth' as we think of it, there is a lot to incorporate into any SF story.
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Another take on the Gravity answer - If we're talking about the far future "anything is possible" sort of scenario.
Since everything emits gravity, a wide-ish array of ridiculously sensitive gravity sensors may be able detect all mass-having objects within a particular range. If they are sensitive enough they'd be able to make out movement, shapes and mass-distribution of individual objects to tell the difference between warships and rocks.
And if you think that it would be impossible to invent sensors that sensitive given gravity is such a weak force, think of things like blu-ray discs and microchips, examples of things capable of manipulating unfathomably tiny scales.
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one of the issues is we're attempting to describe something that doesn't exist so the only thing we have to fall back on is what we know.
Stealth technology as we know it at our now cutting edge relies on either building vehicles with specific shapes to trick radar, reducing heat emissions to fool thermal imaging or using camouflage systems that mimic how digital information is captured and displayed, or a combination of all 3.
Slightly less cutting edge technology is reflective chaff and flares to confuse local radar and heatseeking weapons.
What we can do from looking at these real world examples is see that depending on the sensors being used, knowledge of how they work helps you understand how to counter them. Like hunters standing down wind of prey for example.
So you want to find a spaceship where do you start looking on the visible (to us) spectrum, infra red, ultra violet? Does it use chemical propulsion? Does it emit radioactive isotopes and so on. You'd build up a profile of how that ship would be expected to appear across a range of tests that would make it stand out from its background. What if you made a projector that could emit random elements that didn't fit that pattern? Or could emit patterns typical of neardby asteroids or other space entities, the technological equivalent of rubbing yourself with dirt so you don't stand out from the background - would that be describing a cloaking system?
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This is a followup to [Zero Privacy: Culture](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13439/zero-privacy-culture).
Background:
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> In this future, technology advances in such a way that privacy becomes obsolete. In other words, no one has decided to give up privacy, it's just that trying to hold onto it is like trying to keep the horse and buggy around when everyone else has cars - it's a losing battle and isn't going to work in the long run.
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> The basic technology that allows this is untraceable, stealth micro-drones. They can be created anonymously and cheaply using 3D-printer farms. Defenses are possible but don't work 100% of the time, so any person, place or system can be compromised eventually. These drones also allow remote physical access to computer systems, and therefore given time will also allow an attacker to bypass any computer security.
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> For the purpose of this question, assume that the absolute best security in the world (government w/unlimited resources) only has a secure half-life of 6 days (so in other words after 6 days the chance you're compromised is at 50%). Note that you do generally know immediately when you're compromised, because you're watching everyone else too.
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> Your thoughts and internal body are safe.
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> Everyone has *access* to everything, from big companies to governments to Jim down the street. Even if there's an exclusive feed (the NSA compromising a foreign nation), the NSA is almost assuredly already compromised by several other sources, and that allows other people to see the "exclusive" data through them.
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> Computing resources are sufficiently advanced that you can scan all available data for behavior/keywords, ex: have a dumb AI that monitors all feeds for a specific scenario.
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> To keep things narrower, answers should be loosely based on Western (US/Canada/France/etc).
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I am interested in answers for a **mature** culture with this kind of tech.
**Questions:**
How would warfare work in a culture like this? Specifically I'd like to look at two scenarios - guerrilla warfare from an indigenous population (is this even possible anymore?), and a more traditional war between two nations over resources/territory.
Assume your enemies have similar tech, so they are watching you back.
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In order to confuse the enemy and prevent them acting on "perfect" information, decision trees are created but the actual branches are chosen through a random process. The simplest way to describe this (and a low tech insurgent force would likely use this method) would be to roll a set of dice to determine the branch of the decision tree that will be used, then act on the revealed branch *immediately* so there is no time for the enemy to see the decision and react to it.
Wars will be much smaller scale and more chaotic, since this will only work well with very small units pursuing very limited sets of tactical goals. Trying to mass forces and synchronize actions will be a thing of the past, since even squad and platoon sized units would have to be taking random actions at all times to prevent enemy countermeasures from catching them. The defender will also need to implement some sort of means of stopping random attacks (which is quite difficult; even today armies and security forces attempting to stop *non random* attacks by terrorists and insurgents still get caught out). Defence may devolve into large concentric layers of passive and active measures to attempt to stop a barrage of random attacks by small units.
This also implies the ultimate goal of warfare will be to exhaust the enemies resources through random actions before their actions can exhaust your resources, essentially "swarms of wasps" attacking each other and trying to empty the enemy nest.
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What you describe is a war of nearly perfect information. The only unknown is what individuals will do. I see two paths war can take. The first is important, but less interesting: war will take place using information hidden inside individuals minds, rather than by physical locations on a battlefield. If you say the only place I can keep a secret is in a person, I will intentionally craft my army around abusing that detail.
But what if I don't abuse that? What if the lack of privacy has turned people into sheeple who really don't do much on their own. Now we truly have a battle of perfect information. Each individual is like a Chess piece or a Go piece on a playing field, whose behavior is fully understood.
This offers a really interesting twist, because war is expensive. If I can achieve a goal cheaper without war, I will not pursue war. With perfect information and sheeple soldiers, I have something which is so similar to a game that we could substitute a game for war. Whoever wins the game gets to act as though they won the war.
The tricky part is that the enemy could double cross you. They could lose and not submit to the rules of the game. We need to use the rules of this no-privacy universe to commit people to the result of the game.
Let's use everyone's armor and arms as collateral. Everyone should modify their arms and armor with a "game chip." It's given the ability to render unusable all arms and armor instantly if anyone goes against the rules. You could also put the lives of your soldiers up for ante with some Saw style solution, but in a world with this much technology, losing all of your tech should be a sufficient disadvantage to make it worth playing by the game's rules. Because all computerized knowledge is considered "in the open," it will be trivial to vet that an opponent has a functioning game chip installed correctly.
So at any point, a combatant may send a "game request" to the other team. That game is reviewed, and correlated to the current battle, and the apparent strengths and weaknesses of both sides. The review determines whether the result of the game is sufficiently close to the result of the battle/war that the cost savings of not battling is enough to pursue. If the other side accepts, the game initialization begins.
During game initialization, the game engine reaches out to all of the arms and armor on the battlefield, announcing the presence of a game. Soldiers may opt-in to the game (once they use their perfect information to confirm that their superior officer has opted in). Generally speaking all soldiers will opt-in to save their own hide. Opting in does nothing until a quorum is reached (quorum defined ahead of time as part of the game definition which was reviewed earlier).
Once quorum is reached, the soliders who oped-in now act like policemen for the game, literally taking orders from the game to allow the game to retain the commitments of both sides to it. For example, soldiers will not be allowed to advance into more optimal combat positions during the game. However, these soldiers will be tasked by the game to help handle those who did not opt in. If most soldiers opt in to a game, but one or two Rambos do not, the rest of the soldiers will be tasked with detaining the Rambos to prevent them from disrupting the game. Penalties for disobeying are severe, but known ahead of time. If your soldiers disobey enough that the game's fundamental stakes are changed (such as a group charging an enemy encampment while nobody is shooting), the penalty may be the complete disarmament of your entire force, and the termination of the game.
At each move in the game, a leader has the option of leaving the game, instead of finishing it. We never take that choice away from them. However, the game chip intentionally moves soldiers around the field such that leaving the game never puts you in a better position than continuing the game. Thus it is always in everyone's interests to let the game play out, even if they are losing.
Which game would be played? Any game really, and it could differ from battlefield to battlefield to best suit the circumstances. However, I have a preference for games like Go, whose game tree is described using [Surreal Numbers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surreal_number). These games have the nice property of having 4 potential outcomes depending on states:
* Player A always wins
* Player B always wins
* Whoever moves first wins
* Whoever moves second wins
The complexity of having all four of these options allows for more strategy: sometimes holding still will be the best offense, because moving first could cost you the victory.
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I would say there will be a large use of EM Pulse weapons. if you need some privacy in a war, you just knockout the electronics. Of course this is only temporary and you will need to let off some dummy pulses to that there are multiple dead zones at the same time.
Likely there will be command centers that are hermetically sealed, receiving data from many different inputs. Then talking in code will be needed. Bring a soldier into a sealed chamber, kill the spies, give orders and let him go.
A huge amount of effort of course would be spent on misinformation and giving orders that aren't what they seem. certain orders would have to be a code for doing something completely different than what is spoken.
Implants that can put a heads up display inside the cornea or vibrate the eardrum inside the head to have truly secure communications would be high on the list of wants.
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First things first: you would see a drastic decline in technology at the strategic level, because military commands would happily EMP their bases every three days in order to maintain privacy. (And likely a large swatch of the neighboring countryside to increase the time it takes new snoopers to invade). On top of that there's going to be All The Jamming. You name it, they'll have made sure it's running. There's zero electronics in my war room.
(Also, I expect you'd see several of these "CAMP LUDDITE" bases so that old fashioned HUMINT doesn't steal your secrets).
(Second aside: the description doesn't quite cover how fast these guys are. If it's possible to secure Air Force One, replace the press seats with food supplies, and have it stay airborne to constantly outrun the snoopers, expect that to happen.)
Second: anything planned isn't going to be on computers. It's going to be in people's heads, spoken quietly inside your warded spaces, and orders will most likely be written down, sealed (and possibly put inside EM-blocking envelopes) and hand delivered. (As well as old fashioned code books).
The goal of secrets and encryption isn't to hide forever, just until you need to. So war is going to be based around moving *very* quietly, and then *very* fast. Decisions and conversations will be held in secure locations, and then any information that leaves will be cryptic and the bare minimum. Soldiers will be expected to follow orders near-blindly, because if the enemy finds out things the same time as them, there's no need for them to know where they're going until they need to be there NOW.
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Historically, winning a war isn't always done through stealth or even the usage of actual force. Threat of force, especially in the open, can compel participants to take certain actions.
Consider a chess match. Both sides know exactly where each piece is. At the grand master levels, both sides even know a huge range of strategies and usually have researched their opponents prior games before it even starts. Yet, there is a almost always a clear winner.
Winning the game comes through maneuvering. Forcing your opponent into a position in which they either cannot stop you from accomplishing your objective or you effectively stop them from completing theirs. In chess all of this is done 100% out in the open, with only the private thoughts of the participants *during the match* being hidden from view.
In war history there have been many battles that were won without a single shot being fired simply due to both commanders recognizing the inevitability of the outcome and reverting back to standard political negotiations.
Winning a war would be similar. There would be no surprise attacks, the deployment of forces would be completely out in the open. So, by necessity, both sides would employ generals that acted like chess grand masters. They would keep their thoughts private and wouldn't discuss their strategy with anyone.
Rather, they would just issue deployment orders. Sometimes shots would actually be fired because no matter how many simulations you run, there is an element of chance in every endeavor.
However, at some point the outcome would be obvious and the war would conclude.
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I have a similar interpretation like Cort Ammon, but I come to a very different conclusion.
Under these conditions, everyone would have the ability to calculate the results of a war in advance. That means the winner of a war would be known in advance. However, I doubt that this will result in wars getting replaced with harmless games. I would consider it highly implausible that politicians would decide global power struggles by playing highly regulated games.
There would still be **invasions to gain control of a territory**, but they would be quite bloodless. When country A decides to invade country B, both would run the simulation based on the standing troops of both countries. When the simulation says the invasion won't be successful, A would not do it.
When the simulation says the invasion would be successful, A would send its troops to occupy B, but B would not resist because they know it is pointless - you can only get a soldier to fight for his country when there is a chance the war can be won. When the soldier himself can run the simulation and know for certain that the war is pointless, he no longer has an incentive to sacrifice himself and would certainly desert, no matter how indoctrinated.
A would march into B and take control without firing a single shot.
There is, however, one thing the simulations can not prevent, and that's **war which is fought with the motive of genocide**, something which still happens far too often in our world.
When country A runs a simulation which says that it would be better off when every civilian of ethnic group B is dead and the simulation says that they could have that for the cost of X$ in material and the lives of Y of their own soldiers, they might decide that it's worth it. B will then have nothing to gain by surrendering and will make sure A at least pays the price - bloody war ensures, even though everyone knows how it will end.
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There are ways to hide the truth even if you're being observed almost constantly. Misinformation and hiding the truth behind code would become far more commonplace.
Needless to say, it wouldn't stop war, it would just make tacticians far more creative.
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Information is key in any war. Spreading misinformation seems nigh impossible in this world, but one could use lack of information as a strategy.
In the question it is stated that defence are possible but they do not work 100% of the time. I will make the assumption that militaries in this world know a more precise percentage. For example: one can keep a room safe for X minutes with a Y% success rate. The exact numbers don't really matter as long as they are known.
The general of an army uses computer simulation to generate an extremely large number of battleplans. Here, the battle plans can be presented as decision trees. This decision tree will inevitably be compromised at some point. The trick is to pick one battle plan within this tree and keep secret which one is chosen.
So how would on go about that? We can give each path within the decision tree a code. The codes are made as similar as possible whilst remaining unique. For example a small number of codes may look like this
```
AAA
AAB
ABB
BBB
ABA
BBA
BAA
```
Now we set up multiple meetings with the generals of the army. To the best of our effort we secure the meeting rooms against espionage. At each meeting a small part of the code is given to all generals. After all meetings are done, all generals have the entire code and thus know the battleplan. Some meetings will have been compromised so parts of the code are known, but as long as the code is complicated enough this will still leave our opponent with many possible battle plans\*.
Unfortunately, any battle plan lasts until first blood.
There are only two ways of changing a battleplan: redo the meetings (takes long) or send an uncoded message to your generals (immediately compromised).
If this system works, then war would become a game of disrupting your opponents plan as often as possible. Either they will have to disclose their entire plan to respond quickly or spend a lot of effort and time on setting up a new plan.
Now this leads to some interesting mindgames.
If your opponent can guess what your plan is then they know how to disrupt it. Naturally you want to make your plan as unpredictable as possible so you would choose suboptimal plans, but then your opponent may guess that you are not following the optimal path and try to disrupt suboptimal plans. This mindgame can go around in circles forever. Great generals may be separated from the good ones simply because they know how to predict the thinking pattern of their opponent.
In short: I hope you like mindgames.
\*I'm not a cryptologist, but it wouldn't surprise me that it's possible to set up codes in such a manner that small scraps of code hold little information.
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I don't buy the premise that in this world that there's absolutely no place where a drone can't penetrate, ever. If a drone is large enough to use propellers then it can be detected by its sound and heat signature. If it's small enough to float on air currents then a strong airhandler and dust filter will clean out the drones. Insect size drones can be defeated with [lasers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser)!
But assuming that the ubiquitous stealth drones and privacy has disappeared, how would warfare be conducted?
Humans won't call the shots anymore though they will set the rules of engagement. Attacks will happen too fast for a human to decide what to do or even begin to synthesize the situation. Look at high frequency trading on the stock markets now. Humans setup the rules and processes of "engagement" then let the computer run full speed.
Investment in conventional guns and tanks become less worthwhile, though not worthless, because most attacks will be of a digital nature. Why spend 20M on an advanced main battle tank when a $30 drone can hijack the the electronics and render the tank inert? At the same time, investment in the arms race between keeping secrets and discovering secrets would explode. As it is today, some attacks are so [expensive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet), so [specialized](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame_(malware)) that they can only be used by nation states. Defense against such attacks takes the resources of nation-states or mega-corps.
**Attack vectors:** time based attacks, information denial, area denial, info processing denial, drone production facility denial, attacks on info aggregation points, drone subversion.
*Time based attacks* - This will be the most likely approach. Learning to attack in cyber-space and in real-space so quickly that even someone with perfect battleground intelligence can't stop an attack. For example, knowing that a [Rods from the Gods](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0zkhQFHNac) [weapon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment) has launched doesn't mean you can do anything about it.
*Area denial* - Deny an enemy use of a strategic area such as a port or major mountain pass through biological/chemical/nuclear means. This could be especially effective when used against information processing/aggregation points.
*Information processing denial* - Even if the enemy has total access to your information, if they can't synthesize that information into actionable data, it doesn't matter if they have stealth drones all over the planet. Attack their data centers.
*Information mis-routing* - The information has been processed but it's only useful if it gets to the people/systems who can actually do something with that info. Route the target info to that goatherder in Afghanistan. It'll be too late before it gets back to the right people.
*Drone production denial* - With a drone defense system capable of knocking out 90% of an opposing drone force, keeping an enemy from replenishing their supply of in-flight drones would be a huge advantage. Likewise, denying or delaying your enemy access to drone raw materials would decrease drone coverage.
*Attacks on drone design* - Do what Stuxnet did to Iranian uranium centrifuges by forcing small but critical errors in equipment operation. Inject deficiencies into the 3D printers that make the stealth drones so the drones don't work as well or have compromised stealth abilities.
**Defense measures:** Drone area denial, Drone hijacking, encryption, greater defense in depth, geographic dispersion, steganography.
*Drone Area Denial* - While not 100% effective (as stated in the question) even a 90% attenuation will offer sizable information security benefits. Drone countermeasures for everyone! *Party fanfare*
*Drone Hijacking* - Make the drones work for you!
*Strong Encryption* - Remember that the point of encryption is not to keep a piece of information safe forever, but to keep it safe long enough that it won't be useful to an attacker.
*Greater defense in depth* - Build defensive systems in such a way that compromising one layer doesn't offer the attacker access to the asset. Even better, design the defenses in such a way that if one layer fails, it notifies the next inner layer of the attack.
*Geographic dispersion* - While uneconomical in many ways for the defender, isolation does mean that if a drone shows up, it's not supposed to be there and is hostile.
Things that won't change much:
* Economic imbalances won't go away. The US would still outspend
the rest of the world to maintain their technical superiority.
* It's really hard to duplicate esprit de corps, even if you know everything there is to know about an organization. This happens in software companies all the time. Rackspace is an excellent example of how corporate culture plays a huge role in how they compete. A competitor may know a lot about how Rackspace culture works but duplicating that culture is very hard. Culture depends on the individuals who make up the group and how they think.
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**Hive Mind**
Massive advancements into the fringe sciences would be taken place "secretly" (as possible) by all nations. Only your thoughts remain your own, and all actions are known to everyone. All orders will be discovered, all top secret documents immediately uncovered. Instant co-ordination is the only option with an armed force, and would only be possible via telepathic link between soldiers. The link would be switched on via an extensive training program to simply emphasize this natural ability between humans.
Evolution has advanced so much by this point that only a 2 year boot camp is necessary to jump start the 6th sense. The documentation of these techniques would be stored in solid state crystal pyramids, not connected to any electronic device and immovable in the face of EMP charges. The reading of these crystal pyramids would take place in an altered reality, with the use of psychoactive substances.
Attaining these abilities would be a double edged sword though, as allowing this to become natural in us also attunes us to the pain we inflict on others. Our enemy's pain becomes our own. Commanding officers know this and although no "secure" telepathic channel is possible, they ensure all soldiers are numbed down while still retaining psychic awareness.
Because this is well known, citizens are reluctant to join the armed forces anymore. Our evolution has taken us to a point where war is in the most literal sense, hell. Even the numbification of the senses only lasts a few years - in which the solder has no recollection at all of the events. His memory recovers one cell at a time as natural regeneration of the brain takes place. The unearthed memories becomes too much for the poor soldier and he simply cannot harm anyone anymore. Countries have tried subduing these soldiers during the initial years of the technology, but found that they all submerged to the inescapable suffering of their war-torn mind eventually, with no hope of further recovery.
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I am imagining a race of spider-like creatures that remain still in the water. They glow to attract prey/would be predators. They surround themselves with a thick layer of slime that can catch creatures much larger than them. I need my creatures, however to be able to quickly get through their own cloud of slime. It has to be able to restrain a shark and they have to be no larger than a cat.
They kill their prey with venom injection via biting.
How can my creature evolve to meet these criteria? What is this slime made of? How can my spider get through it?
Edit:
The multiple types of spiders exist at various depths, although I am trying to figure out how the deep sea ones would work.
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The hagfish, not actually a fish, but an invertebrate, (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagfish>) exudes a substance that is made up of cloud of microfibers that causes the water to thicken around it, trapping predators while the hagfish itself wiggles free by tying itself in knots. A spider wouldn't want to exact same thing, but it could use a similar trick, a web made of fibers that when contacted expand and thicken with the water, causing the prey to thrash and contact more strands of the web eventually holding it perfectly still. If you wanted to make it extra creepy and unique, it wouldn't even have to use a toxin to kill, the webs thickening agent could clog the gills of the prey like the hagfish as well.
As far as moving through the web, most spider webs are built of two different kinds of fibers, some sticky and others not. The spider knows which ones it can safely step on since it made the web, but everything else is totally clueless.
The spider could also exude a substance onto it's carapace that effectively dissolves the fiber that touch it, letting it move uninhibited through thickened web sections to bite prey and inject their toxins that liquefy the insides and make it easy to feed.
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That would be a fairly large spider, but if it lives primarily under water then it's a bit more feasible.
It's probably easiest if it evolved from existing water dwelling spiders.
These spiders bring bubbles of air down for them to breathe. These bubbles may actually act as a shiny lure for fish and larger ocean predators. This means bioluminescence is not required.
If the spider can craft large enough bubbles it may only need its prey to accidentally breach the bubble, the spider could then rapidly seal the breach and the gilled creature would suffocate and become weakened inside the gas atmosphere of the bubble. Allowing the spider to easily finish it off.
Alternatively the spider would simply create a web network which has gaps large enough for it to pass through while a larger creature will get tangled if it tries to follow. Once trapped, the spider can finish off the prey and drag it into its bubble for consumption.
The web, if woven in a mesh, would appear to be slime to the uninitiated. It would have a much higher tensile strength than slime though.
---
Another sort of out there option is for the spider to actually tend to a small farm of sessile [nematocyst-wielding creatures](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cnidocyte), [cnidarians](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cnidaria). Weaving a structure for the cnidarians to live on, the cnidarians would sting and paralyse any large creatures who wandered into the web. The spider could then capture the prey and give its corpse back to the cnidarians to feed them and keep things clean. This would be similar to some small crabs who live in [sea anemones](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_anemone).
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[Question]
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*Note: This is for a game. However, players can't directly control the creatures I'm talking about. They have their own AIs that fight, and I'd like to make it look realistic.*
I've seen the idea in several places (I can't remember them all) of having a creature with a tail that is sharp or has some other weapon on it. However, I'm wondering, how would a creature like this keep its balance?
Most (real) animals use their tails for balance, if they have a long tail. However, if a creature is swinging its tail around at an enemy, especially a tail with a heavy weapon on the end, wouldn't that knock it *off* balance?
Having said that, here is what I'm wondering: Is it feasible to use a tail as a weapon? What would need to happen to make it feasible?
Some extra notes:
* They also have a good tech level (better than modern humans) and with that, a good weapon level.
* They are sentinent, like humans. They can do a lot on their own, like the actual fighting, but the player is their commander and can tell them to train/practice/go smash those enemies over there etc.
* I'm not really interested in how they would evolve, just how they would exist.
* The weapon on the tail can be technology, but the tail is the creature's natural tail.
* The game isn't all about fighting. The species must be able to do a very wide range of other tasks, equal to or better than humans. They are also about human-sized and will probably walk upright.
* The fighting is mostly defensive, against pirates and such.
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Feasible? How about the [Ankylosaurus](http://www.livescience.com/25222-ankylosaurus.html)?
Granted, they all died. **But**, that was likely *not* because they kept getting knocked off balance when using their tails.
Humans sometimes use their outstretched arms for balance, but that doesn't mean we can't also use them for swinging heavy things to hit stuff. If the animal has sure footing, and is not currently using the tail for balance, then it's fair game for swinging.
I once owned an iguana when I was a child. They have tails which are primarily used for balance, however they will also use them to *savagely whip* children who just want to hold them nicely. If the demon iguana was on a smooth countertop its whole body would slide around while whipping, significantly decreasing its power. If the demon iguana was sitting on carpet or clinging to a log though, it was able to get traction and apply full power to the child whipping.
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"However, if a creature is swinging its tail around at an enemy, especially a tail with a heavy weapon on the end, wouldn't that knock it off balance?"
Tell that to the scorpion! 
Obviously, scorpions aren't human-sized, but there's nothing intrinsically limiting about their body geometry to make their offensive tail ineffective at human scale. And this is a piercing attack rather than a blunt force attack, but again, I don't see anything which would prevent it from using it as a club instead (other than the fact that whatever weight is used to give it heft would be useless drag outside of combat).
You might say that the scorpion is cheating because it's using 6 legs for balance, but I'm pretty sure it would be fairly effective with just 4 as well. Bees and wasps not only use their "tails" offensively, they can do it while flying! How awesome is that??
A bipedal human-sized creature with arms and a prehensile tail like a monkey could simply use the tail like a 3rd arm, although, one would wonder why it doesn't just use its arms. If the tail were stronger than the arms, that would be one reason (maybe it has T-rex arms). If the tail is longer, it can create a greater moment swinging a mace or hammer, but only if it is correspondingly stronger. This could be another reason for using the tail instead of an arm. Of course, technology can make a hammer really long too, so if I were such a creature, I would use the tail *in addition* to my arms. Say, two swords and a dagger/spear/mallet/buckler/use-your-imagination. That could make for some very interesting techniques.
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Quadrupeds generally use their tails for balance only when in a bipedal stance, usually as part of a tripod with their hind legs. Such an animal would have no trouble using a weaponized tail, since the quadrupedal stance is inherently stable. I would expect a fighting style from such a creature to consist of bracing itself on all fours facing away from the enemy and flailing away.
A biped constantly uses its tail for balance, shifting the tail to keep the animal's center of gravity over its base of support. Because of this, I'd expect the fighting style to be far more dynamic, with fancy footwork and body shifts used to maintain balance and add to the momentum of the tail (think: some of the fancier movie martial-arts styles, only justified by the need to keep your balance while on the move).
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Think Kangaroos who can use their tail to stand on, to A) propel themselves forward, or B) lash out with both hind legs at the same time. ideal for martial arts and hand to hand combat.
Pangolin's are the only scaled mammals. With scales made of keratin and a semi prehensile tail with sent glands near it anus (used for marking and self defense) it could be a deadly weapon... However as an insectivore they use their tails to roll up into an armored ball. (imagine air deploying that). Still their tail could be used to a more dangerous effect then an alligator or crocodiles tail given its greater flexibility, especially with the Pangolins curious habit of walking on their hind legs with their front feet held off the ground in front of them.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/78B8x.png)
The Thresher Shark's weaponized tail has a scythe-like upper fin nearly as long as its body that it whips forward at more then 60 mph. Direct contact can tear apart fish and the shock wave stun others. Unfortunately such a long tail is probably only practical underwater.
The poisonous piercing sting of the Scorpion has already been mentioned, But the stingray also has a poisonous sting however has a more blade like design creating a slash wound, although theses blades often break off in the wound to deliver the poison as its saturated in the flesh rather then secreted from a gland. (poison blades could be more useful then a club for a small frame). I used to believe that some stingrays could give a electric shock with their tails like a taser, But no that is just a popular myth.
The porcupine has a tail full of quills that it slaps in its opponents face leaving behind painful barbed quills, which means it does not have to have a lot of force behind its blows.
Other notes of legend are a bird with a tail fan of blade like feathers. Mythological creatures with a snake for a tail. The Kitsune (nine tailed fox) who's tails extend and contract at will. Some dragon tails that are toothed like a saw-blade, coiling around their prey like a snake cutting them in half.
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# Retractable Tail.
If the creatures' tails were permanent, the most stable way for the creatures to walk would be on all fours, and quadrupedalism is somewhat less conducive for precision, which is necessary for scientific advancement.
**However,** if these creatures developed technology and modified their genetics to allow their tails to be extensions of their spine. Think about it, these creatures, in their normal mode, would be around 7 feet tall. When they go into combat mode, their tail would extend out of their body. This tail would not be weaponized yet, although some of the members of the species choose to have their tails spiked/weaponized.
At this point, their height is 4.5 feet, and they are automatically more agile dues to their decreased size. They now don their battle armor, some of the species attach blasters to their tails, some attach swords/blades, and others use prototype technology, which can allow for flight, stingers, etc. In this mode, they can go quadrupedal with weapons attached to their back and tails and claws on their limbs, or they can remain bipedal, and act as marksmen, infantry, horde control, with armors similar to Iron Man's, transforming suits that can make many types of weapons. Their tails acting as extra arms. They can also use their tails to jump and land.
## A bit of anatomy
### Spinal Tail
For those wondering how their tails retract and extend without affecting their legs, you can think of it as their spine/tail - the upper part, being attached to their head and arms, while their legs, hips, and pelvis are a separate part. If you were to look at their pelvis from the front, you would see a U-shaped hole, from the side you would see that it the opening to a canal that goes from the upper part of their pelvis to the lower part, the upper spine slides along this canal when it is retracting and extending, it remains attached to the canal via magnets. Their spine has powerful magnets embedded in it and their pelvic canal also has magnets embedded in it.
### Tail skin
As for how the tail skin works. You can go about this two ways. The first way is simple - the creatures have hyper-elastic skin. The second way is probably more realistic. When inside the body, the tail is coated with a liquid that is kept as a liquid thanks to a special substance(gas) present in the creatures' bodies. When the tail is extended, it exits the body via a special opening near the small of the creatures' backs. When the liquid is exposed to air, it solidifies into a strong, tensile, nigh-impenetrable skin. The opening is also coated with this substance preventing the tail from retracting accidentally. All this happens in a fraction of a second. From the outside, however, the tail looks quite normal, the skin looking just like the rest of the creatures' skin. When the creatures want to retract their tails, their brains send out a signal that re-liquifies the skin and allows the tail to be retracted. Also, when the tail is retracted, the opening is covered with the hardened liquid.
Hope this helps.
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[Question]
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Let’s say a new high energy propellant is now in use for infantry rifles. With this new propellant, bullet velocities are increasing into the range of 1200m/s with a 110 grain projectile out of a 20’ barrel. The problem I am foreseeing is that with these increases in projectile velocity there will also be overheating issues on rifled barrels due to friction. Could a wax or polymer coating be applied to the projectile to engage rifling without shredding the barrel? If not what are some things that could be done?
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## These are problems modern weapns already have to solve,
1. is **coating the barrel** with exceptionally wear resistant coatings, this is done to machine gun barrels since they will see a lot of rounds in rapid succession, wear and heat is a problem. look up stellite which was put on M60 barrels.
2. use a **sabot**, this is much like what you propose but solid. A softer solid material surrounding the round which engages the rifling instead of the round. the sabot can be a much much softer material than a round and thus reduce wear dramatically. you can have integral sabots or discarded sabots that fall away from the round after it leaves the barrel. this is the solution railguns use. You can read more about sabot [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabot_(firearms)). You likely want to use both solutions.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/TF4SH.png)
Heat dissipation is a question of **active or passive cooling**, again look at machine guns for inspiration since they have the same heat and wear problems, in their case due to volume less than velocity.
[Answer]
# We already account for the friction
The way we do this is by making the projectile out of a softer metal than the rifle. The round suffers a slight ablative loss traveling through the rifled scoring. Bullets are lead or copper, partly for this reason (among other benefits). Have you ever seen a steel bullet from a rifled barrel? It doesn’t bode well for the barrel.
# Removing friction removes the benefit
If your round doesn’t bite into the rifled scores in the barrrel, how will it possibly gain a spin? The friction is what causes the rifled barrel to “bite in” to the bullet, giving it the stabilizing spin. A perfectly frictionless exit will have a round leave your barrel and fall into a tumble. Your accuracy will suffer greatly.
# Heat dissipation is the only solution
Gun design has to account for this heat of friction as a necessary part of the design. A lot of engineering goes into a complete gun design, that limits the rounds per minute and operating environments and lubrication. Friction is not the bad guy here, it serves a purpose. You just need to mitigate the heat damage operationally.
[Answer]
**Compressed gas cooler.**
I was thinking about radiators for the gun barrel but [those are apparently done.](https://gundigest.com/gear-ammo/accessories/5-top-barrel-cooler-options-so-you-dont-get-hot-under-the-collar)
Better: a tank of pressurized air! On releasing the pressure the expanding gas absorbs heat from the environment which is why those compressed air boat horns get so cold.
Your future soldiers have a big tank of compressed air. It runs thru the barrel when the gun is in use and absorbs heat then comes out the front.
"But wah!" the comments say. "Compressed gas is heavy!". The freaking gun is heavy as well as all the ammunition. One more heavy thing along for the ride will not be a deal killer.
Also when the barrel smokes after use, the smoke will go down because it is cold.
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## We are allready there :-)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzzle_velocity>
>
> ... Firearm muzzle velocities range from approximately 120 m/s (390
> ft/s) to 370 m/s (1,200 ft/s) in black powder muskets, to more than
> **1,200 m/s** (3,900 ft/s) in modern rifles with high-velocity cartridges such as the .220 Swift and .204 Ruger, ...
>
>
>
[Answer]
Coat the bullets (the projectile itself) with molybdenum disulfide before they're inserted into the casing. This is used in some applications to increase duty cycle in automatics and such. It's not an extremely durable coating though; if you have a bunch of rounds loose in a bag, the coating will get scratched off.
My 2¢
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[Question]
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In my world (a very soft sci-fi world), humans live beneath the surface in a large planet that is largely inhospitable on the surface. It's not Earth. The hollow planet is kind of like Swiss cheese in that it's mostly solid but there are large "burrows" where humans live and they connect to one another through large tunnels. 300 years prior in this world's history, a burrow launched a nuclear bomb at another burrow during a war. My idea is that after this, the burrow that had a bomb dropped on it was sealed off out of fear that the nuclear waste would travel to the rest.
Is this a plausible reaction? My line of thinking is that since they are underground, there are less places for the fallout to go compared to a planet where the people inhabit the surface. In addition, would sealing off this contaminated burrow even prevent further damage from reaching the other burrows?
Additional information: this bomb was around the beginning of the world's foray into nuclear technology. Its strength was 21 kt.
On average, the distance between these burrows is about 3,500 miles. The tunnels that connect them are not straight. They curve, sometimes moving up and down.
There is volcanic activity on the surface, though not a lot above the burrow that suffered the attack.
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## It would be much less disastrous.
Nuclear bombs are deliberately detonated high above the surface because then they can cover more surface area with direct destructive heat, pressure, and radiation. Underground all the tunnels and twists and turns would quickly deplete the energy of the nuclear bomb.
Air is much easier to travel through than rock, and it's much easier to nuke someone through air than rock.
If you want nuclear fallout to spread you need wind to move through the tunnels carrying radioactive material. It's certainly reasonable that such wind could carry radioactive materials, although at a distance of 3500 miles the radiation would be negligible. It might be good to have a satellite settlement near the nuked one that could potentially be hurt, within a mile or two.
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## They adapted, developed a divergent culture, and physically modified themselves.
When a nuclear bomb drops near your house, it's time to consider moving. But when a lot of people want to move, they're called *refugees*, and the countries of the world join together to help them with walls, deportations, and a finely nuanced appreciation of every conceivable risk they could bring.
Trapped in the fallout zone and left to their own devices, the residents suffered an elevated cancer rate as the short half life elements decayed. There are [areas with high background radiation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsar,_Mazandaran) on Earth that are inhabited, and just how people seem to adjust remains a bit mysterious. That probably only goes so far, and I don't think that a site would recover nearly as well as Hiroshima in an underground bunker situation because would seem to be little ocean on hand to receive contaminated runoff.
Let's suppose, then, that they simply used other nuclear-age tech, namely genetic engineering, to address the cancer problem directly. We might consider what would have happened if [He Jiankui](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui) explored the use of [p53 paralogues to prevent cancer](https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/how-elephants-defend-against-cancer) as in elephants, instead of creating a possibly hazardous variation to resist HIV.
After a few generations, the fallout from the *weapon* is long since past. But the society is made up of *people* who resist cancer, and have customs and standards to match. Getting a radiation burn from tinkering with the reactor is still a problem for them, but it is as mundane an issue as burning oneself with a stove. You can imagine then that they would make relatively free use of energy sources and enjoy a higher overall standard of living, yet their agricultural products would not be fit for "human" consumption.
Beyond fear of their products, there would also be fear of the people. They are now culturally and genetically different, and have been cut off for generations. Allowing some of them into your country, erm, cave means that you have residents who might feel free to contaminate their home, the town, or the entire cavern, knowing that *their people alone* would then be able to live there. The social fear and persecution would be more intense than any such fear we can recall having in our own history in regard to peoples who are functionally genetically identical on average.
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No real problems.
Yes, some radionuclides might travel even a long distance, but **without active air circulation** diffusion times are *very, very long*. And only apply to volatile isotopes, so mainly 14C, 18O, a little 15N, some neutron-enriched argon; in practice, they're all innocuous. The real stinkers - 141I, 137Cs, 90Sr, don't move so much. All the rest (from irradiated common rocks, dust and organic matter) are pretty unstable isotopes, and decay below the danger threshold within two to three months. In absence of wind, they won't travel more than a few tens of meters beyond the immediate ejecta range (which, depending on the size and shape of the tunnels, might be considerable).
The blast will travel quite far, I'd expect a hundred to three hundred kilometers due to the "rifle barrel effect". Expect massive damages within 20-30 kilometers, depending on the burrow size and geometry. Hypothetically, the burrow ceiling might crack or even crash down, burying the burrow, again depending on burrow position, depth, nature, local geology and so on. There might be some fracking, some repositioning of water tables and slipping of nearby fault lines.
3500 miles away, no problems whatsoever.
But this is me. The people in the burrow might not be familiar with radiations, and FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) is a force in itself; just look what happened to Japan's *[hibakusha](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hibakusha)*. Sometimes their *children* get shunned.
From a burrow administrator's point of view, it could be faster, cheaper and more expedient to build an impenetrable wall cutting off the affected burrow - after all, they might all be dead and they aren't *their* citizens anyway - than to explain all of the above to their constituency.
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**You can do better than nukes!**
The thing about a real nuke is that the fallout is only dangerous for a while. Things turned radioactive by a nuclear explosion turn unradioactive after a short time. Those tunnels would be full of dusty debris.
Nukes. Flash boom. Ho hum. You have a sweet tunnel world! Soft sci fi it up! Make their bomb something interesting! I am picturing a weird energy release that was hungry for life and that changed and fed on things in its path. Purple tendrils and maybe you can hear them in your mind. Things came up from the utter deep to join them.
You need to block off those tunnels with serious seals and not for theoretical reasons. Very bad things are in there.
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**21 kilotons is small**
21 kilotons is (probably deliberately) the estimated yield of the [Fat Man](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Man) device used against Nagasaki in World War II and almost the same as the preceding [Trinity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_(nuclear_test)) test of a 22 kT device. Physically it was a very large device which was designed to air burst at an altitude of 500 m in order to cause damage to surface structures over the maximum area.
If the equivalent of Fat Man was literally "dropped" by something that could survive flying above the inhospitable surface then it would cause negligible damage to a deep underground structure. At Nagasaki the radius of total destruction was approximately 1.6 km with extensive fires out to 3.2 km as a result of the airburst. However, there was no crater. The Trinity test resulted in a crater only 1.4 metres deep with a radius of 80 metres. Shallow structures directly under the blast would certainly suffer, but any solidly-built structure over a hundred metres deep would survive easily.
The Fat Man device was relatively fragile - even if there had been a strategic requirement for such a weapon, it would not have been possible to build a warhead that would penetrate into the ground before detonating. However, if by some means the bomb could be either dropped down a vertical shaft that led to the heart of an underground city (after, of course, maneuvering down a trench protected by turrets and TIE fighters) or smuggled into a deep underground city - what then? Fortunately we have the answer as a result of the various [underground nuclear weapons tests](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_nuclear_weapons_testing) that were conducted after nations working on nuclear weapons realised that spreading fallout over large areas downwind of their test sights annoyed the people living downwind.
Underground effects are proportional to the cube root of the yield in kilotons. To get some nice clean numbers, let's work with a 27 kT weapon (so we have a cube root of 3) instead of 21 kT.
* Melt cavity formed by the explosion is 55 x 3 = 165 m radius
* Crushed zone, where rock has lost all integrity is 2 x melt cavity ie 330 m radius
* Cracked zone, where rock has radial and concentric fissures = 3 x melt cavity ie approximately 500 m radius
* Zone of irreversible strain is 200 x melt cavity ie approximately 5 km radius
* Surface collapse (ie crater form on surface as material collapses into melt cavity) - 95% chance if detonation depth is <450 metres, approximately 50% chance if detonation depth is >540 metres
The above numbers depend on the type of rock that the underground burrows are built in, but the takeaway lessons are:
* An air burst will make the surface even more uninhabitable but will not affect a durable underground burrow at all.
* A surface burst will create a very shallow crater and will only seriously damage a shallow-depth underground burrow. It will make the surface even more uninhabitable by throwing a very large volume of fallout into the atmosphere.
* A deep underground burst will create structural damage out to 5 km from the centre. However, it is likely that the structural damage will collapse any tunnels leading out of the affected area and therefore it is unlikely that significant amounts of radioactive material will contaminate surrounding tunnels.
* 3500 km away there will be no effect underground. If there was a surface burst and they are downwind and they are monitoring for fallout on the surface then they may find something.
] |
[Question]
[
Living in polar climates can be quite difficult, and staying warm can often be such an issue. But not anymore with the heat sponge! This nifty little organ draws heat from even the coldest water to keep you warm. How does it work? I’m glad you asked! Frigid sea water is taken into the organ, which is insulated to protect against thermal transfer. Upon reaching maximum capacity, the heat sponge initiates endothermic chemical reactions that proceed to absorb small amounts of energy from the water, cooling it further. The products from the endothermic reactions are then transported into the body and “burned” as fuel to provide heat for the creature. It’s that easy!
So sales pitch aside, here is the dilemma. While I know that there are endothermic reactions that can occur at low temperatures, I don’t know if they could be used this way, or if this type of heat transfer is even theoretically possible. So the question is **could this method of drawing heat from a cold object and transferring it to a living creature work within the realm of physics.** If it is theoretically possible but we don’t know if anything that actually does it then that’s fine.
If anyone does know of a physical process that could do this, or if anyone has any better ideas that could still produce the same effect, I’m all ears and generous with bonus points. I personally like this idea because it also justifies a creature being able to fire blasts of freezing water/ice as a breath weapon, which is very cool (bad pun I know).
[Answer]
**What you have described is a [chemical battery](https://phys.org/news/2017-02-eco-battery-seawater.html) and a thermo-electric heat pump all neatley packaged as a sponge.**
>
> Researchers at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology
> (UNIST) in South Korea will be working to develop a new battery, using
> abundant and readily available seawater.
>
>
>
Since all chemical reactions involve electron transfer or sharing, all you need to do is put those electrons to work for you to transfer heat. For this you need a [Peltier Effect Device](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_effect):
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ji19R.jpg)
*[Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License) Wikipedia 2019*
>
> [A] Peltier heat pump involves multiple junctions in series, through which
> a current is driven. Some of the junctions lose heat due to the
> Peltier effect, while others gain heat. Thermoelectric heat pumps exploit this phenomenon.
>
>
>
They range in size from the tip of a finger to bigger than your palm and start at less than the price of a fancy cup of coffee.
# So, conclusion:
Yes, the physics sais it's possible, how to integrate this into a creature's body is more of a detailed technical challenge.
* The chemical battery is straightforward, different metals laid down in layers separated by porous structures, that allow salt water to enter - straightforward.
* The Peltier side - that would also be different metals laid down fused at alternating edges, with current passing from one end of this concertina shaped tissue to the other, the heat being drained from one side to the other - again straightforward.
[Answer]
This is more or less how a modern refrigerator works.
Sea water, even though cold, still contains 'some' energy, and that energy, in theory, can be captured through [Convection](http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/heatra.html). Put simply, certain fluids and gases are capable of absorbing heat energy really well, thus cooling down the environment around them by extracting their heat. [Refrigerators do this](https://homeguides.sfgate.com/refrigerator-work-using-convection-77008.html) with gases like Chloro-fluoro-carbons (CFCs, in the old days when we didn't care about climate change) and more recently, tetrafluoroethane.
Once the gas has absorbed the heat, it is transferred to heat sinks like radiators (which used to be on the back of old fridges) to dissipate. In your creature however, it transfers through the body in a circulatory system, like arteries & veins, or the lymphatic system. In point of fact, the lymphatic system would probably be ideal to extend to this unique heat & energy distribution model.
Once you have the heat, how that transfers to energy that the body can use isn't that hard to imagine; ultimately while it's hard to envisage, that's what most creatures do when they eat; they release the stored chemical energy for their own needs. In this case, the energy is absorbed directly from the environment through an exotic form of gas or fluid instead. If your creature used this heat to create its own chemical energy stores, pretty much like a plant does with photosynthesis, then you don't even really have to mess too much with exotic biology beyond refrigerant gases.
The key problem with this model is that most of these refrigerant gases are toxic or at the very least, damaging to the environment. But, it's *possible* that a creature could evolve such a gas in their system that acts like a form of refrigesynthesis, drawing heat from the outer (already) cold environment, and you could still use the even colder water as a weapon like you describe. Given that you're already doing this in water, you could even put some of it aside to use to generate the carbohydrates and oxygen you need for your creature to survive .
[Answer]
# You're describing a chemical heat pump.
Perhaps one of the best known examples is the [Einstein-Szilard refrigerator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_refrigerator). It can work with several chemical mixtures (the best one so far [claims](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2008/sep/21/scienceofclimatechange.climatechange) to be as much as 400% more efficient than the original butane/ammonia mixture).
Basically, heat from the body is used to drive an absorption/resorption cycle that keeps some part of the animal way colder than the environment by boiling some organic mixture. Maybe the beast could use specialized muscles to expand the mixture-containment vessel, reduce the pressure inside and have it boil that way. In the end, the animal expends say 100 kCal to drive the process; this heat goes to supplement the body heat, and so go another 100-200 kCal from the environment. This way, the animal can gain up to 300 kCal at the end of the process, having expended only a third of that.
The heat-collecting organ should probably be shielded by a specialized insulator, probably a [rete mirabile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rete_mirabile) ("*wondrous network*). In theory both butane and ammonia can be produced by the body, in practice you'll probably want something more manageable.
[Answer]
# No, this does not work (at least not in a practical sense)
1. The laws of thermodynamics say that you can't do this without adding energy from somewhere else. (this is specifically the second law of thermodynamics)
2. If you're adding energy from somewhere else, then you might as well just use that energy to heat your body. (this is the problem with the refrigerator example)
3. To prove this consider the following: If the heat sponge you describe can do this passively (without additional energy), then it could be used to create a perpetual motion machine of the second type which has been proven to be impossible.
4. If instead it uses something in the water as fuel (like plankton, or fish) then it is just like any other warm blooded animal that has to eat to stay warm.
[Answer]
**Sodium is what you are looking for**
Another solution is simply pouring sodium into the water because it reacts with water and ignites it. [Like this](http://www2.uni-siegen.de/~pci/versuche/english/v44-1-1.html). To get sodium free you need water and salt. When you got these two ingredients you could use the [electric eel cells](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_eel) to conduct electrolysis with the product you again use electrolysis to produce your free sodium which you can pour into water to get this [result](http://www2.uni-siegen.de/~pci/versuche/english/v44-1-1.html). Which produces heat like any other fire.
] |
[Question]
[
This species of humanoids has a peculiar way of reproducing.
Instead of the usual physical intercourse between a male and a female, followed by the sperm cell merging with the egg cell to generate the embryo, they reproduce following something similar to what sponges, corals or some anemophile trees like pines do.
>
> The males periodically diffuse in the air a cloud of "pollen", which
> then is carried by the wind until it lands on a surface. If the
> surface is the suitable appendix of a female, fecundation takes place.
>
>
>
I have the following constrains:
* the female, though not controlling the fertility period, can control whether to expose or not expose the appendix.
* though technically possible, 1 on 1 fecundation is extremely disdained in their cultures. "You know who your father is" is one of the worst insults one can pronounce in all their languages.
* It's common that males gather together to spread their pollen around. Willing females sometimes gather together, too, in a suitable place according to the wind.
* Their embryo development follows the same general lines of *homo sapiens*
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/2Pfme.png)
The problem I have is that I am not finding a way to reconcile this way of reproduction with physical pleasure for both sexes. In *homo sapiens* the nerves form before the sexual differentiation, so the basic sensitivity is already present in the areas which will become either a penis or a clitoris. But for these humanoids the female seems to have no use for sensitivity in the sexual organs. Simultaneity of the pleasure is not in scope.
What mechanism can I use to have both sexes experience physical pleasure which can be coherent with the embryo's development?
[Answer]
>
> It's common that males gather together to spread their pollen around.
> Willing females sometimes gather together, too, in a suitable place
> according to the wind.
>
>
>
**It is the gathering that confers pleasure.**
There is physical pleasure associated with humans sex. Also pleasurable and sometimes the main source of pleasure is the intimacy and closeness between two conspecific beings, regardless of the acts involved, genders involved, or resulting procreation.
So too your anemophiles. They are social creatures, and the gathering in groups to emit or receive pollen is a special kind of gathering, and extra pleasurable for those involved. The difference between these creatures and humans is that the pleasurable intimacy is not between the male and female parent, but between a group of same sex individuals all involved in the emitting, or all involved in the receiving of pollen.
The emitting or receiving done alone is physiologically possible, but akin to masturbation. A lonely, secretive affair with implications that the individual is somehow not eligible to be part of the group action.
[Answer]
In humans the pleasure is from the right combination of electrical and chemical signals getting to the right parts of the brain.
In these beings it could be essentially the same thing. Males releasing their pollen might not be to different from masterbation in humans, where the pollen glands are stimulated to release pollen, and create a pleasure signal.
On the female side the pollen hitting their appendix could create a chemical signal which in turn starts an electrical signal which triggers the pleasure reaction.
[Answer]
I think to answer your question you need to think about the development of these processes from an evolutionary perspective. What purpose does pleasure serve in your humanoids’ reproductive cycle? In humans and other mammals sexual pleasure encourages participation in elaborate courtship rituals. If we didn’t derive pleasure from sex we would behave very differently. In a species with this form of reproduction what need is there for a reward or incentive to release or receive spores? Potentially these actions could be driven by the same urges that cause us to drink or sneeze so why would evolution instead choose to make them pleasurable acts? Answering this question will in turn provide the answer for how the pleasure is achieved.
Some potential ideas:
For males pleasure could drive them to release spores only when they have the best chance of fertilizing a female. This might mean they derive pleasure from strong winds carrying away their spores.
For females pleasure might reward the act of fertilization. When spores land they initiate a chemical reaction that produces pleasure.
[Answer]
Both sexes require stimulation of the relevant area and resulting orgasm before they can reproduce. The males 'ejaculate' a cloud of spores into the air and the female also require orgasm to fully expose their appendix.
Depending on the amount of pollen produced this might be a biologically very expensive reproduction strategy. In that case I wouldn't be surprised if the males of the species evolve a specific 'breeding season' and are incapable of being aroused otherwise.
] |
[Question]
[
A ravine the size of the Mediterranean in area and ~15 miles (~ 24 km) deep on average opens up over the course of a few days in the Himalayas.
A size comparison of the Mediterranean Sea to the U.S. to give a better idea of the scale to Americans like me:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/eu0I7.jpg)
Source: [The Mediterranean Sea of America](https://kottke.org/17/10/the-mediterranean-sea-of-america)
This is roughly the shape of the ravine superimposed over the Himalayas:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0yQeR.jpg)
The Earth's crust is about 20-30 miles (32-48 kilometres) thick on average for continental plates. I specifically chose the Himalayas because I want this scenario to not penetrate into the Earth's mantle from the ***initial*** opening itself.
The cause of such a disaster would be the direct result of an unnatural magical event.
Would such an event snuff out all life, let alone intelligent life? **Do we survive?**
**EDIT:** for claritication, the nature of the magical event is that the section of crust in question disappears. This would be unnatural in our world, which is the setting I provided.
[Answer]
**Short answer:**
Humans as individuals and as a species are really *really* hard to kill and then we have technology that makes the job even harder but you might have a good chance with this; I give higher civilisation no chance whatsoever.
Here's some discussion points to consider as to the viability of life on Earth in the aftermath of what you're describing. I've tried to go from the big and immediate to the smaller and more long term as best as possible:
**Orbital considerations:**
The mass removal is on the order of 200 billion metric tons, that will do strange things to the overall stability of Earth's rotation the first effect is probably going to be a pronounced wobble in axial tilt that will destablise the Earth's seasons in the immediate and longer term but should settle relatively quickly, on the order of decades, as it's only a surface effect. I learned all my astrophysics from ex-scientists who now write some of my favourite stories while not bad it's also not a real grounding in the subject but I'm reasonably sure that while it's a big mass it's a small enough percentage not to effect our solar orbit anything much.
**Rock Effects:**
There are going to be immediate pressure effects in the area where the crust is being disrupted, they'll be on a whole range of different scales and operate over many different timescales so in no particular order; there will be both plastic and brittle deformation of the underlying and surrounding lithospheric rock and there will be a much larger set of processes around the asthenospheric and tectonic response to mass removal. All these processes proceed from the fact that "nature abhors a vacuum". From sea-level the Himalaya rise nearly 9 kilometers, what most people don't realise is that mounts are much bigger underneath than on top, mountain have a "keel" of rock that holds them up and lets them float on the mantle, a bit like how an ice berg is mostly under the water line but mountains are slightly more evenly divided. The depth of the keel is determined by the weight of "over-burden" (the rock on top of it) so when you take 200 billion tonnes off the top in a week flat the keel will pop up like a cork out of a champagne bottle. This is where we get into problems as to the real effects of doing this, I can argue that even with such an unnaturally sudden release that "pop" is going to take centuries and won't be noticeable in a human lifetime and I can equally argue that there will be a massive and instantly recognisable rebound event that will cause massive destruction worldwide. I suspect that the real answer goes something like this; there are immediate and nearly explosive brittle fracture processes involving all the surfaces around the canyon due to the sudden lose of containing pressure this will proceed to a certain depth where plastic processes take over due to temperature/pressure effects (in geophysics pressure and temperature are almost interchangeable in their effects on the physical properties of rock), I'm not sure of the exact number at that location but it'll be deep, where the rock reacts in a more [plastic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasticity_(physics)) fashion the reaction will be slower, and by definition non-explosive. Now if the process happens fast what you'll get is the whole mountain range melting due to [decompression](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igneous_rock#Decompression) and instead of plastic or brittle rebound you just get an enormous flood basalt filling the newly formed basin. The roots of the Himalaya have another effect that will be missed when they start to be buoyed up by the removal of so much rock, they hold India back. [India](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Plate) is moving into [Eurasia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_Plate) at only 5 centimeters a year these days (which is still ridiculously fast for a tectonic plate) but before the Himalaya started forming it was going 3-4 times faster still, with the Himalaya basically removed and the roots no longer providing enough resistance India will lurch forward causing massive Earthquakes that you'll probably feel in London. It's also possible, depending on the exact structure and precise location and outlines of the ravine that you'll see flood basalts *without* decompressive melting, either because the ravine cuts too close to the asthenosphere and there's not enough pressure to prevent magmatic migration or because as India moves it opens up large scale fissures and rift volcanism occurs around the margins. This completely ignores out-gassing, the reality is going to be worse.
**Atmospheric:**
Any rebound event is going to be overshadowed by out-gassing from all the rocks previously held at high pressure under the Himalaya. All rock holds dissolved gas, the deeper it is the more pressure it's under and the more gas it holds, this is "usually" carbon dioxide, water and various sulfurous compounds, with the pressure off... imagine what happens to a shaken bottle of soda when you take the lid off, now imagine that instead of sugar water it's rock turning into foam across an area of two and a half million square kilometers. What does *that* do to the Earth's atmosphere? Nothing good, there are several effects that are important here, [particulate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particulates) is going to go up, and up, and *up*, there are going to be rock fragments, broadly similar to [volcanic ash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_ash) in vast quantities in every layer of the atmosphere, where the cloud is really thick you won't see the sun at all for, I don't know, probably months, maybe years. Where that material falls thickly it will bury the landscape and anything on it, call that East Asia, the North Pacific and the West Coast of North America to the Rockies. Moderate falls are still measured in feet and will destroy grass and crop lands, where it falls more thinly (there's going to be some everywhere) it'll depend on the exact chemistry of the fall (also where moderate volumes fall on forested terrain) but elemental toxicities, such as [Phosphate toxicity](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3120105/) could kill everything exposed to it. [Sulfur aerosols](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_sulfur_aerosols) are going to reflect and absorb sunlight in the upper atmosphere which will lower global temperatures appreciably, so you're probably looking at a few years without a summer, minimum. Longer term with some much newly exposed rock on the surface the level of atmospheric Carbon Dioxide is going to go into freefall (Carbon Dioxide is absorbed during erosion as it's washed out of the atmosphere by rain and reacts chemically with the rocks that rain falls on), this will put any surviving forests in jeopardy as trees cannot grow if the level of CO2 is too low. The resulting lack of greenhouse gasses will also create a more lasting cooling trend, possibly even resulting in an ice age. Sulfur finally washing out of the atmosphere *en masse* will also result in massive [oceanic acidification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification) and kill sea life on a grand scale.
**TLDR:**
Yeah, life will suck, for almost everything on Earth and for an extended span of years but, like I said, humans are tough, I'd give it even odds that some of us would come through even this much damage.
Please note: I'm sure I missed a couple of important thoughts, so I'll add anything else as it comes to mind.
[Answer]
## It wouldn't snuff out all life (bacteria can get through almost anything) but it would probably kill all humans.
I assume you're trying to avoid the mantle so you don't have a volcanic event like the Siberian or Deccan Traps. Unfortunately, just because you're working with continental crust doesn't mean you don't have an exploision. The continental crust doesn't behave the same way at that depth as it does at the surface. Even at half the depth you're going for, the rock is melted enough to act more like clay (what geologists call "plastic").\* At 15 miles continental crust is only stable *because of* the rocks sitting on top of it. Remove the rock, and it explosively decompresses just like any other eruption. And an eruption of that size would cause a volcanic winter that could kill most lifeforms.
I'd check out the Kola Superdeep Borehole: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole>
To quote that page,
>
> The mud that flowed out of the hole was described as "boiling" with hydrogen.
>
>
>
That's in addition to water vapor, and probably other volatile compounds that would explosively "boil out" of the rocks after decompression.
\*<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zz6v6OfoQvs>
[Answer]
Assuming the magic takes care of preventing the explosive decompression of the lower crust. If there is some force isolating the rocks over the ravine, I think this is a logical assumption.
Short term:
You would have massive earthquakes in the region. I assume they are beyond catastrophic for the local region. With earthquakes lasting for days on end, [soil liquidation](https://www.iris.edu/hq/inclass/animation/buildings__bedrock_effects_of_amplification__liquefaction) would play a major role as well.
Huge and repeating tidal waves across the Indian Ocean. East coast of Africa, most of south east Asia, western Australia will be heavily affected. You would have a very chaotic ocean as the waves reflect of land and each other, [amplifying each other](http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/science/add_ocr_pre_2011/wave_model/lightandsoundrev6.shtml). The tidal waves will work their way into the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and cause similar havoc on a slightly lower scale.
Long term:
The rocks displaced will cause the local gravity fields to change. You are creating a less dense area in what used to be a very dense area. This could be a fictional reason why your rocks are floating.
If you don't have some sort of magical force in place, (and explaosive decompression doesn't happen somehow) the surrounding rocks will try to flow back into this void. Try to equalize through isostacy. The ravine wouldn't last any geological length of time, while the floating rocks could still stay floating.
You won't have to worry about the floating rocks affecting other areas across the globe due to your magical isolation force. This will cause large shadows in the ravine, very little life that is dependent on sunlight would regrow in this area. You could have a large mossy and mushroomy pit (fungus likes darkness, doesn't it).
Because you are affecting the gravity and geoid of the planet, you will affect the axial tilt. It will become wobbly and seasons, if you could call them that, will become very extreme and erratic across the planet (dependant on how wobbly the axis get, of course).
Such rapid change to the seasons will cause massive loss of life to many species. Especially those in niche environments. Humans could adapt but because their established food chains will be disrupted, we will have massive loss of life too. The 7 billion population is just not sustainable if we interrupt our farming production for any length of time. Disrupting it altogether would be catastrophic.
I don't like your chances, but there is a chance...
] |
[Question]
[
There is a tribe in the ruins of old San Diego. There are about 300 of them in the village, they grow crops like maize, squash, and beans, and use metal tipped spears to hunt aquatic sea animals like fish. Everything is peaceful.
Then, out of nowhere, this strange metal flying bird (helicopter) lands right outside their village. Then, out of the metal bird come six men, all wearing strange suits (body armor), wielding fire sticks (guns), and small devices that shoot out lightning (tasers). They try to kidnap as many people in the village as they can.
**How could the villagers fight back, given these circumstances?**
[Answer]
**Scuttle their boat.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/egLr5.png)
This relies on there being a super cool headed person who is watching what is going down.
Primitive people practice [bride raiding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bride_kidnapping). You show up, grab as many young women as you can handle, and leave quickly. These tribespeople might be familiar with the practice. In San Diego, brideraiders would probably approach by sea. If you know what they are and what they intend, a saboteur can attach and scuttle their boats while they are rounding up the women. When they return with their captives they find the boats cannot be used. They are backed up against the sea with no exit. They become very willing to negotiate.
Your perceptive person sees that these strange beings are taking people alive. Both men and women, true, but your person is aware that for brides, some people prefer men and some prefer women and so she does not miss a beat. She sees that the bird is metal like the spear points and she is aware that once, boats were made of metal because there is a rusted hulk off Tijuana. She understand that the bird is an air boat. That is how they arrived and that is how they will leave.
To save the captives these bride raiders must be prevented from leaving. For a boat, a hole in the bottom can be quickly patched. A tether can be cut. But if the oars are gone and the sail is gone you cannot move the boat. The big oars on top of the air boat are too big to handle but the little one in back is not. She removes two of them with her hacksaw and hides. When they are getting ready to leave she shows them the air oars from a distance. They become willing to negotiate.
"Hack" would be a good name for this character. She is quick with that saw.
[Answer]
**If you're playing Sid Meir's Civilization III you will regularly encounter the infintely powerful spearman who can [hold off tanks](https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/whats-is-wrong-with-this-spearman-vs-tank.56572/).**
But spearmen vs. modern combat soldiers with body armor and automatic weapons1 in real life? No, this isn't even remotely possible. While the more primitive tribe might get lucky and drop a man or two over time, the reality is that automatic weapon fire can throw a killing bullet 10X-20X2 the distance a spear can even be thrown. The spearmen might have a chance with the element of surprise, but that only works until the surprise wears off — then it's a bloodbath.
Perhaps the spearmen could win this encounter with surprise and substantially superior numbers. Say 5:1. Still... automatic weapons... it would be like shooting fish in a barrel.
**However...**
If your story requires the spearmen to be captured (not just the women and children), then the soldiers are disincentivized toward killing. Non-lethal defense (e.g., rubber bullets or slower, non-penetrating rounds) would dramatically tip the scales in favor of the spearmen because when you shift from throwing a spear to using it as a hand weapon a spear is *remarkably* deadly. Check out the [wonderfully choreographed spear fight](https://youtu.be/NQ62frK74u0?t=1m18s) from the movie *Troy* and think to yourself, "could I get a taser past that spear?"
---
1 *I'm jumping to the conclusion that your soldiers have MP5s or something like that rather than just pistols. However, I'm not at all convinced that my answer is invalidated by using pistols. The firepower difference is still outrageously in favor of the modern soldiers. 9-11 bullets vs one spear and the bullets can kill at 10X the distance the spear can be thrown....*
2 *Ok, more like 1,000X, but I didn't want the answer to look too outrageous.*
[Answer]
Old San Diego is presumably still on the coast. This means they know how to fish. Throwing a fishing net on someone or something severely hampers his/its movements: humans have to cut their way out of the net, the helicopter blades would end up badly.
I assume that once they hear the noise of the approaching metal birds they seek shelter and hide. Then, as they notice the hostile intention of the visitors, they attack them with throwing nets on the visitor and then assault them with spears and stones. Especially in a closed environment like a village this has some chances of success.
[Answer]
The main point is to close the distance from the assaillants. Automatic weapons are extremely powerful and charging them, for example, is guaranteed death. However a spear in very close combat can be as deadly as a machine gun, especially if outnumbered. But how to do this ?
**1. Let them in**
Let them go inside the village first. Houses can then be used as a cover, for making ambush and such. The 6 modern soldiers won't see the spearmen until way too late for them to use their biggest advantages.
**2. Heavy use of smoke**
Using fire and special combustibles, I imagine that you can completely smoke the village. Again here, your modern men won't see the ennemy until he's right in front of them.
**3. Don't panic**
The primitives villagers should be somewhat immunised to fear : a heavy modern weapon will be terrifying for them and the natural reaction is to scatter or flee at the first shot. They need to know their adversaries. Or to take meth, you decide.
**4. Use dogs**
Military Dogs are incredibly fast and deadly if trained to do so. They'll can be a serious threat for everyone, even a modern soldier. In the conditions of visibility set precedently, they'll be a very serious answer.
**Conclusion**
In these conditions, I don't think the 6 poor guys stand a chance against maybe 60-100 armed men. They'll kill some for sure, but in close quarter AND outnumbered like this, their weapons won't give them a tremendous advantage, and their battle suits won't protect them from blunt hit, strangulation or gappling.
Note that this plan can be applied ONLY if the 6 attackers ARE attackers. They have to go in to kidnap people, and this is their main if only weakness. This allow you to ambush them. You can't perform as well against them if they defend, for example.
[Answer]
Remember the *Fuzzy-Wuzzy Fallacy* aka [Lanchester's law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanchester%27s_laws).
The guy with the gun may be much more deadly than the guy with the spear, but one good hit will still kill him. It takes 300 good hits to neutralize the villagers. It takes 6 good hits to neutralize the invaders. The villagers will win as long as the exchange rate is better than 50:1.
* Modern body armor provides full coverage for the torso only, not arms, legs, or the head. The head gets partial coverage from modern helmets, but the face remains vulnerable.
* Your raiders are *tasering* the villagers. A taser does not work as a science-fiction stun gun. It will probably disable the victim while the taser is firing, and some short time afterwards. There is a decent chance that it will do either [less or more](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taser_safety_issues#Manufacturer's_risk_acknowledgments) harm.
* After using the taser, the raiders will come close to their victims. With enough chaos, what is the likelihood that a tasered victim is lying on top of an untasered victim, or that one victim recovers fast enough to slash a knife across the leg of a raider? Then there are five walking raiders trying to extract a wounded one. Mayhem ensues.
[Answer]
The tribesmen have a huge disadvantage in technology, and they don't even know how bad their chances are. Further, they aren't familiar with fighting styles of the soldiers. However, they also have several thing going for them:
* **Numbers** - it's reasonable to assume some of the 300 are kids and elderly, or sick. but in a hunter-gatherer society (like the OP describes), typically many people will be fit to hunt (and thus fit to fight). Let's assume that 100 of the tribe can fight.
* **Knowledge of region** - They've lived there all their lives. They hunt there regularly. They know the area well. Yes, the soldiers probably studied maps of the area before a team was actually sent, but that can't match the life-long knowledge of natives to the region.
* **The tribe is desperate** - It is important not to overlook this. People get very creative and produce great results when pushed to corners.
* **The soldiers seem to want them alive** - This one won't be a game changer, but it definitely doesn't hurt.
## Weaving it together
So let's look at how the tribe can react to possibly have a chance. Two things to remember:
* I don't think there is any plausible way the tribe won't suffer quite some casualties. They might repeal the attack but at a cost.
* The solution I propose requires coordination, and likely some planing. This is mostly possible because they are used to hunting together, and could 'translate' strategies.
**Goals for the tribe wants to achieve**: They want to split up the soldiers as much as possible. They want to scare them.
Two strategies possible:
### "guerrilla" warfare
Guerrilla warfare is usually used when you are the smaller group, but I think due to the massive technological disadvantage, the tribe should use similar concepts.
In practice, spread them out. Split up to groups of 2-3, and spread across the village or nearby area (if it provides cover for the tribe's warriors). It would be a good idea to devote some resources to protect those that can't fight, and you'd best evacuate them.
Now, attack the soldiers constantly. If you have bows, use that. If not, throw rocks. The point is to not allow the soldiers a moment to breathe. Ideally, you'd manage to have them split up. Either way every some time, have a small group from the tribe jump from a house/tree/[any other hiding place] at the soldiers. Focus entirely on one of them. Repeat this six times, and the threat is dealt with.
As I said, casualties will be high, but they just might have a chance to survive.
### All out battle
Basically, have all the tribe's warriors run at the soldiers. This uses the advantage of numbers. However, I'd advise against it, as the rifles the soldiers have will take out a hefty number of tribesmen, and there's a good chance it won't be enough.
[Answer]
1. **Charge**.
If they are close range and have many of the spears close by, just charge the attackers. There would be a massive loss of life sure, but the attackers have to reload sometime. However the a lot of the men would probably die and the tribe would be severely crippled without them.
2. **Evacuate.**
If the helicopter lands a couple hundred feet away, evacuation is the best option. Grab as many weapons as you can, supplies to last you a day or two, and wait for either the men to leave or for an opportune moment to strike. Unfortunately the attackers would probably set fire to any fields and houses as soon as the tribe fled.
3. **Feint**
When the attackers get close, charge, but with only about half your men. As soon as the attackers start firing, have some of the men with spears drop like they are dead. The attackers will slowly move forward over them and voila, problem solved. The trick is to make sure that only six or seven drop down at set intervals. The other half of the men is to ensure the tribe's future, or even another attempt if the first one goes awry.
**Note**
This answer assumes your village has no walls and no immediate surrounding cover. If you village does have walls or ample places to hide, ambushes should work very well. A description of the surrounding terrain might improve the quality of answers that you receive and reveal more reliable tactics.
Also, only type IV body armor (with ceramic/composite plates and extra titanium plates) will stop a spear or bladed weapon (in theory). Anything under that without plates is completely pierce-able.
(<https://www.quora.com/Can-a-knife-machete-axe-or-spear-penetrate-type-IV-body-armor-with-a-direct-hit>)
[Answer]
This is so one-sided it isn't funny. Any time one of these scenarios come up, the only way it even comes close is if (a) the side with advanced weapons are complete morons and (b) the side with the primitive weapons are uber-competent and don't suffer any demoralizing effects from seeing their buddies get their heads blown apart by some force that can't even be seen and they have never experienced before.
First, the scenario: the attackers are not going to simply land within sight of the village. That's just stupid. For a kidnapping mission, the chopper is going to land some distance away, out of sight and sound, and the team is going to approaching on foot, at night. With night vision and IR gear, they have a total advantage over anyone who happens to be on guard in the darkness. Throw in a couple of small drones with similar sensor systems on overwatch, and they'll know if anyone is hanging around. This gives them the opportunity to go where they want to with very minimal chance of discovery.
What happens next depends on the mission goals: are they wanting to catch as many people as possible and not worried about causing as many fatalities as necessary? Well, that depends on the tribe, which some observations will tell you. If it's your standard tribal society, the leaders in a threat situation are either going to be the eldest, and minimal physical threat, or they are going to be the strongest/best fighters and thus tending to lead from the front.
So you prep a killing ground. Three snipers in elevated, concealed positions. One handling drone surveillance, and possibly remote detonation of mines they've placed in advance just in case a retreat is necessary. The remaining two then lure the tribal fighters into the killing ground by doing something that looks threatening, but not *too* threatening. What you want to do it make the leaders of the tribe become apparent, and they will be. And then long before they get within spear range, the snipers start taking them out. Hell, at under 100 meters or so, which is well beyond spear range but short range for a rifle, they don't even need sniper rifles. Trained shooters, firing single shots, at a distance of 100 to 150 meters, should each be able to hit at least ten targets per minute.
Now, the immediate counter-argument is that, sure, but the tribespeople will be looking for cover, they're not just going to stand there in the open. I wouldn't. You wouldn't. But the difference is, *we know about firearms*, even if you've never touched one in your life. When a primitive tribe starts seeing people going down with no idea what the hell just happened, the majority are going to freeze. And you take out the leaders. They'll be the ones in front who were looking all threatening before their skulls started exploding.
With the leadership gone, people will be cowed. The attackers might be required to shoot one or two to make the point about resisting, but most of the tribe will simply be too frightened to do anything. Then you march them to a someplace you've previously secured (more remote-detonated mines for protection) out of spear range from any concealment in case some idiot who managed to get away got brave and tries to come back) and *then* you call in the helicopter.
That's an attack by people with advanced weapons who aren't morons.
Now, if you want minimal casualties and are content with low numbers of captives, initially the same. Infiltrate, surveillance, and then you do snatch missions. Again, the attackers have the advantage in knowing where people are and being able to see where and when the tribe can't. Watch to see where individuals go alone, and grab them, and take them back to your secure location. Keep doing it until the tribe notices people are missing, and quietly slip away calling for the chopper. No fuss, no muss.
Advanced weapons, sensors, communications, and training. This is no contest.
Now, on the other hand, if the attackers do operate like morons and the tribal defenders are stone-age ninjas completely unphased by the utterly Out of Context Problem they've suddenly found themselves in, then sure, go Stormtrooper vs Ewok all you want.
[Answer]
Basically all the other answer assume that the modern man are a group of a disorganized guys trying to kidnap someone, but from the question this don't seems to be true, an while it is true that they are 6 against 300, the tribe are not spartan warrior and there is 2000 year or more of tactical advancement (not to consider the weapons).
So in a situation like this, the tribe cannot fight back and stand a chance to not be massacred. Also the tribe's people will be scared at the first shots fired and the first tribe people killed. All they can do is try to escape, hoping to not be the one taken.
Some reasons:
* The six men are (or seems) military personnel, so they have training (I suppose) or at least a plan of action
* There is no match in weapons: the six men will not allow them to come too near, they know their advantage
* If it is a one-shot operation, than the tribe probably will be frightened enough to not fight back
[Answer]
I want to mention first, that the soldiers dont have such a huge advantage.
The factors that decide the battle:
-> The Information about the Enemy, for either side
-> The Soldiers training, equipment(helicopter included) and overall teamwork
-> as well as the strategy of the soldiers
-> The Hunters count and hierarchic structure
-> the plan of the group leader
-> the amount of people that should get stolen, based on the fact how many the heli can carry
It all narrows down to:
=>The weakness of the soldiers to surprisng spear attacks
I'm going to showcase it in a mindgame:
The Soldiers are doing the first move:
moving to the center of the village and gather the people for a huge grab and snatch action
or they grab people sneaky
In the first case the soldiers might shoot someone *1* to show their power and will, and every tribal citizen tries to run -> means they have to go in close combat for hunting down people:
in that case the counter strategy is luring/kiting and assault atttacks from the hunters
*1 Instead of shooting they could try something else that i just can't think of right now*
If they go sneaky they are more likely to get spotted later by the hunters. In that case the soldiers have to split up, 2 to 1 to save hostages, 2 for transport to heli and 3 hunt down. In the case of hunting down the soldiers have way less hostage they need to deal at the time, which is the reason they can be carefullier. The hunters here have a harder time. They need to assault either silently the hostage-watcher or might trap the transporter with their kowlegde of the surrounding.
In each case its important that the leader of the hunter has a hierarchy of commands for spreading the exact plan (might be aquired by raids on very big animals) and the ability to assess the situation and learn form battles.
Special considering is the helicopter worth: when its on the ground its basicly wothless for the soldiers, but in the air it can provide reconnaissance and extra firepower, maybe a net shooter and explosives.
This is quite material for writing 50 pages of a book. Or making a a counterstrike game out of it
I hope this text helps :)
For demands write in the comments
Have a nice day
[Answer]
Shine a blindingly bright light into the pilot's eyes as the helicopter is leaving.
This is San Diego. It is sunny. Perhaps the tribe worships a sun god. Their temple has ancient devices that gather sunlight and aim it at a target. (Either mirrors or lenses.)
The tribe also has bonfire ceremonies. They use the sun gathering devices to start fires at a safe distance. So they have practice aiming their dangerously bright light. Suppose the raid happens at a time of day and year when the tribe holds its bonfires. Further suppose that the same geographic feature that makes a lovely bonfire site also makes a great helicopter landing site. Then the tribe will have practiced the exact shot needed to take out the helicopter pilot.
Afterwards, the tribe should abandon the village. There is a considerable chance that the raiders will want revenge.
[Answer]
## It is possible, if you're prepared
If you look [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tUuZrvadMQ) you will see a video of a 'primitive' tribe capturing a small but technologically superior foe.
If you can't view the video, it's a clip of
>
> Luke, Han, and Chewbacca being captured by Ewoks
>
>
>
Okay, I'm kidding. Kinda.
But while body armor is good at protecting from physical damage, it's pretty useless against traps that are meant to impede movement. A pitfall trap can't be killed by a gun, and it's hard to aim when you're suspended 10 feet off the ground in a net.
If you suppose that this tribe is sharing post-apocalyptic San Diego with a variety of dangerous wildlife (I would mostly expect feral dogs, mountain lions, and coyotes, but there is a real, if improbable, chance that some of the animals from the zoo and safari park survived to leave descendants) or other aggressive tribes, then they likely already have a number of traps and obstacles set up for protecting themselves. Traps that are designed for animals won't always work on humans, but between the traps and the advantages they get from numbers and knowing the terrain and I think that your tribe has a fighting chance.
## What would you do?
Primative does not mean stupid. What would you (assuming that you were a soldier or a hunter) do if an alien appeared with body armor that reflected bullets and guns that could vaporize people?
You tackle them and steal their guns. They're not *that* hard to figure out. Aim the part that was pointed at you at someone else and press the trigger. At point blank range, any untrained fool can be dangerous.
] |
[Question]
[
So, I was wondering if it would be possible for a race of reptilians to live in a climate similar to that of Germany or Scandinavia without having to hibernate for the winter months. They would be culturally similar to Germanic tribes and/or the Vikings. The would not be able to hibernate due to the war-like tendencies of the surrounding human clans. Would they just need to be more careful to avoid freezing to death? Would the hearth/long house be more important to them do to higher need for warmth from other sources?
If physical appearance is important, they will resemble Vurks from Star Wars (Colemam Trebor was one).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ag7tZ.jpg)
Edit:
Answers can also address if this race was mesothermic since cold-blooded species cannot survive in cold temperature without hibernating and/or advanced technology.
[Answer]
I agree that the concept is not very practical for the level of technological advancement you have described, but if you absolutely must have winter reptiles there is some very limited biological precedence--but activity is severely reduced and your species would be very vulnerable at this stage.
Excerpt from <http://www.bcreptiles.ca/reptiles_north.htm>
>
> How do reptiles survive Canadian winters?
>
>
> In northern British Columbia, winter weather is too cold for reptiles
> to be active. If they stayed in the open, they would freeze to death.
> To live in the north, reptiles have to find some way to avoid exposure
> to cold in winter.
>
>
> Many birds escape the cold winters by migrating
> to warmer places, but, aside from marine turtles, reptiles can’t
> travel large distances. Instead, reptiles must either tolerate the
> cold or go underground or underwater to escape it. One way of
> tolerating the cold is to ‘supercool’ (lower the body temperature
> below 0oC without freezing body fluids – not something you should try
> at home) or to tolerate freezing directly (survive freezing of the
> body).
>
>
> Some northern amphibians can survive freezing of a large
> part of their bodies, but this seems to be a less common strategy in
> reptiles. There are a few exceptions. Hatchling painted turtles
> appear to survive winter through a combination of supercooling and
> freeze tolerance. Garter snakes also seem to have some tolerance for
> freezing. Most of our reptiles though, including garter snakes, avoid
> winter weather (and freezing temperatures) by hibernating. Except for
> hatchlings, painted turtles do this by going to the bottom of ponds or
> lakes that do not freeze solid. Even though the surface of the lake
> may be covered in ice, hibernating painted turtles survive by
> absorbing the small amount of oxygen they need from the water. In
> comparison, lizards and snakes hibernate on land, using burrows and
> cavities to get underground and below the frost line (the depth that
> the surface freezes to).
>
>
>
[Answer]
With intelligence comes the ability to modify your environment.
1. Insulation. Your reptiles will have a much higher interest in thermal insulation than humans. Huts will exhibit better caulking, thicker boards, or even layered solutions to retain heat.
2. Heat reuse. They might have developed looped chimneys to retain the heat of fire.
3. Personal heating. Right now I'm thinking bedpan, wherein the victorian age put coals to pre-heat a bed (not the other bedpan, thanks). But, they would also have glommed on early to the use of [gypsum, soapstone, and basalt](https://www.hunker.com/12003502/which-rocks-absorb-heat-the-best) at an early stage as natural stones that retain heat well.
4. Finally, where humans tend to put boots in front of the fire to dry them out, our reptiles would place boots and hang coats to warm them up. It would almost be a religious observance as they move from building to building, staying warm, and then hanging up the clothes to re-heat while visiting friends (so to speak). You'd find clothing warmers in every building, the warmers getting larger as the buildings become more public.
[Answer]
A little (lot) late to the party, but one possible method for your endotherms to survive the winter (in addition to the technological innovations already mentioned) is to hold territory around naturally occurring hot springs. Their society could be semi-migratory, with the summer months spent in a wider territory and then retreating to their (well fortified) geothermal pools for winter.
[Answer]
You are right to say that the reptilians would find their long houses and fires of critical importance.
The reptilians could stay outside but would need to find others means to keep themselves warm. One way would be to have continuously burning fires outside which they could bask beside. But this would not be very practical. Insulated clothing could help even out temperature fluctuations, but they would have to be careful not to venture beyond the warm zone of the fire for more than a few minutes at a time or else they would face being stuck in the cold and not being able to return.
Active heating would be ideal but with Viking technology what could be achieved would be very limited. Perhaps they might carry some hot coals in an insulated bucket, but that would be of marginal use.
**Two big problems they would face are:**
* The need to collect colossal amounts of fuel in the warmer weather as
foraging for fire wood in winter time would become increasingly
difficult as the winter progressed as all of the available nearby
wood was depleted. They would probably be forced to live underground
or semi underground to aid in insulation, but unless chimneys were
available this would be impossible.
* Predatory humans who would have a variety of methods of attacking them especially in very
cold and/or snowy weather. They could try to extinguish fires with
large amounts of water or by smothering (especially effective against
chimneys if allowed). Another perhaps even more successful strategy
would be to ignite the reptilians huge wood store, let it burn out
and then return a few days later.
[Answer]
In the other answers we see some clever techniques which *might* make cold-winter climates survivable, given enough preparation and risk-tolerance. That said, are these techniques practical? Our human types live all the way up into Nunavut, but if you look at where the permanent towns are you'll see that there's a northern edge to where their lifestyle works. The northernmost town, called Alert, is more of a military base supported behind the scenes from a more southern industrial base.
What I'm getting at is that your Scandinavia winters are long and severe enough that they are likely out of the practical living space for active reptiles. Unless they're industrialized, it's *just not worth it*.
This of course offers you the tremendous opportunity of having two sapient species on one planet, so there's that silver lining... ;D
[Answer]
If your reptile race is a conscious, tool-using, language-using race, they'll be there. Whatever combination of lifestyle and technology makes it possible, there would eventually be a tribe of losers, fleeing a genocidal war, who would just have to make it work, or die.
Clothing works. Carrying a heat source or a heat reservoir would help. Over thousands of years, their physiology will adapt to work with the technologies that enable them to be there-- just like humans in northern Europe became able to digest lactose.
Maybe your northerners get really big so they can carry hot stones around all day. They could have a version of the *siesta*, but instead of sleeping, they go in, warm up, and trade cold rocks for hot. There could be a network of warm shelters, and cultural norms that maintain them. Rescuing stranded, cold-stupefied travellers would be a societal concern, just like in the Alps-- they'd have St. Bernards!
I find myself rooting for those guys. :)
[Answer]
Would there be magic in this fictional world? Magically induced warm longjohn's, and PJ's.
In a non-magical setting your Reptoid race might have a second stomach, or summat that they use to store warmed stones which helps them regulate their internal temperature. Maybe an evolutionary holdover, or an atavistic trait. Perhaps their species used to have a closed digestive system. Perhaps they have to heat stones of a certain size and swallow them, and then regurgitate them later, though... ewww. Still, wear some well insulated clothes and they're good for XX number of hours in whatever conditions you choose.
[Answer]
A few options:
1. Your reptiles evolved in symbiosis with other animals that provide heat. Reptiles walk around covered in furry warm thin mammals, like live mink coats.
2. The reptiles evolved in an environment with lots of geothermal heat, and when they became intelligent they learned to insulate themselves and carry thermal mass with them as they forage away from their natural heat sources.
3. Like ants, they evolved to regulate the temperature in their lairs through the heat generated by fermenting vegetation, which is also their food source. Lizard lives involve foraging for vegetation, mostly during warm periods, and storing it underground. It is then moved around and stored in the right quantities to provide even, steady warmth underground. Perhaps their winters are spent underground studying, crafting, etc. In warm weather they all pour out and start foraging. Perhaps the modern technological ones don't do this anymore because they have personal and lair heaters, and can now move around like anyone else. Technologically advanced lizard people may have learned to selectively breed and engineer different types of plants to provide for their needs, such as bioluminescent leaves for underground light, plants that ferment into high energy foods, etc.
As an aside, one of the problems lizard people would have is generating the energy needed for a complex brain, and preventing the heat loss through the skull. So they might have thick skulls with strong insulating ability, and/or a circulatory system that uses the heat generated by the brain to help keep blood warmer.
] |
[Question]
[
Believability of a fantasy creature can go so far. Case in point--the title feature. I have first seen it on a Ringwraith's winged mount...
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/b538z.jpg)
...then on Smaug...
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/kjca2.jpg)
...and finally on the dragons of Tui T. Sutherland's *Wings of Fire* series.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1cCB1.jpg)
I never understood the appeal. Bats don't have it. Pterosaurs certainly didn't have it. It doesn't add to the wings' appeal--it just makes them look scrawnier.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/sbZr5.jpg)
Without the need for a spike growing from its elbows, a bat's wings look better and cover more surface area needed for flight. So in regards to adaptation, what point would elbow spikes on a creature's wings serve?
[Answer]
The elbow spike is quite simply an extension or enlargement of the olecranon. This is the distal attachment for the triceps muscles, and will be important
in dragon flight. Evolutionarily speaking, this enlargement allowed archaic proto-dragons to broaden the muscles and tendons that attach to the mid-arm, allowing for stronger wing strokes, easier take offs and increased gliding & in flight arm stability. Eventually, this will also lead to larger dragons, able to take advantage of the increased wing power. The actual visible spike itself is just dragon eye candy.
[Answer]
# This is what's known as drawing a picture without understanding anatomy
First the bat:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/j8Y7q.jpg)
As you can see, it has a clear elbow, wrist (unlabelled), thumb and 4 fingers. Spikes on the ends of the fingers would not be unreasonable.
Next, one of the "dragons". This has a couple of problems
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/K3CIh.jpg)
It seems to have a finger coming out of its elbow with a spike on the end and a couple of extra fingers with the thumb but is missing the first short finger on the leading edge of the wing so only one extra in practice. A quick glance at a bat would have shown that this was incorrect but when does that stop anyone.
Note that this error has not been made on GoT. There's no general rule, it's a mixed bag as to whether people get this wrong or not.
[Answer]
Dailey I am here again to help you with your delightful biological schemings! Jumping off from Separatrix' fine bat diagram I have figured it out.
Your question: "What point would elbow spikes serve?" is not relevant to dragons, because the spikes are not at the elbow. Allow me to explain.
First the bat.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/RraQ6.jpg)
Now Smaug
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/bLbUD.jpg)
Smaug has an additional finger in his wing proximal to the spike on his "elbow"!
This solves the problem: the "elbow" on dragons is not the juncture of the humerus and radius/ulna, but rather a wrist-equivalent. The humerus, radius and ulna are condensed into short, powerful, proximal structures as happened in the whale and icthyosaur. *This fact leads to the conclusion that the dragon wing is in fact derived from a flipper, and dragons are evolved from aquatic ancestors.*
The role played by the radius and ulna in bats and birds is played by elongated carpal bones in dragons - a long "wrist". The evolutionary equivalent of fingers spread from this site to form distal webs similar to those in the bat as well as proximal webs as seen in Smaug and related dragons. Additional digits not used in the webs persist as "spikes" or nearly formed hand-like structures (like Smaug has).
That gives Smaug more than 5 fingers, you may protest. But that is OK. Dragons are polydactylous. Polydactylous cats get by just fine.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/VMmWw.jpg)
**ADDENDUM** @KSmarts comment made me think that it worth adding an image showing how a dewclaw could be very medial, as is the case for a dog. In the dragon that dewclaw oriented phalange would not be reduced to just one bone and would extend out to be the medial wing finger.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/j6gaf.jpg)
from <https://www.joshuanava.biz/human-figure/paws-and-hind-legs.html> with my text box added
[Answer]
Given that many Dragons also have claws, the wing spikes could be vestigial appendages that once were claws. They could also possibly be used in self defense, though the movement of a wing isn't designed for stabbing forward with significant force.
[Answer]
The first joint in the arm is the elbow, the second is the wrist, where you have the hand and fingers. Claws are likely here and primitive birds have them, for example the Hoatzin (at least when young). They can be used for climbing and gaining additional purchase.
Actually, this is one of the more believable features of these mythical animals.
[Answer]
I don't think they serve any biological function - they are there because artists wanted them there, and then became a 'tradition' which other artists copied. For instance, in 1978 Michael Whelan drew his first cover for one of Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern books - *The White Dragon*. [Book cover link](http://www.michaelwhelan.com/wp-content/uploads/whitedragon.jpg) (I tried to add the pic inline, but it won't play ball and claims it is too large, even though it isn't!)
In his book Works of Wonder, Whelan says he based the dragon on bat and crocodile, and asked McCaffrey questions on how it should look. I guess the 'claws' on the wing-fingertips are there to make it look less like a bat's wing, and more 'alien'.
] |
[Question]
[
**Would a state be able (with currently available technology) to cause cancer in its enemies**, which it can't silence in a different way? (e.g. staged accidents, assassinations, imprisonment)
The answer should include methods that could be used by states, using *only* currently available technology, or technology that is very likely to be available within a couple of years.
Also, the method doesn't have to *always* work; 30% chance of causing cancer would still be enough.
---
As side-note, Hugo Chavez [wondered](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-usa-cancer-idUSTRE7BR14I20111229) if the US have discovered a way to cause cancer to their enemies:
>
> It would not be strange if they had developed the technology to induce cancer and nobody knew about it until now ... I don't know. I'm just reflecting
>
>
>
>
> [...] Chavez, Fernandez, Paraguay’s Fernando Lugo, Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff and former Brazilian leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva have all been diagnosed recently with cancer. All of them are leftists.
>
>
>
[Answer]
# Low level radiation poisoning
[Alexander Litvinenko](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvinenko) was killed, probably by the Russian government, by getting him to ingest a significant quantity of radioactive Polonium-210. He did not die of cancer, he died of acute radiation poisoning.
Cancer does not kill fast, so if you are trying to slowly poison/kill your enemies over time (a year or so), this same sort of radiation dosing would be effective. Polonium-210 was hard to detect despite the fact that Polonium is not common (or present) in the human body. It does not give off much gamma radiation (only on 0.001% of all decays); instead giving off alpha particles that caused significant damage to Litvinenko's internal organs while not penetrating to the outside where they could be detected. The medical and police examinations of Litvinenko did not detect the radiation poisoning, it was only when samples were send to the UK's Atomic Weapons Establishment that the Polonium was identified.
A low level dose from certain other radio-nuclides could be even harder to detect. Polonium-210's activity ($\lambda$) is 8.36$\times10^{-8}$ 1/s; that means that $1 - e^{-\lambda} \approx \lambda $ or 8.36$\times10^{-6}$ % of the material decays every second. We can find a radio-nuclide that has a lower activity and is thus harder to detect. It will have to decay by alpha or beta decays so that it is difficult to detect outside of the body when ingested. It will have to also decay to a relatively common isotope so that the daughter nuclide isn't easily detected. If the poisoning element was a common biological element, it would be difficult to chemically separate from materials already in your body.
# Possible poisons
Lets look at [this list](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_radioactive_isotopes_by_half-life) and a [chart of nuclides](http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/chart/) to find some possibilities.
-**Sodium 22** has activity of 1.22$\times10^{-8}$ (about 1/8 of polonium) undergoes beta decay, delivers [500 eV](http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/chart/decaysearchdirect.jsp?nuc=22NA&unc=nds) x-ray radiation about 0.1% of the time, is the 9th common element in the body, and decays to stable $^{22}$Ne which is not common but is found at 0.138 ppm dissolved in blood. Sodium-22 is hard to detect in sodium form, and doesn't release many gammas, but does release positrons that can cause annihilation events and follow-on gamma release that would be suspicious. It also might lead to suspiciously high dissolved neon levels in the blood. However, I don't know how many doctors would perform gas chromotography of the blood as part of diagnosis of any symptoms.
-**Strontium 90** has activity of 1.22$\times10^{-8}$ (about 1/80) of plutonium, undergoes beta decay, releases [zero gammas](http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/chart/decaysearchdirect.jsp?nuc=90SR&unc=nds), is the 17th most common element in the body, and decays to $^{90}$Y. This isn't great because Yttrium-90 itself is not stable, and will decay within hours to $^{90}$Zr. This second decay does release gammas, 200-400 keV ones 97% of the time, but 2.3 MeV ones .002% of the time. The high energy gammas will occur at 1/40 the frequency as the already hard to detect Polonium gammas; the lower energy ones are lower energy and harder to detect, but will occur about a thousand times more frequently than polonium. I don't know if this would be net easier or net harder to detect. In any case, Zirconium is rare in the human body and might stand out. An advantage of Strontium is its chemical similarity to Calcium, so the body will naturally try to deposit in in bones, giving a very good chance of causing a particularly debilitating case of [myeloma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_myeloma).
-**Phosphorous 32** has activity of 8.10$\times10^{-7}$ (about 10 times polomium), undergoes beta decay, delivers [zero energy](http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/chart/decaysearchdirect.jsp?nuc=32P&unc=nds) as gamma radiation, is the 6th common element in the body, and decays to stable $^{32}$S. This is the most common isotope of sulfur, and the 8th most common element in the body. Phosporous-32 will act quickly, blurring the line between acute radiation poisoning and cancer. Its energy delivery is 1/10 that of polonium, but it decays 10 times faster so net energy delivery is about the same. This will kill in weeks. It does not release gammas at all. Its decay products are identical to the 8th most common constituent of the body and is therefore all-but impossible to detect.
# Conclusion
There are three decent options for poisioning. Keep in mind, this is with a 10 microgram dose, equivalent to the one that killed Litvenenko.
* Strontium-90 will almost certainly cause deadly bone marrow cancer in
a few years, but might be detectable due to its significant low
energy gamma activity and decay into the rare element Zirconium.
* Sodium-22 releases x-rays that are unlikely to be detected, and will cause chronic radiation poisoning in about a year. However, the body may be apt at flushing sodium, limiting the damage; the decay product Neon might be detectable in the blood; and the positron annihilations may or may not be detectable.
* Phosphorous-32 releases no gammas, is metabolized directly into ATP and DNA for a whole body radiation kill, and has an undetectable decay product. However, this would kill in a matter of days leaving little question that the victim has been poisoned somehow.
Pick your poison, and happy hunting.
[Answer]
How to induce cancer to someone, with current technology? The answer is so simple, that you will not like it, so please bear with me (because I will not limit myself to answer no. 1):
The answer is: make the target start smoking!
Yep, that easy. And perfectly within reach.
Tobacco inoculates you with up to 70 carcinogens, being the no. 1 avoidable cause of cancer, inducing cancers from the lung, larynx, head and neck, bladder, kidney, esophagus, stomach and colon. However, as you know, even smokers haven't got as nearly as 100% rate of cancer. The percentage is something as 10-30%.
So this just goes to show you how hard it is to induce cancer the way you want. Because cancer is a disease that is caused by mutations on the DNA that will make the cells go haywire and proliferate uncontrollably. But even after the mutation, the cells have lots of mechanisms to heal that mutation, be it DNA repair systems, be it immune responses against the tumor cells.
And carcinogen induces DNA mutations, either directly or indirectly.
This means that a person that is not exposed to a carcinogen may develop cancer, and a person exposed to a carcinogen may not. It's a matter of probability, of likelihood.
To increase the cancer rates to non-negliglible numbers, you would have to opt between two strategies:
a) Expose the target to a single, but super-high dose of the carcinogen (e.g. radiation from an atomic bomb)
b) Expose the target to low, but continuous / repeated, doses of the carcinogen
Both of these would increase the rate of detection.
So let's see some ways we could do this, with technologies available today... even though none will be as simple and accessible as tobacco.
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**1) Exposure to chemical carcinogens**
This is the easiest way and it doesn't need much sophisticated technologies to achieve.
For example, sneakly cover the air conditioning of the rooms where the target works with a layer of asbestos. This will increase the risk of lung and pleural cancer.
Or taint the meals of the target with known carcinogens. For instance, make them eat only cereals contaminated with the Aspergillus fungus, that produces aflatoxin, that increases the rate of liver cancer.
Or make your own cocktail of chemical carcinogens and put them on the food or air supplies.
**Pros**: The access to these carcinogens may be extremely simple, depending on the carcinogen.
**Cons**: The efficacy will be extremely low. You would need to constantly taint the food and air of the target, which would increase the risk of detection.
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**2) Radiation**
This is your prefered method, but I don't think it is feasible. Contrary to what Pete has said, I have no knowledge of solid evidence demonstrating that constant exposure to CT scans (or to radiation produced by CT machines) increase the risk of cancer significantly... if it means doing a semestral or trimestral CT scan.
Even radiotherapy, with significantly higher radiation doses, will not increase this risk with great orders of magnitude, even though radiotherapy is more limited in time and is fine-tuned to reduce the risk of radiation-induced cancer to the max.
But still, you would need very high doses of radiation **AND** you would need them to be focused **on a very concentrated and constant spot in the body**. Even today, radioncologists need to make "armors" and "masks" that completely imobilize the patient and need to constantly recallibrate the machine in order to be certain that the beam is always affecting the same area, or else the therapeutic benefit gets compromised.
There is just no way to achieve this on a moving target with current technology, without using such a dose of radiation that would affect all the neighborhood, increasing the chances of detection.
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**3) Radioisotopes**
But there is a way that you can make radiation find your target. Kingledion has beat me to the punch with that. Just make the person ingest substances containing radiation releasing isotopes. They will decay at regular intervals and innoculate a dose of radiation at each interval.
You can concentrate the radiation on a specific organ by binding the radioisotopes to molecules that concentrate on particular regions of the body.
For example, the only place on our body that uses iodine is the thyroid. Doctors use 131 iodine as a means to concentrate radiation on the thyroid.
Another example, doctors use radionuclides bound to a prostate specific antigen on diagnostic PET. This antigen concentrates the radiation on the prostate, making it easier to detect prostatic cancer by measuring the radiation released.
Kingledion mentioned strontium 90, which is analogous to calcium, which would concentrate the radiation on the bone. This would be helpful, because the bone marrow (the place where you produce the blood) is a place with a high celular division rate and therefore, very sensitive to cancer induction (leukemias, etc...)
**Cons**: Radiation may be detected,as kingledion as mentioned.
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**4) Immunity**
It is true that immunosupression may lead to cancer, because then there will be no immune cells to detect cancer cells and destroy them. However, that level of immunosupression would be hard to induce without extremely high doses of myelotoxics or radiation. Furthermore, it would be easily detected before inducing cancer... because the target would contract many infectious diseases beforehand, that would make him/her see a doctor, which would easily detect the immunosupression with a blood test.
So I don’t think that’s feasible.
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**5) Epigenetic tampering**
We don’t solely depend on genetics. We also depend on epigenetics. Meaning, all the cells in our organism possess the totality of our genetic code. But which genes we express, on which organs and at which situations depend on epigenetics.
Epigenetics means that we may turn on or off a gene, by adding molecule radicals (namely methyl radicals) to the DNA sequence immediately preceding that gene.
So, if a cancer is promoted by a mutated gene, we could epigenetically turn it off. And vice-versa... we could epigenetically turn on genes that would increase the likelihood of cancer.
At this time, we don’t have a way to manipulate epigenetics at our will. Every anticancer epigenetic drug that I know of has failed on clinical trials. But it is not a stretch to believe that this technology will be available in a couple of years.
**Cons:** You would need to develop this drug on highly specialized laboratories. Either you make a drug that just tampers with **all** your epigenetic make-up (and so the consequences will be unpredictable)... or you develop a drug that epigenetically focuses just on one gene, but then you will have a problem. Because you will need to make that drug available to the target on a sufficient dose. Since you can’t make physical contact with him, it means you can’t innoculate the drug. So the drug should be able to traverse the digestive system without being digested and be absorbed on a sufficient dose to achieve the effect. I don’t think this is feasible for a stealthy assassination.
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**6) Addiction**
Remember tobacco? Everyone knows that it causes cancer! Yet everyone still does it.
Why? Because amongst the carcinogens you have nicotine, which is also a neurotransmitter that causes a sense of well-being and therefore, addiction.
Processed meat is a carcinogen, but who can live without that yummy hamburger? You just need to have it. Just one won’t make a difference, right? Cancer just happens to the others, right? You can stop whenever you want, right?
Just make sure that you couple your carcinogen with an addictive substance or behavior. **Thereby you will ensure that the target will be exposed to the carcinogen on continuous and regular doses.** The target will **BEG** you for the carcinogen.
In fact, the target will make the job for you. They will rationalize everything, everything, to be able to continue their addiction. This is truer if you make the addictive drug have a hangover effect, that will cause depression or fatigue, so the target will no longer be able to live without it.
This is easy. Every neurological substance that induces addiction may induce (sometimes fatal) abstinence syndromes.
Heck, at a certain time, you can even forget about stealth. The target will be crawling up to you. If he asks for anyone else's help, he/she will stop getting the drug. He/She will not have that, especially if he/she is a dictator that won't have anyone deny him/her something.
Just make your evil chemists develop a carcinogen and highly addictive neurotransmitter, like nicotine.
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**7) Infection**
This is, according to my opinion, the best strategy. Viruses may cause cancer because they are genetic invaders, that will cause DNA damage. Bacteria may cause cancer, because they may produce carcinogens internally.
Any microbiological laboratory would have the technology to genetically alter bacteria or viruses in order to turn them cancerigenous, if they would set their mind on it.
*Helicobacter pylori* is a bacterium that infects nearly half of the world’s population and it increases the risk of gastric cancer. We know there are strains that are more cancerigenous than others. Taint the food with a genetically altered *H. pylori* and you’re good to go.
Or why not alter a non-cancerigenous bacteria that is ubiquitous on our intestinal flora, like an *E. coli*?
Or create a hybrid flu virus. It would be airborne and extremely virulent. But give it genes that would incorporate on the host’s DNA in order to induce mutations. Or make it hijack the cellular machinery to produce and release carcinogens on circulation.
**Pros**: You would have to inoculate the target just once, thereby decreasing chances of detection. It could be airborne or foodborne (or, if you don't count that as physical contact, sexually transmited - just hire and inoculate a prostitute). Once inside the host, the microbe would self-perpetuate, without the need for more actions from the killer. You could just sit back and enjoy.
In the case of viruses, doctors wouldn’t be able to detect them, because they would be new viruses. They would only be found if the doctors knew *a priori* what viral antigens they should be looking for.
**Cons** Theoretically, a doctor could eventually detect the infection.
**Pro pro** But even if they did diagnose accurately those infections, that doesn’t mean they could treat them. Viral infections are extremely difficult to treat. And you could genetically engineer your bacteria with antibiotic-resistance plasmids.
[Answer]
# Use Stuxnet
Basically, you indirectly supply state-of-the-art medical facilities to your intended target. Let's say a CAT scanner or some other kind of diagnostic device.
When your target is observed going in for a check up, boot up your [Stuxnet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet) worm and overload the radiation dose (while logging the correct dose amount to cover up).
Repeat on a yearly/quarterly basis as required.
# Bonus Answer (detection of assassination attempt)
Although people tend to trust computer logs implicitly, a suspicious security team may wish to use a radiation detector during use to ensure that the x-ray machine (or whatever) is really delivering the dose it says it is to the victim in question.
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In the news there was real-world case of man with HIV being infected with cancer from his parasite. His parasite had a cancer, but then its cancer cells invaded his body too because his immune system was too weak to stop them.
<http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/parasitic-worms-cancer-cells-caused-tumors-hiv-positive-man/>
So the answer is simple. Induce cancer in a parasite by using radiation and then get your enemy infected by said parasite. But for this plan to work immunity of your enemy politician must be already weak (old age, bad genes, HIV-positive, etc).
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# Immortalization ex vivo
It sounds like a rather unlikely name for a method of assassination - so much the sneakier. The agent obtains live tissue from the victim by some means - anything from a swapped biopsy sample to perhaps hair follicles on a comb, if they're lucky. Then they do something like [this](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41596-021-00506-4), deleting genes that constrain cell growth, or adding new genes to direct it. Then the "immortalized" (which oddly enough, usually means cancerous) cells are injected back into the victim. The immune system might still do for them, but cancer cells tend to invent well established ways of reducing those risks, which you can have provided to them during your genetic manipulation.
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Consider a race of humanoid, winged tree-dwellers. They can fly and generally spend most of their time either in the air or climbing around their tree-homes in the upper reaches of a forest. In order to climb, land, and perch effectively, they need claws capable of sinking easily into hardened tree bark and occasionally even stone. At the same time, in order to create and manipulate tools, they need humanlike hands with nimble fingers and opposable thumbs. They must be able to extend or retract their claws quickly, including in response to being startled, or as a weapon in a fight.
Given all this, **what is the most likely digit structure for retractable claws in humanlike hands?** Sitting at, and retracting into, the tips of the fingers? Or situated between the fingers and retracting into the palm?
What problems would a race with this kind of retractable claws have? Could a claw get "stuck"? How would the muscles support the weight in both configurations? How would the curvature of the claws affect the shape of the hand - the fingers for fingertip claws, or the palm for between-finger claws? What happens if a claw is broken? Are there any benefits to one claw structure over the other?
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How about, rather than extending the claws, you retract the skin around them?
Keep the claws firmly attached to the bone, but add a muscular pad, something like a tongue or an elephant's trunk, that can close around the claw when it's not in use. That would allow fine manual dexterity - perhaps even better than our own fingers, if this muscle could be controlled precisely enough - but also keep the claw available for grasping tasks.
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Retractable claws are tricky business - consider cats, for example. Their claws don't really *retract* all that much - it's more that the skin around them is flabby enough to cover them unless stretched. The claws are always there. And this extra skin around the "fingers" doesn't lend itself to dexterous digits.
If I might suggest an easier solution - smaller claws at the base of each finger, around the palm of the hand. These would be perfect for gripping trees, while leaving the fingers themselves free to manipulate objects.
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An alternative would be segregating the two functions into two different kind of fingers.
Your creatures could have two big hooked claws in two of their fingers and nails in the others.
The hooked claws would need to flex back when using the other fingers for fine manipulation, so they don't get on the way. As they don't need such fine control as the others, they can have bigger muscles and a wider range of movement.
Something similar to Spielberg's velocirraptor's feet.
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Perhaps this could work if the claws were made more finger-like. Instead of claws which retract into the hands/fingers, how about small claws between fingers which can be pulled towards the back of the hands (putting them out of the way behind the fingers) or forwards, extending in front of the palm in the same way that regular fingers move at the knuckles?
I imagine the hands would be more brittle and less strong, needing space for muscle and bone for such structures.
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It's clear that you're not talking about humans here, but I'm going to use human hands as the basis for my answer, as they are by far the most relatable hands for me personally.
I would definitely say they'd come out from in between the fingers. For one thing, there's actually space in between the metacarpals for claws to rest. The hands would however need to be a little wider to account for the claws as well as new muscles whose primary function is moving the claws, and a little fatter to account for the curvature of the claws.
Second, if there were to be a retractable claw coming from a fingertip, the final knuckle of that finger would need to be longer than the claw in order for there to be room for it to fully retract, assuming it actually can fully retract. Because if the retracted claw extended into the second knuckle, the fingers wouldn't be able to bend well, which would severely limit fine manipulation. On my fairly average-sized hands, a 2 to 2.5-inch claw could fit comfortably in between my metacarpals, but only a half-inch claw in my fingertips. For comparison, lions have roughly 1.5-inch claws, and tigers have roughly 4-inch claws. Since the primary function of claws in cats is grasping, these longer claws are very useful to lions and tigers because they lack fingers. Human fingers are already pretty good at grasping things, so a short claw at the end of a fingertip may be sufficient for most human claw-related needs. But longer claws in between the fingers would allow the fingers to rest, even when climbing or hooking prey, so they wouldn't be tired later when it's time to do a task requiring fine manipulation. On a related note, you would definitely want claws on a fingered hand to be able to extend while the fingers are extended for two reasons. One: For increased grasping capability. And two: Imagine trying to climb a tree with balled-up fists. There's no way your claws would reach the tree and you'd scrape your knuckles on the bark.
Third, human fingers contain no muscle tissue; only fat and connective tissue. If a finger were to sheathe a retractable claw, it would need to be a massive bratwurst finger in order for there to be room for a bone, fat, connective tissue, a claw, and muscles to hold the claw in place. And depending on how long you want the claw to be, the final knuckle of each finger would need to be very long. One possible solution to this would be to have the final knuckle of the fingers not have a bone, and instead only be a skin flap covering a claw. The skin flap could recede over the previous knuckle to reveal the claw. Theoretically this motion could be make with no muscles in the fingers, using only connective tissue connected to muscles in the hand. It doesn't sound very structurally sound to me, though.
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What about something like a spur growing backwards from the back of the hand like from the knuckles. By backwards I mean it would curve away from the hand. This would reduce the need to have it retract and still allow fingers to be regular. The hand could be twisted around when using it to climb and for fighting could be used in a back handed striking style. Arms in general might be double jointed and/or more flexible to allow for ease of rotating and for hugging a surface when using the spurs.
They could be a mutation where the fingers split into two fingers at the knuckle but the backwards fingers didn't fully develop and became spurs. The could also maybe develop claws at the end of the spurs as a remnant of being fingers. Or maybe the culture developed a tradition of sharpening the spurs.
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Cats' claws can retract because the last joint of each digit is able to bend completely backwards and has a fleshy sheath to go into.
The challenge with combining retractible claws with primate-like nimble fingers is the fingerprint. Our fingerprints serve an important purpose in gripping, the ridges allow for more friction and a firmer grasp. But that requires us to use the last joint of our digits for contacting objects, which is incompatible with retracting like a cat.
One possible solution would be to have gripping pads form on the second-to-last joint, instead of the last joint. If they have the same number of finger joints as mammals do, this would mean somewhat reduced finger dexterity, equivalent to if you used finger braces to make yourself unable to bend the last joint on each finger, but I've seen people with disabilities doing complex manual tasks with finger braces like that so I know it's workable. If you're not constrained to basal mammalian skeletal features, you could give them an extra joint in each finger. The biggest challenge they'd have, regardless of the number of joints, is that when their claws are retracted, the end of their digit will be wider front-to-back than a human's, causing difficulty with tasks that involve inserting fingers into small spaces.
Another solution would be to have claws and gripping surfaces on different digits, similar to many prosimians (lemurs etc). For example, tarsiers have fingernails on most digits, but have a "toilet claw" (used for grooming) on the second and third toe. The most important digits for manual ability in humans are the thumb and index finger - if they had a humanlike thumb and index finger but retractible claws on the middle and ring fingers, for example, that wouldn't have a huge impact on their manual ability.
[Answer]
Claws should be split off from first knuckles from wrist. They only stick out when fist is made tight. add Abrasive palms, and microscopic suction cup cells to underside of fingers. Finally fingernails are permanently extracted small cat like claws. there you have it!
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A high medieval kingdom is ruled by a king. The king is fairly cunning and intelligent, has exactly two magical gifts:
1. He ages very, very slowly
2. He has physical prowess well, well beyond that of a normal man.
These mean that it's nearly impossible to kill him (poisons don't phase him, stabbing him is near impossible, and simply throwing soldiers at him would require him to be considerably outnumbered, so it would not be a stealthy affair), so he knows he's fairly safe on a personal level.
The king, however, has a bad habit of taking long (decade long) trips away from his kingdom. He knows during this time he leaves his kingdom ripe for the taking of particularly ambitious noblemen, advisors, and the ilk, and if any such man *did* take charge, the king would not be able to face down the entire kingdom's army to regain power... nor does he want to have to go through such efforts.
How can the king structure the government so he has reasonable security that when he returns to his kingdom he's still king? What variation of a monarchy would support this?
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He’s a folk hero, star of legend and lore, and people love him as a cultural icon.
When he comes back to town, he’s treated as a rock star. The prime minister puts up with him and everyone lets him play figurehead for a while.
Meanwhile, he uses his celebrety to talk to the people and influence things along the lines he has in mind.
[Answer]
## Setup a monarchial democracy like the UK
There are a lot of decisions that need to be made in a monarchy...which requires a king to be present. If the king is absent, those decisions still need to be made, and if not filled in a procedural, non-violent way, someone, somewhere will fill that void. So, setup a form of government where he maintains the hereditary title of King but is only tangentially involved in making decisions.
Since the common people will be making the decisions for themselves *and* the power vacuum of king-like decision making is filled by elected representatives, there's nothing to be gained form usurping the throne other than a name. If the king does it right, he'll always be able to come back and claim the throne.
The king's ongoing role will become one of vision-giver. "I have a dream that this country can...." Since he's not around to oversee its implementation, he just comes back every so often to check and see how things are going. If the performance is subpar, he can offer guidance.
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First he needs an administrator that he can trust, preferably someone that doesn't have a claim to the throne. He must be respected enough that people will obey him (at least until the king returns) but not respected enough that they will follow him if he makes himself king.
Second divine right, kings have been using this method to stay in power for centuries. This king actual has evidence of how special he is (his magical powers). He must get his people not only to believe that he is the king, but that he should and must be king. This will insure that he always has at least some support from the people if he needs to retake his kingdom.
Three he needs to take a powerful army with him when he goes on his trips. This army will not only protect him from harm while his is gone, but it we also be ready to help him retake his kingdom if necessary.
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This king is not the governor of his kingdom. I recommend that king to delegate the management of its kingdom to a [Favorite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favourite) as some kings did in the 16th and 17th century.
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The First Law trilogy by Joe Abercrombie has a similar situation (spoiler alert). In essence the wizard Bayaz rules the entire kingdom and always has (he created it hundred of years ago). He accomplishes it by appointing figurehead kings, and ensuring that the real power is always held by a trusted adviser. Then he rules from afar by sending instructions to his lackey, ensuring he always retains power for when he returns.
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Here on Earth, Carbon is the base of all life from plants to fungi to animals. The most common alternative that exists is Silicon, but surely out of the over 100 elements other than Carbon and Silicon, there are other options for life bases. Out of the elements that exist, which ones can possibly work as a base for life? What are their advantages and disadvantages when compared to Carbon?
[Answer]
Wikipedia has a full article just for that: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemistry> - Most of this answer is based on this article.
Basically, alternative biochemistry would be:
# Changing chirality
Almost all of Earthly amino acids have a L form and sugars have a D form. But, life in some other planet could adopt L-L, D-L or D-D.
# Replacing carbon
* **Silicon**: Silicon is the most frequent candidate as a replacement for carbon, but molecules created with long sequences of silicon (those are called silanes) tends to be much less chemically stable than their carbon counterparts. Further, silicon is much more common than carbon in Earth, and even with that, life here is carbon-based. Anyway, it remains as a possible candidate.
* **Silicone**: Alternate sequences of silicon and oxygen (aka silicones) are much more stable than long sequences of just silicon, so silicones tends to work better than silanes. Polysilanols are the silicone componds analogue to carbon-based sugars, and they are soluble in liquid nitrogen.
* **Boron**: Boron sequences, called boranes are highly explosive in Earth's atmosphere, but might be viable in some other planet. However, boron is relatively too rare to be seen as a viable alternative.
* **Sulfur** or **Phosphorus**: Those also are able to create long chains in some situations, however they tends to be even less stable than silanes.
* **Metals**: Some metals mixed with oxygen are very capable of creating significantly complex molecules. However, many metals are relatively rare, so you only get a few options left, namely titanium, aluminium, magnesium and iron, which are even more abundant than carbon.
# Replacing water
Water is essential because it is a liquid capable of acting as a solvent to a large set of substances and also has a pretty large liquid temperature range. Few substances have those characteristics, but there are some, namely:
* **Ammonia**: In low temperatures (i.e. planets which orbit reasonably far from their host stars), ammonia becames a liquid capable of act as a solvent to a large pletora of substances and has a reasonable large range of liquid temperature. The liquid range is not as large as water is, but in those cold planets where it remains liquid, maybe the temperature does not variate as much as it does in Earth. In high pressures environments, however, ammonia has a liquid range even larger than water. Also, ammonia dissolves many metals even better than water does.
* **Hydrogen fluoride**: Has a suitable liquid temperature range, similar to water, but in colder temperatures. It is also able to act as a solvent for many substances. However, it is considered too rare to be a viable candidate.
* **Hydrogen sulfide**: A good solvent, but not as good as water or ammonia. However, mixed with a small proportion of hydrogen fluoride, it becames great. Unfortunately, it features a narrow range of liquid temperature, but it might be workable at high pressures where its liquid range is better.
* **Methane** and other simple **Hydrocarbons**: Titan has lakes made from hydrocarbons, mostly ethane and methane. By the way, accordingly to the wikipedia article, some people as Darrell Strobel from John Hopkins University suggests that Titan actually features hydrocarbon-based life, which combines hydrocarbons to hydrogen, reducing ethane and acetylene to methane (something analogous to what many organisms here in Earth do in order to breath). Water is a stronger solvent than methane, however this is not necessarily a con to methane, since this might mean that it is more able than water to selectively preserve molecules useful for biologic reactions. Also, computer models shows that cell membranes based on carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen are capable of working in liquid methane (Earth's cell membranes uses carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and phosphorus). See more [here](http://www.astrobio.net/news-exclusive/the-methane-habitable-zone/). Also, accordingly to Chris McKey, methane-based life could be more common in the universe than water-based life.
* **Silicon dioxide**: In Earth this becames glass or sand, a solid. However, at higher temperatures (higher than what we see in Venus), it becames a liquid. It still needs high pressure to keep a possible workable liquid range that is not too hot for organic reactions.
And there are other possible substitutes for water given a suitable temperature and pressure range: Hydrogen chloride; hydrogen cyanide; sulfuric acid; formamide; methanol; liquid nitrogen; liquid hydrogen; supercritical hydrogen; supercritical carbon dioxide; liquid sodium chloride (aka salt); and water mixed with hydrogen peroxide (H2O2).
[See more about the solvents here.](http://www.nap.edu/read/11919/chapter/8)
# Replacing phosphorus
Phosphorus is an essential atom in biochemistry, participating in the structure of DNA and RNA and transporting energy as part of ATP. It might be replaceable by arsenic. While poisonous to almost all life in Earth, there is at least one known species of bacteria that is able to replace at least part of its phosphorous by arsenic. However, arsenic is somewhat rare and features poorly chemically in comparation to phosphorus.
# Replacing oxygen and CO2
Some bacteria actually "breath" sulfur instead of oxygen. In fact sulfur-reducing bacteria were widespread in the primitive Earth before we had an oxygen-rich atmosphere.
Also, if the life-in-Titan hyphotesis is correct, Titan's bacteria should breath ethane and acetylene instead of oxygen and expell ethane instead of carbon dioxide. Or perhaps absorb hydrogen, ethane and acetylene, producing methane.
Life that uses hydrogen sulfide as a solvent could breath sulfur monoxide producing carbon monoxide and/or carbon dioxide.
# Replacing nucleobases, amino acids, DNA and RNA
DNA is composed by four nucleobases - adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine. RNA is similar, but replaces thymine with uracil. However there are other possible nucleobases that were sythetized in labs or that might had occured abiotically in early Earth's and were not used by Earth's life, which might not be the case in other planets. Notably is an experiment performed in 2014 in the Scripps Research Institute ([see here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_pair#Unnatural_base_pair_.28UBP.29)) where two artifical nucleobase pairs, namely d5SICS and dNaM, were added to genoma of *Eschera Coli* and were able to be replicated in their DNA with high fidelity without reducing the capability of the bacteria to reproduce nor reducing its ability to self-repair DNA's damages nor losing those artificial bases with time.
Further, the genetic code uses triplets of nucleobases to synthetize amino acids, from which 21 are naturally synthetized, but many of [nonstandard amino acids are know](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanded_genetic_code#Non-standard_amino_acids). An alternate biochemistry could use perhaps quads or pairs of nucleobases to form amino acids, perhaps using nonstandard nucleobases and/or producing nonstandard amino acids.
There are many alternative forms to DNA and RNA. Those alternative forms for RNA and DNA are collectivelly called [XNA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeno_nucleic_acid). Some of them are:
* [PNA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peptide_nucleic_acid), which is a candidate for a DNA substitute, and it was suggested that very early Earth's life was PNA-based instead of DNA-based since PNA may polymerize spontaneously in water at high temperatures and pressures. PNA is not known to occur naturally in Earth, but its backbone molecule is produced naturally by some cyanobacteria.
* [TNA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threose_nucleic_acid) and [GNA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycol_nucleic_acid). Those were produced in labs and known to be as good to store genetic information as DNA. TNA behaves similarly to RNA and GNA could replace either RNA or DNA. However, those are not known to occur in nature, they were synthetized in labs, but it is hypothesized that they may have occurred in the primitive Earth and could be DNA's and RNA's precursors. Also, it is notable that GNA is simpler, more stable and more heat-resistant than either DNA or RNA. TNA is also structurally simpler than RNA.
* [LNA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locked_nucleic_acid): A possible substitute for RNA in some xenobiologic environment.
* [xDNA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XDNA): An artificial DNA substitute, which features four extra nucleobases in adition to the common four nucleobases. Those four alternate nucleobases are modifications of the standard nucleobases, where an extra benzene ring was added to each one. The resulting molecule (xDNA) is more stable than regular DNA in high temperatures and is not compatible for integration into otherwise regular DNA.
I have no idea of what kind of molecule could be a nucleobase, amino acid, DNA or RNA substitute that is not carbon-based and I doubt that present-day science have enough knowledge for proposing any candidate of that.
# Possibilities for alternate biochemistry
Based on all of that, I think that some possible alternate biochemistries are:
1. (Titan's environment): Low temperature. 45% larger atmospheric pressure than Earth. Methane and ethane are the solvents. Carbon-based life which breathes methane and ethane and expels acetylene. Other possibility is breathing hydrogen, ethane and acetylene, producing methane. Those two possibilities could be complementary and living in the same environment, just as plants and animals does. Don't know if some replacement for DNA and RNA would be necessary or not nor what it could be. Accordingly to [this](http://www.astrobio.net/news-exclusive/the-methane-habitable-zone/) such world would benefit from orbiting a red-dwarf star, but this is not obligatory.
2. Similar to Earth, but featuring GNA and TNA as a replacement for DNA and RNA. Possibly with different amino acids.
3. Low temperature. High pressure. Ammonia solvent. Carbon-based life. Don't know if some replacement for DNA and RNA would be necessary nor what it could be.
4. Low temperature. Earth-like pressure. Liquid nitrogen solvent. Silicone-based life. Something very different than DNA and RNA would be needed for genetics, but I have no idea what it could be.
5. Low temperature. High pressure. Hydrogen sulfide solvent, mixed with bit of hydrogen fluoride. Carbon-based life breathing sulfur monoxide producing carbon monoxide and/or carbon dioxide. Don't know if some replacement for DNA and RNA would be necessary nor what it could be.
6. Low temperature. Low pressure. A mixture of water and water peroxyde is used as a solvent. Carbon-based life. No idea about what would be the metabolism or what would substitute DNA and RNA, but it would not need to be so much different from what happens in Earth when compared to the other possibilities.
7. High temperature. High pressure. Silicon dioxide and silicates are used as solvents. Silicione or aluminum-based life. No idea about what would be the metabolism or what would substitute DNA and RNA.
8. High temperature. High pressure. Sulfuric acid solvent. Don't know if carbon-based or silicone-based, nor what would be the metabolism, nor what replaces DNA and RNA.
9. [High temperature. High pressure. Supercritical carbon dioxide solvent with small quantities of supercritical water. Carbon-based life.](http://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/4/3/331) Don't know the metabolism nor what would replace DNA and RNA.
There could be a lot of more possible combinations, but I think that listing those are already good enough. Alternate biochemistry knowledge is still a baby, so there is a lot of speculation and uncertainties and very few certain knowledge about what could be or not be the possible biochemistry for alien forms.
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A while back I wrote a story, [Learning Curve](http://www.scifiideas.com/inspiration/featured-stories/featured-story-learning-curve/), about silicon based life living in molten sulfur aquifers on the Jovian moon of Io. Io seems to have the physical characteristics that would allow complex molecules based on silicon and sulfur to be stable since it is totally desiccated. Nevertheless there is certainly an energy gradient on Io both thermal and electrical. Life can be defined as a self replicating system that uses an energy gradient to locally reverse entropic stasis or collapse. Of course such life would have very alien ways of making use of that energy. One of the interesting things about sulfur is that, unlike water, it has an absurdly low vapor pressure at or significantly above melting temperature. This makes it an ideal fluid for an organism living in a near vacuum. Protective skins would not have to be as pressure resistant as our space suits though conductive loss of heat would still be a problem. Most objections to sulfur as a life fluid are based the characteristics of pure sulfur, something sulfur on Io would definitely not be. Impurities in molten sulfur would drastically change viscosity, solubility and other characteristics increasing the range of possible chemical interactions. A lot of people assume silicon life to be crystalline but that's as silly as assuming carbon based life would look like a double helix. On a macroscopic level silicon based life might not look any more crystalline that earth life. One danger is that silicon sulfur life might catch fire or even explode when exposed to terrestrial conditions.
Since Voyager we have learned a great deal more about Io and the possibility of underground sulfur seas has been diminished but not entirely eliminated. I'm hoping to one day see a 'critter' rolling across the ochre sands of Pele Patera on a space probe viewer.
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If you're looking for specific molecular polymers:
* dimethylsiloxane (Si, O, CH3)
* phenylsilicone (Si, O, C6H5)
* oiphenyllead oxide (Pb, O, C6H5)
* diphenylltin (Sn, C6H5)
* butylpolystannoxane (Sn, O, OH, C4H9)
* silazane (Si, N, H, CH3)
* phosphonitrilic chloride (P, N, Cl)
* dimethyl polyborophane (B, P, H, CH3)
* silyl orthoborate (Si, O, B, CH3)
* dimethylated polygermane (C, H, Ge, CH3)
The parentheses indicate elements or radicals that are in the molecule. I got this from [1](http://www.xenology.info/Xeno/8.2.3.htm). As far as I can tell, you could replace the hydrocarbons with biomolecules of your choice.
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The only true way to build an inescapable maze is for the maze to always change its layout, like the temple in Alien vs Predator or the maze from Maze Runner. This ensures that no matter how many times you use it, your memory is false and no matter how lost you get, you cannot go back.
This culture has unlimited resources and 400 years to build an always changing labyrinth but, I can only use technology from the years 2500 BC - 2100 BC. This labyrinth can and will be discovered 4000 years in the future and must still be able to move its internal components that allow it to change. For the sake of simplicity lets say, using hand waving, that the explorers cannot drill or explode through the maze, they must go through it.
Using the above information, how would People from this time build this?
A list of Can We Build question can be found [here](http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3540/can-we-build-series#autocomment9591)
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I'd start with one basic assumption: the maze only needs to change when someone is actually moving around in it. Admittedly, this loses some of the wow factor of something more autonomous like Maze Runner, but I think this is the only way that could reliably work.
My main suggestion is balance. Take a look at the [Falkirk Wheel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falkirk_Wheel). The wheel is perfectly balanced, which allows 500 tonnes to be moved with only 30 horsepower. Using this principle, consider a long hallway constructed so the floor is a large, balanced lever. One person walking across a long enough lever could provide quite a bit of torque. A clear usage here is using that lever to push up a lever-wall, resulting in a new wall somewhere in the maze, and another one removed. Another one in an apparently different part of the maze could reset it.
This approach also allows for some interesting one-way features. Imagine a hallway overweight by about half a person's weight. As you start walking down the hallway, the floor begins to sink. As soon as you step off, it begins to ascend again. You're now on a lower level with no way back up to where you started. Such a system could even be triggered by more weight; sending one person at a time will get you through the hallway, but taking a group of people would trigger the sinking action.
Lastly, I'd just like to mention an awesome fact. You can use just levers to build a mechanical computer. Doing this may make the maze more deterministic than you'd like, but it's still cool.
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Most of the others did point out correctly what will happen to superstructures that are made out of erodible building materials 4000 years after construction: they'll tend to fail somehow. Especially if you want to move around whole rooms. Even materials from this day wouldn't stand the test of time... except if you manage to build this out of highly corrosion resistant plastic (maybe).
So I'll offer this:
**The crazy labyrinth powered by door opening explorers approach**
You can go for a crazy labyrinth approach on a less mass-intensive scale. I saw the slab-setup AndyD suggested, but you can go even smaller and just make the **doors** highly irritating. Use a single axis to rotate two doors at different levels, but have one's open setting be the others closed setting by having the corridor at the other level passing by at right angles. When you manage to make a closed door look like the wall of a room, your explorers would close the opening in the strange-room (tm) they went through a hour ago by opening the door-to-dead-end (tm) they met now. Going back and... wasn't there a door?
Combine this with hard-to-notice-changes-of-level using **long winding corridors** and make two rooms look alike; when they come in they might think they were here already (except for the clever ones who leave glowing light sticks lying around).
Combine these two, so they will make the long-winding-corridor winding in another direction if a door a level below was opened. lead them in a third room that looks like the first two and repeat as long as possible.
If you feel cruel, make the level-separated doors detach when pushing in the other direction. Even meaner: have such a double-door blocking off another double-door, so the strange-room (tm) with the used glowing light sicks lying around inside can't be exited through that wall where everyone agrees that was a door when they entered.
Speaking of closing off walkways - its hard to pull a stone-wall-door when it fits perfectly into the wall because you can't grab it properly; doors employed in such a way make fine fake walls.
Okay, one level of mean door-play I still have to offer: use that two-level-door to push a stone wall until it falls through a slit in the bottom. Now that's a sure way to keep anything from escaping ever, but its a one-use-device. You can use this for more indirect effects, like having an underground river flowing over due to being blocked off and drowning anybody inside your labyrinth.
Sadly, the whole idea could be exploited by not pushing these doors to their maximum opening positions, so maybe whole 90 degree turns should be avoided in favor of ... 30 degree turns. Just enough space to have a curious explorer fit through.
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**Survivability**
Your labyrinth is going to have to survive an incredible amount of weathering and erosion. There is a significant amount of randomness to the world's weather, of course, but optimistically an ancient structure could survive for this long (the Great Pyramids, for example). However, we also need this facility to *function* after thousands of years, which means it will have to especially robust.
**Functionality**
No matter how sophisticated the machinery, if the maze needs to shift more than a single time there will need to be a constant, nigh-unlimited power source from which to draw energy. There will also need to be mechanisms that harness this energy in order to affect the changes in the maze. Mechanisms need to be dependable in order to survive the millennia of waiting, and they need to be robust in order to move the presumably weighty barriers.
**Inescapability**
For the reasons listed above, your maze will need to be constructed of materials not easily affected by the elements, but it also needs to be able to withstand determined escapees. If someone is trapped in the maze, they will eventually resort to physical destruction in order to escape. Also, as has been mentioned in the comments, there will a non-zero chance that someone random-walking through the maze will accidentally discover the exit no matter how convoluted the system. If you intend for your victims to never escape, there will need to be a solution to both problems.
**Resources?**
The years 2500 - 2100 BCE contain quite the variety of technological possibilities depending upon where on the Earth we are located, but if we want to be as advanced as possible (and we probably should) we'll likely want to be in the Near East, India, or China. You may recognize those locations as the early River Valley Civilizations, and that is no coincidence. By the time period in question, these civilizations were already approaching the Middle Bronze Age, which will give us the most advanced technology we're likely to find anywhere on the Earth at the time. So let's look at the three requirements from the guise of an ancient engineer.
* Granite or a similar stone could be used for the base structure. The Walls, Floors, and Ceiling could all be made of stone, even the moving portions. It is resistant to weathering, though not weather-proof.
* Building underground will provide excellent protection from the elements. Some Egyptian tombs have survived basically unfazed through millennia because their construction left them effectively hermetically sealed.
* A river and a series of water wheels could provide the power for the labyrinth. In fact, placing the maze underground will help in this regard because it adds potential energy to the water which will fall into the maze and generate even more power than if the water wheels were on the surface.
* Mechanisms made from rope and wood will decay no matter what, so the construction will have to be done with metal and stone exclusively. This includes water wheels, any rollers, counterweights, pulleys, gears, or anything. Personally, I think I would mostly use blocks of granite on stone rollers, and push the blocks around (think pistons in Minecraft without any sticky goo). Stone and Metal simply do not have the tensile strength to support a system of pulleys or other hanging mechanisms. You'll have to rely on compression alone, which will be challenging but not game-breaking.
* Finally, you have the issue of human destruction. A victim trapped in the maze will eventually try to break their way out using violence if they see no other alternative. I propose sealing the maze completely with no chance of escape, but let the system continue to change in order to provide the illusion that there is an escape somewhere. The victims will follow the path of least resistance and will likely just search for the exit rather than break things to get out. Beyond that, a system constructed of nothing but metal and stone will be quite formidable to an unarmed human anyway, so the risk is minimal in the first place.
**Liabilities**
Obviously, this is an extremely optimistic setup. Earthquakes, Meteors, and other geological "acts of God" could lay waste to this construction no matter what precautions you take. Also, using water as a power source (which is really the only option during the Bronze Age) comes with the risk of water erosion. Also, even metals will decay eventually. Bronze is more resistant to corrosion than steel, but it's not everlasting. Your stones might fatigue over time and crack. Dust could collect in the mechanisms and result in a failure when they are activated. Honestly, any number of things can go wrong. BUT, there is at least a snowball's chance that this thing could actually work. Hope that's enough!
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Given the enormous time over which your labyrinth must remain functional I think you have to abandon every common notion of the stone labyrinth you probably envisioned so far.
It is already highly unlikely to think that a civilization 2500-2000 BC could create anything even remotely similar to a stone labyrinth with moving walls, floors and doors it is **completely impossible** for such a structure to still be in working condition after more than 4000 unsupervised years.
For this to work we need to think outside the box:
* Maybe your labyrinth is **partially flooded by water**: the tides, the season and changing weather conditions could lead to some parts being flooded, then others. While this would create a little wear on the dungeon walls, 4000 years isn't a long time in geological terms, so this could work well.
* Make the **moving parts alive**: what if animal herds or vegetation make for the moving part of your labyrinth, blocking of some sections while opening up the ones they left?
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I think it could be done.
First--the elements will destroy your control system over 4000 years, thus you must shield it from the elements. Go underground--say, a cave.
Second--power. There's only one viable source: water. You need a never-dry small river to operate it.
As for how to make it work: The maze floor is made of tiles--some of which are pressure plates. The pressure plate moves a **small** mechanism that diverts a small amount of water--this keeps the needed pressure low and doesn't make for big drops in the pressure plates as the mechanism is activated.
When the amount of water is too low to do the job directly use it to operate a larger control to get enough water.
In it's passive state the water simply flows through the system without being diverted and does nothing. Any controls that are operated divert water into float chambers that lift a partition and apply sideways pressure to it--it moves into a new position. Once in the new position it trips a valve that resets the original, the water drains away.
The actual changes in the maze are from these partitions being slid into or out of the way. Since they can't slide unless first lifted up and they have no exposed edge to lift it would not be easy for someone in the maze to operate them. They can also be quite heavy--even if someone drills the wall and puts in something they can grip they're too heavy to move.
Note that this mechanism is slow and thus there must be considerable separation between the partition and it's trigger.
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There are two factors in a maze: [complexity and difficulty](http://archive.bridgesmathart.org/2001/bridges2001-213.pdf).
The easiest way to increase the difficulty is to build islands as this breaks the traditional "follow the wall" option for solving it.
The easiest way to massively increase the complexity of a maze is to build it in three dimensions. A two dimensional maze has a complexity cap, ultimately at any point you have a limited number of options, most of which will end with a dead end in fairly short order. If two are linked in a loop, everything between is a dead end. Start putting in bridges and tunnels and anything could happen. Just because you've walked round three sides of a path option no longer means going down it is a dead end.
To make your maze shift and turn is now a lot easier, you have bridges that swing and don't always go to the same place, levered floors that don't always end up at the same level. If you need power, a river running nearby will allow you to reset things. Triggers, weights and balances can power movement by dumping water, then reset by refilling the bucket.
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They did have mining and stone working back then, so that's where I'd start, by mining out a huge underground complex.
In order for the maze to change I'd have big slabs of rock that fit into pockets in the ceiling, and that could be raised and lowered at random.
By using counter weights, possibly by linking two slabs so that one goes up while the other goes down, you could make it so that it wouldn't take that much effort to move them under normal conditions, and then by using water power, possibly with a tipping bucket system or something similar to give it some randomness, you could cause the slabs to shift without any human involvement.
You could also go the other way, by having the slabs set in the floor, and then raising them using water flowing through channels and filling pockets that float the slabs up to block the passage. The downside of this is what it would take to raise a several ton slab of rock.
Maybe if the rock was pumice then it would float naturally and be a lot lighter too, but pumice is soft enough that digging through it wouldn't be hard. It could be pumice faced with granite or metal.
Considering the pyramids were built around 4000 BC, this kind of rock cutting and shaping would have been technically possible with enough skilled workers, and especially if they already had a mine started to start with.
The handwavyness comes in with the idea that this setup could exist for 6000+ years without crumbling to dust, but it is possible.
**EDIT:**
One way that it could exist for that amount of time is if it was completely dormant. Take the "slabs raise from the floor and are powered by water channels option"; First make sure that it is in a geographically stable area with zero seismic activity. If the channels are completely drained, the water source blocked off, and the entrance very tightly sealed, the maze would have essentially zero wear and tear, little to no dust or moisture to get in and cause corrosion or gum up the works, and generally be inert. It could at that point exist for a long long time without falling to pieces.
To wake it up, have the door being unsealed be a trigger that unblocks the water and allows it to flow through the channels again, raising some slabs right away, and restarting the randomized sequence.
The important part is that the maze can't make use of any organic materials like wood, rope, etc. since those things would most likely rot away long before the maze was needed again.
**EDIT 2:**
Just a thought... just because it's old doesn't mean that it has to be completely abandoned. There could be a local tribe that does the required maintenance as part of it's religious rituals for instance.
It is a long time, but it's at least possible that an extremely isolated group could maintain their culture.
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Say you have a man, living in a medieval time. When he is twelve years old, a stone amulet is placed on the skin of his chest and glued on. It will remain there forever, untill he dies.
What will happen when he grows, and when time passes? Will the skin and flesh grow around the amulet, or will it just remain on top of the skin? How many years will it take for skin to grow around the object?
And if it doesn't grow around it automatically, is there a way to make it so? Say you cut of a piece of skin in the shape of the amulet, and glue the amulet on the wound? Or place something over it so it will grow like that?
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**You're better off with a bone amulet, but you can make stone work.**
Without a special material coating (or special material), the skin will not grow over the object. In fact, even if you cut a hole for it and placed it in, it would be ejected during the healing. This is a feature of the body, not a bug. It's a good thing to not integrate things that stick into your wounds.
You can cut open the skin, place it underneath, and close the skin back up with sutures. This may prevent the object from auto-explanting, but there is no guarantee.
**Anchor it.**
You'll be better off cutting a hole in the skin and affixing the object to the sternum. Without proper treatment this might just lead to a wound that won't heal. This is because the skin won't affix to the object and will remain in a state of constant irritation (as with the dog collars others have mentioned). The key is to coat any smooth object with material that allows it to be osseointegrated and allows skin growth over the surface. We have such technology today (something I've mentioned in a [previous answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/10240/3202)): Intraosseous transcutaneous amputation prosthesis or [ITAP](http://www.stanmoreimplants.com/itap-implant.php). Translated to English that means, in-the-bone and through-the-skin limb replacement. The very cool thing about these prosthetics is that they attach directly in the bone and don't rest on a healed over stump.
The most famous patient, currently, for these special prosthetics is [a cat named Oscar](http://www.theengineer.co.uk/news/cat-fitted-with-bionic-feet/1003200.article).
For the medieval ages this is a difficult feat to achieve. You could use a bubbly epoxy to seal the stone and leave the surface amenable to osseointegration and dermal integration. Alternatively, if you use bone, very sterile bone, you can likely achieve the same effect.
But by creating this bone amulet, leaving the base of it as porous bone and the front as polished bone (or inlaid stone), you can have the amulet surgically attached to the sternum. This means skin will grow around the edges of the amulet, but not over the face of it. It will also be grown into the bone of the man and will remain for his entire life.
**You also need to protect against infection.**
As an extra precaution, you may want to make the amulet from one of *his* bones (perhaps the [xiphoid process](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiphoid_process)). This will help prevent rejection and will facilitate healing by integrating living bone, rather than simply a growth substrate.
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So, here's the horrible story of a man named Zhang Chuanqiu. Mr. Chuanqiu was shackled in a Huang prison for at maximum 5 years. The skin on his arms grew around his chains because they were affixed extremely tightly. [Here is an article describing his ordeal](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/07/zhang-chuanqiu-chain-skin_1_n_805792.html) (and subsequent rescue!); the photos are extremely graphic, and I would recommend not looking at them.
So, your skin will in some cases heal around objects, much like a tree absorbs chains. However, it causes severe pain and infection because your body knows it's a foreign object. In my completely irrelevant opinion, I'd stick to "woo-magic amulet stays on magically".
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So when I was 12 I broke my wrist and wore a cast for almost 3 months. At school people would jokingly give me charity by sticking change down my cast but it couldn't come out once inside. When I finally got my cast off my skin had grown over the change. It was disgusting. My skin was blue, green, and in between purple and brown. Of course I needed antibiotics. So I think it could happen if it's in the right "environmental" conditions and it would be best to try something that your body would not reject or could potentially lead to infection or worse.....
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If you could something glue to the skin permanently (you'd need to stop skin from growing and producing fresh layers of dead skin cells ready to shed)... it would still stay outside. Permanent strong pressure can lead to desintegration and re-healing of the skin, like this poor chinese man learned. Happens uncomfortably common to mistreated animals, also there are quite,some human reports from more ancient times! Its not a clean process you want.
So... cutting. You want a.) skin attached to the amulet, which itself stays bare? b.) The amulet covered by skin, you just see the shape?
a.) In the bodymod scene this is called transdermal implant. Smaller ones (Microdermals) are rather stable. The skin indeed heals the shape of the embedded part inside. This larger part thus is well stuck inside the bag-shaped structure. Skin sheds - so all this material needs to be transported, cleaned away. Works on small thingies. Bid transdwrmals show way more complications, as this debris gets easily stuck, and than a feast for bacteria - which also attacks the healthy skin. Hurray infection. Still there are a lot of enthusiasts with healed stable transdermal implants around. Medieval hygiene? Nogo.
Probably the medical solution is better, the skin just fuses to the accepted edge of the transdermal, the inner parts being integrated into connective tissue and (if applicable) bone.
b.) Easy. You open a small cut, strech it, level the skin from the connective tissue with medical tools, do that a bit offside the cut, push the STERILE amulet into the prepared spece, stitch the cut. Heals in 2 weeks, the implant will get integrated into the connective tissue, its surface form will show on the skin in detail after a few more weeks. 3D Art Implants this is called, and they do reallycomplex motives in the bodymodificatio scene. It started with hard materials, (steel, titanium, PTFE) but this is somewhat prone to injuries which can result in rejection. Meanwhile most is done with implant grade silicone.
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In post apocalyptic worlds gas, is often portrayed as the main power source, and without it, it is impossible to travel anywhere. Two examples are [Mad Maz](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1392190/) and [Waterworld](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114898/).
However, gasoline is limited, especially when you have nowhere to pump it from. There is current development of electric cars such as Nissan Leaf, BMW I3, Tesla's rockstar models and many [trucking companies researching for electric alternatives for trucks](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_truck).
In Jericho, they figure out how to use [mechanical voltage regulators](http://www.ustpower.com/comparing-automatic-voltage-regulation-technologies/avr-guide-mechanical-type-voltage-regulator/) (something that is in almost every farm machine, especially tractors).
Solar panels aren't difficult to obtain and a [kid in Africa](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kamkwamba) managed to create a windmill from scrap parts.
This proves that electricity is easier to create in its raw form than pumping gasoline pass that in to a generator or a turbine - even a car engine.
Also, the process of creating an electric car is ["fairly easy"](http://www.instructables.com/id/Build-your-own-Electric-Car/) given time, money, and the correct skills. Still, it is not impossible to create from scavenged parts in the post-apocalyptic world.
Would it be viable assume that electric cars would be the main transportation in the capital wasteland, and not gas-driven cars?
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> Would it be viable assume that electric cars would be the main transportation in the capital wasteland, and not gas driven cars?
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>
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No, not unless the technology evolves quite a long way before the apocalypse. Current batteries are rare and very importantly, do not last long (around 10 years with reasonable storage left). And after they are gone, you cannot easily replace them with homemade kludges - [lead acid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_acid_battery) batteries are somewhat doable, but you need a lot of lead and a lot of acid and their capacity sucks.
On the other hand, older gasoline cars can be rather easily modified to run on [woodgas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodgas) - wood is quite common. Though you'd have problems with modern [drive-by-wire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_by_wire) cars and the tolerance of the engines towards non-standard fuel is very low.
I'd expect horses and oxen to be the main transportation method, at least until enough industry is rebuilt. Assuming they survive the apocalypse.
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I'm a little more sanguine about electric than the other answers. True, you have to go to lead-acid batteries, and the power densities on those aren't nearly as high as lithium-ion, but they have the advantage of lasting, essentially, forever.
And, so do simple electric cars. I saw on an episode of Jay Leno's Garage where one old woman drove her [Baker Electric](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baker_Motor_Vehicle) for 50 years or so -- all the way into the 1970's. A basic electric car like that has the advantage of being dirt simple and almost entirely solid state -- there's nothing to wear out.
Granted, it's basically a golf cart. But, if you're living in a world where the gasoline's run out, then being able to reliably drive 40 miles at 23-25 mph is actually pretty useful.
Gasoline's out because it's hard to refine. But, Diesel is not. Diesel is just oil in much the same way as cooking oil is oil, which is why you get those eco-gearheads [converting their diesels](http://www.treehugger.com/renewable-energy/converting-diesel-engines-to-run-on-vegetable-oil.html) to run on used french-fry oil. You can make vegetable oil out of a lot of things: peanuts, rapeseed, oil palms, etc.
I'd also not overlook the utility of a horse. Think about it: a mode of transportation that is self-refueling, self-replicating (vehicle factory in your back yard!), and comes with built-in collision avoidance. What's not to like? :-D In a serious post-apocalyptical world, your biggest concern is making food, and horses, mules, and oxen are perfectly suitable to tilling a farm if you're not trying to farm a 1000-acre monoculture at once. And a horse, or horse and buggy, are decent modes of transportation. Works for the Amish.
Come to think of it, just look at what they used in the 19th century -- that level of tech should be easy to reproduce (the most difficult being a good quality steel).
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## We'd use biogas.
Generators that run off of propane can be easily made to work on biogas (the naturally formed gas that is composed mostly of methane). Those generators can be used to charge batteries for regular electric cars or power small cars.
The key thing about biogas is we can generate it from any organic waste. Ever poked the bottom of a creek with a stick? The bubbles that rise to the surface are biogas. You can actually lay something over the surface, like a garbage bag, and trap the gas. It's highly flammable (I grew up on a farm with a forest and creek and a scientist father, we had a lot of fun).
If you fill a barrel with organic waste (leaves, food, mutant grubs, etc) and water (doesn't need to be very clean) you will start getting biogas at a fairly good rate. That gas can be burned directly for heating a dwelling, cooking food, or running a generator to charge your electric vehicle, or directly powering a small vehicle like a scooter or go-cart.
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The easiest source of energy is undoubtedly: *muscles*.
* human muscles can power bicycles, of course, but do not forget cycle tuktuks which are very popular in Asia
* horses, of course, but also all kind of animals, whether for riding, bearing or pulling
The main advantage of muscles are evident: self-replenishing, self-repairing, available in abundance and adaptable to a broad range of situations. There's more than roads and flats: rough terrain, obstacles, uphill/downhill are all easily dealt with on feet or hooves, but offer significant chances of breaking down axles.
On flatter terrain, and well maintained waterways, a team of ox can pull a barge, or a team of rowers can pull/push it: barges can easily transport heavy weights and large volumes. Waterways are better than rails in that they do not monopolize steel (which is at risk of being stolen).
Muscles will also be supplemented with sails, sailing boats being one of the oldest available modes of transportation, they are low-tech enough.
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Not really, unless technology improves from the current. (Copied from Radovan Garabik since I agree.)
The energy density of fuels such diesel or gasoline is 40 to 50 MJ per KG. Current batteries store less than 1 MJ per KG. [See the energy density table.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density) There are projected battery technologies that are roughly on par with liquid fuels, but the fact we can't build such probably tells all we need to know about the practicability of building them post-apocalypse. For that matter lithium-ion batteries are kind of finicky due to the relative volatility and rarity of lithium. I expect we'd be down to lead-acid pretty soon.
Superiority of fuel to batteries is IIRC the actual reason electric cars have taken so long to become competitive despite electric motors initially being superior.
For power generation the story is bit better but even there we'd probably have to rely on salvaging the materials and some of the components. Reasonably there should be plenty to salvage, though. I expect we'd run out of things that can use electricity first.
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In the setting I've been working on, I have high level technology that doesn't break science.
On many occasions due to strategic reasons, tank style units are fielded to planets. Some have shields, others may project shields.
My artillery was using a specific type of shell that creates electromagnetic radiation to disassemble molecular structures. I was using these for the artillery.
**However, I wanted to explore the idea of instead using a pure energy method, or one that was at least partially energy based.**
As such, the following can't be used:
* Plasma - Since it's just far to inefficient to try and shoot it
* Any kind of magic nonsense - Strictly forbidden in this case
**What completely or partially energy based weapon could arc to act like artillery in this situation?**
Some caveats:
* Energy is not an issue
* Technology is not an issue, assume the capability exists if science
allows for it
* It has to at least simulate what current real world artillery does
* It must be usable in a planets atmosphere, but working elsewhere is fine as well
Or am I talking about something that's impossible?
**Clarification: I'm taking about making a projectile from an energy source, IE a battery, generator or whatever without requiring anything physical. If that's not possible then a liquid or minor physical basis that the energy could be constrained around also works.**
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While I agree with the other answers none actually proposes a solution - so here is one. It doesn't quite give the "going up then coming down" effect but it does provide ranged area denial that does not require direct line of sight.
**Constructive Interference being destructive**
Essentially you place Gravitational Wave Generators around the battlefields at various locations. They can actually be anywhere so long as they are able to communicate their exact position and time basis to each other.
Each starts emitting waves of gravitational energy. These waves will cause nausea and slight tremors around the machines but nothing more.
However the machines time their position and the release of the pulses so that all the waves strike each other in a way that causes them to all amplify at the target location(s). We know that gravitation travels at the speed of light, that's been experimentally confirmed (they used Jupiter and a star IIRC).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/sD8D7.png)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Atd3e.gif)
What's more the pulses could then be matched to the resonant frequency of the buildings or land in that area. By doing this you cause a massive localized earthquake that only has a large effect in the target locations and is basically impossible to stop. The gravitational effects will pass through anything and so the only protection would be to have your own similar machines trying to disrupt the resonances.
Of course we have no way to generate gravity waves at the moment but this is future tech :)
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I don't think that what you want is possible.
For your projectile to arc it needs to be slow enough to be pulled down by gravity.
As you are not interested in launching a usual artillery shell with some unusual flavor inside, ballistic trajectories are off.
Plasma without anything containing it will vaporize everything it'll touch as soon as it'll leave the magnetic constraints of your barrel. Most probably it'll first vaporize the barrel, then the gun, then its crew, in that order.
For an indirect fire you can reflect your impulse, like Heaviside's layer does with some radio wavelengths.
However, for the reflected impulse to be harmful enough you need either a very specific atmosphere (and your artillery needs to fire on any planet) either some reflector (then why doesn't that reflector fire itself?).
You can insert a pinch of magic if shields in your war are powerful and ubiquitous enough to warrant anti-shield regiments.
Let's imagine a stream of magic particles (energy shields are also magic) that very weakly interact with matter, but interact well with shields, destroying them or turning into particles interacting violently with matter when passing shields.
Then your artillery will be shooting through the planet to hit the enemy. The usual indirect fire rules apply, but correcting fire will be much harder as, as with aiming a laser beam in space, you don't really know where exactly you're aimed at if nothing reflects your beam.
To make it more artillery-like make it impulse-fire, not a continuous beam and add humongous amounts of waste heat to be transferred to expendable sinks.
You can adjust beam dissipation and exact effects of these particles interaction with shields to fit your story.
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Traditional artillery exploits gravity to fire shells in an arc. Energy weapons will not curve without an enormous gravitational field. That would crush everyone fighting on the surface of what could, at that point, hardly be called a planet. We need something else.
**What is the role of artillery?**
* Providing immediate fire support to a large area of the battlefield.
* ...without regard to intervening obstacles.
+ Hills.
+ Curvature of the planet.
* ...while being safe themselves.
+ Counter-battery fire is an exception.
As a soldier on the front-line you want to be able to pick up the phone and say "*please make everything in grid section X,Y go away in the next three minutes*".
**Airborne artillery?**
An energy weapon hovering a few km above the battlefield would have a very large field of view and could shoot over most intervening obstacles.
The down side is it will also be *visible* to everything it's firing at, so that doesn't work.
**Orbital bombardment**
An energy weapon in orbit has an unobstructed view of the surface below. It can play the role of artillery the way ground-based artillery cannot, the view is amazing. Various orbits have various advantages and disadvantages.
A [geostationary orbit (GEO)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit) has the advantage of rendering the artillery stationary with respect to an area on the planet. If the battlefield is "small" (ie. a continent) this would provide total coverage of the battle. The down side is it is very far away from the surface (35,000km for the Earth) and thus a focused energy weapon will dissipate on the way.
If it's in a [low orbit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Earth_orbit), it will pass over a large percentage of the planet every hour or less, depending on the orbit. The advantage is it is much closer to the surface (between 160km and 2000km for the Earth) and thus can better deliver focused fire. It can also cover the entire planet, though there may be a delay as it's repositioned. Ideally, a constellation of a few dozen low orbiting artillery satellites would provide total coverage.
This has the same disadvantage as flying artillery, everything on the surface can see it. Presumably they're not equipped to attack things 200 km in the sky, but who knows?
This also has the disadvantage of requiring orbital dominance. Can't set up your satellites if the enemy fleet is just going to shoot them down.
**Orbital/airborne reflectors**
A hybrid approach. The expensive part, the energy weapon, stays on the ground. Reflectors are placed in the air or in orbit. The energy weapon fires at the reflector which bounces the energy at the target.
The reflectors are still vulnerable, but they can be small, cheap and replaceable.
This approach is similar to the modern practice of launching a [stand off weapon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standoff_missile) from over the horizon in the general direction of the target and having it be guided in by a [laser designator on the ground](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_designator#Ground-based) in line of sight of the target. The firing vehicle remains safe while only the designator is vulnerable.
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what a interesting question.
Most non-energy solutions have been posted already, I think. But I feel that something is missing right in your question: what do you count as "energy weapon"?
When I hear this I think of Star Wars Blaster and Turbolaser and these Weapons the Jaffa from Star Gate do carry around or proton torpedoes. Well... But you asked for a science-valid resolution. So count out all of these above, even if there might be some realism behind, if you dig deep enough.
So... still, what do you accept as an energy-weapon? And what do you accept as a piece of artillery? From what today is used, you separate into
*Direct Fire Weapons* and *Indirect Fire Weapons*. Most artillery is the second type (even if most of them can do both), but what we do understand as artillery is something that specialize hitting stuff beyond their line of sight, using calculation, observers or intelligent ammunation.
To archive this, your weaponsystem should be able to do this. Using energy.
Even further, a piece of artillery could be everything that isn't a handheld weapon. Even tanks can be artillery (no, not self propelled howitzers, real tanks), if you wrap your description carefully... At all, they are a piece of self propelled direct fire barrel based artillery with extreme crew and weapon system survivability due to well thought placing of highly resistant armor plating. But thats quite a description for a tank...
So first question to clarify: What kind of combat participant would you accept as artillery?
Second problem: what is energy? Does a random burst of hard gamma rays count? Does it need to to flash colorful? Does it need to make boom?
I want to ask you what I asked the guy who opened that Railgun vs. Gyrojet question: What the hell you want to archive using this energy-artillery? Leveling enemy installations? Keep enemies away from a given point? Performing priority target sniper shots? Provide gas or other nasty agents? Well, for that case energy weapons would be not usable... but Artillery is used for providing smoke-screens this days - especially the smaller pieces, like mortars.
So... lets take a simple approach and say, your energy-artillery would be a self propelled unit, that is tasked to do indirect fire support at a range of targets, primary to deny access to an area...
no, wait you said, your first though was that artillery shells the enemy using dematerialization ammo.
That sounds like a task for an anti-tank whatever. WW2 ones were direct-fire units, and still... if you want to make sure to hit something, you need line of sight. Either the gun itself, or someone who can aim for them (even the ammo itself does count, but you will have a hard time creating an intelligent plasma bolt). Otherwise all you would do is cutting huge holes into the battlefield, sometimes get a lucky indirect hit, what would... well, the same this days artillery do.
Here does one thing kick in, the other posters already mentioned: Energy as a weaponized wave isn't able to curve over a prop at your battlefield. Either you can ignore this and right punch through, or you need to stay with the good old ballistic shells.
And shooting through the Planet? When your enemies turn off their shields. this attack is supposed to react to, you are bad off. Even more - your position would be known if they have a way of tracking these beams. Or they get triggerd by something in the ground, like an unstable repository of ultra heavy metals. Uh... sounds like you can accidentally blow up the whole planet doing this, or at least the continental plate your units stand at. Well... your decision.
So... what to do? Whatever you want to - if you need the traits artillery is widely known for - indirect fire, providing big boom - you either stick with shells or allow some magic. Or Plasma. Its not this inefficient as one might assume. All you need to do is keep the containment intact until it hits something. Let me think... XCOM used a plastic, that is wrapped around the plasma bullet when it leaves the gun. I don't remember the details, but why not use a meta-material, that can be created like a soap bubble and transform heat-energy into magnetic fields. As soon as it hits something, that containment-thing break and whatever did cause this get a plasmasplosion right in its face. Sounds pretty mean.
Finally... when you want weapon-systems, think of us as kind of weapon companies. Tell us, what your weapon system should archive, what it may use and so on, and you might get a big idea from someone who happens to know some crazy stuff that might suit your needs. Because maybe the task you try to archive with your energy-artillery is done better by something other. Well... yea, like the satellites the others mentioned.
Have a nice day
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[**Skywave**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skywave)
You do not arc your energy over. You bounce it back down out of the sky. It is like a bank shot in pool, except the ionosphere is your cushion.
>
> In radio communication, skywave or skip refers to the propagation of
> radio waves reflected or refracted back toward Earth from the
> ionosphere, an electrically charged layer of the upper atmosphere.
> Since it is not limited by the curvature of the Earth, skywave
> propagation can be used to communicate beyond the horizon, at
> intercontinental distances.
>
>
>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0Uo6J.gif)
I feel like these wave trajectories look kind of like artillery shell trajectories! Only certain wave frequencies will bounce off the ionosphere. The frequency determines where it will bounce. But frequency of electromagnetic radiation is independent of energy: you can have 520 nm green light that you can barely read by, or 520 nm green light which incinerates what it falls upon.
Now you have the frequencies that can bounce. Can you make a laser with that frequency? A pencil thin radio frequency laser? Maybe...
<https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/2152/can-radio-waves-be-formed-into-a-pencil-beam>
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Some ideas:
Just shoot through the ground. You'd have basically an artillery system where the beams emerge from beneath the enemy's feet.
Antimatter projectiles. Do these count? A variety of bombs can be made as energy weapons and be shot at the enemy.
Arcing lightning guns. Shoot some kind of projectile that ionizes the air behind it, then shoot a pulse of electricity through the track the projectile left. Can also be done with a cabled projectile.
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The enemy tanks are clustered in a valley on the other side a ridge of hills. They outnumber our vehicles 20 to 1 and each is heavier and better armed than our best. When they come up over that ridge, nothing we can do, will be able to stop them. The capital will fall.
Fortunately, we brought some mobile artillery along, a pair of Irish Twins.
Your assignment is to take one of the twins and flank the enemy camp. You'll need to get on the other side of them so that when you fire its nano-laser out over their heads, it will intersect with the one we're launching from here. If we are careful, we can place that intersection directly above those tanks. Then, when their combined energies meet, it will be hot enough to ignite a spontaneous nuclear reaction. The very air above their heads will fission and rain hellfire down upon them.
In a single shot, we can win this war!
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As Noname mentioned, you need a slow moving projectile, for it to arc. This is because you need the travel time to be large to allow the projectile to accelerate downwards.
However simple Physics states.
Given that an energy weapon is a weapon where m = 0. This equation reduces to E = pc.
To maximize E (ie energy on target) you have to maximize p, which would make your projectile shoot more straight.
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I am envisioning a beautiful world in the near future, say in the next decade. We will have a couple of self sustaining, colossal airplanes, capable of carrying thousands of people and stay airborne for several months without landing to refuel.
These planes will house an efficient and reliable nuclear reactor(s) and acts like a tiny city in the air.
We currently have a few aircraft carriers operating using the principle of nuclear fission.
Is it feasible to see a flying city, running on nuclear energy, in 10 years time?
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Your description seems to match a flying aircraft carrier in terms of size, etc. So I will consider it to be a flying version of the [next generation USS Enterprise named PCU Enterprise](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Enterprise_%28CVN-80%29) that is also scheduled to be put into service 10 years from now. Those that like Marvel Comics may envision this as a real life helicarrier. Let's call it the MC1.
The PCU has a loaded draft weight of 100,000 metric tons (including 2 nuclear power plants). A 747 has a loaded capacity of about 450 metric tons. This means that the the MC1 is about 222 times as heavy as a loaded 747.
There are a couple of real problems that are unlikely to be resolved and put into production within 10 years. [Nuclear powered planes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Nuclear_Propulsion) have been considered in the past.
**Pressurized Water Nuclear plants are very heavy**: Nuke plants usually require shielding, cooling systems if you don't want to kill everybody. Pressured water plants require high pressure systems, and really should have a containment vessel. There are designs that do not use high-pressure steam, notably liquid metal cooled reactors, gas cooled reactors and liquid salt reactors -- all of these have been considered for use in planes. The liquid metal reactors have additional concerns (esp. toxicity and/or flammability). Most of our experience is with pressurized water plants, so you would be stuck using designs that are not as well understood. Even unconventional designs will be quite heavy so that your available living area will be limited. For military use, these were considerable acceptable as keep bombers in near continuous flight was thought to be worth the compromises required.
A 747 uses about 90 MW for takeoff and 45 MW for cruising. Since the MC1 is 222 times the weight, we will assume that we need 222 times the power which is 20 GW of power. Modern power plants are often in the 1-2 GW range. Now image flying 10 2 GW power plants, or just for cruising 5 2 GW plants. 2 GW plants are more powerful than the 1.5 GM plants used in the Enterprise and much more powerful then the 550MW plants used in the previous generation that is in current use.
**You can't design and build something that large and complicated in 10 years**. Remember the PCU Enterprise, it is scheduled to be ready in 10 years. This will be the 3rd USS Enterprise aircraft carrier, it is another Gerald Ford class design. Yet given all of that experience, the navy will be waiting 10 years for a delivered ship. The MC1 will be more complex, require a new design, have more stringent safety, reliability, and weight issues and will not be ready in 10 years.
You can't even build 10 2-GW nuke plants in 10 years as you really need new design and construction techniques to be lower weight, etc for use on the MC1. Unlike pressurized water plants, we don't have multiple generations of improvements that would make off-the-shelf technology acceptable.
**Reliability cannot be guaranteed** Large projects must be built based on previous experience. Consider the history of off-shore oil rigs. There have been many generations of rigs incorporating new design features (and learning from prior disasters) since the first ones were built. The MC1 is far larger and more complex than the largest offshore rig. Surprisingly [the first marine oil rig was in 1891 and there was a related patent in 1869.](http://aoghs.org/offshore-history/offshore-oil-history/)
Nuclear reactors do not operate 24x7x365. The best uptime is around 96% and includes scheduled and unscheduled downtime. You need lots of redundancy to keep machinery working for months on end. In the case of the nuke plants, 10 plants is clearly redundant when cruising, but what other critical points of failure could be hiding in the MC1?
**Cost** Somebody has to pay for all of this. Since the PCU costs perhaps $10 billion, how much will the MC1 cost, 20, 50, 100, 1000 billion? Design phase costs alone for something this complex could exceed the cost of construction.
**Safety** Not many people are likely to want the MC1 flying overhead as the consequences of falling out of the sky would be horrible. Maybe not too many people, esp. really really rich people, are going to willing to risk flying on it either.
Flying nuke plants do not exactly inspire confidence either.
Clearly a flying city will not need all the military toys found on a carrier, but residents are going to want tennis courts, swimming pools, shopping and fine dining, etc. in the end, I suspect similar weight requirements. A carrier has often been described as a floating city for good reasons.
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In the event of a serious problem with a nuclear reactor, the MC1 is going to be grounded for a long time. This additional economic risk will also scare of potential investors.
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Lifting area -- common rule of thumb for winged aircraft is 1000 Newtons per sq. meter, 1000 Newtons is roughly 100 kg, so the lifting surface will need to be 1 million square meters at a minimum. The PCU has a length of 337 meters and a beam of 41 meters, so the total lifting area would be about 13,817 -- you need 72 times as much lifting area. Trying to increase the lifting area would require lots of additional structure to support the lifting area -- Seems like a problem and this is the most energy efficient heavier than air lifting.
Any other ways to generate lift? Rotors have been mentioned and also mentioned as impractical. Jet engines do achieve thrust / weight ratios in excess of 1. [Pratt & Whitney F119](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratt_%26_Whitney_F119) have a thrust/weight ratio greater than 9:1, so technically it is possible -- this is an afterburner engine design sans afterburner, and eats fuel at about 14,000 kg/hr to generate 156,000 N (35,000 lbs) of thrust. High tech (expensive) materials will be required in abundance, and frequent and expensive maintenance would also be needed.
Just how much power to operate direct thrust with jet engines? Jet fuel energy density is about 42.7 MJ/kg and 3600 secs/hr. Burning 14,000 kg/hr means 4.27e7 \* 14000 / 3600 = 5.72e7 J/s aka 77.2 MW. To lift the MC1 we need 6292 of these engines. This corresponds to 485.7 GW of power; of course this is only a crude approximation since heating the air with a nuke plant is not the same as heating it by burning jet fuel.
BTW, one of these engines cost 10 million. I am sure that in volume you would get a discount. Since the undiscounted cost would be 63 billion, you are going to want a discount. Even with cash up front, Pratt and Whitney would be very hard pressed to build 6300 of these in 10 years. They only made 507 of these, ever. You might be paying extra for a rush job, maybe $63 billion won't be enough. These engines have also failed in the past, serious fan blade flying through the casing wall, ground your MC1 for a long time failures.
I suppose you could use enough balloons to generate lift, though this would not actually be flying. Just considering the lift of the helium (without airframe, etc.) you can get a lift of about 1 kg / cubic meter of helium. So you will need over 100 million feet of helium. But I don't know that you would be allowed to buy that much as the US helium reserves are about 1 billion cubic meters. Helium cost is about $2.24 per cubic meter so you need a quarter billion dollars worth of helium, at a minimum such as large order would increase the price by a lot. Hydrogen is considerably cheaper, more available, and provides a little more lift. But ever since the Hindenburg, hydrogen is not favored choice for passenger use.
It's only easy in the movies.
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The question is multifaceted, and any definite answer is going to draw on multiple disciplines.
A part of the answer lies in the comment raised by [Steve Bird](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/11711/steve-bird): what would be the purpose of such a machine? Who is the intended target audience? Without an answer to this, it becomes very hard to see why something like what you are describing would be developed at all, and even with it, whether it actually does get developed depends very much on the specifics of the answer to that.
A part of the answer will be the time needed to develop a new (*any* new) aircraft. Based on the answer to [How long does it take Boeing to develop an aircraft?](https://aviation.stackexchange.com/q/12283/753) on [Aviation SE](https://aviation.stackexchange.com/), given that such an aircraft would be a significant change compared to current models, we can likely reasonably expect this to be at a *minimum about ten years* from announcement to first flight.
A part of the answer would be the time needed to develop a safe and suitably lightweight nuclear reactor. Remember that most nuclear reactor power plants work by [heating water, then using the steam to drive a turbine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor#Electrical_power_generation) to generate electricity. So you need the reactor, and enough water to bring to a boil to run a turbine in a suitably closed system. You also need the closed system itself, or you would need to add water often. (Note that nuclear reactors are often built close to the coast for reasons of ready access to water, including for cooling purposes.) I'm not sure how feasible a completely closed system nuclear reactor for generating electricity would be. The nuclear reactor would also need to be able to survive a crash without breaching, because, as we know, airplanes occasionally do crash for a wide variety of reasons.
A part of the answer would be that you need engines that are sufficiently powerful to propell the aircraft, which are made to run on electricity, and which are ideally quiet enough that the resultant onboard noise level is not a major problem. Propeller engines can easily be made to run on electricity, but perform poorly at high altitudes and high speeds as well as that they are quite noisy (propeller tip speed is actually [a limiting factor](https://aviation.stackexchange.com/a/4954/753) in what can be done with propeller engines on aircraft). I'm not sure about the feasibility of an electric jet-type engine, but that may be a good question on Aviation.
A part of the answer is what I alluded to above, crashes. Anyone who proposes something like this has to show that the machine is sufficiently safe. That is going to present a major hurdle in selling the concept to the general public, at the very least, even if cost of living aboard something like it isn't.
A part of the answer will be making it self-sustaining in terms of eatable food and drinkable water. Without self-sustenance, you are going to have to land periodically anyway to take aboard supplies.
But let's say some existing aircraft manufacturer was really bent on producing something like what you are describing. You have given them a ten-year time frame. Is it feasible? Based on the relatively incremental adjustments made for example in the Boeing 787 taking almost nine years from announcement to first public flight (and there probably being some preparatory studies and possibly design work done before the announcement), I would consider the feasibility of a completely new type of airborne platform, with completely different engine technology to what we are using today, to be **very slim.** You are changing too much, and doing it too fast.
**Given a good answer to the question about purpose, with the above difficulties accounted for, a timeframe of 20-30 years might be more reasonable,** assuming that the desire from all involved parties to do something like what you describe is there. If that desire isn't there, I don't see what you describe being developed; there are simply too many problems that would have to be addressed, and which can be adequately addressed by other technologies in any scenario at least I can reasonably see developing in the next decade (and even more so if the scenario develops in such a way that we still have time to design and build *anything* like what you are proposing).
Even when [Kennedy announced](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy#Space_policy) the US goal of getting to the moon within about nine years, rocket technology and even rudimentary spaceflight was a reasonably well understood field. Sure there was a lot of work yet to be done in order to land a man on the moon, but much of the theoretical and practical ground work had been done already. And even then it took almost a decade; more than a decade before the technology worked well enough to be considered reasonably reliable in terms of being able to carry out the mission without any major hitches. The Space Shuttle [built on work done in the late 1960s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle#Early_history), [officially began](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program) in 1972 and first flew in 1981.
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Short answer: **No**.
More useful answer(s):
* It took 5.5 years for the Boeing 777 to go from design phase to the first commercial flight. This was a new design, but was essentially only a bigger, better version of what they already built.
* Currently, it takes an estimated 9 years for a nuclear plant to go from application process to being built. Actual building time is 4 years, with an additional 1.5 years pre-construction preparation. Getting a permit for a plant that could potentially be flying over heavily populated areas will be extremely unlikely.
* Regulations require planes (perhaps only on ocean crossings?) to always be within 3 hours of a diversionary airport. This plane will require rebuilt airports to have runways sturdy enough to support its weight, and to have enough wing clearance.
* Building new Aircraft Carriers currently takes 5-7 years from lay down to commissioning. Again, this is essentially just making better versions of what they have already built.
* On the actual physical engineering, I'm not sure that materials we currently have available would be to support such a huge mass. The body would likely need to be entirely designed as a "wing" rather separate fuselage and wings, but this thing is going to be *heavy*.
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None of the existing answers really address the mechanical feasibility of such a thing. Firstly, it has been attempted: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Nuclear_Propulsion>
Then there's this, which most people think is vapourware but may actually be a breakthrough: <http://www.lockheedmartin.co.uk/us/products/compact-fusion.html>
But the main problem of putting a reactor (fission or fusion) on a plane is shielding. This needs to be quite thick (many inches of lead or feet of concrete) in order to protect the crew, even if you mount the reactor at the other end of the plane from the cockpit and allow the cargo space to be irradiated. Then you need to consider how to avoid exposing ground crew to radiation as well. Let alone if you want to carry passengers. This adds to the weight of the system and makes it harder to fly.
If you have a fission reactor and don't want to irretrievably contaminate a large area of land in the event of a crash, you'll need even more weight for a containment system.
It's just about conceivable as a weapons platform if you have a lot of money and want to park a huge looming nuclear threat in someone else's sky. While it's a fun proposition as a flying cruise ship, the shielding issue would have to be solved as well as the safety issues that will probably get you banned from the airspace of all sensible countries.
Then there's the 9/11 question. If the city can fly, it can be crashed on another city. Can you secure it adequately?
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Fission? No.
Fusion? Maybe. Lockheed Martin is working on a [compact fusion reactor](http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.html) that they [claim](http://www.technologyreview.com/news/531836/does-lockheed-martin-really-have-a-breakthrough-fusion-machine/) could be commercially operational in ten years. The first link even mentions the possibility of fusion-powered aircraft.
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**Building a craft like this is roughly equivalent to President Kennedy's statement to go to the moon**, only he's advocating that we put men on Mars by 2025:
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> We choose to go to [Mars]. We choose to go to [Mars] in this decade ... not because [it is] easy, but because [it is] hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
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In addition to Gary Walker's answer (which is fantastic), I'll offer the following in terms of economic insight. I also recognize that I'm anchoring the size of the aircraft on "aircraft carriers". Heck, let's just go with it.
**Mission Definition**
What is this going to do? What will it achieve? How large is the market? Is that market likely to grow or shrink in the next 50 years?
For the US, it's worth the cost of multiple aircraft carriers to be able to project power anywhere on the planet. For a commercial endeavor, the investors will want a substantial return on investment. This cannot be the "Olympics" of airplanes where billions of dollars are spent, used once then allowed to decay. The Spruce Goose was okay only because Howard Hughes had more money than God.
**Costs of Failure**
What happens if this airship fails in mid-flight and crashes, killing everyone aboard? How are you going to handle the liability lawsuits in event of a failure? Would anyone insure this craft? Probably not.
**Legislative Difficulties**
At least in the US, the FAA will have a lot to say about the regulation of this new aircraft. New regulations will need to be developed about where it can fly, how fast, how high and for how long. All these requirements will have an impact on the design and functionality of your craft. Designing a craft of this size and complexity in such a dynamic engineering and regulatory environment may border on the impossible.
**Anti-terror Measures**
A craft this large could embody to poor of the earth all that is wrong with the rich elites. As such, it will be the focus of attacks or the fear of such attacks will have a huge effect on the design and operation of this craft. Methods will need to be developed to defeat attacks from outside the plane as well as subversion attacks by pilot or crew. Crashing this thing into New York City would eclipse 9/11 by a large margin.
**New Powerplants**
Fission powered steam power plants are too heavy so a newer, lighter, more powerful power plant must be found. Fusion is the better option though the Tokamak fusion reactor is a long ways off. Other fusion methods are in development but suffer from a lack of funding. It may take years to develop fusion power plants sufficiently powerful to lift and keep aloft for an indefinite period a craft of 100,000 tons.
Committing the funds to design a craft before there's a power plant strong enough to propel it is economic folly. Few nations or corporations have the kind of capital to burn to indulge in such an endeavor.
**Design Precedent**
Humanity's experience with ships dates back thousands of years. We know how to build them, how they break, what to make them out of. Our experience with aircraft is less lengthy but such experience as we have is in a period of considerable mathematical and engineering prowess. For a craft of this size and complexity, we have no easy analogue.
**Complexity of the Project**
As previously cited, designing a craft would take at least a decade. In comparison, the [Boeing Dreamliner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_787_Dreamliner) took the better part of decade to enter production. The Dreamliner used new technologies in many places such as a carbon fiber wing but built on decades of development in airliner design. Building a flying city is far outside of what we have designed and built so far.
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This is not feasible for one simple reason: what principle are you going to use to fly the the behemoth? You are most certainly not considering rotors, for it's plain impossible to fly that on rotors. The only possibility you have is jet propulsion: namely, releasing a powerful jet of steam underneath/behind to stay afloat. And with a thing weighing as much, you will need a river-worth of water supply aboard, which would actually take more space than anything else, leaving no room for anyone/anything else at all.
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The unmanned version (which saves a lot of weight from the radiation shields) is ideal to send on an intercontinental one way mission to circle over the capital city of the opponent indefinitely, broadcasting harmful pornography and nasty propaganda whilst snooping the airwaves for anything worth decrypting. The other side might get annoyed and shoot it down, in which case they have high level radioactive waste smeared over their city. If they don't then it will continue to circle and cause social problems and eventually dirty the fuel rods with waste products until it crash-lands, smearing their city with even more high level radioactives. Please don't anyone build that thing. Such may have been thought of when the US military stopped work on a 1960's nuclear ramjet which was reputedly tested with miles upon miles of closed air pipes so as to avoid any risk of release of possible radioactives in the air which passed through it. Simple to sketch but politically and ethically horrible.
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The Moon is made of cheese. So:
* Should we eat the whole moon or should we keep it until the famine breaks out?
* Will the moon melt or freeze or neither?
* Can you still eat the cheese after a while or will it spoil?
* Is it safe to eat this Moon cheese?
* Would you get high from this Moon cheese, just like spacecake?
* What would happen if the cheese melts because of the sun?
What do you think, what we do with it?
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## What do we do with it?
At least to start with, we'll leave it there. As illustrated in many places around this site, going to space and moving cargo around costs a lot. Given that we do have enough food on the planet (albeit not equally spread), there would not be much value in harvesting Moon cheese.
We'd also have the scientists on our backs telling us not to harvest the Moon because the Moon keeps many things on Earth stable, such as the tides.
## Melt or Freeze?
Both. When the Moon is in line of radiation from the Sun, it'll melt the cheese on one side. When that side turns away it'll freeze again. When the Moon is behind Earth, all the cheese would freeze. It would be a very strange place to visit, to be sure.
## Would it go off?
Nope. Bacteria and fungi are what cause food to go off, but they're lifeforms that exist only on Earth and could not survive in space. However, it would be hard to eat given that it's always either frozen solid or burn-your-tongue-off boiling.
The Moon won't explode as it will still have gravity keeping it together, but its overall mass would be significantly less as the density of cheese is less than that of rock.
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We would start the search for extraterrestrial crackers.
Also, see *[Wallace and Gromit: A Grand Day Out](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Grand_Day_Out)*.
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Something I've been pondering- spacefaring humanity makes contact with alien species who, while being intelligent enough to learn to understand human languages, their throats or vocal cords (assuming that's what they use to communicate with in the first place) aren't really suited to make the proper sounds for English (or Cantonese or Swahili, etc.) And humans have similar problems with the aliens' "native tongue"- what would be an effective way for these species to work around this problem?
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**If both parties can perceive the other's signals:**
Receptive bilingualism, or creolization.
Han Solo and Chewbacca (Star Wars) demonstrate receptive bilingualism: each of them can understand both languages, but only speak one. So, they each speak their own language, and get along just fine.
Ryland and Rocky (Project Hail Mary) demonstrate creolization. Ryland isn't great at learning languages, and Rocky can't reproduce human speech... so they settle on a mixed language, in which Rocky pronounces Eridian words (which Ryland can learn to recognize) in English-like syntax (which Ryland already knows).
**If one or both parties cannot perceive the other's signals:**
Perhaps the aliens are deafblind, or at least deaf to the range of human speech. Or perhaps they can perceive our language, but they communicate in ultrasonics, or with IR light, or through biometric fields, etc.--some medium that we can't perceive. Then technological assistance is required. At minimum, you have devices which transpose each party's signals into a format which the other can perceive, and then proceed with one of the above options. Potentially, you rely on technology for automatic translation entirely.
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**The Written Word**
There's a science fiction book (possibly by Robert L Forward) with underwater aliens with sonar, whose language closely resembles the echo-sounds of the object of the word they're saying. They developed knot-based writing to communicate over longer distances. Humans arrived, and the sound language was far too complicated and subtle to even start, but the knot system was very accessible to both.
This idea could be applied to other variations of the written word, in a shared language accessible to both, despite not being their "natural" language.
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**Vocoders**
In particular, [transforming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocoder) rather than encrypting and decrypting ones. Each species wears a device which takes *their* words in either language and shifts frequency, etc. to something the other can deal with. In this model, one or more learns the language of the other, and translation is by the speaker and not a computer. The computer merely applies rules to transform the sound.
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Perhaps the aliens use ultrasound to communicate and have no vocal cords as we known them. As their ears are tuned to ultrasonic frequencies they can't properly hear the low rumbling of any human communication and humans similarly can't hear the aliens high pitch at all.
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# Word Board
We already have done this, with both [dolphins](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Diver-working-with-dolphin-at-EPCOT-Centers-underwater-keyboard-in-Orlando-Florida_fig4_319149508) and [gorillas](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbMXzIuQyz8) here on earth, both intelligent species who have a hard time speaking our language.
Obviously, we could get more sophisticated than that, with Google Translate But For Aliens doing live audio translations, but we're not at all lacking experience with communicating with people who can't speak.
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# Construct a Natural Language Model for both languages, let the AI interpret.
1. If you have the cooperation of both species, they each simply build a “corpus” of their language by uploading large volumes of written language. The AI doesn’t need to know what the words mean (and it never does), it simply knows how often words are used and in what circumstances.
2. With this built on each side, written language translations become nearly automatic. The translation only works when the language models are “parallèle” however. This means that concepts of “anger” for example, are similarly tagged in each Natural Language Model corpus. When the AI searches for terminology to say, “I’m upset”, for example, it looks in the correct place in each language model.
3. Now proceed to “prononciation” of each object (for us it is words and phrases, they may do things differently - AI machine learning doesn’t care)
4. Communication may now begin through text-to-speech and vice-versa. Here are the steps this systems would take to translate a spoken phrase on either side:
* The speech to be translated is recorded and converted into a digital format, and noise is removed. It’s now “pre-processed speech audio.”
* The pre-processed speech is segmented into individual objects (words or phrases for humans).
* The objects/words or phrases are translated using the written NLM. Now the written data is saying the same basic thing in the other language.
* Now the translated text is simply converted back into speech and played back to the listener.
That’s how modern Chatbots are converting our notes and letters into different languages more easily than even Google Translate.
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I'm writing a story set in the medieval era, and it wouldn't be a real medieval story without dealing with the nightmare of the logistics of medieval travel, nor would it be a medieval story without plenty of that said medieval travel. I know that traveling in medieval times was slow, and I've done my fair share of research about it. In every place I've looked for that research, sources always talk about speed in good conditions. But I'm writing a story where characters travel in bad conditions. How much would these conditions slow them down?
The specific example of this is that I'm writing a scene that takes place in the middle of October. Two characters are riding down to a nearby city that is about 45 miles (70 km) away. They each only have one horse, so from my research, the journey would take in good conditions about a day and a half if they stop to sleep through the night. However, this is the day after a rainstorm. While it is no longer raining, the characters are traveling on dirt road that became very muddy after the rain.
I also have some travel scenes in winter. With a large group of people, I'm not sure if my characters would stop for the winter or continue moving. They're walking on foot, and I don't know how the snow would slow them down if they kept moving.
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The reason all your research is based on good conditions is because you can always invoke enough bad conditions to bring travel to a complete stop. If you're looking for hard-and-fast numbers you're going to be disappointed. What kind of horse? Or are you walking in armor? Is it raining? Are we talkin' a light shower or a complete downpour? Is the road made of stone? Grass? Mud? Is the river you need to cross even crossable?
There are thousands of variables — far too many to give you predictable numbers about how much travel will be slowed down. *But you don't need them.*
Now that you have the best-case numbers, all that's left is to *choose based on the needs of your story* how much an individual or group must slow down — and then determine what weather conditions you need to rationalize that speed.
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45 miles is easily achievable in one day on horseback. You could walk that far in two days.
When travelling, people back then would be the same as now when travelling open country. By first light they have already packed and had breakfast, so they start at sunrise, and go on until dusk. The journey is a task they want completed asap, not a sightseeing adventure.
Soldiers like the Roman legions were expected to be able to march 20 miles a day carrying gear and be able to set up a camp afterwards. It's not a huge distance to fit people.
The factors that would mean the most to your speed is what you're carrying with you. If your horse is loaded down, or is an old sickly beast, or dragging a cart, you'll need more time.
Roads are not made of mud, medieval people weren't stupid. They use the easiest paths for the weather. Snow they would use ridges, wet they would use paths over bedrock.
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According to *New Scientist*, a tech-destroying solar flare [could hit Earth within 100 years](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2150350-a-tech-destroying-solar-flare-could-hit-earth-within-100-years/). It could knock out our electrical grids, satellite communications, and the internet. It might also erase data that is stored on financial servers such as bank account balances.
Let's imagine something like that would happen, and all of the world's financial data would be erased. Nobody knows who owns what anymore. All of the world's account balances and stock/bond portfolios are completely nullified due to the effect of the solar flare.
In this case, only the physical currency (coins and bank notes) that is currently in circulation remains. How would a solar flare event like the one described above affect the value of this remaining currency? On the one hand, it is imaginable that rapid deflation would occur because the total money supply would suddenly be greatly diminished. After all, [92% of the worlds currency currently exists in a digital form](https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/12-weird-but-true-facts-about-technology/email-existed-before-the-world-wide-web/photostory/51422306.cms). So that would mean that 92% of all the money would simply vanish.
On the other hand, I can also imagine rapid hyperinflation would occur. Most if not all of the world's currencies is [fiat money](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_money). Which means its not backed by gold or silver but purely based on trust. I can imagine people would also lose trust in the value of the currency if most of it suddenly disappears.
So what would be more plausible? Hyperinflation or hyperdeflation.
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As a general rule, scarcity increases value. Given that 8% of the world's currency (the portion that was actually in physical form, be it aluminum coins that look and feel more like bus tokens or paper or plastic notes) now has to do the job once done by 100%, it seems reasonable to believe that a dollar bill (or Euro note) will very soon be worth more (in terms of what it will bring) than it was before -- assuming anyone sees it as having *any* value at all.
David Brin's *The Postman* looks at this as a very minor subplot. The protagonist, who steps into the role of a USPS mail carrier, begins to accept *only* actual US dollar bills. Not coins (dollar denominated or otherwise), not larger bill, only singles. By the time he's been carrying the mail for a couple years, those tattered old singles have become the core of a new economy, because they *represent value* -- one of them will see a letter delivered anywhere in the Postman's district, or passed off to another carrier when/if he meets one going the right direction.
And that's all it takes -- establish a value for something with sufficient rarity and difficult of counterfeiting, and that thing is money, whether it was money last week or last year, or not.
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**Neither**
Money (or anything acting as money) only has value if it can be spent to acquire desired things, or kept to acquire things in future, and if sufficient others agree by their actions that it has that function for them, too.
If the computer systems with financial data died, as the question says, then money simply won't have value. Think about it. You run a business, and suddenly your entire supply chain fails, you have 1000 suppliers here and indistant places but no way to pay any of them (can't pay remotely, no usable bank accounts exist for anyone, exchange rates unknowable, and do you have 200,000 $1 bills for that item.needed for production?) Your staff have just lost their savings, theres chaos on every street. In a total loss of confidence in the financial system, nobody actually trusts the bills you wave round, anyway.
Or, put another way.....
**Everyone suddenly owns precisely what they physically have in their pockets and homes at the time, nothing more.**
The outcome isn't deflation or inflation. Its a kind of chaos in which money as was, becomes irrelevant. Something may take its place, but that won't be the fiat currency and therefore inflation/deflation won't be applicable terms.
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# Computers wouldn't be impacted a lot.
Data centers tend to be grounded, and power generation systems often have protections nowadays. In addition, we monitor the sun more, so people can protect stuff during dangerous times. Don't worry, banks are keeping your financial records safe. The electricity grid might be damaged by a powerful enough set of solar flares and CMEs, especially older parts with weaker protections but the data centers containing all your debt would be fine.
They could just fix them up and send the debt collectors to collect more debt from people.
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First: I imagine that most datacenters, mainframes, and hard drives would be less affected than you present - for various reasons that aren't probably interesting/relevant to your worldbuilding premise.
That's just one IT person's opinion. Remember that the New Scientist article has to be compelling, and leaning towards doom and gloom - makes people talk about it more.
#### But this is worldbuilding SE - do it your way!
Back to your question - it certainly would be a catastrophe.
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> So what would be more plausible? Hyperinflation or hyperdeflation.
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Hyperinflation
Physical money would be of little value initially - at least within most of the USA, and probably most large cities in the world.
Few people have more than a couple days of food in their homes - and it is worse in places like New York City where the apartments don't even have full sized appliances nor any place for food storage.
Fiat currency or metal backed... doesn't matter in the short term.
People who aren't farmers or "preppers" would be willing to part with most of what they had to get food to live - **that's inflation**!
And remember, if your power grid is down - no refrigeration!
Think about the amount of food you have in your house right now.
Anything in your refrigerator will be bad tomorrow, unless you put it in the freezer - but even then you only get one more day.
How long before you're willing to trade all the money you have to get a jerky treat for your child? (or any food that doesn't require refrigeration)
The computers within cars and trucks would likely be fried if the vehicle weren't in a garage of some kind (home garage, carport, parking garage below the top level, etc.)
With enough of them immobilized, there's plenty of fuel in gas stations for a while - but there's no supply chain left because even if you have enough vehicles, and clear enough roadways to drive them on, your communications are knocked out long enough for the whole thing to fall apart. It's rather interdependent.
So... hyperdeflation for vehicles.
Depending on your target audience and genre, you may want to look into real life instances of people within countries experiencing hyperinflation going to the border of a neighboring country to 'traffic' themselves and their children for food. Only do this if you have a strong stomach.
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The destruction of large amounts of money, in the long run, would cause a general reduction in the price level (and therefore, deflation).
If you take a quantity theory of money view of the world:
$$ PY = MV $$
$P$ is the price level, $Y$ is real output, $M$ is the money stock, and $V$ is monetary velocity, the massive reduction in $M$ would – holding $Y$ and $V$ constant – force $P$ into a proportional reduction.
The specific size of the reduction in the money supply would be substantial. Eg for the US, the amount of US currency (that is, Federal Reserve notes and coins) in [circulation in Nov 2021](https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h6/current/default.htm) is 2 114.6 billion. At the same time, the M1 money supply ('money' including money in chequing and savings accounts) 20 345 billion. That's about 90 per cent of the M1 money supply gone.
In general equilibrium, that sort of destruction would have a large effect on real output and velocity as well. One could expect a reduction in velocity as money becomes more difficult to exchange, along with disruptions across the financial system, which would massively reduce output in the medium run. You would have to model the impacts of that for a more precise answer.
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I would say hyper-inflation, although in a very roundabout way. Everything we have is going to lose all value except for gold and silver.
Why? We protect our data. Sure, there's data sitting in unprotected harddrives that are going to get wiped, but there are backups on varied media in underground bunkers in case something goes wrong.
So if all of those get hit, that solar flare was... bad. Very bad. All of our cars are going to stop working. Supply chains will grind to a halt. Governments which depend on the rapid communication afforded by computers will collapse. This is not an "end of finance" event. This is an end of civilization.
So this is why I say hyper-inflation. Everything supported by civilization is going to fall apart. All fiat currency is in this bucket. All that will be left are the currencies that have stood the test of time over thousands of years: gold and silver. And it would be hard to say if they would hold value or not. The available basket of merchandise with which to measure inflation is going to change rather dramatically and start focusing on food water and shelter rather quickly.
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In my world there are merfolk who live in their own underwater civilization. They are sapient with unique and complex social customs, and one of them involves food.
Just like on land, merfolk royalty hold banquets/dinner parties. Cooking for merfolk is basically sushi, fish and crustaceans are sliced into pieces and arranged to look aesthetically pleasing.
One potential problem is that due to being underwater, the food might float away, and so merfolk might need to come up with a way to force the meat pieces to stay in place.
How would merfolk accomplish that?
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**Shish Kebabs**
The other answers were all good; however, I must point out that *impaling* is an option, used by swordfish and their ilk, a rather good option actually. Why?
* When one has to chase one's food, one risks losing said food, not to mention exhaustion and injury. This risk is only increased with a feeding frenzy, as evidenced by [sharks](https://www.ranker.com/list/shark-feeding-frenzies/laura-allan).
* Tying food down may only delay the inevitable; unless edible substances like seaweed are used to tie the food down, you will have to untie the food to eat it, or else spit out the tie....it *works*, but it's not exactly convenient. (And even with the seaweed, what if you bite the 'chain link fence grid' the food is tied onto?)
* Covering food is bad for the same reasons as above, and in fact may be worse because if the food is not totally covered, the current can snatch it away.
**However, with *skewering;***
* Food can be eaten right off, or else plucked off and popped into the mouth
* Catching prey with one's mouth is relatively difficult; eating skewered prey not so much
* Currents can't affect skewered food, unless they are of the same alignment (with the skewer held up, food can be pushed off by a current going straight up, and the same goes for a skewer held sideways)
* Whatever tries to eat food off of your skewer may just poke/stab/impale themselves
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**All Part of the Fun!**
One possibility to consider is that merfolk like a bit of social interaction with their food before they eat it. Rather than killing the fish, they might enjoy chasing it around their feasting hall before grabbing them and sinking their fangs into its sweet and wriggly flesh!
Presentation might be a ball of harvested fish and other critters in a nicely woven bag which is sliced open by the maitre des fetes. Upon this signal, the ravenous merfolk royals set to their feeding frenzy with reckless abandon!
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/vrAWw.jpg)
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If the concern is just that the food might float away before it's eaten, a simple cover on the dish/tray will do.
Nothing much different than what is used in high end restaurants to prevent the food from getting cold and releasing its aroma all around
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/oH0LH.jpg)
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**Hang 'em High !**
Basically you need to suspend food and tie it down to something to avoid movement by water currents. Just merfolk moving around will cause unpredictable currents so this is unavoidable.
I would suggest something similar to a chain link fence grid that food can be attached to and arranged in whatever your merfolk consider artistically pleasing (which will vary according to individual taste). Probably arranged vertically although the details would part of the artistic presentation.
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Hmm.. using local resources, I'd stuff the food into empty conch shells. The relatively narrow opening should prevent most food displacement (especially if covered or blocked by a broad leaf seaweed before eating). Then, when eating, the conch could be brought near to the mouth and the food scooped out and consumed.
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I am trying to construct a terrestrial planet that is almost entirely made of silicates but with a core that's able to generate a magnetic field. I really don't want to use iron, nickel, or cobalt, and was wondering if I could use a non-ferromagnetic metal. I was thinking maybe titanium (aparently its weakly magneticü§î). Would this be possible? Or would the magnetic field be too weak? I know that Jupiter has a field from metallic hydrogen so I don't know what is and isnt possible at this point.
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Yes. The fact that the Earth's core is made of materials that are ferromagnetic at standard temperature and pressure is completely coincidental--it has no bearing on the generation of the geomagnetic field. In the regions where the field is generated, iron and nickel are in fact *not* ferromagnetic.
All that's necessary is that you have an electrically conductive fluid. Experimental simulations of the geodynamo make use of rotating spheres of molten sodium. Molten titanium should work just fine.
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**To generate a planetary magnetic field you just need a liquid metal where electrons can float freely.**
There are several options for this, these are a few examples which come to mind:
* Iron and Nickel
This is the Earth setup, but I thought I'd mention it. [Wikipedia explains pretty well how it is generated.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_magnetic_field)
* Metallic Hydrogen
This is the [Jovian setup](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetosphere_of_Jupiter) and shows that one doesn't even need a true metal.
* Magnesium Oxide
[Some recent reasearch](https://carnegiescience.edu/news/magnesium-oxide-earth-super-earth) suggests that magnesium oxide turns into a conductive liquid at pressures one might expect in super-earths. This is the most realistic bet in my opinion.
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The Hegemony is a welfare state dedicated in giving all citizens: housing, education, basic necessities (water, food, etc), and help with either finding employment or a job assigned by the Hegemony.
The Hegemony is built on the principles: prosperity, security, and conformity (as in equality/everyone has a place in the Hegemony since the Hegemony provides one common culture).
However large corporations still exist within the Hegemony. Some of these corporations like Prometheus step into Mega-corporation territory owning their own regions (company towns, reservations) as well as their own police forces (private security due to the scale of these corporations).
Could a welfare state (a unitary global government) coexist with megacorporations without many ramifications? What sort of economic or political compromises would have to be made?
Note:
Hegemony is still a free market. While any one can apply for state housing anyone can also buy their own housing. This applies to any of the state benefits. Any one can buy private instead of state goods if they want.
Hegemony would be considered "Big Government" since it is a unitary state with smaller regions having limited autonomy and legal authority.
The laws on monopolies have been relaxed with only "harmful" (as in causing stagnation) monopolies broken up.
[Answer]
It's simple: the megacorporations coexist with the government because they're under contract.
Let's say for the sake of argument that the Hegemony was not always a welfare state. Once, it didn't provide such things for its citizens, and then at some point it decided to do so. This is a massive undertaking for any state: it has to study its own people, organize aid disbursements on an unprecedented scale, and add new bureaucracy to manage these functions. Making matters worse, many of the things it's providing are not things it's used to providing. Does the government have the facilities to physically receive and ship massive quantities of food from the farms to its citizens? Does it have nationalized power plants and the highly-trained staff needed to run them? Does it have retailers? Marketing staff to determine which luxuries the people want? Analysts to decide what fields it should focus education on? Very likely it doesn't.
Who does have that infrastructure and those people? Corporations do; that's what they're for. Rather than creating its own government dispensaries for, say, medicine, the government goes to the existing pharmacies and drug companies and insists that they will provide certain products and services to designated standards, in return for subsidies. This way, the Hegemony isn't duplicating existing infrastructure, and its role is limited to regulation, oversight, and contracting - all things governments have more experience with.
Over time, the government and corporations would grow more symbiotically entwined with one another. The corporations can't simply walk away from the government, because they would operate at a loss without those subsidies - not to mention the loss of markets. On the other hand, the government can't shut down too many corporations or it loses the ability to provide for its citizens. This protection applies best to larger corporations and cartels, though; if a small corporation misbehaves, the government can smack them down and rely on their rivals to pick up the slack. So there's a strong incentive for corporations to merge into ever larger, more diverse conglomerates in order to negotiate with the government on a more equal footing.
[Answer]
Of course megacorporations can coexist with a welfare state. Duh. We know they can because *they do*. You may have heard of [Philips](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philips) (which coexists with the Dutch welfare state), [IKEA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA) (which coexists with the Swedish welfare state), or [Airbus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus) (which coexists with a number of Western European welfare states).
Now, what the question posits *could* be understood to refer not so much to a welfare state but to a form of [totalitarianism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism). Such an understanding makes for a (slightly) more interesting question: can megacorporations coexist with a totalitarian state?
And the answer is again that yes they can; we know because *they did* and *they do*. One can hardly imagine a state more totalitarian than fascist Italy, or national-socialist Germany, or the communist Soviet Union, or the People's Republic.
[Fiat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_Automobiles) coexisted with the Italian fascist state; not to mention the [Institude for Industrial Reconstruction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istituto_per_la_Ricostruzione_Industriale) (IRI), the mother-of-all-holdings, *created* by the fascist state and which survived until 2002.
In national-socialist Germany they had such megacorporations as the infamous [I.G. Farben](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IG_Farben), [Krupp A.G.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krupp) or [Telefunken](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telefunken); not to mention the [Todt Organization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organisation_Todt), a mammoth engineering company *created* by the Nazis.
In the Soviet Union they had countless megacorporations; for example, the Gidroelektrostroy Trust (that would be "Hydroelectroconstruct" in English), [Elektrosila](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Machines) ("Electropower") and the famous [LOMO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOMO), the Leningrad Optical Mechanical Organization, which gave its name to the [lomography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lomography) movement. ("Lomography" is a trademark of the Lomographische A.G.)
Actually, megacorporations were a major structural principle of traditional communist or socialist economies based on the Soviet model. By and large, in countries which modelled their planned economies on the Soviet model, vast tracts of economic activity were organized into country-wide sectorial megacorporations. Of course, they were not *called* megacorporations, but rather trusts, or centrals, or enterprises...
And in the modern People's Republic we find that megacorporations coexist just fine with the most recent instantiation of the eternal Chinese state; Huawei, [CNPC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_National_Petroleum_Corporation), [COSCO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_COSCO_Shipping), Lenovo, Tencent, TP Link, ZTE...
[Answer]
**Absolutely**
In fact, it would be in the best interest of the mega-corp to have at least one welfare state hanging around. Somebody pays. Somebody *always* pays. In the case of a welfare-state, it's the government that pays by taxing everything else under the sun. And it's easier to convince one government than it is millions of people (especially when you have a group of people politically biased toward taxing everything to ensure everybody has everything in equality).
Could a mega-corp exist *only* within the context of a welfare-state? Probably not. But do they want one or more from many states? Absolutely.
[Answer]
I'm going to argue that this is exactly what we're moving to with varying degrees of effectiveness from country to country.
Put simply, it's in the interest of EVERY government (hegemony, dictatorship, democracy, communist or capitalist state) to keep its citizenry in good health and productive. The question of how that should be done is one of the key differentiators between the different economic models.
On the one extreme, Communism is based around the belief that it's the personal responsibility of the state to maintain the populace as a healthy, productive and equal work force.
On the other, Fascism states that it's the responsibility of the powerful to maintain the population and that the state's role is little more than mutual defense of the powerful as a large cartel; anything else is just getting in the way of the people who organise the production.
By comparison to Australia, the USA has a political spectrum that is far more right shifted (although it would appear we're drifting towards that ourselves) and the obvious example of it to me is healthcare. In Australia for instance, we have a state funded health care system, but there is a lot of pressure on wealthier people to switch to private healthcare instead to take pressure off that system (even though outside of the two major cities Sydney and Melbourne, there isn't a lot of choice).
In the USA however as I understand it, the healthcare provision is essentially an employment benefit. In that sense, the government has an interest in the welfare of the people but outsources it to the corporations. I suspect that the same concept could be extended beyond healthcare to the point where mega corps could be tasked with more and more responsibility for the welfare of the people under the guidance and regulation of a hegemony.
In essence, the scenario where the two co-exist is one where the hegemony has the power, and the mega-corps have the funds. The hegemony exercises its power to ensure the welfare of the people through regulating the mega-corps into increasing their cost of doing business by making them responsible for the welfare of its employees.
The next logical step is to take all citizens that are *not* employed by a megacorp, and putting them into a government enterprise of some sort, whether it be public administration, road building or whatever. In that sense, you achieve full employment, outsource the expensive elements of social welfare to the corps, and pay for those who slip through the employment cracks via the taxes those same corps pay.
[Answer]
Yes. But details depend on who's in charge.
1. Hegemony is in charge. All corporations, mega or not, need to play by its rules. They are allowed a freedom to make profits, but have to pay taxes and should never go political. Hegemony, on the other hand, keeps ordinary people content and takes care of those who didn't find a place to work at mega-corporations. When corporation tries to skirt the rules, Hegemony would make an example of it.
2. Corporations are in charge. Hegemony is heavily influenced by the big money, no decision is made without considering corporate interests. Mega corporations like to make profits, but they realize the danger of large discontent underclass. As a solution, Hegemony acts as a law enforcement and welfare agency jointly run by the corporations.
[Answer]
Mega corps are really only interested in on thing profits. A lot of the time they are not even interested in the well being of their employees, outside of keeping them just happy enough for them not to leave. They are definitely not interested in the general welfare of the populace as a whole. Having a government around would benefit the mega crops in various ways. The government provides an atmosphere to do business in buy ensuring law an order, an educated populace from which to recruit workers, a national defense, a source on income in the form of government contracts, a social safety net(health care, basic income), infrastructure(roads, bridges, electricity, water, telecommunications), and protection against foreign mega corps in form of protectionist trade policies. All this helps mega corps maximize their profits. In turn the mega corps provide tax revenue, jobs, products, services, and an economy in general.
[Answer]
**Absolutely. The welfare state is not a selfless, charitable effort. It is an investment in the resilience of the working population.**
It's important to understand that, while there is a significant humanitarian aspect to the welfare state, it is also an investment by the government (and its tax-paying citizens) in the wellbeing of its population. It can be argued whether the benefits outweigh the investment, but ultimately it is easily viewed as a business transaction.
We pay some of our earnings to provide for people who cannot work. Because we do, if we suddenly cannot work we are also provided for. Then, because we are provided for while we cannot work (thus avoiding nasty things like starvation), we are more likely to become productive members of the working population again.
If you want to cut out the humanitarian aspect, then you just need to engineer a situation where for megacorps it is worth providing welfare. I can think of a few options:
1. Provision of welfare is used as an incentive to recruit high performing and motivated staff (like good dental plans in the US). This would work especially effectively if one high performing individual could provide welfare for additional members of their family, both widening the spread and increasing the social pressure for someone to come work for your company.
2. It's something seen as desirable by the buying public. Something like FairTrade which costs more to produce, but increases the appeal of the product.
3. Welfare as a strategic investment in the long-term health of their working population (this is the main benefit our current governments reap from things like provision of welfare and free universal healthcare). In addition to tiding people over in rough patches, providing welfare could also have benefits like reducing the likelihood someone will have to resort to criminal activity to make ends meet. A happy, healthy, crime-free workforce will be more productive than an oppressed, unhealthy workforce that's just had their house burgled.
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[Question]
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Magic in this world is gender linked. Estrogen lets you focus and direct the power, while testosterone allows you to channel larger amounts. Shamanism is a field of study that calls upon the magic of the planet, and relegated mostly to witches. Rather than using their own natural energies which are finite, an individual uses the energy of nature and the world around them. This form of magic is unlimited and never runs out. The user doesn't control the magic directly as it is too massive and powerful, but rather guides it in a particular way as it flows through them. These rituals require hours to perform and months of preparation, such as gathering various materials and a period of ritual cleansing or fasting. Magic resulting from these rituals are not permanent, and last as long as the spell is being performed. An example would be a rain dance, or a spell altering a landscape for a particular amount of time.
Covens in this setting function similar to royal houses and operate as political entities. They are matriarchal and led by witches, with the top matriarch ruling over the family and extended or lesser clans connected to the main coven. Males can potentially reach high positions as well, but they have a handicap. Due to an ancient curse thousands of years ago, males cannot do magic naturally. Instead, they depend on a ritual they go through that a group of 12 other witches must conduct. These rituals require various components, incantations, and a period of six hours, as well as months of preparation and steps that all parties must perform. This includes a period of fasting, prayer, etc.
The resulting warlock trains in sorcery, a field of magic that involves using your own energy to create spells of destructive power. These effects are immediate and can have long lasting effects, such as a fireball or a lightning bolt. They are also much quicker to use, but also more dangerous to the user. Warlocks can be found in high positions of power, soldiers, or bodyguards for other witches. They are also used to add power to rituals, which is often needed to create stronger effects.
Covens need to create warlocks because shamanism is necessary to the continued function of society, and many spells cannot be performed without them. However, there are concerns that warlocks, being stronger in sorcery, can rise up to take control of a coven, or band together to create their own entity to rival other covens. While witches have the strength of numbers, their form of magic is slow and takes preparation while warlocks are more immediately powerful. What is the best way to prevent this from happening?
[Answer]
Good old economic self-interest.
Think of the coven as a business. The witches don't have what they need to keep it running on their own (at least, not with total efficiency). Neither do the warlocks. Therefore it's to their benefit to work together.
Specifically, from the point of view of the warlocks, what the witches offer is a way to turn their talents into a marketable good. Fire and lightning are all well and good, but there's a limited supply of people willing to pay you for them, without turning to crime or becoming a hired thug. But when they're working with witches they can change the weather, reshape the landscape - things people will pay them for.
Operating within the system as it stands - working for witches' covens, even though they don't have power in them - offers them steady work and a minimum of risk. They can't go off on their own because unless they intend to become mercenaries or bandits, a group of warlocks has no source of income. (Some no doubt will do so anyway, or turn their backs on their magic and go work some kind of normal job, but I would imagine they would be in the minority.) Likewise if they take over a coven, the witches still hold all the power because they're the ones who determine if things get done. A general strike by the witches would mean no money coming in.
It's also worth pointing out that, in this world, covens are major political entities. In a noble house, you don't just become heir by deciding to shoot all the other potential heirs. They're working within a political system, which means there are laws (presumably enforced by other covens) restricting what is and is not considered legitimate. Taking over a coven at lightning-point might simply mean that you have an example made of you by every other spellcaster for a hundred miles.
[Answer]
Why don't nuns take over the Catholic Church? (In the US in 1965, there were 3 times the number of sisters as Priests...today it is a lot closer but still more women.) Why do women have so much less power in the most popular world religions?
Systematic brainwashing disguised as cultural indoctrination.
It's not a system that is easily dismantled by logic. And it works for all areas of life. Why are there fewer female scientists than male ones, even though all logic tells you girls are just as likely to have the skills for science as boys?
If your society has men in charge for everything else then the way you keep women in charge of witchcraft is to belittle any man who is involved. Make it "women's work" so only a few men even want to do it. That may backfire because even in "women's" fields, like nursing and ballet dancing, men can still do well and be respected, and may run some or even most of the institutions.
[Answer]
A common pattern to solve these issues is that the user of the powerful destructive force has little control over the effects that result from it. They may be able to generate a bolt of lightning or a fireball, but from that point on they're basically not in control of it. The rest of the world is in control of it. That includes the laws of physics, and they rely on those laws to lead the fireball or lightning bolt towards their target.
It also includes the witches. They're part of the rest of the world too. If their spells take a long time to cast, it's also very reasonable to assume that their spells have long lasting nuanced effects.
Have much of the coven's spellcasting be in the form of "You may start it, but I'll finish it" kinds of spells. When the warlock launches a fireball, he gives up control of it, trusting in the laws of physics to finish the job of propagating it towards the witch. However, if the witch's magic is already in the process of gathering some control over the fireball, it may start to re-direct the fireball in a way that doesn't hurt the witch.
Of course, the smaller the protected volume, the easier such spells would be. Coven witches would learn how to provide just enough protection to keep themselves alive.
Skilled witches might manage their magic in a way that not only directs the harm of the fireball away from the witch, but uses that energy to further her own goals. This may be as trivially combative as turning the fireball around, or it may redirect the energy towards a positive goal. Perhaps the coven needs a great deal of energy to cast the spell to bless this year's harvest. The warlock was kind enough to gather that for her, so that she doens't have to gather it the old fashioned way during the spellcasting.
[Answer]
Indoctrination.
Make part of the ritual (required or not) drilling the males from a young age in being subservient to the witches of the coven. Only the ‘best’ (least likely to try anything without direction) get to become warlocks.
In this manner you make sure the idea of ‘taking over’ doesn’t even enter the heads of the warlocks. They are there to follow orders. They might be high up in the social order and even be in positions of power over more junior witches, but any warlock will (by doctrine) will want to find a ‘more senior’ witch to follow. Bonus points if they will all turn on any warlock that dares to suggest insubordination.
Build something into the ceremony about ‘now you are a weapon, given the power to defend or attack those your coven dictates. As a weapon you cannot have a will, you must work the will of your Coven.’
Also neatly lets warlocks avoid any lingering moral concerns over killing, but only as long as they’re being controlled by a witch.
[Answer]
Add more requirements.
Warlocks only have any powers at all if the warlock has been castrated before puberty. That way they cannot reproduce, and any power they get in life follows them to the grave.
Think of catholic priests who can't marry and have kids, ir the [castrati](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castrato), who can only sing if deballed at a young age.
[Answer]
Make being a warlock a losing proposition.
The fact that warlocks must use their own power drains them of 'life energy' (or whatever you fancy) and consequently the more they practise magic, the faster they die. Suddenly being a warlock is far less attractive and it's far harder for them abuse their 'superior strength'.
This will also give you the opportunity for some entertaining plotting amongst the warlocks as they try to work out how to overcome this handicap by forcing them to work together over long timeframes (generations) creating a secret society that can wield sufficient power for long enough to overthrow the covens.
Obviously the witches are fully aware of this (not very) secret society and enjoy seducing the young warlocks or inciting them to self-destruct in ill-advised displays of power.
[Answer]
Make the Creator Goddess unambiguously say, "Women are in charge. I'll smite any man who tries to take over."
[Answer]
**Warlocks must be maintained.**
The reason for the curse was to prevent men from being great magic users. The elaborate workaround and ritual by the 12 witches is able to short circuit the curse, but only temporarily. In a way it is like raising the dead - creating a creature which is against nature. A warlock is an unnatural occurrence in this world and immediately on being created, the magic in him begins to decay. Without regular maintenance and upkeep by the 12, the warlock will gradually revert to being just a man.
[Answer]
**The optimum number of warlocks per coven is three: Master, Journeyman, and Apprentice.**
As stated, inducting a new warlock requires the participation of 12 witches plus several months of preparation by all parties. The coven is capable of supporting only a limited number of warlocks at a time, whether due to practical logistics or magic constraints. As such, the pipeline of new warlocks is much more constricted than that of new witches.
So a coven can optimally support only three warlocks at once:
* A Master to instruct (lead and train the coven's warlocks);
* A Journeyman to conduct (carry out the magical tasks);
* And an Apprentice to learn (so that there is a candidate warlock in the queue).
As a wise man once said, this Rule of Three is really more like a guideline. Whether a coven can handle more or fewer depends on that coven's abilities.
But the optimum size of a *coven*, as per PTerry, is one witch. A single induction procedure already involves too many witches working together for too long, and having too many apprentices in training can make the coven itself fall apart.
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[Question]
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I imagined a creature that would have an expanded lifespan thanks to a regular production of stem cells that would replace the damaged cells.
During its very long lifetime, when it eats food (the creature is omnivorous so I mean it eats plants or animals), something special would happen:
For example, if it ate a plant, an undamaged cell of the plant would be analysed by special microorganisms produced by specialized cells. Then, this analysed DNA would be stocked in a genetic stocking cell.
After, the creature could replicate some of the stocked DNA if needed. For example, it could use the strand of DNA that codes for chlorophyll to be able to use photosynthesis.
This genetic mimesis would allow the creature to adapt to environmental changes during its extremely long lifespan.
My question is, if this process is somehow possible (ignoring how it would have developed in evolutionary processes) would it work like I described it? If not how?
[Answer]
There are two major conceptual problems with this creature.
The first is neatly summarized by one of my favorite quotes on the subject, from *Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri*:
>
> Remember, genes are **not** blueprints. This means you can't, for example, insert "the genes for an elephant's trunk" into a giraffe and get a giraffe with a trunk. There are no genes for trunks. What you **can** do with genes is chemistry, since DNA codes for chemicals.
>
>
>
Taking your example, photosynthesis: this is a very complex chemical process with a lot of moving parts. There isn't just one gene that says "this being is photosynthetic" or even "this part of the being is photosynthetic" - photosynthesis is the cumulative result of many different genes, potentially scattered throughout its genome in totally different areas.
This relates to the other conceptual problem, which is that it's not at all obvious what each individual gene *does*. They create proteins in specific sequences, and those protein chains can go off and do other things. But outside of the complete cellular environment, it can be extremely difficult to predict the purpose or effect of a specific gene or sequence of genes. Humans can do it, because we have the luxury of examining countless other organisms and sharing our findings. A specific creature dealing with a specific new gene sequence it hasn't encountered before has no idea what it does, except perhaps by experimentation.
Oddly enough, the basic idea of gleaning genetic information from other creatures is totally sound - viruses and prokaryotes [do it all the time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer), and it's possible (though not at all clear) that it happens in larger organisms too. However, this isn't a conscious act on the part of the virus; it's more a consequence (sometimes helpful, sometimes presumably unhelpful) of existing in an environment with other DNA around. The problem is doing it on demand and making sure that an organism grabs enough genetic information - which can be widely scattered, remember - from the subject to mimic a large-scale process like photosynthesis.
One possibility is that the creature has some kind of expendable cell - skin cells, perhaps, which by their nature are numerous, die off readily, and can be shed when they've served their purpose - that acts as a testbed for new genetic material. Most of the time, the gene-transferred skin cells die. When they hit on something advantageous, they thrive (briefly), tripping a biological mechanism that propagates the new genes throughout the creature. (In essence, this is normal natural selection, but within the confines of a single creature rather than a population.) However it would be limited to changes that are at the cellular level, rather than the level of organs: it might confer resistance to heat, or some kind of toxin, but it wouldn't give you wings.
[Answer]
**Kind of**
It's not believable that an animal could process foreign DNA and from it incorporate features into its **anatomy**. However we can design a creature that -- to some limited degree -- incorporates foreign DNA into its **metabolism**.
For example consider the stomach. Cows (and humans) for example rely on a healthy infestation of gut bacteria to digest their food. Their stomach provides a warm humid environment to cultivate those bacteria. Remove those bacteria and the animal's metabolism stops working until they grow back. Tube worms do something similar but outsource even more of the digestion. I believe tube worms can live for hundreds of years.
Your animal is similar. It's stomach is warm and humid and is evolved to host whatever sort of microorganisms it needs at the time. It cannot digest grass on its own. But feed it grass and it starts cultivating bacteria that digest the grass for it. It cannot digest meet but geed it meat and the stomach changes to support bacteria that break down the meat for it.
For photosynthesis I imagine big oozing sections on the creature's body which host bacteria. Natural petri dishes that can gather photosynthetic organisms that it somehow ingests for energy.
[Answer]
*What if I told you* that when you or I eat, we do something special: you absorb undamaged cells from the food. There are also special microorganisms that analyze the cells (themselves) and store the analyzed DNA in a genetic stocking cell (replicas of themselves)
A significant fraction of the DNA in your body is not human (the vast majority of cells aren't, but per-cell they contain less DNA), but is a vast colony of microflora. In addition to contemporary research indicating that they can play a role in modulating your immune system, many organisms gain tremendous benefits or are totally dependent on their microflora.
Termites and ruminants use cellulose-digesting gut flora in order to extract nutrients from wood or highly fibrous grasses. Colonies of bacteria, yeast, and protists can break down the complex carbohydrates into absorbable carbs.
Humans' gut flora has been shown to vary with diet, and many plants are covered with microorganisms that are prone to ferment said food (cabbage → sauerkraut, pineapple → tepache, milk → cheese). If over long timespans some creature changed its diet due to migration or climate change altered the food supply, its "overall metabolism" (the combination of the host plus flora) could drift a bunch. In addition, due to the rapid generations/evolution of microorganisms, new traits that didn't exist when the host was born could be used by the host via a new passenger.
[Answer]
**Generalised metamorphosis**
When a caterpillar turns into a butterfly it makes a hard shell, dissolves into free swimming biological matter which deactivates parts of its DNA code and reactivates others, and then rebuilds the organism. It is a matter of perspective whether the butterfly and caterpillar are the same entity. Certainly we would not expect a sentient caterpillar to transfer memories over to the butterfly.
The DNA of the animal has two sections. One has a list of 'catterpillar parts' and how to build them. The second has a list of 'butterfly parts' and how to build them. There is yet a third section says which components to put at which parts of the body plan. These are called Hox genes.
When the caterpillar is developing in the egg one hox gene says 'put a caterpillar mouth here' The data on how to build a caterpillar mouth is stored elsewhere. When the butterfly is developing in the cocoon that Hox section changes to 'put a butterfly mouth here'. That is the only change.
By mucking around with Hox genes cook up all kinds of horrific mutant fruit flies with wings/legs/antennae/eyes in the wrong places.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/q3yLG.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/eEarN.jpg)[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/mXUZ3.jpg)
I propose an animal that has not only two lists of parts, but a great many variations of each. At any one time most of that DNA is redundant. Large sections of seemingly redundant DNA are common in existing organisms. But when our new animal metamorphoses it 'mixes and matches' the parts based on environmental factors to acquire a new form.
The animal also selects genes that code for the instincts necessary to use its new form. In that sense some 'memories' seem to transfer. Or at least it knows how to use the new body.
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[Question]
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## Background
Centuries ago, nuclear inferno engulfed the world, and billions were killed. Most people were knocked back to Texas, one of the mightier states in the bygone era, was split up into many warring city states. Texans near the borderlands were absorbed by Mexico, while others were annexed by the main Texas cities, which are Laredo, San Antonio, Austin, and the two top dogs, Dallas and Houston.
## 26th Century
Texas ha started to hit extremely turbulent times. The two main cities from before have annexed many of their neighbors. Dallas is by far the biggest empire in Texas, and have a territory that stretches from Chihuahua to Oklahoma, and they’re getting rich from it. But not as rich as Houston. Houstonians have access to the Great Gulf on the east, and the San Antonio River. Taxing all the merchants who come from across the Great Gulf has given them a great income, and Dallas is jealous. Dallas has lost a lot from the failed invasion of Klaho(Oklahoma City) and people are starting to question their king. King Lorvert IV Of Dallas has a plan to take over Houston, and he has to get the help of a few thousand barbarians to do it.
## Lubbock
Lubbock has become a wild wasteland, with many tribal clans fighting and warring with each other. The only major power in that region is Yellow(Amarillo) and it is forgotten about by most Texans. The Lubbock tribes are primitive, fighting with spears clubs and arrows, but King Lorvert has an ingenious plan. He has forced the Gun Runners, a company of weapons-manufacturers up to Lubbock to strike a deal with the Lubbockians. They send up Guns, Cannons, and Horses to the most powerful of the tribes, in a show of fake friendship. One day, a messenger from Dallas comes to Lubbock, and tells the tribes that Houston is currently invading Dallas territory, and that they must invade Houston to stop it. But, in reality, Houston has not invaded Dallas at all, and no Houstonians know what’s about to hit them.
## Battle of San Antonio
The Lubbock tribes, armed with the guns and cannons and horses, and led by a detachment of Dallas soldiers, march through Dallas territory, and finally they reach San Antonio. The city of 50,000 is sleeping, as the tribes reach the iffy at early dawn. But, a few soldiers on watch at the time notice the tribes and soldiers, and alert everyone else. The entire military of San Antonio is scrambling to shot down the invaders, prepare cannons, and get ships going down the river, but it’s no use. The force of 10,000 men easily take down the smaller, less experienced garrison at San Antonio. They get past the city walls, and start hacking people to pieces and capturing them for enslavement. The also kill every single horse and messenger, so it will be impossible to warn Houston about the invaders by messenger. But they must warn Houston.
My question is some other way, besides by messengers, that San Antonio could warn Houston about the coming invaders? Something based on actual past history would be really nice, as I prefer my Worldbuilding to have groundings in reality.
## Map
-Everything in Black is Houston Territory
-White is Dallas Territory
-The red arrows are the path of invasion by the Lubbokians
I based my future history of Texas on medieval and Renaissance Italy, when it was divided into many city-states. Dallas is supposed to represent Florence, while Houston is supposed to represent Venice. Of course, I expanded their territorial space, and added some barbarians just for fun. I put a lot of work into this, and so I’m glad to share it with you all.
[Answer]
I can think of a number of ways any warring state should have available with Renaissance-like technology as you suggest.
1. [**Homing pigeons**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homing_pigeon): not difficult to re-breed from the *feral*, ubiquitous, city dwelling descendants of the possibly-lost-by-the-26th-century breeds of old. According to an unsourced Wikipedia statement, [t]*heir average flying speed over moderate 640 km (400 miles) distances is around 80 km/h (50 miles per hour)*, faster than [horses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse#Movement). They will remember and be able to travel back to the place they were raised as soon as released. It was part of the defense and diplomacy of Medieval kingdoms to share a few with allies or between cities in the same kingdom.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9vOR8.jpg)
2. [**Beacons**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beacon#For_defensive_communications): Remember [the siege of Minas Tirith](http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Warning_beacons_of_Gondor)? They are set atop the highest mountains and are agreed specific meanings like: "Help! We're under attack!". Their fire is obvious by night and not too difficult to see in daylight. The message travels at the speed of light, except when a new beacon needs to be lit. Guards keep them functional and watchmen must look at them as part of their job description.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/RmW1R.jpg)
Their range is limited, though. Especially in the area you describe, you'd need a network of beacons atop hills or towers to cover the 200 miles that separate San Antonio and Houston. As a reference, a beacon at 200 meters (660 ft, a little less than the [difference in heights between both cities](https://www.google.com/maps/dir/San+Antonio,+Texas,+USA/Houston,+Texas,+USA/@29.6626161,-97.4141691,8.75z/data=!4m14!4m13!1m5!1m1!1s0x865c58af04d00eaf:0x856e13b10a016bc!2m2!1d-98.4936282!2d29.4241219!1m5!1m1!1s0x8640b8b4488d8501:0xca0d02def365053b!2m2!1d-95.3698028!2d29.7604267!3e2)) of altitude, could be visible from 50 km (31 mi) at sea level under good weather conditions, provided there is no visual obstacle (like other mountains). Texans could be interested in building such a network, if the loss of a surprise attack is worth the investment on the network.
You can do a rough estimate of a beacon's visibility range by assuming the Earth is a sphere and using Pythagoras's theorem (the results won't be perfect, but they won't be too biased either):
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/BIUnrm.jpg)
$d=\sqrt{6.3712^2-6.371^2}\times 10^6\,m\approx5.048\times10^4\,m=50.48\,km$.
3. You could replace or complement beacons with [**smoke signals**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_signal). It's not difficult to make big fire beacons generate a lot of smoke. Columns of hot smoke (in absence of wind) can add a couple of tens of meters height and increase the range of your warning signals. The color of the smoke can be easily engineered through the appropriate fuel to [white](https://adventure.howstuffworks.com/survival/wilderness/how-to-send-smoke-signal1.htm) (green vegetation) or black (oils, less oxygen, tar, paper). Smoke works obviously better in daylight.
4. If the technological level allows it, fire beacons could be replaced by [**Semaphore lines**](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semaphore_line). Either mechanical arms or color flags would work, but you need either a much more dense network, or telescopes, which are late-Renaissance. They allow for written messages, just as the telegraph or email
5. If everything else doesn't work in your world, there could also be [**relays of horses**](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_delivery_by_animal#Horses) or some other animal. They are even faster than cavalry, since relays allow constant sprint speed.
**Update:**
Regarding a **relay of cannons**, suggested by G0BLiN, all I have found is that the Ottoman empire cannon's (XV century) *could fire heavy stone balls a mile, and the sound of their blast could reportedly be heard from a distance of [10 miles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannon#cite_ref-FOOTNOTEBradbury1992293_61-1)*. In order to keep a stable way of emergency communication you'd need to permanently immobilize 20 pieces of artillery to cover the distance between San Antonio and Houston. Unless you have 20 towns you are willing to waste a cannon to defend, woodpiles are cheaper, and towers are less tempting to move somewhere else.
As for [**heliographs**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliograph), as suggested by Thucydides, they could be a possibility, depending on how much you are willing to twist history. They were invented in the XIX century, although you could build one with a mirror and good navigation technology from the Renaissance (telescopes, precise mechanical machines) to point it. Morse code is also XIX century, but your peoples could kind of remember the idea from the past or plausibly reinvent a set of codes meaning different messages. Heliographs are better than (fire) beacons in the sense that you can send a variety of messages, they have the same reach and restrictions as beacons, but are useful for sunny days only—unless you have an equivalently powerful source of light (or an extremely precise parabolic mirror not available at the time).
All factors considered, I think **homing pigeons** are by far the best option. They are very reliable—one of them even [carried a message wounded during WWI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cher_Ami)—, they fly—so they could be dispatched in time and easily dodge messenger-killing attackers while other watchmen *warn everybody else*, and could reach Houston in 4 hours, while the attacking cavalry couldn't get there [in less than 2 days](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_riding) (maybe 3) and the heavy artillery/infantry in more than a week (3 mi/h, avg. 10 h a day of walking... with cannons).
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Lots of people come to big cities at dawn. I am thinking farmers who come early from the countryside to set up their wares.
These folks would be coming in from all directions as the sun rose and they would see the battle, possibly from some distance. The attackers could take out all inhabitants of a walled city but not the entire surrounding area.
Some of these early risers might get closer to see what was going on. Some might go home. Some who realized what was going on might head for the nearest big city. They might have varying stories depending on how much they saw and what sort of context they would put it in.
It would be hard to so completely exterminate an entire region that no word of it would get out.
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### Cannons are loud.
With the right weather conditions, it's plausible people outside the 'kill zone' could hear the battle. A low-lying and flat cloud-cover would help keep the sound from dissipating upwards. Also humidity seems to help sound travel farther. The sound would travel especially far through valleys that stretch outwards from the source. Valleys or mountains perpendicular to the source would absorb the sound. Dense forest would absorb the sound.
At first glance the geography of the area makes this seem possible, but you've studied it more than I. For distance estimates check out this thread on people hearing civil war battles: <https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/sci.military/6zjZBvtJl8I>
Some accounts claim battles were heard as much as 150 miles away which from San Antonio is already most of the distance to Houston.
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Other people have already provided workable solutions, e.g. beacons or birds. I'd only add sound based signals, e.g. dry firing a cannon or using explosives at a hilltop in a chain all the way to the city.
However, those might not actually be required since a normal person will most likely arrive far before an army could, even on foot. That is, unless every attacker had horses, the cannons were lightweight and the attackers expected to find food everywhere they slept.
A roman army [could probably march around 30-50km a day](https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/8226/how-quickly-could-the-roman-legions-march-how-does-it-compare-to-the-mobile-cav) and they were trained for endurance long before they started to receive combat training. They also had the advantage of roman roads. I can't find good numbers for armies of the american civil war, though google results suggest a speed of 15-30km a day. Unless your warbands have military endurance training, it'll probably be around 20-25km a day. The reason for that is not just the endurance, which mostly reduces the expected top speed, but also the required logistics behind it.
As a rough guess, an army of 10'000 men doing hard work requires around 20 tons of food and 40 tons of water each day. Your horses might also require food and water, depending on how many there are. A small batch of horses can feed on grass in the wild, though whether you find grass in a place that 10'000 men walked over is never a sure thing. You'll probably need food for the horses. A horse eats between 1.5 and 3% of it's body mass in food each day, let's say 10kg food and 10kg water a day. Estimating that 10% of your army consists of riders, that makes for another 10 tons of food and 10 tons of water. Where is your army getting 30 tons of food a day from? A cow produces ~250kg meat, so your soldiers would eat 80 cows a day. Unless your army happens to stumble upon farm after farm rich in cows, you'd have to bring the food with you. However, soldiers can't carry unlimited amounts of food in addition to their combat gear, and your horses need to be supplied as well anyways.
In summary, you need a logistics train and carts. Carts mean you either need roads or you need to prepare a way for them to move behind the army, i.e. remove trees, roll away rocks and such. If you have roads, great, your carts can move about as fast as a human can walk, around 5km/h. However, roads rarely go in a straight line towards where you want to move. You also have to consider that 10'000 men just walked over the road your carts are using, so it might no longer be recognizable as a road unless it was fortified, which means carts get stuck and stop all other carts behind them from moving ahead. If you don't have roads, well, expect your daily speed to go down a lot. The requirement to supply a large army is a big reason why the famous fortified roman roads were built behind the advance of roman legions.
In addition, your army would probably want to prepare a camp each night, i.e. digging out latrines, preparing some minor fortifications and such, just in case the enemy did know they were coming. That limits the amount of time the army can spend marching. Lastly, you want your army to arrive without being exhausted, so you'll probably need an extra night unless your last rest was just 10km away from your target.
Your army is bound by the requirements of logistics, which a single wanderer or a group of them isn't. A lone person can easily forage and move in a straight line, but an army can't. Imagine telling 10'000 people that marched all day that they have to go to bed without food, because you couldn't find a farm to plunder today. You'd probably wake up with half an army the next day.
It would just take a single hunter or forager spotting you from afar without you noticing, who then proceeds to move at his fastest walking speed cross country to your target to warn them in plenty of time for them to prepare. Since you are in hostile territory, the probability for that happening is extremely high, a 10'000 strong army isn't exactly covert.
Even if you do a forced double speed march, for which your soldiers will hate you, you'll need around 6 days to cross 300km and your army will arrive tired, exhausted and probably very hungry. A lone hunter can cross that distance in 4-5 days on foot, giving your target at least a day to prepare. At a normal marching speed and adding a night rest before the battle you'd need two weeks for that distance, which gives your target more than a week to prepare.
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# First stage: San Antonio to somewhere nearby
It is very likely that *somewhere* near San Antonio there are horses or other means of transportation. While all "official" messengers may have been killed, someone might have hidden himself - or played dead - and could reach beyond the battle area. If they kept their wits, they should be able to dodge patrols sent to intercept messengers.
# (Alternative)
If somebody heard the battle from far enough, and believes the information to be worth something in San Antonio (it's unlikely that the warfare situation would be a complete surprise for anyone: complete information control is beyond the ken and capabilities of Renaissance-level tribes), or suspected that silencing patrols might attempt to remove uncomfortable witnesses, they might decide to run for it without ever coming near the city.
# Second stage: from somewhere nearby to Houston
The Lubbock tribes will require a substantial time to regroup, secure their loot (and slaves), and prepare to proceed towards Houston, even having coming prepared.
In a pinch, you might need to reincarnate an Apache Spirit Runner to make the San Antonio - Houston tract in under four days on foot. But otherwise, the Lubbock army isn't likely to do more than fifteen to twenty miles per day, nor leave inside a week. So it will be at least fifteen to twenty days before Houston is hit. A pilgrim-paced individual (e.g. those making the *Camino de Santiago*) can do that in half the time. During the Renaissance, pilgrims routinely walked more than that.
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Even in the days of horse-drawn cannon, you don't generally hear about sneak attacks taking entire city-states by surprise - particularly if tensions were high between the two regions, as you've suggested.
Houstonian spies would presumably have been keeping an eye both on Dallas and their new friends to the north, and any armed force advancing through Dallas' territory towards Houston would not go unnoticed. It might be that in the spies' urgency to get the message to Houston, they feel that San Antonio can be sacrificed, but there's no chance that ten thousand armed men plus supports could invade Houston's area without Houston knowing they were coming.
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You don't need "dedicated" messengers, you just need a few nosy people that have seen the battle from a distance.
As has been pointed out by SCMorfildur, armies are SLOW and limited by supply. A single person is not.
**I think this is something that needs a reframe--the question isn't how the news would get to Houston given the army in San Antonio, it's how it wouldn't get there.**
You're looking at the impossible odds, I'm looking at the fact that it just takes ONE person getting away, seeing (or even hearing) the carnage or even the army itself, from a distance.
It's an army of 10,000, and they have to cross some elevated terrain to get to San Antonio. There are bound to be people who live there who know the territory and who will hide as they pass. They will not get all of them. It's those folks that will warn Houston--they might even gather intelligence as the army passes, knowing that it's too late for San Antonio, they might just head straight for Houston, or follow the army, watch from a distance and head to Houson.
But I take umbrage with the fact that San Antonio would be totally unwarned--an army of 10,000 is not sneaky or stealthy. You can have scouts but they might not cover everything (it's inevitable that they won't).
Some questions:
1.Do your barbarians set fire to anything? When a city is sacked, some of it tends to burn, especially when cannon and gunpowder is involved? That right there will tell people for MILES that something is up.
2. The whole enslavement and looting thing--how long is that going to take? I'd estimate that your barbarians will spend SEVERAL days looting the city and enjoying the riches. They came a long way, and this sort of thing is important for morale and health (they need to stock up on supplies and eat well while they can). You're asking "how ever will Houston know in time?" I'm saying that even without the logistics of a supply chain and moving an army, they WILL LOSE several days here.
It feels like you're using this as your model: [The Battle of Carthage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Carthage_(c._149_BC)) Even though you said Renaissance. Roman cities were a lot more populated then than they were later. The Roman army is far more organized than a barbarian horde might be--but this might depend on the given definition of barbarian...
You have other problems--disunity. In your background, you said that the tribes fight each other. And here you have an army of 10,000. I presume there is loot, they are armed and they still don't like each other. This may also buy time...
A smart barbarian leader would be questioning the populace about the supposed invasion of Dallas by Houston. And he'd know the difference between stuff said to avoid torture and the truth. Barbarian doesn't mean stupid. It can mean savvy--and if San Antonio is as ill-prepared as you say, they will notice, and they might ask themselves WHY. They might also ask why there weren't scouts through out the countryside as soon as they hit Houston-ruled territory. It's definitely what the barbarians would do. The questions leadership might have, and the finding of those answers-- may also buy time.
**You keep hammering away at "how would they get the news in time?" I'm saying that there are a number of complications given your background, plus the logistics of moving an army that would give an individual, even one on foot more than enough time to get the news to Houston.**
On a practical level besides nosy people/unofficial news carriers, the answers of signal towers, homing pigeons and cannon fire are good ones from Rafael.
If the folks of Houston are smart, they will have people in the country side charged with getting news to them--the battle itself--with the cannon fire, not even a signal one, just one being used in battle, is enough to even get folks who haven't even SEEN anything to report back that information.
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Homing pigeons are a great idea. I own a [pigeon control company in Phoenix](https://www.goldshotexterminating.net/) and can tell you from personal experience that even the feral pigeons that we deal with every day are tough birds that can find their way home from a great distance away. They hold up well to just about any weather and are actually pretty smart. I think they would be a great resource.
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[
I'm designing a world with a humanoid race, which has two sexes, male which is analogue to human male, and hermaphrodite which is analogue to human women with additional male reproductive organs, like futanari from Japanese manga.
After reading [this answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/67483/51413) by [John](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/29409/john) to the question [Gender ratio in a three gender system](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/67460/28789):
>
> Sex ratios are controlled more by mating strategy than anything else,
> even species with the same sex chromosomes can have vastly different
> sex ratios. So really it is controlled by how many partners each sex
> has at a time. if your species is monogamous, or serial monogamous
> like humans, then you actually can have a wide range becasue the
> normal 1:1 gets thrown for a loop when you have both sexes at the same
> time as an option. I suspect you will quickly see the hermaphrodite
> begin to dominate the gene pool since they can switch hit depending on
> circumstances.
>
>
> Males are high risk but potentially high reward, like a lottery, less
> likely to find a mate but also capable of hitting the Genghis Khan
> jackpot. Females are a conservative but safer bet, they are almost
> guaranteed to reproduce but have an upper limit on on the number of
> offspring they can have. So if their ratio gets unbalanced the
> opposite sex has a big advantage so the people will have more of that
> sex until they reach equilibrium again. Too many males and males have
> even less of chance to find a mate so females get favored, if females
> dominate males have a much better chance of finding multiple partners
> so males get favored.
>
>
> Hermaphrodite have both a sure thing and the chance of the jackpot.
> The only thing preventing hermaphrodite domination is if males or
> females (or both) are less willing to mate with hermaphrodites than
> the opposite sex.
>
>
> So really it's entirely dependent on how hermaphrodites are viewed as
> possible mates. If they are just as desirable as the opposite sex soon
> all you have is hermaphrodites. basically the less males and females
> are willing to mate with hermaphrodites the closer to male/female
> domination you will see and the more willing they are the closer to
> hermaphrodite domination you will get.
>
>
>
It seems that males are unnecessary and that having hermaphrodites offspring is a winning strategy for parents.
Could there be any explanations why such a species still has males?
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It might be "cheaper". By that I mean - every capacity a body has, every organ or gland or limb or what have you, is something it needs to build up as a child and sustain as an adult. This takes resources: energy, proteins, trace minerals. The less a creature "spends" on its reproductive system, the more it can spend on other systems, like its skeleton, or its muscles, or its brain. I don't know how much more efficient your species would run if they each had a single gender. If it's a non-trivial amount, I would expect them to select away from hermaphrodites in the first place. In a wide-ranging species, you might see different selection pressures in different areas, such that in some places having discrete genders is favored and in other places it isn't.
In the absence of such a variation, I'd expect that one or the other strategy would become predominant and the other would eventually fade. (Although that does take time - you could conceivably set your story in the interim, *while* the species is changing.)
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Actually this happens in nature! There are a [number](https://academic.oup.com/icb/article/46/4/449/635378) of [species](https://academic.oup.com/icb/article/46/4/449/635378) with hermaphrodites and males in their population. It's far less common then species made up of hermaphrodites and females, but it does occur.
Unfortunately, the reasons for males existing aren't as easy to describe as much of evolution, so far most of the examples I researched seem to come down to peculiarities of a mutation with the exact benefits offered not being as easy to explain as other examples. But there are a few generalities of evolution which we can apply.
**Genetics aside, Why we aren't all hermaphrodites**
I should first point out that hermaphroditism usually only sticks around when a species is generally isolated, where it's rare to run into potential mates and therefore the ability to mate with every other member of your species you meet becomes important to being able to produce young (plus the ability to self-fertilize, which many, but not all, hermaphrodites can do if no mate is available) When mates become more common the species usually transitions to traditional male and female roles, with no hermaphrodites around. This is counter to Johns prediction, but it's because males and females are both more efficient at their preferred role then a hermaphrodite is.
To explain this lets imagine a system containing a commonly interbreeding community of male, female, and hermaphrodites. First you must realize every hermaphrodite *wants* to play the role of a male. Males commit far less resources in producing a young, but pass on just as much genetic material; thus it's preferable to go around dedicating resources to fathering multiple young then it is to spend all those resources into raising one (or one batch) of young as a female. If a hermaphrodite has it's choice it will always mate as a male only for this reason.
Unfortunately for the hermaphrodite there is mate competition, other herms and males are competing to be the male that inseminates the other herms/females if mates are readily available. This is particularly a problem for the herms who want to be males because the pure-males are just plain better at it. Allot of resources are dedicated to female reproductive system in a herm, where as pure males are reallocated those resources to being the best male they can be at the expense of not being able to serve as a female. The males are thus stronger, better able to compete in whatever competition is used by females to pick a preferred male, and produce more/stronger semen to insure they inseminate the females. The males will thus reliably out compete with the herms and usually secure reproductive success as a male.
This relegates the herms to constantly having to play the role of a female, due to lack of ability to compete with pure males. However, if a herm is *always* going to be a female there is no need for male parts. Again it's better for the herm to sacrifice the male reproductive parts entirely to dedicate themselves to being a more efficient female, able to produce more and/or stronger young, at the expense of not being able to play the role it rarely gets the chance to play anyways. Thus the herms will slowly evolve to be pure females so they can be better at their role (or the strongest herms may evolve to be pure male, the point is they will tend to divide to be the best at one role by slowly sacrificing the ability to act in the other, until no herms are left)
For this reason (simultaneous) hermaphroditism only sticks around whenmates are rarely available, which prevents herms from having to worry about competing with males to inseminate another herm often.
**The lonley world of Herms**
*IF* you keep your species isolated from other mates, as is usually the case with herms, then males can be explained as having an evolutionary niche where *sometimes* they can out compete herms to achieve mates, but the inability to assure finding mates is a handicap in other situations resulting in maleness being a tradeoff rather then clearly superior.
Imagine a world where mates are *sometimes* hard to find, but sometimes more plentiful. For instance imagine a species in a usually inhospitable location, like a desert, who are usually isolated from each other with rare meetups/matings, as with most herm species. However occasionally a rare resource becomes abundant, such as rain in the desert. At these times all members of the species meets up to exploit the resource and also mate, as an abundance of resources is usually a time that it's good to expend resources on mating and producing young.
In this situation the males will have a clear advantage during the times of abundance when all the species meetup, as they can out compete herms for the role as a male and thus father young with multiple herms. However, during any other time when this abundance isn't happening the males will be at a disadvantage, as when they rarely meetup with other's of their species they will only be able to play the role as male and not female, loosing out on the ability to produce more children (and if they meet up with a male no matings will occur at all). If the instances of abundance were intermittent enough relative to the more common intermittent matings males could be *just* useful enough to sometimes be useful but not always.
It would perhaps be more accurate to say that males are useful in this situations, but pure females are not as useful as herms so a separate female sex doesn't evolve. In general male reproductive tract is far less costly them the female, it 'costs' less for a herm to keep male parts (as opposed to being a pure female) then it costs for a herm to keep female parts (as opposed to being a pure male). As such it isn't *too* costly to stay herm then stay pure female. If a herm gets even a few occasional opportunities to mate as a male it can justify keeping male reproductive parts even if the herm will usually serve in the female role. So if the herm will occasionally meet up with another herm in situations where no male is readily available, causing the two herms to mate with each other rather then waiting for a male, the herms will get to mate as male & female and thus benefit for being a herm over being pure female. Even occasional opportunities to mate without competition from pure males will be sufficient to prevent females from becoming common; even if most mating are done in situations where herms have more potential mates and thus competition to be the male is higher.
I used desert/rain as an example, but your not limited to this example. Any situations where a herm may occasionally have multiple potential mates and may occasionally have only one potential mate will result in this sort of dynamic, where potential females consider it worth keeping male parts in hopes of getting a few lucky matings as male, even though they don't try to compete with pure-males when they are available.
**You poor, stupid, herm**
Unfortunately the above example likely won't work for you, because it doesn't result in a narratively interesting species. The sort of species with this reproductive strategy likely has very short lifetime, Is R select (produces lots of young with little child-rearing), and by definition is not social. Unfortunately all of those traits means it's not going to achieve sapience, and without sapience it will not be a very interesting species to write about.
This gets to a bigger problem that makes it hard for me to answer your question well. If my presumption that your wanting to write about a sapient species is right then the species probably won't have any herms! There are some handwaves you can try to do about this, in fact I have an entire question dedicated to problem [here](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/58147/how-to-justify-evolution-of-a-sapient-hermaphrodite-species). The problem is that without knowing what solution you use to justify the evolution of a sapient herm species I don't know what avenue to pursue to justify herm/male combination. Ideas come to me, but trying to cover all the possible options without better understanding what type of species your looking for would be difficult. If you could give me more clarification on what you want your final species to look like I may be able to give more feedback on how it could evolve.
**I've decided when I get pregnant next I'll let one of my kids have a penis**
One option which could help to justify herms sticking around in a population that would have usually favored a normal male/female split is if the parents have some form of sex determination for picking the sex of their child. There are a number of species, mostly reptiles, that can do this, with everything from changing the environment (temperature being most common) to changing the hormones they expose the child to in the womb.
If you had a species of primitive herms develop the ability to choose sex of their young such that they would produce more males, and females, during time of plenty (when finding fellow mates may be more common, and thus male competition higher) and produce more herms during times when finding males were less common. The key trick being that male, herm, and female *all* existed, and had evolutionary niches, back in the per-sapient species. Where as most species loose the ability to produce herms at all when they develop to male/female roles this species had an evolutionary advantage in keeping the herm role even as it developed a pure male & female role and so their genetics *allows* all three roles to be produced.
If this species then developed into a more social species they may have evolved to have primarily males and females, but maintained the possibility of producing herms even though they were no longer being birthed by mothers because they were less fit then pure sex roles. More likely the species would evolve to pure male/female, but occasional rare birth 'defect' would still produce a functional herm (in much the same way occasionally humans will be born with tails, even though they haven't been an evolutionary advantage since we diverged from other apes). Then only after a more evolved culture kicked in did herms 're-enter' the mating pool.
For instance if a primitive culture considered a herm to be sent by god then the very rare production of a herm when male/female were more common may have lead to the herm being praised and thus getting more matings. Culture's favoring of herms would then help the first few herms produced to further the herm genetics until the species as a whole developed the ability to produce herms.
This is really still a stretch, The length of time that has to have passed between when herms were evolutionary useful and when sapience was achieved is so long that it's likely that the genetics that made producing of herms possible would have been lost through general mutation (if a trait isn't useful it slowly changes because no evolutionary pressures keep it from degrading). This is why I suggest herms would not be produced any more and only a genetic mutation allowed herms to be produced. It's implausible that a herm that was able to reproduce would still be able to be produced, even by rare mutation, in a sapient species due to genetic drift but I think you can handwave it.
In this situation your culture is the reason herms re-entered the gene pool, and thus how herms are treated and how common they are will be more based off of culture, giving you more room to produce whatever mating behaviors and culture you want around the herms. However, you almost have to have pure-females be a possibility as well, even if few of them are birthed due to culture preference for herms
**I use to throw like a girl, but I grew out of it.**
One other option is to have sequential hermaphrodites. In this case everyone is born as a herm, and only a few will grow up to be a pure male. Males are consider prestigious and get most mates, but you only reach malehood if you survive and are strong enough to earn the right.
The catch here is that in sequential hermaphrodites the 'final' sex is always the one that benefits the most from being the biggest (which is usually the female). This would imply that the male gets almost exclusive matings with herms almost never getting to play the male role. It's also more likely in aquatic species, where most sequential hermaphrodites occur.
**Pay no attention to the evolutionary psychology behind the curtain**
If, however, you are okay with handwaving a species existence without fully explaining it's evolution I can give you an idea of what the species will look like in it's final state, which seems to be the primary aim of this question?
by handwave you could just ignore the fact that the species wouldn't evolve. Or you could use genetic engineering, or cultural preference for rare mutation (over an unrealistically long time) favoring the production of herms, Perhaps even hybridization with another non-sapient species producing herms. Again, I need to know what your looking for and what sort of handwaves your open with to go into the full range of options here, another question may be worth tackling your species evolution.
However, the final product would work if the same rule of thumb, that herms rarely, but occasionally, get to mate as males, were to persist. The most obvious option in my mind would be that herms naturally prefer males as mates, males are more attractive, more 'sexy' if you will. Thus in abundance of mate options a herm will most often choose a male. This is pretty much a given no matter what, males are better at being males or they wouldn't be males, they would still be herms.
The more interesting question is why do herms *occasionally* get to mate as males, if herms generally prefer male mates? One option is mating arrangements. If for example herms usually raise their child without male investment, but young/'weak' (from genetic perspective, unhealthy, poor, low social class etc would all apply here) herms will pair off with other 'weak' herms to produce young.
In this case the herms are agreeing to make sacrifices (less preferable mate in a fellow herm, and effectively fewer young produced since your taking turns in the female role) in order to get assistance in raising their young. This would make sense if the herms just couldn't raise young without assistance. So for example if young herms generally have their first matings with fellow herms and co-parent, and then as older herms they tend to mate with males and raise their young without assistance (or possible with some male assistance, but less then a fellow herm would provide).
There are many other solutions here, but be careful they not be purely cultural. For hermphroditism to stick around it would have to be the case that herms got occasional matings in male role for a long time, longer then culture was round. Thus culture should be built around the evolutionary fact that herms occasionally, but rarely, play the role as males rather then culture being the reason for this to be the case.
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Something similar to this exists in real life. Not with male/hemaphrodite but with male/asexual reproductive female
This reproductive strategy is called
arrhenorokuos parthenogenesis.
It is found primarily in some types of mosquitos, bees, ants, and wasps whose unfertilized females only give birth to males (who then in theory have a higher chance to mate with females) while fertilized females primarily give birth to females (but still give birth to males). This leads to a bigenerational species, that alternates between sexual and asexual reproduction.
For your hemaphrodites perhaps they have a reproductive strategy similar to this where the hems give birth to males if fertilised by a hem, and give birth to hems if fertilised by a male.
This would explain why your species still has males. And would give this species an unusual social dynamic compared to humans.
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This exists in real life. The nematode worm [*Caenorhabditis elegans*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caenorhabditis_elegans) is the most well studied example.
In *C. elegans*, hermaphrodites are XX, whilst males are X0. This sex determination system means that hermaphrodites can spontaneously produce males by non-disjunction events. Without males, hermaphrodites almost exclusively reproduce by selfing, rather than by sexual reproduction. Males are smaller, and more active, and their sperm outcompetes hermaphrodite sperm after being passed into the female. Moreover, hermaphrodites impregnated by males produce several times as many eggs as hermaphrodites that self (1000 or more, compared to around 300) due to limitations in their sperm supply since they stop producing sperm once they start producing eggs.
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I am making a reincarnation novel with all of the protagonist's memories intact from the previous life. So what is the time when the protagonist can actually communicate through speaking?
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There was a story recently about a man who'd had an injury, stroke or similar and needed to learn to walk and talk again, just as his partner had a baby. Hopefully someone can find it as his recovery time is effectively the answer.
Even though he had the knowledge of these activities, he still needed to go through the same motions, lying on his back and watching the limbs as he attempted movement, making strange noises as he relearned how to control his vocal chords. In doing so it's said he reduced his recovery time below that of people who get frustrated by their inability to pronounce fully formed words for a considerable period.
It's not just about learning the words, it's about making the connections between the brain and the peripherals and learning how to control them, and building up the muscle strength and control to the level of finesse required for speech.
If this is his first time reincarnating, it may be no quicker than the average baby. If he is an experienced reincarnater then perhaps he has a set of exercises down pat to accelerate effective use of vocal chords and other muscle groups.
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It's around [three months](https://www.babelsdawn.com/babels_dawn/2006/10/the_human_laryn.html).
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> At birth the human larynx is in the normal, animal location, enabling babies to nurse without risk of choking. The larynx typically begins to move lower at about three months of age and reaches its final position by age four. People familiar with children’s speech will notice that the start of the relocation is also when infants start to coo. The end is about the time the children finally become clearly intelligible to well-meaning strangers.
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The relocation of the larynx is primarily evolved to support our need for speech. Complex speech patterns require the valve to select between breathing air and eating food to occur lower than it does in other animals. The result is that it is much easier for us to choke on food until we get the hang of controlling this valve. Infants have a high larynx so that they can nurse without choking. As they get older, and gain more control, the larynx descends to start providing us access to the full repertoire of the human voice.
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I don't see what is their difference with normal child therefore I think it would all go along the usual [language acquisition period](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_acquisition). The brain and muscles have to develop enough to be able to articulate the sounds.
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> there is a "sensitive period" of language acquisition in which human infants have the ability to learn any language. Several findings have observed that from birth until the age of six months, infants can discriminate the phonetic contrasts of all languages. [...]
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> At a very young age, children can already distinguish between different sounds but cannot produce them yet. However, during infancy, children begin to babble. Deaf babies babble in the same order when hearing sounds as non-deaf babies do, thus showing that babbling is not caused by babies simply imitating certain sounds, but is actually a natural part of the process of language development. However, deaf babies do often babble less than non-deaf babies and they begin to babble later on in infancy (begin babbling at 11 months as compared to 6 months) when compared to non-deaf babies.
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I think it would start from about 1 year onward.
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You're asking about radically different things.
**Age to communicate via the vocal cords? Zero.**
All (normally developing) neonates can communicate via the vocal cords. Screaming, etc. Initially, there is basically one word: FIX-ME!!
As infants develop, they quickly are able to differentiate their screams/vocalizations. Some do this more than others and of course it's dependent on how well caregivers pick it up. One cry can mean "I'm hungry," another "I'm wet/need to pee," another "I need to be held."
**Age to articulate spoken words such that they are understandable by others? 4-6 months (though for most children, it's 11-13 months).**
This is fairly rudimentary and it depends both on the word and the listener. Most infants do not have the cognitive skills to really create language here. For them, these articulations are practice sounds. Even deaf children do it to some extent.
While it's not super common, infants can have real spoken words in this period. My own daughter had her first spoken word "all done" (yes, that counts as one word) at 5 months. My husband heard it from the other room and yelled "did she just say 'I'm done'?" Naturally, people didn't believe us. Until they heard her say that and other things themselves, then they all believed it.
**Age to communicate using symbolic language? Very young.**
What do I mean here? I mean actual words in an actual language. But spoken words need some time due to maturation of the vocal tract. So the words come from sign language. Note: if a caregiver teaches a child a made-up or wrong sign (something no local signer would ever use, or one that is misarticulated), and the child uses that, it still counts as a word, the same way teaching a child a made-up spoken word does; output comes from input).
Since I have a background with sign language (including teaching it to special needs students), I had already planned to teach it to my baby. But it turned out that "baby sign language" was a huge fad when my daughter was born (maybe it still is). I refused to use the made-up words but instead used American Sign Language (ASL) adapted for the developmental level of her finger articulation. I only used single words and no grammar.
And this is where I lament the fact that I didn't own a video camera (smartphones didn't exist yet but I could have bought video and I was stupid not to). Because no one hearing this story believes me (even seeing the still pictures). But dozens of people who saw it in action were instant converts and babysitters could interpret her needs via signs.
My daughter started learning a couple signs at 2 weeks. By 2-3 months, she had a vocabulary of several words, quickly growing to maybe a dozen (I took careful field notes but am doing this from memory). One of her common words was "all done" which she used while peeing/etc either on the toilet (after she could sit up and with a special seat and adult help) or being held over the sink. This is the word that morphed into her first spoken word (she said it while she signed it, something we modeled to her). (Our experiences with this were filmed for a documentary about Elimination Communication but were cut from the final version, though I have a copy somewhere.)
**Age to have actual conversations? At least 1, up to 3 or 4.**
This varies by child a lot. I know a lot of children who could simply not sustain a back and forth conversation until they were 3 or 4. After that, they were fine. A lot of kids can do it at age 2 and many can do it earlier. For my child, we were having fairly complex conversations at 18 months (I remember in particular because one of our cats died then and she was asking about the afterlife, talking about seeing his ghost, and all sorts of things to freak parents out).
**What about memory?**
The memory issue is completely separate. While there are stories of people who can remember things from birth or infancy, it's hard to know what is true. Memories fade from young children.
Using my daughter as an example again, she had a terrific memory when she was very young. She could remember things from 18 months when she was 2, for example. But then it all faded. She lost all her sign language very early, by age 2, because we stopped using it with her (no need). Starting about age 6 (or so), she stopped remembering a lot of things she had known, even things she knew continuously. There is a veil that goes over early childhood, perhaps as a consequence of brain development. My daughter is 13 now and remembers kindergarten well, and a trauma that happened at age 4, plus a few things from earlier. But pretty much all her memories from birth through at least age 3 are completely wiped out.
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My background: I have a B.S. in Speech Language Pathology and Audiology with a minor in Linguistics and a masters degree in Communication. My specialty was language development. I worked for a short time as a special ed teacher. Have not done this stuff in decades though.
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An adult's soul trapped in an infant body? In this realm of imaginate, it is possible that the personality of the adult, possessing all knowledge and emotions of its previous life, will push harder the body to respond and develop adequate brain capacities. You will probably have a funny-talking, well-learnt 5 y.o.
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The idea of a child being reincarnated with vivid memories of their previous life is not only not that far-fetched, it isn't even fictional. There are lots of [real-life stories](https://exemplore.com/paranormal/Past-Lives-The-True-Story-of-The-Children-Who-Have-Lived-Before) of exactly this. These children, usually toddlers, have demonstrated intimate first-person knowledge of someone else's life. One child's vivid nightmares actually *solved a murder case* that had long gone cold.
These all follow a rough pattern: the child starts discussing these memories at around one-and-a-half, the age when a child is first able to put words together into rudimentary ideas, and the memories fade by age four or so as new ones take their place. The reason they don't discuss them as an infant is that simply *having* the memories is not enough; an infant's brain just doesn't have the ability to move the right muscles in the right way to form words.
(One reason for this is that the neurons in a baby's brain have not yet developed a sufficient [myelin sheath](http://www.blinn.edu/socialscience/ldthomas/mynotes/03neuron.htm), which is a fatty coating that insulates it from the neurons around it. Without that, the electric charge surging through a neuron when it fires also triggers all the ones around it; which is why a baby's movements are so sporadic.)
If you could somehow implant an adult brain into an infant's skull, shrinking it down to fit, theoretically he or she could start talking within a few days (after recovering from birthing shock); all the moving pieces are there, they just need to grow. But barring that, you're basically looking at the same developmental timeline that all children go through, which is that they start forming words at about a year old and basic sentences at about two.
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I have seen an instance of a child verbalizing in recognizable words and phrases at 6 to 8 months. However, I have seen several children who can do that in the 12 to 15 month time frame. However, this was not on the order of the fluency of talk show material. It was recognizable thoughts beyond "Ma" or "Dada."
This is just a couple of subjective singular data points.
While I am a scientist, I am not a medical or developmental scientist. You might ask someone mainstream in the field, like a speech pathologist who has an interest in very early speech development.
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## Nothing is Instantaneous
The ability to speak and understand develop first, taking such months as they may. In rapidly developing babies, maybe 4 months. In some other children, typically a year to slightly older. Some children never develop speech.
As speech and understanding develop, the brain is forming symbolic connections between words, These connections are the basis of forming rational connections between ideas, and for organizing the sensory inputs into memory. As they develop, the reincarnated person's memories have a way to connect with the developing baby brain.
The reincarnated memories help to shape the baby's brain, and development occurs more rapidly than with a novel baby of the first incarnation, but the fundamental framework in the brain must first exist.
## And, Surprise, "Things Go Wrong"®
In fact, one failure case in which reincarnation fails is when the balance between the baby's neural capacity and the enhancement from the reincarnate are out of sync. If the baby develops faster than the reincarnate, it builds an independent awareness and personality that creates difficulties for the reincarnate. If the baby develops too slowly for the pressure of the reincarnate, the memories can be badly forms and jumbled.
There exist cultural mechanisms for identifying and intervening in these cases, and there have been spectacular failures. Every part of the culture of child-rearing is touched by this awareness. Grandmother's stories abound. Tragedy and Comedy plays use this as central plot points.
## No Disembodied Brains
Because of this mutually enabled development, there is no case where a fully aware reincarnated person inhabits a baby body with no ability to communicate. The reincarnate's awareness grows with the baby's brain and capacity. The reincarnate is not fully possessed of their former capacities until the baby's brain as fully developed, which, even with the aid of the reincarnate to catalyze development, is typically around age six.
[Answer]
**Story assumptions:**
Since the memories -- which would include cognitive knowledge of language & the ability to use it -- are transferred intact from former body to present body, the answer is actually *very young indeed*. So young, in fact, that the protagonist won't actually be able to talk for several months.
**Scientific assumptions:**
* a) [Chronological age begins with conception](https://www.princeton.edu/~prolife/articles/embryoquotes2.html), which is Day 1
* b) [Birth typically occurs at 40 weeks](https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/healthyliving/baby-due-date), which is Day 280.
* c) The [larynx begins development](https://embryology.med.unsw.edu.au/embryology/index.php/Paper_-_Development_of_the_larynx) within the first few weeks.
* d) Vocal cords & other laryngeal structures are clearly [identifiable on ultrasound](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23239522) by 11 weeks (Day 77).
* e) Here is a child at 29 weeks (approx. Day 203) [using her vocal cords to good effect](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ks4AUMJ7db0).
* f) The (biological) science on this point is quite young & ill prepared to deal with the OP's underlying query, but it may be catching up to the theological science: [mind & consciousness & memory etc](https://qz.com/866352/scientists-say-your-mind-isnt-confined-to-your-brain-or-even-your-body/) are not actually merely manifestations of the [physical phenomenon called the "body"](http://catholicstraightanswers.com/brain-control-soul/), but are components of the *entire & transcendent human person*.
**Conclusion:**
Your protagonist, with her memories & personhood intact, will know how to speak, that is, *have the cognitive capacity for speech*, the instant her new body is conceived (Day 1). But we're a little ahead of ourselves! She will theoretically be able to speak, that is, *have the cognitive & physiological capacity to speak*, before about three months of actual age. She won't be able to actually talk, however, until birth, when her chest expands and the [fluid filled lungs are first inflated](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4526381/).
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I have a creature (a cat person) that wants to set its own fists/claws on fire, because it attacks via its fists/claws, and is fighting enemies that are fairly flammable.
What can this creature do, with as low tech as possible, to set its own fists/claws on fire with as minimal damage to itself as possible?
That is, what could it do this with technology?
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50/50 mix of ethanol and water will set light but not burn skin beneath it. Perhaps your creature produces this mix in glands beneath its skin which can be secreted and set light. Perhaps by a ferrocerium claw or pad for sparking.
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> The creature is a humanoid. It's a cat-person, but I'm not sure if
> that's entirely relevant to the problem? I feel like the other
> question is more specific in some ways than this one needs to be, but
> it does have many ideas that will probably cross over
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Cats have retractable claws. I'd suggest that your cat person has hollow retractable claws and that a flammable liquid can be stored within the hollow claws or in a pouch fed through the hollow claws.
Your cat person wears a rough fingerless glove. She can extend her claws and release the fluid while striking her claws one at a time against the glove.
From this she has a short, controlled flame from the tip of the claw. Because the enemy is flammable, it's enough.
Since she has ten claws (but you could give her more) she has ten opportunities in any fight, to light a claw. Maybe she can reload if you need her to, but the idea of a limited number of 'bullets' has some advantages too.
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The creature uses leather gloves that only expose the finger tips(for the claws), these gloves have a insulating "bowl/groove" inside its palm or on its knuckles with desired flammable material inside. The heat will not penetrate the insulation, so the creature shouldn't mind.
How will it work?
You will have some sort of strap holding this device on the hand (this can help you get rid of it quickly if the device fails, so it does not burn your hand) Remeber that the creature has gloves on, so any sparks or hot coals brushing against the hand can not harm it.
Next is the bowl attached to the strap, this could be ceramic, stone or even thick or wet wood. It depends on how long do you expect the device to last. I think the best and cheapest and most primitive way would be some hard wood wiped with clay on the inside.
Next is the flammable material in the bowl, this could be any solid fuel or a medium doused in flammable liquid.
The last part is the most technologically demanding thing (we are talking bronze age or so) You will need wires. They are complicated to make with primitive technology, but they were used both in medieval and ancient eras. And I don't mean like "they could make these", but "They were made for something uselful" Like [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinker).
So once you get some wires you create some sort of mesh and you put it over the bowl with the fuel inside. The mesh will allow the air to flow, feeding the flames, when the creature moves its hands around. You attach this mesh on the sides of the bowl. You can drill holes in the sides for the wires.
And now your "Flame paws" are complete. Now with the strike of your palm (tiger stance) you shall turn thy enemies ablaze. Apply more flammable substance on your target in case it is not flammable enough.
The burning bowls of the Kitty the Scorcher, The searing claws, The doom of the flammable folk!
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**Fur braid.**
The cat has a rope. It could be braided fur. The cat should have plenty of that.
One half of the rope is wet. Maybe wet with salty water or urine, to increase boiling point / decrease volatility. Maybe the wet half incorporates hairballs, which cats also produce in abundance. This wet half is tightly braided to restrict airflow.
The other half is loosely braided and dry. The outermost part might be greased. Cats make sebaceous secretions that could serve as the grease.
The cat starts with the wet half and winds it around her paws. Thus the inner windings are dense and wet and insulate the hand from fire / heat / hot air.
Winding continues; outer windings are the loose / dry and greased fur braid. Grease burns better, longer and hotter than fur. Dry fur burns well too. The loose braid permits airflow. The outer part will burn during the fight and the inner part will protect the hand.
Cats could make these fur braid ropes in advance and quickly wet, wind and light them as events warrant.
This burning fur / anal gland grease / cat urine system will also smell unbelievably bad, which I have to think these warrior cats will appreciate.
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Normally in order to achieve a flammable reaction you mix two liquids which have a volatile reaction to one another, thus causing heat and flame.
Your cat-creature could either have them biologically produced in its organs and delivered to the hands via some vein-like system which ends in the end of the fists, causing a spray of mist to occur from both liquids at the same time. Upon contact, liquids burst to flame.
Same can be achieved via technology, just tiny pumps instead of veins.
As for protection of its own skin - a skinless fist covered in an oil that evaporates easily thus protecting the hand for biological solution or a simple material that does not heat up easily for a tech solution.
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I am trying to think of a reason where on a moon (or small planet), GPS isn't possible/feasible. If you want to go out into the wilderness you need a map and a good sense of direction.
However it's the future. Mankind has already colonized star systems and technology has never been so advanced. So how can there be a planet where GPS isn't possible?
If I remove satellites (like the ones that we have now) I might be limiting my moon colony in many aspects (communication, for example). I tried thinking of ways that the moon itself could interfere but I haven't found much leeway there either.
Is this impossible? Am I trying to have my cake and eat it too?
Thank you!
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# Communications and GPS must either both or neither be present
First off, you imply that you want communication satellites to be possible, but not GPS satellites. This is simply impossible. Communications satellites and their ground stations *depend* on GPS in order to operate. A ground station must know its exact GPS coordinates in order to meet its timing windows for communicating with a satellite using [TDMA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-division_multiple_access), for example. If the ground station is moving, then it has to recompute its distance to the satellite on the fly, every time it moves. The satellite itself is also probably moving, most satellites have some sort of orbital precession. When windows are miliseconds wide, a few hundred kilometers can cause you to miss your window (at the speed of light, 1 ms is worth 300 km, for example)
So, if you have communications satellites, you also have the ability to make some sort of navigation system, and the requirement to have some sort of navigation system in order to allow those satellites to work.
There are several links in the GPS 'chain' that could be broken to prevent GPS (and communications).
### How to prevent satellites
This could be accomplished by [Kessler Syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome). Lots of orbital objects can cause cascading failures that all but ensure that anything put into orbit will be hit by particles at tens of kilometers per second. If your planet were colonized at one time, then there was some Kessler Syndrome catastrophe, then it would become cut off from the outside world.
Removing satellites doesn't prevent older electronic navigation systems such as [Loran-C](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loran-C). However, it takes time to set up that sort of station. If the colony is young, or doesn't take up that much of the planet, and if the Kessler catastrophe is recent, then perhaps navigation stations haven't been set up over much of the planet. If you find yourself on the far side of the planet, for whatever reason, there is limited radio communication on HF bandwidths (which is not good quality signal) and potentially no navigation beacons.
### Preventing all radio signals
In this situation, an atmospheric radiation event has occurred that is causing significant interference. The GPS signal is not powerful, around -160 dbW. This [corresponds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decibel_watt) signal is in the femtowatt range; not much at all! For comparison, this is about three orders of magnitude less than the minimum wireless signal your computer or cell phone can pick up.
All it takes to disrupt this is EM noise at the appropriate frequencies. You can invent some sort of stellar and/or atmospheric phenomenon that is operating at the appropriate frequencies. To prevent existing satellites from being quickly repurposed to alternate frequencies, the noise will have to have a pretty wide band. Fortunately, stellar phenomenal can be pretty wide band...like all bands if your star suddenly starts some kind of radio emission (for details on that...ask a different question!). Given that the wireless in your house isn't killing you with radation (we hope) this stellar interference wouldn't have too much affect on the biology of the planet's surface.
In any case, in this scenario, after colonization of the planet (since who would colonize a planet where radio doesn't work) the star started a period of unusual and unpredictable stellar activity. The planet's magnetic field is protecting the biology of the planet from the unusual radiation activity, but radio spectrum interference makes satellite navigation un-workable. As the planet rebuilds communications capacity with higher power transmitters to cut through the noise, there could be a time gap of decades where communication and navigation is limited. Alternately, the magnitude of the radio interference makes higher power infeasible, rendering communications moot until the star changes its mind.
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'GPS' in the form of radio beacons was available long before satellite GPS. Even if you cleared the orbits, if someone really wanted an area to be navigable with GPS they'd just need to set up radio beacons at high points around the perimeter.
An area could not yet be covered by such beacons but it wouldn't prevent someone setting them up if needed.
The following could be combined with cleared orbits to prevent such beacons
* Unstable ground. Either marsh or shifting dunes could do this. It would mean any local beacons could only be temporary
* Periodic localised radio interference that it wasn't worth developing technology to compensate for, either very rare or highly localised
* Sabotage
* Deep winding gorges that blocked any line of sight or signal
* High winds to prevent static balloons being used
In practice though, you are on a cake and eat it footing here. In theory on a well mapped planet, and given suitable technology, a GPS system could be entirely visual, plotting against a simulation of the skyline, sun, or stars, at almost any point on the planet.
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Cheap and compact handheld GPS receivers depend on the reception of signals. As Separatrix pointed out, there have been [ground transmitters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loran-C) for similar systems.
* Interfere with radio reception in general. That would also limit smartphones. A lifeform with natural radio transmitters and receivers? Or simply "electric eels" producing static?
* The moon suffered a [Kessler cascade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome) and shuttles/starships in orbit have to maneuver constantly to avoid fragments. That makes sats impractical.
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This is not a physical explanation not to have GPS but how about an economical? The company who won the tender for setting up the satellites went bankrupt and the contract is tied up in lengthy legal battles surrounding the bankruptcy and until they are done, no one else can just go and establish a system for legal reasons.
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GPS satellites need to have their known positions and clocks calibrated from time to time, otherwise these could drift. Once a satellite has a wrong reading, it will disrupt all readings that involve its usage. On real Earth, this calibration is done by the [2nd Space Operation Squadron](https://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/control/).
In your world, central command may have lost access to the satellites, or they may have been hacked or broken. So it is not really that GPS is unavailable - it's that due to equipment malfunction any readings are random and inaccurate.
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Realistically, any civilization capable of colonizing another planet will blanket its orbits with satellites first.
Satellite imaging and communication will simply be too important for maintaining a developing colony, especially if contact with the home world is valued.
GPS would absolutely be one of the vital services provided by the satellite arrays any of our colonies would demand.
Instead of mandating that GPS satellites are not used/ are not reliable, why not posit that the GPS satellites have been taken out or sufficiently damaged?
A large solar flare or Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) could potentially wipe out all the satellites in orbit and even damage ground based positioning systems. <https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/news/flare-impacts.html>
If you still need long range comm systems that survive the CME, have the colonies connected by fiber optics rather than relying on satellite communication.
Alternatively, if your GPS satellites were parked in geosynchronous orbits that are far enough outside of the protective magnetic field of the planet they could be critically damaged while those in near-planet orbits were protected.
It could take quite some time before replacements arrive from outside your colony or for your colonists to fabricate and launch their own replacements.
A major part of the need for unguided exploration could be scouting to find deposits of rare earth-metals needed to fabricate replacement GPS satellites.
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It is hard to find stable orbits around our own moon. Low altitude orbits are unstable due to uneven distribution of mass within the moon ("lunar mascons"). High altitude orbits are unstable due to interference of earth's gravity. It is possible to find stable orbits, but I'm not sure if it would be possible to create a constellation of satellites such as that needed for a full GPS system.
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hmm, why does it need to be impossible/unfeasible?
So you want a planet without GPS but with maps?
Possible solutions:
* There is GPS but it is military use only. (Because some countries fight at the moment or have a cold war)
* GPS is too expansive too install when they just make some photos from orbit and have a program make a map.
* GPS on that world can track the user. And your characters don't want that.
* there are many mean people/enemy government that spoof GPS. So better to rely on maps..
And no you could probably get away with GPS satellites but no communication satellites not the other way around. GPS satellites don't need much data transferred.
[Answer]
Due to it being a former military outpost the planet's oceans have an unknown number of ICBM equipped fusion-powered autonomous submarines programmed to attack the source of any unverified artificial radio signals they detect, there may even be autonomous factories in the ocean trenches building more submarines/missiles as needed. Colonists are unaffected by this insofar as they maintain radio silence which for a technologically advanced society is an easier problem to overcome than clearing out a rogue defence system, a system which if attacked may resort to nuking the planet into an asteroid field out of spite.
High frequency short range radio communications may be safe to use inland but anything with enough range to be practical for use as a navigational beacon will probably get attacked and a GPS satellite is going to get destroyed almost immediately.
[Answer]
Stopping GPS:
You have a fairly large retrograde moon in a fairly low orbit. It plays havoc with satellite orbits.
(Note, however, that in the long run your world is doomed. The moon's orbit will decay.)
This doesn't stop limited-range GPS systems based on transmitters on mountain peaks but GPS is inherently basically a line of sight system (it will measure the distance to the satellite by the path the signal took. If that's not direct your answer will be wrong) and thus limited to areas with four visible peaks with transmitters. Far from civilization that won't exist.
] |
[Question]
[
On one of the continents in one of my fantasy worlds, I have a kingdom. The kingdom is comprised of two different geographical regions, a steppeland area in the kingdom's north and a desert region in the kingdom's south.
The problem is, I've been trying for a while now to figure out how this kingdom would function, as the geography poses several issues.
* The only major source of freshwater in the kingdom is a tributary river that flows from the steppeland area into a larger river on the kingdom's northern border. The kingdom is surrounded by two large bodies of water on its western and eastern sides, an ocean to the west, and a large inland sea to the east, but you can't really use that water because it's saltwater.
* The kingdom doesn't really have access to any major forests because of its geography.
* There are only two major cities in the kingdom due to it only having a single river and the land being flat, the capital city at the head of the steppeland river and a port city on the kingdom's eastern coast also in the steppelands.
* There are no mountains or large lakes in the kingdom.
* The world technology level is roughly medieval.
So, taking the points above into account, how would a kingdom with this kind of geography function? Specifically:
* How would the king maintain control over his people with such harsh geography?
* How would the kingdom's citizens live, considering the lack of land good for building settlements?
* Lastly, how do I justify the kingdom not being invaded?
Edit: It seems I didn't really describe the geography all that well, so I'm going to link a map: <https://i.stack.imgur.com/NlAXK.jpg>
The kingdom I'm referring to is the one called Morizar
[Answer]
## Available resources :
**Natural borders**
Significant river in the north, a desert in the south, and sea to the east and west. Your northern neighbours might occasionally come and occupy or loot the cities. If they are powerful they might demand tribute from you, if weak they will pay tribute in exchange for a quiet border free of raiding and unrest. Realistically it would vary over time. I guess the normal would be an exchange of gifts based on wealth and power.
In any case your neighbours neither want your land nor have any capability to hold most of it, so your defense is fairly good. Similarly you are extremely unlikely to be attacked from the sea or the desert. Most of your wars would be to suppress uppity tribal chieftains to submit to the power of the king.
**The steppes**
Steppes grow cattle and horses. You can export meat and leather from cattle. You will also probably almost always have more and better light cavalry than your neighbours. You can easily raid their lands if you wish while an attempt to harass you beyond the border and the few cities and towns will result in losing whatever army was wasted on the attempt.
**The desert**
A flat desert you describe will probably have [evaporites](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporite). So you can expect to mine and trade salt and maybe nitrates and gypsum. This could easily be a royal monopoly (nobody actually owns the desert) and give the monarchy an independent source of income. The salt trade would also be a good reason to have a king keeping things in order and suppressing unrest. And the wealth from trade would make it worthwhile for the chieftains to submit to the royal authority. You might also get [placer deposits](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placer_deposit) of gold and gem stones.
**The rivers**
Your tributary river makes shipping the riches of the desert to markets much easier. From your capital you control the river trade to the north or to the port city.
## Actual answers :
**How would the king maintain control over his people with such harsh geography?**
By controlling mining and trade and then leveraging it to rule the nomadic tribes. Those who support the king get their share of the wealth and get to sell their meat and leather in the markets the king controls. Given that the wealth sharing might happen in the form of steel weapons, I'd expect that loyalists protecting the trade will outcompete rebels trying to loot the trade. Or even tribes trying to just opt-out of the kingdom.
Alliances would also be cemented with marriages, so after a century or two, you can expect leading families of all tribes of any significance to be related to the royal lineage. So the king would have the best connections and likely be the one source of stability needed for the trade.
Monarchies often have some religious component as well. It might be as simple as the first king who unified the tribes having legendary status. It might be a story about the royal family descending from an actual God. In any case the royal family has the status and respect that possible competitors do not.
The king is also the sole focus of the network of alliances of the tribes, so rebellions against him would normally be opposed by other tribes and the largest alliance that can oppose him would normally be much smaller than the one supporting him. This can of course fail if a weak king coincides with a charismatic and ambitious challenger. But the rival would normally be part of the royal family as well, or at least claim he is.
The king is also the sole source of stability and peace, so the traders and usually the northern neighbours would back him against rebels.
**How would the kingdom's citizens live, considering the lack of land good for building settlements?**
Not sure what you mean with this. Steppe nomads do not really need settlements except for trade and you have that covered. Also the steppes and even the desert will probably have places that are good for agriculture and work as major nodes of commerce. Purely from the description of land I'd expect more cities along the rivers and good spots in the steppes and the desert. I'd assume the king is actively suppressing the formation of cities other than those **he** needs to control trade. This sounds silly, but is actually a valid strategy to prevent conquest by his northern neighbour. Even the strongest army cannot conquer a city that does not exist. And nomadic tribes are a much better source of cavalry than city people are.
**Lastly, how do I justify the kingdom not being invaded?**
Natural borders, lots of cavalry, and few locations you can conquer and hold against the said cavalry. Trading for peace and trade goods is clearly a better option as long as the king is powerful enough to keep the peace.
## Minor complaint :
If you have a river along the northern border there must be height difference east to west. So you would probably need a coastal mountain range on one side. Of course the mountains can be old enough to be closer to hills if you wish.
[Answer]
You have a few options for your kingdom.
1. Ancient Egypt. Everything is centered around the river, which is the source of virtually all necessities for the people. All cities are situated on the river, and there are almost no settlements inland. Big river like Nile can provide for a population that is huge by preindustrial standards. Your kingdom can build high walls and field considerable armies.
2. Mongol Empire. Your steppe can maintain considerable amount of livestock, and kingdom's people are very connected to their nomadic roots. Cities for them are more like religious and trading centers than places of permanent habitation. Who would invade such a kingdom? Neighbors beware!
[Answer]
**Does the river flood during the rainy season (even if it doesn't rain in the desert)?**
If so, you have the Nile. When it floods, it spreads good soil across the land around the banks which makes for good farming. That will allow for a very large population.
If it doesn't flood, then there will be a narrower strip of land that they can farm (unless you allow good canal and irrigation systems).
**Is the river navigable?**
If so, you have trade of goods all up and down the river.
If not, you have roads running down one or both sides of the river and trade routes will be shorter.
**Does the desert kingdom extend to the point where the river lets out into the sea?**
If so, you have a, potentially, large delta region for crops. You also have a good trade city for trade with other sea faring cultures.
If not, there is probably a trade city at the farthest down flow end of the river.
**Don't forget the steppes.**
With farming near the river and herds livestock and, maybe horses, this becomes another food source.
[Answer]
The two climactic regions would tend to support two very different economies, which suggests that the Kingdom is either rife with intrigue and strife as the pastoralists of the Steppe come into conflict with the very differing lifestyles of the sedentary farming "River dwellers" who hug the river.
The real life counterpart seems to be the early Mesopotamian civilizations, which were "hydraulic" empires built around the maintenance of elaborate irrigation systems. These kingdoms were periodically raided by the steppe dwellers, who might even establish a dynasty of their own for a few generations until the next large armies of raiders came swooping down.
How the upper an lower kingdoms combine in this scenario is up to you (perhaps it is simply the river dwellers are under the control of a new and vigorous dynasty that swept down from the Steppes).
Remember the "Farmers" may not be very militaristic, but have numbers, are able to assemble in compact masses quickly and have logistical advantages in terms of stored food, the ability to build and man fortifications on choke points and so on. The Stepp dwellers will be more mobile, and have a hunting/warrior culture where people train in riding and shooting bows or throwing spears from horseback at an early age, and can live off the land or drive their flocks before them.
[Answer]
You said:
"Lastly, how do I justify the kingdom not being invaded?"
**Never Get Involved in a Land War in Asia**
Perhaps the denizens of your country use a scorched earth tactic, retreating into the steppe and eventually the desert when invaded, using paths known only to them.
**Better Targets/Threats Nearby**
Are there better places to invade? Are there more threatening enemies lurking? The opportunity cost of invading this region may be too high if you open yourself up for an attack by your belligerent neighbors.
"How would the king maintain control over his people with such harsh geography?"
**Control of Trade**
With few natural resources available, the monarchy, with a monopoly on trade, could completely dominate the nobility.
**Charisma**
The Mongols, a steppe people, habitually rallied around charismatic leaders and dominated their contemporaries, usually due to superior cavalry and their ability to travel close to 50 miles per day, compared with 15 for almost everyone else. Perhaps your steppe people would run circles around their opponents?
\*Note: The river coming from your steppe city needs to originate from somewhere. If the river it joins is flowing from east to west, your city is located where the river begins to dry up. If from west to east, there needs to be a mountain where your city is located.
[Answer]
The Gothelari kings are clients of the Vanlian Empire. The kings are descended from tribes of Alsakubraans that were denied the chance to make the pilgrimage to the Great Oasis.
The Vanlians support the Gothelari kings for three reasons:
* To prevent the Tirreans from settling south of the river. If the Tirreans could settle south of the river, they could double their territory, build a major navy along their Inner Sea coast, and generally be a major threat to the Vanlians.
* To prevent the prophesied re-union of the Alsakubraa. Alsakubraan prophesies predict that a future Alsakubraan Empire will scourge the heretics of all the Southern Lands, forcing the Raelins and Aumedeszeli to flee to the Tempest Islands. This would destroy trade routes that are very profitable to the Vanlians.
* To hire experienced mercenaries for use in their wars with various land-based powers around the Inner Sea.
Much like the nineteenth-century British Empire, the Vanlians have chosen to ally with a warlike, powerful minority within Morizar. The Gothelari kings know that if the steppe peoples unite, the kingdom is likely to fall; they rely on the Vanlian subsidy and remittances from mercenaries to stay in power.
The Gothelari kings encourage their fellow desert tribemen to have a rite of passage in which young fighters raid dissident steppe tribes, or smash any Tirrean outposts on the south side of the river. The survivors become eligible to join the Expeditionary Forces, which are hired out to the Vanlians.
Steppe tribes can appease the Gothelari kings by making pilgrimages to Gothelar, by raising animals that the Vanlians value, and by carrying trade between the Western Ocean and the Vanlian harbor at Dalere. Each year, the steppe tribes that do the most to appease the kings are spared being intentional targets of the young fighters' raids.
As for dealing with threats of invasion:
* The Tirreans occasionally invade, usually in retaliation for the destruction of Tirrean settlement(s) on the south side of the river. But Tirrean logistics are designed for settled lands, not the steppe. Their only useful invasion route is up the river tributary toward Gothelar. Gothelar is strong enough to resist even a strong Tirrean raid. A typical Tirrean raid results in more Tirreans being captured and sold as slaves, than any lasting damage to the desert tribes. The Tirreans still have not figured out that the Gothelari kings don't care about the damage a Tirrean raid does to the steppe peoples.
* Any Lanvelensi invasion is aimed at the Tirreans, not Gothelar. Basically, the Lanvelensi march along the south side of the river to bypass Tirrean strongpoints. If the Vanlians are allied with, or neutral toward, the Lanvelensi at the time, the Gothelari just charge the Lanvelensi suitable tolls. If the Vanlians are hostile toward the Lanvelensi at the time, the Lanvelensi army risks the same fate as a Tirrean army would suffer.
* The Alsakubraans are currently not set up to invade anybody. They might be the greatest threat to the Gothelari kings, but by subversion instead of invasion. If they can convince the desert tribes to worship at the Great Oasis, and turn their eyes to the South instead of the North, then the Gothelari kings would be left without any forces to suppress the steppe tribes and without any mercenaries to rent out to the Vanlians.
* The Expeditionary Forces have fought various overseas potentates. But these powers cannot retaliate against the Morizari as long as the Vanlian Navy stands in their way.
* A civil war in the Vanlian Empire might result in an invasion of Morizar. But the invasion would have a limited objective: Capture the port of Dalere. The Gothelari kings can be relied on to accept their subsidy from whichever Vanlian faction controls Dalere. Having the Gothelari kings change sides would make life difficult for the Expeditionary Forces, and any Vanlians accompanying them.
] |
[Question]
[
Suppose that humans blame the occurrence of mega-tsunamis and flash floods that taking nearly a million lives annually on the terrifying mermaids living in the Mariana Trench. The Secretary-General of the UN decided to use force against this intelligent species and many nations are involved in a campaign against their terrorism.
Since bullets proved useless against the mermaid in their habitat the military deploys powerful laser weapons instead. What kind of energy-based weapon is suitable at such depth? To give you an idea what we are up against the mermaid actually is in possession of a super weapon nicknamed "Rolling in the deep" which is responsible for powering the tsunamis and floods.
The mermaids can hide inside the hydrothermal vents for hours naked and their primary weapon of choice is a punch that is the equivalent of a mantis shrimp snapping and scaled up accordingly!
[Answer]
Trying to use directed energy weapons under miles of seawater won't work. The water will absorb them, boil, and be replenished from the vast supply of surrounding water.
Nuclear depth charges, which already exist, are a much easier and more practical solution. They'll need stronger casings for the extreme depths in question, but that's known technology. They'll kill by shock waves at significant ranges underwater.
[Answer]
## Negotiate with them on the terms of mutually assured destruction.
The [energy released](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake_and_tsunami#Energy_released) by the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami was 9600 gigatons, and only killed around a quarter of a million people, meaning the mermaids' superweapon is even more powerful, despite knowledge of attacks and humans putting up defences against it.
In comparison, the sum total of all the nuclear weapons in the world is [7 gigatons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent).
The mermaid civilization has pretty much 3 orders of magnitude more energy in each firing of their superweapons than the humans'. Since the mermaids are living in a trench, it would be possible to simply use nuclear depth charges as per [John Dallman's answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/59989/4790), but there is no reason to attack each other when both civilizations have superweapons capable of destroying each other effectively.
[Answer]
I'm assuming that you're looking for a way to make man to mermaid combat happen? If so, then powerful lazer weapons sounds like over engineering a simple problem. Although normal guns may be useless, how about needle guns? They work just fine underwater:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_firearm>
The simple fact that the mermaids need to get close an punch their enemies gives them a massive disadvantage when facing off against an enemy/army armed with rapid fire projectile weapons (think of the colonial wars where small colonizing troops massacred entire tribes <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_indigenous_peoples>)
But the fact that they possess a massive weapon capable of creating tsunamis etc. would suggest they are technologically advanced and therefore also in possession of more advanced combat weapons, regardless of how deadly their melee fighting is.
If the UN just wants to lay waste to the entire area John Dallmans' answer would clearly be the best solution
[Answer]
If the mermaids have such technology to cause tsunamis... well, then we are all pretty much already dead and their defenses are probably as advanced as their weapons are, so we have no way to attack them.
Humanity has 2 options in this case:
1. surrender
2. become an ally of the mermaids
] |
[Question]
[
I've been looking into anti-matter and a relatively realistic way to contain it through gravity in my story. I'm probably incorrect in the theoretical physics of the idea but, I'm imagining that the fabric of space/time is the barrier between the matter and anti-matter in the universe. Now if you could somehow stretch space/time like a piece of cloth to its limit and then somehow make a tear in it, antimatter would flow from the other side. I'm wondering if this idea has merit and if I'm missing anything that's needed to describe the experiment.
[Answer]
This comment too long, so I'm posting it in the answers area. **This is not an answer to the main question itself**, but hopefully it will be enlightening.
**Note:** I do not believe a true answer is possible with the **Science-Based** tag in play.
In your question you talk about stretching space and time until you create a tear. Obviously how the tear itself is made is stuff of **Science Fiction** and not going to stand up to the **Science-Based** tag, but let's allow that one aspect to stand.
**How the Tear Came About: Build Something Denser than a Black Hole (Sci-Fi)**
Black holes create such an stretch space-time to such a limit that our current mathematics start to treat many aspects as "infinity". Let's apply **Science-Fiction** for a moment and assume that you made something "more massive per unit area than a black hole", taking those numbers beyond infinity and ripping a hole in space-time.
At this point physics and mathematics cannot identify what would occur. We can, after all, only create hypothesis about the observable universe, but this would be - by definition - a view into something outside the known universe. The fact that it obeys our physical laws at all is frankly astounding.
Here's where we start to (loosely) use the Science-Based tag. Let's talk about [antimatter/gravity interaction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_interaction_of_antimatter) (reference the link for the next three cases).
**Caveat 1:** Once we start talking about a hole in space-time, I'm going to assume that there aren't unforeseen consequences like gravity or time stopping/warping everywhere. Those would be interesting topics to write about, but it sounds like you're going for "business as usual" everywhere else. So let's assume the hole is only locally significant.
**Caveat 2:** Whatever exists beyond the tear is pretty much by definition not from our universe, so frankly I'm surprised that it manifests as something that follows the same laws of physics as our own universe (it doesn't have to). But maybe there's a meta-universal reason for it we just aren't aware of. So I'm assuming that the other universe has the same laws of physics... it's just full of anti-matter.
**Case 1: The Leading Antimatter/Gravity Theory Holds\***
Currently the standard theory of antimatter/gravity interaction is that antimatter reacts to gravity in the same was as regular matter. We haven't been able to demonstrate it yet, but that's the leading theory.
If that is the case, on our side of the superdense region you created we see it as a black hole. On the other side they would see about the same thing. The black hole would then be sucking in both matter and anti-matter. Assuming (as it sounds like) the other universe is just wall-to-wall antimatter and that the hole on our side opened in space (where there is very little matter), the black hole would eat antimatter quickly until it lost so much mass that it stopped being a black hole.
At that point either the hole to the other universe closes or it remains open. It's worth noting that if the hole remains open, the door between this universe and the other is only as large as the black hole that made the tear... anywhere between [0.1mm - 400au](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole#Physical_properties).
**Case 2: Anti-Matter is Repelled by Gravity**
In this case the other universe would have a hole suddenly pop up that repels that universe's standard makeup (antimatter), so presumably none would be hitting the black hole to wear it down. The result would be no "leakage" between universes.
**Case 3: Anti-Matter is Attracted by Gravity, but At a Different Rate than Matter**
At the end of the day I think this basically devolves back to Case 1. As long as there is attraction and a sufficient supply of anti-matter the black hole would eventually cause the black hole to evaporate.
**Aftermath**
This is more or less the range of possibilities available for your story. If you created a very large black hole (eg. 400AU) on Earth or anywhere in the vicinity, you would wipe us all out in an instant. On the other hand, if you created a pinprick you would get very little anti-matter out of it, so that may not be entirely what you want either.
Another, far more concerning, area of concern is what happens when the black hole evaporates as a result of the antimatter. Per [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation#Black_hole_evaporation) "a 1-second-lived black hole has a mass of 2.28 × 10^5 kg, equivalent to an energy of 2.05 × 1022 J that could be released by 5 × 10^6 megatons of TNT" - though we could halve that if we assume half the energy were released into the other universe (we see 2.5 x 10^6 megatons of TNT worth of explosion). Let's put that in perspective. The largest **theoretical** nuclear weapon can deliver [only 1,300 megatons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_yield) of explosive - **still multiple orders of magnitude less than the destruction of this black hole**.
Worse, a 228,000kg black hole would only have an event horizon radius of [3.386 x 10^-22m](http://www.wolframalpha.com/widgets/view.jsp?id=15c7a7eb32c8610b005811b8640ebc1) (1.333 x 10^-20 inches), which maybe doesn't play out very well when you consider how little anti-matter is going to come through a hole that size in realistic time... especially when it needs to come out of a tear a VERY GREAT DISTANCE from Earth.
**In Conclusion**
Even allowing for some hand-waving to enable a tear in the universe using a black hole, **I just can't justify a science-based tag**. So you're going to have to find a different way to rip the fabric of the universe. You probably were going to anyway, but hopefully this thought-experiment demonstrates why this particular route would have no good science-based ending.
[Answer]
Anti-matter is currently [stored](https://home.cern/about/engineering/storing-antimatter) using electric fields on time scales of minutes. In order to store it with gravity, you need to invent a device that can generate gravity (or negative gravity, if that is a thing?) [Here](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/01/160108083918.htm) is an article about theories for a gravity generating machine, though it is pretty short on the facts.
Asking for science-based on this question is a bit much for a topic that is on the farthest edges of the event horizon of theoretical physics. Also, your description, "the fabric of space/time is the barrier between the matter and anti-matter in the universe" sounds like it is grossly in error conceptually. It sounds like you are describing sleep as the boundary between our world and the Fey world...i.e. it sounds like you are describing fantasy.
Anti-particles don't leak into our universe from their own anti-matter universe...well if they do we don't know about it. They exist in our universe, and are created by certain high energy interactions. The big cosmological question surrounding anti-matter is: why is the universe mostly composed of matter instead of equal parts matter and anti-matter? This field of inquiry is called [Baryogenesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryogenesis).
Such an exotic technology as anti-matter storage using gravitational fields is beyond the boundaries of science-based on this site, so, like Separatrix says, stick to sci-fi and let it happen.
[Answer]
Using reasonably known physics, you could use gravity to create an antimatter trap, but not the way you are describing.
Robert L Forward wrote about this in his book "[Future Magic](http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0380898144)", describing various ways to manipulate gravity. Newtonian manipulation involves doing things like squeezing 4 million ton asteroids into spheres about 30 cm in diameter to create a 1 g field on the surface of the sphere. IF you did this multiple times you could set up a ring of spheres where the gravity cancels out in the centre of the sphere. Some sort of auxiliary system would be needed to assist in stabilizing the antimatter, because even a slight perturbation or irregularity in the gravitational fields would cause the antimatter to start moving towards one of the spheres at an ever increasing rate.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/JvWjj.jpg)
*imagine each planet in the picture is only 30 cm in diameter and the antimatter in suspended in the space in the centre*
Forward also suggested more elegant ways to manipulate gravity. Imagine a smoke ring. Now imagine the particles of smoke are replaced by neutronium, and the ring is whirling around at close to the speed of light. The frame dragging would create an area in the centre where gravity would grip the object and fling it through the centre of the ring at high rates of acceleration, but the object being accelerated would seem to be in free fall. An object approaching the central ring could also be decelerated if moving against the direction of the whirling ring. In the picture below, the smoke ring would be turning in such a direction that an object moving from the bottom of the frame would be accelerated towards the top, while an object approaching the ring from the top would be decelerated before it reached the bottom.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/lDAMr.jpg)
*Stay away from the neutronium cloud at the bottom!*
Once again, a series of these "smoke rings" could be used to keep antimatter contained. If the rings were in a vacuum and arranged so the antimatter was either passed back and forth like a ping pong ball, or in a large ring so the antimatter was moving through the centres like a car in a racetrack. then the antimatter wold be much less likely to interact with normal matter.
[Answer]
I think I’ve answered this before… yes, in [this answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/51796/how-can-i-make-an-anti-matter-rod-warhead-for-interplanetary-delivery/51831#51831). Your question asks about using gravity, but that’s totally impractical. For the amount of power needed to manipulate gravity in any form, instead of powering that machinery you can just use electric and magnetic forces directly for the containment!
I see another Forward fan answered already, but I want to point out the “trap chip” and other questions that are more general on containing antimatter.
As for your unusual physics, the closest thing that sounds like this in the real universe is [this paper](http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20010091016.pdf) (boy, that took a while to find again just recalling the general idea!) “Antimatter Production at a Potential Boundry” from 2001.
It’s very interesting to read as background if you will be featuring antimatter in your story, regardless. Check it out!
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