The Associated Worlds

Xveers joined the server. 11/13/2017 11:04 PM

JordanPlayz joined the server. 11/14/2017 12:09 AM

@everyone hi

hello~

I own a server with 100 members

00:10

@Xveers

I am certian a sticker of some kind can be arranged

john dougan(his grace/his grace) joined the server. 11/14/2017 1:24 AM

waves

Archon joined the server. 11/14/2017 1:41 AM

heyo

Hello.

Morgrim Moon joined the server. 11/14/2017 7:26 AM

Enderminion joined the server. 11/14/2017 7:39 AM

hello

TerinSh joined the server. 11/14/2017 8:51 AM

Mark joined the server. 11/14/2017 9:38 AM

00kristofermurphy joined the server. 11/14/2017 10:03 AM

Celti joined the server. 11/14/2017 10:04 AM

John joined the server. 11/14/2017 10:36 AM

nods - "Yes, a rather wild John, indeed!"

10:48

Greetings, all!

Reactionaryhistorian joined the server. 11/14/2017 4:12 PM

Jade Nekotenshi joined the server. 11/14/2017 4:45 PM

waves

18:37

Hi, folks. Not sure what we'll use this for, but nice to see such enthusiasm for it.

18:43

Anyway, just popped in to say that, and deliver the obligatory authorial legal boilerplate: Since I can never keep track of where ideas come from or in what order, by using this Discord y'all agree that anything resembling an idea mentioned here is mine to freely use, fold, spindle, mutilate, propagate, concentrate, exterminate, write down, and/or publish commercially and also not to sue, defame, or complain overlong to me about it, m'kay?

But of course.

18:44

Or, I suppose, as I ought to say, Deal!

JHPrime joined the server. 11/14/2017 6:48 PM

@Overmind pin that messege

Overmind 11/14/2017 7:08 PM

@Enderminion It is done.

good

Nerriana joined the server. 11/15/2017 3:36 AM

Wessmaniac joined the server. 11/15/2017 8:24 AM

charliii joined the server. 11/15/2017 12:58 PM

Noxes joined the server. 11/15/2017 4:15 PM

sdschildberg joined the server. 11/15/2017 6:38 PM

Jinnora joined the server. 11/15/2017 6:42 PM

nobody actullay says anything here, they just join it

joins again

lol

19:40

soo, are you really the author?

Yep, that’d be me.

coool

Indeed it is cool.

19:45

I do have to say, I'm not talking becuase I don't have much to say.

19:46

The work hasn't been updated since this channel started.

Yeah, there’s some stuff in progress but the day job is in crunch time right now.

Fair enough.

o11o1 joined the server. 11/15/2017 7:53 PM

waves

19:54

enjoyed your books!

and just because it's quiet now doesn't mean it'll be quiet forever

wonders how one woulc go about trying to run a role playing game in the Associated Worlds.

21:57

since the setting is so... broken up over vignettes and anthologies, it'd be tricky to get someone up to speed on it quickly.

Take a look at the RPG Traveller

Diaspora's framework may work too

Diaspora?

it's based on the FATE mechanics, the social combat in particular strikes me as suitable http://www.vsca.ca/Diaspora/ Obviously you'd have to ditch the jumpdrive mechanics, but with a little tweaking of the tech levels even the cluster generation is plausible. Maybe change the scale of it to be habitats instead of planets if you wanted to set the game in a particular location

Personally, I'd run it in GURPS, but that's because I'm a bit fanatical about the system.

GURPS is the system I favor - and, IMO, a natural fit for firm-to-hard SF settings, although you'd need to adjust things a bit to account for the 'verse's pro-awesomeness bias - but I'd have to acknowledge that the harder you get, the closer it becomes to Death By Mathematics for some folks' taste.

10:25

(And to properly simulate more than a few 'verse characters, you also find yourself having to build 'em on the Holy Crap How Many Points!? standard.)

Sevoris joined the server. 11/16/2017 11:15 AM

(Randomly: I watch this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5Ok5oxcFng - and I become pretty sure the First Directorate needs a Noodle Incident in which someone was assassinated with a watermelon waterfall. special agent: "Well, they were there , and it seemed a shame not to use them..." lead operator: headdesk headdesk headdesk )

Steven Meng

Oblivion- Present for the king ,5k watermelons + Fireballs

Squid Pope joined the server. 11/16/2017 3:12 PM

...Depends on the failure rate of food transport systems, I suppose... (As in, how easily they can make people belief that that Maglev pod spilling all of its food contents on the target was just an accident) (edited)

if your handler is headdesking going "I can't believe you did that", I suspect most of the Worlds will also disbelieve such a crazy thing could happen on purpose.

Either that or someone would be making a mint on the security camera footage (edited)

MarcusAurelius joined the server. 11/16/2017 6:44 PM

why not both?

reads about diaspora

Zarpaulek joined the server. 11/16/2017 8:02 PM

Hello

20:04

Someone talking about RPGs earlier on this channel?

I've run a few FATE games based on my own stories. Used Mindjammer as a starting point for the custom rules.

If you wanted, you could use eclipse phase if you rejigged the tone and dropped the difficulty of everything by a couple notches. I've also heard about a few high-transhumanism RPGs (mindjammer being one), which might be good, but which I haven't read.

Eclipse Phase has a bit too many "moving parts" if you know what I mean rules-wise. Mindjammer is a FATE system but I'm not a fan of the setting.

Okay, so this a fundamental disagreement then - I love moving parts and overly complex character creation. I don't get to play them much, because not many of my IRL friends agree with me, though. So I might have some untested opinions here and there.

I quite like traveller's system

As do I, but that seems to be the minority opinion in my group.

Oh! I should try and get my group to run traveller. That would be interesting.

Eclipse Phase has a second edition in the works.

22:19

I've often wanted to figure out a good way to import space opera into EP

22:19

also, this Diaspora game for FATE looks super sweet

There’s also an official FATE conversion of Eclipse Phase, “Transhumanity’s Fate.”

Hmph. I should really take a look at FATE, one of these days.

it has an SRD!

22:29

aka: it's availible for free, in full, from the actual publisher (Evil Hat)

22:29

https://fate-srd.com/

And I know a Fate rpg called Nova Praxis that resembles EP minus the Lovecraft, and with corporate feudalism that runs on a Rep instead of monetary economy.

ooooh

reads through these Diaspora rules, engrossed

what was the standard ship to ship weapon in Eldraeverse? gamma ray lasers?

AKV's, and kinetics in general.

23:10

in practice, mostly overheating the enemy ship.

...Interesting question in that regard: What generates more heat: the firing of very-high-impulse manouvering thrusters/sideburners to dodge a 0.9-and-change cee kinetics coming at you, of the KB or lasers slapping it aside?

lasers

Really? I would have thought the thrusters.

I think dodging would generate more heat

the thrusters are ejecting hot propellant which is effetively also coolant

23:15

the lasers have to dump all their waste heat locally

Maybe. Not sure that would work - you superheat the propellant, and everything else still heats up.

a general guideline for lasers: however much heat you're adding to the target, you're generating four times that much heat at the laser itself

„Heat engines that also produce lasers.“

lasers with recoil!

I mean /technically/ lasers have some recoil, do they not?

No

23:19

Photons have no mass - Means no recoil

well

But lasers have momentum because photons have momentum

Photons have some momentum. Just very little.

archon has it right. said recoil tends to be in the pico-newtons though

That‘s how they propel their starwisp probes in the Worlds

it's why solar sails are so slow

23:19

at least with here tech

I mean, they are pretty slow without a terra-watt laser powering them over there.

it's the sort of thing where the accidental thrust from a leaky front airlock becomes relevant in comparison

And all looks meager in comparison to the antimatter-based military propulsion systems who will pull a few Gs without a remass-sweat

This is true.

Does anyone remember what Imperial Warships use for RCS? is it smaller versions of the main engines or lower mass/isp engines or what?

gyroscopes?

I was wondering about that. We know one frigate uses a nuclear-thermal rocket system as the „hot“ deep-space RCS, but that strikes me as not powerful enough for a capital craft thataway of a few million tons, and for dodging 0.9cee projectiles lobbed your way in general (unless I missed a capability of them vector cores to give a starship a boost injection of manouverbility.) (edited)

as for "not powerful enough" you can always make them bigger or set four in a row

Then again given they’re pretty much limited to light speed sensors at combat ranges of a light minute-ish, they probably can’t do much dodging against AKV and other light huggers.

do akv's light-hug?

They use drunkwalk algorithms - can't hit me if you don't know where I am.

23:31

And no, they don't. Much too small.

Don‘t think AKVs (or combat starships in general) can even lighthug

hmmmm, knowing enemy algorithm sets sounds very useful

Very.

At 1-3G endurant power (high-balling it here) you‘re not getting close to cee quick

EW is a big deal.

I think 'slap it off course ' would be the defence against k rods

1

I️ must be getting them confused with something else. And yes, if you know the algorithm they’re not evading. They’re telling you where they are.

AKV is Autonomus kinetic vehicle, I think. Thats the drone swarms. Do you mean K-kill.

Yeah I️ got the AKV and KKV acronyms flipped in my head for a sec. thanks

@MarcusAurelius AKVs come slower than the mass driver rounds in any case (a few hundred to a kilogram at 0.9 cee aren‘t getting bested by somethin a few tenthousand times the weight and an imperative not to meld its drive unit); also, you can always push tangle-equipped plattforms out for that sweet, sweet longscan with pseudo-FTL resolution.

that's why I said pretty much. tangle bits are pretty rare IIRC, so you'd likely not see a signicant number expended on a forward sensor platform during a battle

but probably not zero

23:39

long-scan is great

I mean, if you have a long-scan advantage over your opponent. Thats a big deal, in terms of aiming.

and it probably means you're the defender, with all the advantages that gives you

While the attacker is currently busy using his AKVs, Frigates and Raiders to gobble up the active longscan plattforms in the system...

23:53

Also, I don‘t think tangle are that rare, for the empire of the stars at least.

There're always reaction wheels on-board for backup/slow-and-easy RCS, and always cold-gas thrusters for maneuvering near stations and other ships. Most RCS is some sort of monoprop thruster.

1

00:01

(And, yes, vector-control cores do add maneuverability in the same way as they increase linear acceleration: in that sense, they're very similar to Mass Effect cores. They make good ontotech handwavium for how one can keep up extended multi-G burns.

)

2

1

How do they do that?

00:02

Decrease relative mass, mess with inertia...?

In 'verse physics, futzing around with the vector scalar field (Higgs field) lets you do all sorts of interesting things with inertial mass, gravitic mass, the relationship between the two, and space-time curvature in general. In the specific case of drive cores, it drops the inertial mass of everything inside the field bubble in relation to everything outside the field bubble.

3

1

00:08

(Other related effects produce paragravity, inertial damping, kinetic barriers, tractor-pressor beams, and techlekinesis, but it's all the same underlying handwave.)

1

00:13

(As another note: tanglebits are hard to produce and so expensive, but they're not as rare as all that given how useful they are. As a rule of thumb: The Core and First Tier Markets probably use them pretty freely in their tech where needed - AKVs, sensor platforms, etc.; the Second Tier uses them in a limited number of systems for important missions; the Emerging Markets use them for a very small number of important fixed installations only.)

1

Here’s an idea for tangle bits to write about: The Tangle Courier Service of the Imperial Navy. Or, probably the most important logistics position after the first fuel and remass tankers, especially for the ships not in the frontier (considering you burn more tangle the more stargates are between you and your com partner.)

The fun part is that, since you can't jump one half of a tanglebit pair without the other, you have to ship them by starwisp. Which isn't so much of a problem when it comes to deploying strategic communications relays in friendly, neutral, or uninhabited systems, but it sure makes life interesting for stealthy forward deployment.

1

...Couldn‘t you just deploy tangle relay chains as well? Strikes me as a little more expidient, if logistics-intensive, than waiting the 200-600(?) years it‘ll take a fresh tangle core com the Core to reach any of the outer regions

If it’s still canon, you can send the pair forward through the gate network to the closest friendly gate to the destination, so at least you’re not hurling the starwisp from the core (edited)

Yep. So you can bring the tangle pair to your forward base - or where you anticipate the forward base to likely be - then fire it from there.

1

00:30

In some cases - the forward-planted-for-future-use back door into the Worlds' extranet mentioned in the Core War, for example - that just has to be the nearest stargate with a relay on it. In others, like the IN's urgent-reporting-in network, that usually means the nearest naval base. Sometimes they chain 'em together, but then you're burning tangle twice as fast.

1

That brings up an interesting question: how rare is tangle in the Voniensa Republic compared to the Empire?

In general, though, the local uses (AKVs, sensor platforms, etc.) are the most used ones. You could burn unlimited amounts of money on enough tangle to try and micromanage your war from the Core, and IN policy so far has always preferred having giving competent and trustworthy admirals enough broad-based authority not to have to do that.

1

@MarcusAurelius Could they even produce that?

00:34

Tangle tech always looked a bit near-singularity to me, being an off-shot of ontological science et all (edited)

They (the Republic) have it (tangle), but its uses are limited (low Second Tier-ish) because their production processes are very inefficient; it's a tech that's only barely within their R&D capacity. (edited)

1

...How do the Voniensa Republics deal with savant(-like) specimen, by the way, given they seem to detest anything of intelligence that surpasses baseline?

They also burn rather more of it on infrastructure communications, because Ring Dynamics (having designed their own stargates) built communications-relay functionality into them from the start. The Vonnies' archaeotech gates don't have that, so they make do with tangle and couriers.

1

00:39

They're fine with savants as long as they're natural-born, genetic engineering being one of the techs on their "ooh, scary" list.

Not that geneticaly engineered savantism would be much better. Geneticaly engineered genius on the other hand...

Is the archaeotech gates idea new? I️ went skimming through and the posts seem to say the opposite

The Republic's gates? Well, technically their gates aren't themselves archaeotech, but their weylforge was. Their Propulsion Group swiped it from a Power's corpse and had been pretending they had a firm grip on the technology for centuries... until it broke.

2

1

00:48

(Ring Dynamics, on the other hand, invented theirs from first principles, courtesy of Imogen Andracanth's willingness to hard-wire her brain to a quantum supercomputer cluster... the need for which is why the Republic couldn't invent their own, or properly understand the ones they dug up.)

2

1

But if you do not know how the stargate cores work, it is a little hard to gate information through whatever thingy of hyperspace that keeps the cores connected, I guess.

00:49

(Hyperspace as in, beyond 3+1 space)

The Ring Dynamics gates basically dial each other up periodically and squirt a fast databurst down the resulting internal micro-wormhole. (Since it's a microhole and only massless photons are passing through, they can keep drift pretty close to zero.) So while you don't get real-time communication between star systems, even discounting in-system light lag, there's more than enough bandwidth to keep message traffic flowing and the extranet caches synched up. Most of the delay in getting data traffic across the Worlds is in-system light-lag between gates.

1

..Okay, now I am a bit confused: Where did the Propulsion group get their stargates from, then, if they only had a waylforge? And how to they manage to "ram" wormholes large enough for spacecraft transfer (with momentum adjustment as well, I would asume) but not a small keyhole for communication squirts?

Gen-Engineered genius? I've see that movie, it was called "The Wrath of Khan"

But in this universe being smart doesn't nessercarily make you evil.

06:36

Sufficiently enlightened self-interest is indistinguishable from altruism.

4

eh

06:37

I just wanted to get a star trek reference

Fair enough. The Republic is basically a giant Star trek reference, so it's quite understandable.

"Sufficiently enlightened self-interest is indistinguishable from altruism." "Sufficiently enlightened self-interest" To be honest, that is how I would understand altruism in general. It is taking a disadvantage/less advantagous position that helps someone else now, with the goal of a future and/or alternative reward. "Fair enough. The Republic is basically a giant Star trek reference, so it's quite understandable." ...You know, I never saw the Federation in the Vonies. (edited)

1

The author explicitly describes them as "The star trek federation without the plot armour"

07:15

They have common themes of governmental policy and treatment of natives, AI, transhumanism ect.

now I'm wondering if there has been a rogue Enterprise-like crew that decided they didn't like this and hopped over to Empire space to defect.

07:16

We know there are some mirrored patrols on either side of the border that are good friends.

Probably one of those one-in-a-milenia events

07:17

Well, depending on how much the Empire does "You wanna come over to the civilized guys?" But from the Vonie's side, I suspect getting your hands on a starship is a little harder than taking a truck and driving over the DMZ. And you know they're gonna screen anyone who they let into positions to do the equivalent of the above. (edited)

I remember a story about a scientist trying to defect by uploading and getting caught in a firewall.

fail

@Unknown That's what a weylforge does - makes stargate cores. All they have to do is add some auxiliary machinery and slap their logo on the side. As for why they can't make micro-holes - well, the cores could almost certainly do it if correctly set up, but remember that it's a black box to them. (The Propulsion Group's been trying to figure out how it works for centuries with no success.)They can push the right buttons to engage the cores' basic function, but they've very little real understanding of what goes on inside or how to fine-tune it for other applications.

2

1

07:47

(They may or may not have found a tattered copy of the Precursor equivalent of "Wormhole Operations for Dummies" in the ruins where they got the weylforge.)

Okay. I always thought of the "core" as the entangled collapsed mass.

And that would be the kernel. Clearly I need to freshen up on terminology classes. (edited)

Tomash joined the server. 11/17/2017 7:52 AM

[Altruism-wise - when an Imperial comes out against it, as they do, they're defining it the way Comte did when he coined the word as the antonym of egoism: "an individual performing an action which is at a cost to themselves, but benefits, either directly or indirectly, another third-party individual, without the expectation of reciprocity or compensation for that action". It's sacrificial - you're not even supposed to enjoy it. And that's a bad thing, 'cause it's at best a zero-sum, and rather more likely to be a negative-sum, game. Best avoided. The enlightened self-interest version - as the architects of, say, the Citizen's Dividend in its modern version would put it - is intentionally positive-sum and so isn't, let them be entirely clear about this, is not altruism. Everyone involved is supposed to gain from the transaction, and so that makes it investment .

]

1

I am now suspecting that linguistic collision causes some confusion with new immigrants XD

I have to say, my confussion is mostly with how he manages to develop, hold and articulate all of this in his head without knoting it into a pretzel. Are we sure he's not a first-in scout conducting some subtle memetic uplifting on us? (edited)

's why they insist on fluency. (Note to anyone putting together GURPS Eldraeverse: being linguistically weird in a similar way as lojban is to normal-language speakers, Eldraeic should definitely be Mental/Very Hard. In the absence of Mental/Excruciating, anyway.)

08:12

Heh. Not so much in my head. I have a 'verse wiki to keep my notes in. 12,394 topics and counting.

Yeah shure, but your head develops all of it. ...Doesn't it?

(edited)

Fair point.

There's probably going to be that lovely awkward period where newbies are struggling with "how the heck do I declinate these clauses?" with Eldraeic... although given the culture probably also locals that enjoy helping the newbies through this, both because interesting insights and funny mistakes, and allso the whole investing in the future bit they like

@Overmind what got you to start this anyway? My familiarity with the Eldraeverse basicaly goes until something about 2014-2015 I think, when Atomic Rockets refered me to "Heavy Infantry" and the Havoc. So I don't know where or when this seriously started, only that there was one previous blog of some kind I cannot find.

How big is a Weylforge anyways? I've got a partial Dyson around Proxima Centauri used to make wormholes.

@Zarpaulek Do you write The Para-Imperium?

Yes, heard of it?

2

By recomendation of a certain person who made this server.

Been following the blog for some time now. I enjoy it a lot!

(edited)

Just about to begin my binge of it this weekend

@Unknown Yeah, that original blog is dead and gone. You're not missing anything, though; all the relevant content with a couple of decanonized exceptions has all been republished on the current one.

01:03

As for what got me started - well, like I say in my author blurb, I pretty much woke up one morning with a universe and a bunch of characters running around in my head. That means either authorship or schizophrenia, and the former seemed like a better bet. The current blog goes back to, hm, 2011 or so, the previous now-dead one a couple of years before that, but I've been fiddling with one version of the world or another - the early versions of which didn't bear much resemblance at all to the current, stable version - for probably around 20 years at this point.

If it’s not too intrusive, how old were you when the ‘verse first came to you, in the weird initial form? (edited)

Early 20s, let's say.

01:13

@Zarpaulek Big and honking by starship standards, which translates into "about six miles long, most of which is lightweight frame to get the effectors in the right position for the controlled q-state implosion". (Mass for the singularities is usually gathered locally, and antimatter for power shipped in from the dedicated Esilmúr production facility, if it can't be locally sourced.) (edited)

1

01:16

The stargates that get wrapped around the singularities once they're produced and entangled are about half as long again, but most of that's also lightweight frame around the working parts of the Andracanth ram, and the "distant" half of the pair is hauled to its destination before fitting the auxiliary equipment (space-traffic control, extranet relays, etc., etc.) to it to save on mass.

1

makes sense given it would need to be sent the 'long' way

And then it is massive, as well. Can't find the original descriptor but when you have a payload weighting a few million metric tons without anything else...

Just read the new thing posted to the blog, reminds me of one where an outnumbered force used a virus to make the enemy missiles sentient.

I have to say, the photonic network is frightingly good at squirting executive software into things That Do Not Belong Online, and probably also at doing spaceborne nanowarfare.

“Biosophonts of the Senate, we must close the processor gap with the Photonic Network!”

4

1

And the Dreadnought gap and the mineshaft gap

Also the Cirys swarm gap.

and the Insert pointless thing here gap

Really unreachable unless you are ready to consider general-purview Archilects something acceptable gap.

15:07

Well, I guess you could go for "global meat-brain"...

I would guess the Photonics are almost as good at social engineering as they are at software.

15:09

Remember how a virus was carried onto Iran's air-gapped nuclear reactors by a flash drive?

meat-hacking

Χierumeng joined the server. 11/19/2017 12:20 AM

Does anyone know a good Transhumanist podcast? Searching on iTunes leads mostly to stuff about "cosmic understanding" and "indigo children".

hmmmm. Podcast? dunno. Mostly I know Rationalist webstes, which isn't quite the same

Unfortunately not.

I found "Singularity.fm", but the latest episode turned out to be mostly the host debating Bill Nye on the origin of ethics.

17:51

Nye thought it was evolution, the host guy was arguing some vague "metaphysical" origin

After thinking about this for some time... how is ethics supposed to be „metaphysical“?

He could claim it comes from a soul or god or some idea like that

...If that is the definition coming from a transhumanist/singularity seeker, it feels like a really weak one. Perplexing too, if you argue for the existence of a soul as metaphysical entity, or from a god (which also raises the question, from what god.)

Well, apparently the first episode was an interview with a spiritualist transhumanist (though at least he wasn’t technophobic)

Huh. You learn something new every day.

(edited)

I guess my dumb guess wasn’t so dumb after all

Metaphysical in the sense you should be able to argue it from pure path and logic, without needing to observe the physical world ? (edited)

Well, even pure-quill materialism is a metaphysical position. (Although lots of hardcore materialists and positivists will deny this, despite that being the intellectual equivalent of kicking away the ladder you're standing on and claiming it was never there in the first place.)

23:16

Now, I (along with my fictive chaps) might be inclined to argue that ethics arises implicitly from the nature of sophoncy... which is a metaphysical question in all respects not directly connected to a particular physical substrate.

thomasscott joined the server. 11/28/2017 4:33 PM

Thomas Scott Terry joined the server. 11/28/2017 4:36 PM

waves

Hi Salve 你好 Bonjour Hola Guten Tag Здравствуй Aloha 今天wa Salaam ...Yeah, I think that covers it

Pretty well, yeah. You got my mother language at least

I've always gotten a European vibe off of you, though I can't decide whether I like the French or Russian guess more. Also, I'm gonna apologize for the 日本語, I've got a pinyin keyboard but no kana and I felt popping on a dictionary to copy paste was cheating.

settles down to read these anarchist writings

23:55

Question @Overmind: Is the first quote supposed to be formated as it is?

Yeah, I'm using the blockquotes as section breaks. It didn't work quite as well as I'd like, but I haven't the patience to go back and reformat it.

4

Talia "Elli" B joined the server. 12/04/2017 5:17 PM

I arrived by way of Winchell Chung, where do y'all suggest I start reading?

Greetings, and all the other ones from the great wall of translations above. I'm an archive binger, I like to start at the begnning and work my way forward. The important question is, are you here for some "Atomic Rockets approved" fiction or the worldbuilding behind it? if the first, The Core War is the longest individual story IIRC.

i kinda just bounced around randomly

yeah, most of the archive is pretty well tagged, you can always find a tag that interests you and follow that (e.g. the Eikones for me)

Trope a Day is a good start too

I read through everything in order (twice, now).

From the random-thoughts-not-used-because-of-lack-of-necessary-precursor-memes files: "microaggression (n.): being shot with a derringer macroaggression (n.): being shot with a rifle megaaggression (n.): being shot with a howitzer Extrapolate and interpolate as necessary."

sooo, Mega-Ultra-Hyper-Super-Duper-Ultimateaggression would be ground zero for a big bomb of some form or another?

heeee

Strangelet bomb. Because fuck your information coherency and normal matter state.

Quick creepy-stalkerish question for those more familiar with Discord than I: is there any way to identify a server (presuming it's public) from the server ID/URL? I've been seeing a few discordapp.com/channels/... referrers showing up recently, and I'm kind of curious as to where they're coming from.

eh? if it's spam, don't click on it, OR you could make a burner account and see where it goes

Where they go is mostly to a "you aren't a member of this server" page. Which may just mean it's private, I suppose, but since it didn't say so... well, curiosity, and all that.

Have some random ideas:

12:15

Proposed: the matter/antimatter imbalance in the universe exists because time travelers from the distant post-stellar future stole all the antimatter early on to use in their power plants.

12:15

Also proposed: can we shove a wormhole end far enough into the future to be able to use the Heat Death of the Universe as a functionally-infinite entropy sink?

12:15

(we ignore for this purpose the likelihood of the Cold Ones coming back down the wormhole to eat our infostates)

Counterpoint to the second one: Do we really want to aid entropic decay of the Universe Information Carrigage Capacity by pumping any entropy we produce straight to Heat Death?

Well, in practical engineering purposes, we should get maximal use out of it first . Only lowest-grade waste heat needs to go down the futurehole.

Hmmmm... honestly, I am not quite sold on the concept. I mean yeah, entropy rises onwards (that much physical chemistry has hammered home) but that's a continous number, not an instant jump from "usefull" to "not usefull".

12:20

"High entropy" now will be "low entropy" further onwards, relatively speaking.

Yeah, but the work you can get out of a low-entropy state depends on the differential, right? (The entropy equivalent of the heat engine equation - it's the difference between the source and sink temps that matters, not the absolute value.) By giving you access to the final universe state where even the microwave background has decayed to within delta of nothing, you have the best possible sink, and so can extract more out of your low-entropy states before they decay to uselessness. (edited)

2

...That is true, however. Very good point.

So you're shifting entropy increases from 'waste heat degrading further' into 'useful work'.

Proposed: If you can fling a wormhole that far into the future... could you maybe catch the next big quantum fluxtuation setting off a big bang?

12:27

Also, using far-future wormholes as entropy differential sinks reminds me of this article: http://aleph.se/andart2/space/the-aestivation-hypothesis-popular-outline-and-faq/

admin

The Aestivation hypothesis: popular outline and FAQ

12:30

Yeah, this just brings the entropy sink to you, rather than the other way around. Which might be better for you, as the differential's even bigger if you don't have to wait for the universe to cool first.

Which of course raises the problem of building a transtemporal wormhole first, and it not collapsing as soon as a Q-bit of information goes through the bulk.

12:31

And well, getting it trillions of years into the future

Now, if you can punch holes in the universe and connect to other universes, you can build the perfect power plant: use one universe's Big Bang state as your source, and another's heat death as your sink.

12:32

There may be minor moral issues involved with basically aborting one entire universe's creation, and what you do with the other's desperate refugees/elder gods/both, but hey, the theory's sound!

12:32

(Always these little engineering problems.)

Eh, it's all quantum physics. When you got e^500 universes to target at a minimum, snuffing out one cycle becomes kinda... irrelevant? I mean, it's all gonna repeat itself anyway

Yeah, but like the starfish, it matters to that one.

At least, from the perspective of us people caught underneath the 4th dimension.

12:34

Bulk beings may disagree on our perspective.

And that's when you need to discover how to fire missiles at right-angles to reality.

5

...You know, abstract-rationaly, I understand perfectly well what this sentence is supposed to say. Another part of me just finds it funny and wants to laugh for no reason.

The sentence has achieved both its goals, then.

Or you take 40-meter tall mechs, stuff a child soldier inside it, and give him a gun that shoots projectiles whose fusion explosions spread higher-dimension radiation that kills bulk beings... (Shoutout to Aeon Entelechy Evangelion. If you feel your day is going too good, check it out. Also recommended for all matters high-dimension technobabble.)

...and comments like this remind me why I️ watch so few anime

Hehe. Yeah... they can be really crazy.

16:16

Sometimes that leads to insightfull, philosophical stories

16:16

Otherwise, you just get... totaly confused

the sort of culture that can build a wormhole to other universes seems like the sort of culture that can build some nice deep-black habitats for the desperate surviving refugees of a heatdeath universe, mind

Sure. As long as they aren’t starving Lovecraftian horrors out to eat everyone’s brains in a cosmic orgy of negentropy-absorption.

the ability to build deep-black shelters does not imply they also find it moral to do so

20:50

some of the more inward focused perversions might actually be playing around with dimensional portals, poking at foes too weak to stop them. (edited)

20:50

a lovecraftian horror of it's own, but pointed at someone other than the Empire of the Star

Well that’s not freaky

Now I'm wondering if a perversion can mutate into a being capable of being a reasonable galactic citizen. It'd be hard to convince everyone else if it did, given the first rule for handling perversions seems to be "don't talk to it"

Well that entire conversation is going in my quotes database. Super interesting discussion.

I’m guessing sans my dumb derails

(edited)

Nah. It's easier to just copy/paste the whole thing. You only really said one thing in that conversation.

23:32

And that was actually part of it.

@MarcusAurelius I think that was a compliment!

I'll take what I can get

One last thought on interdimensional (transtemporal) operations and civilizations: It is assumed for first: There exists a Multiverse, where ΔQ > 0 applies It is assumed for second: It is possible to travel between individual universal entities in some manner, and achive the exchange of discrete information from one universe to another it is assumed for third: Specific event points within a universe can be targeted, or Universes do not run "in synch" - Which is to say, one universe can exist near the big bang at the same "multiverse time" as another universe is approaching maximum entropy. In consequence: Given that such a Multiverse expresses every possible information state in some manner, it is very much possible to target one universe to draw power from the big bangs big soup, and use another universe as an entropy sink - As every possible state is expressed in such a universe, there exists another universe where the causal branch made impossible by interference of another universe is possible, and thus no information is ultimately destroyed or interfered with. However, this implies the existence of a limiting factor that I will henceforth call the "Metacausal Event Exception" - Which is to say, not only does ΔQ > 0 apply, there also applies Event NxUx ≠ NxUy in consequence of the former law, so that no universe may express the same information state. In consequence, for a universe where living off other universes is possible, there exists a universe where the same is, for one reason, impossible. So you better hope the cosmic dice dealt you a favorable number. If not, you may curse the great ontology and contemplate your eventual decoherence, or hope Bulk ascension is a metacausal event in your universe.

1

03:24

=================== Other fun ideas of interuniversal travel: Ontology take-over: One universe civilization(s) might seek to take over a more favorable ontological framework and evict or recompilate whatever occupies that ontological framework at the moment. This gets even more interesting if you allow for differing natural laws: Then the Biggest Game is for the control of favorable ontological frameworks. Differing natural laws can also lead to: Ontological Convergence: Your universe might suppot a form of FTL travel compared to other universes. As such, inter-universal factions might often tranfer in and out of your reality to use it as a short-cut. Hospitality (and hostility) and associated opportunities of trade obviously apply. (For one example.) (edited)

1

Tubusus joined the server. 12/09/2017 12:50 PM

"Ah, I see it's time for the most awkward part of first contact: the part where they're selling plushies of you." "Can we make them stop?" "No, but you can sue them, and then settle out-of-court for 50% of the net."

6

At least it’s only plushies

I was about to say. Especially if the body plan's sufficiently similiar, the artwork of the oldest profession is not far behind... ...If not in front. And that came out wrong. Excuse me.

(edited)

1

3

@Overmind that could work both ways

Almost certainly does.

14:54

Argh. Which probably means that every first contact is followed up by a Pokemon-styled ("gotta collect every species") beanie baby bubble.

5

Though on the other side it is probably less plushies and more "nanomotile filling-articulated robot also serving as a plushie" (edited)

Local economists: "Gee, thanks. As if we didn't have enough problems today."

And the defamation suits coming in from individuals feeling their plushies misrepresent them

3

Followed by the rebutals: "If the honorable Sophont would have been more agreeable to handing over personality data for us to build a more authentic emulation based off, this honorable corporation could have avoided the miss-reprentation debacle. And this honorable corporation would like to remind the honorable gentlesophont that by imperial law we do follow privacy laws regarding root personality data." (edited)

14:58

Or somesuch argumentation; I don't think I hit the tone right

Closer than Arrius, at any rate

Deleted User joined the server. 12/09/2017 5:01 PM

Hello

Hi Kevin

Hi

yo

Hey

Note: I've created the #spoilers channel for spoilers for Things That Aren't Mine, 'cause I had a The Last Jedi thought to share. If you mind spoilers for Recent Media Stuff, it's a channel to stay out of.

Okay

(Maybe there should be a list of currently spoilered things somewhere, but, enh, worry about it if it becomes an issue.)

You could always pin the message announcing it and edit it as necessary

Maybe in a separate channel?

Is there a nuclear engineer in the house? http://eldraeverse.com/2017/12/18/liquids-cant-melt-down/

Alistair Young

Liquids Can’t Melt Down

So I’ve been playing around a bit with nuclear reactor design, as one does. Thinking about the gap in the portfolio between the high-performance and high-unfriendliness molten-salt designs me…

seems good enough

06:22

Vapour core is another one of those type of option

probably don't want helium as the chosen gas if there is a plausible alternative, manipulating helium is an extremely painful process if you want it to do more than just sit there. It's used in stuff like supercooled magnets less because it's good to work with and more because liquid hydrogen is even more of a horror and there aren't really other options.

even just sitting their has issues, a pressure tank caved in on a SpaceX rocket and froze some LOX/LH2 (one of them) causing "Rapid unplanned disassembley"

I’ve got a feeling that having the gas free-flowing through the the reactor is going to cause weird turbulence in the fuel and probably carry fuel vapors into the coolant loop. Both don’t sound fun

@MarcusAurelius I was thinking of the turbulence as an advantage, actually: on the one hand, it improves mixing of gas and liquid, and so thermal transfer; but also, by keeping the liquid in the core agitated, it helps prevent the high-density uranium salts from settling out or concentrating to form a hot spot, or worse, a prompt criticality. Fuel vapors, now. Yeah. Those could definitely be a problem.

It’s a trade off, I guess: better thermal properties, but now you’re coolant is going to radioactive, which leads to fun stuff like neutron embrittlement

@Morgrim Moon I'd looked at carbon dioxide (like a CANDU) as a possibility, and a couple of others, but I've noticed that a lot of gas-cooled reactor designs seem to prefer helium because it doesn't neutron-activate easily, so you don't have to worry about significant amounts of radioactivity in the coolant. He (although at least not liquid He, thank Eris) handling might be worth it if you can eliminate the steam generator and the whole secondary loop. (edited)

Another thing I️ just saw: what’s the moderator supposed to be? It looks it says D2, but it’s hard to read.

What temperature is this supposed to work at anyway? Modern molten salt reactors use fluid cooling, not helium gas cooling, while operating at around 600 to 700 degrees celcius.

14:30

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMSR Like, this canadian reactor operates using low-enriched uranium fuel mxed with carrier salts, not Thorium salts, and works using liquid cooling. So what's the advantage of gas cooling?

IMSR

The Integral Molten Salt Reactor (IMSR) is a design for a small modular reactor (SMR) that employs molten salt reactor technology, based closely on the DMSR design (see DMSR) from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, TN, USA, and it incorporates elemen...

@MarcusAurelius it does, but that’s a writo. It should say D2O - heavy water.

20:42

@Unknown The big advantage of gas cooling is that using He, which doesn’t neutron-activate significantly, you can use the primary directly and eliminate the whole secondary coolant loop. Secondary ones are that it provides convenient ways to extract gaseous reaction products and agitate the core, but those are more handy side-effects than anything.

20:45

And I’m not opposed to using a carrier-salt solvent rather than water: the key thing is that whatever the solvent is, it has to work well with the fuel regenerator for extracting neutron poisons and stable waste products, since this design’s intended to eliminate all fuel assemblies and let you refuel without ever shutting down.

This is meant to be when our favorite space elves are still planet-bound/exploring their own system, right? If so, I found an interesting potential problem: almost all of Earth's helium supply comes from natural gas deposits, because it escapes from the atmosphere and isn't really found concentrated anywhere else. So that's going to be fun on Eliéra given the IIRC lack of fossil fuels there. Side note: nice job borrowing the name of the Greek moon goddess, whatever the in 'verse etymology is

It's coming from the same place, though: produced by radioactive decay of uranium and thorium minerals, and Eliéra's got lots of glow dirt. (There's a reason why the Era of Steel and Steam was powered largely by nucleonic furnaces, not coal-burning or wood-burning ones.

) So there was plenty of helium there caught in stratigraphic traps - it just didn't have much natural gas mixed with it.

1

(Eesh, it'd be nice to be able to create pinned messages without having to drop them in the normal flow of traffic. 'Cause then I wouldn't have to explain that the following isn't prompted by anything anyone did or anything that I expect anyone to do - it's just that I've been reminded that it's a Really Good Idea to have some sort of rule/code of conduct in advance of any issues that do turn up.) (edited)

00:50

Default Uncode of Conduct for Participating Here If it turns out that you need a code of conduct to tell you, in general, how to conduct yourself as a civilized sophont, and/or in specific, not to do that shit you just did - you're gone. Meta-Uncode of Conduct for Participating Here Demanding a more formal code of conduct, or elsewise to know what my standards are before the hammer falls, will be taken as prima facie evidence of intent to game the system. You're gone. Clarificatory Note As the founder/owner/author, I have appointed myself Community Manager, Grand Master of the Knights of Standards & Practices, and Chief Ear-Scritcher of Doombringer the Adorable. As such, my judgment is final. Attempting to argue the toss with any of the above after the fact will be taken as a prima facie attempt to create Internet drama, which is... you guessed it. You're gone. A Final Word Have a nice day! (edited)

3

Overmind 12/19/2017 12:50 AM

I’m reminded of a fantasy RPG book I read where alchemists made blocks of stone or metal that produced a steady amount of heat for an extended period and then used them for steam power

that' sounds nothing at all like a big block of radioactive death

I've seen similar. Dragons could make a special rock called 'everglow' with a particular way of flaming it repeatedly, and it'd stay glowing warm for about a year. The dragons used this for bedding and incubating nests. It was only when they allied with humans that the humans had a brainwave about steam power.

Bit of a channel reorg going on, moving announcements to the announcements channel, please bear with us...

I'm currently reading the Sufficiently Advanced rulebook, which is a High-Transhumanism Tabletop RPG. And I want to create a Eldreaverse Charecter for it. So I must ask of you: What would function best as the core values of the Empire? You must pick two - that's how many core values a civilisation gets, from what I have seen.

This thing? http://suffadv.wikidot.com/civs

Oh, hey, that's added a few civilizations since I last looked at it. (edited)

08:35

...ah, new edition.

Aside question given the wiki mentions "root access" to paraphrase, for neural weaves: How much root access do Eldraeverse brain DNI solutions offer commonly?

[How much root access do neural interfaces offer commonly?] Depends on model. If you go full synnoetic (which a lot of people do, because it's just so powerful and convenient) there's functionally no difference between the neural lace and your brain. Less integrated solutions are available for those who feel -paranoid- cautious. (edited)

08:44

But, y'know, you have to miss out on a lot of features that way.

1

To be honest, when it comes to brain hacking, or rather, Ego root access, that might be worth the price. (edited)

would comparatively 'new' species have to settle for less effective solutions for a while? I imagine it takes some research to adapt stuff like neural laces to unfamiliar biologies. Especially how weird some biologies can get...

I'd worry less about biology and more about the conceptual translators...

That's what the fierce firewall at the edge of your exoself and other security systems are for.

Or rather... can a cutting-edge neural lace rewrite the brain as well as wet neural printer, or are they limited to Structure I/O?

But there's a very distinct limit on how vastened you can get if you insist on using only sensory-level access (with, presumably, basilisk filters, etc.) as an interface to your meatbrain. It makes cognitive offloading very tricky. There, the tradeoff has come down in favor of slightly increased risk as preferable to guaranteed stupidity.

1

08:48

@Morgrim Moon Yeah, there are some definite limitations for a while while the problems of interfacing to different brain-structures are worked out.

08:50

Depends on the brain. You can rewrite mind-states with the speed of data transfer like that if the brain in question has been grown - or reformatted - to run Universal Noetic Architecture, which is designed to allow this sort of thing. Your evolution-designed meat-brain, on the other hand, isn't so flexible: for that, you need a cerebral bridge which literally pushes neurons around and trains the resulting networks - not something a 'lace alone can do.

1

So it‘s „only“ a two-way interface, with the Neural System itself requiring the technical capability to rewire as desired?

(UNA is sophotechnological handwavium that reformats a brain into a neurocomputer VM for running mind-states.)

1

08:55

That said, most brains these days use UNA, 'cause mindcasting and various other forms of sophotech is inconveniently slow when you have to lie down with your head opened up while the bridge pushes your neurons around. Naturally-evolved brains were a great way to farm mindstates, says popular opinion, because they generate lots of interesting quirks, but for actually running mind-states they're basically ancient cut-a-cam analog computers in the age of the microprocessor.

1

@Archon To bring this back around to your original question - just two? And it wants one-word CVs, doesn't it... well, if you've got to cut down the Imperial motto, "Order, Progress, Liberty", run with Liberty and Progress. (Order in their sense being mostly emergent order, it doesn't mean what people would probably assume it to mean anyway - you might be better off calling that one "Civilization and Good Form") Or you could treat "Progress" as the civilization's Benefit, I suppose. I know the background, as of 1e, at least, but haven't played with the crunch myself.

I'll be honest, brain uploading makes me uncomfortable in general, but gradual uploading a little less so.

09:25

For instance, the game Nova Praxis has a process called "apotheosis" where nanobots are injected into the brain and over the course of a week replace your neurons with a carbon nanotube-based neural net.

I have to admit, Eclipse Phase-style continous uploads are better than fork-uploading or unconscious uploads, but overall I still follow the identity pattern theory.

09:27

So personally I prefer gettin reinstantiated from Stack instead of being permanent-dead.

I think a Stack might still count as a fork, it's possible (though difficult) to remove one without killing the user and instantiate the Ego saved on it.

See, the gradual uploading thing reminds me of Greg Egan's "Learning To Be Me" and that gave me nightmares

Still, I'd have an easier time believing I was still me if I was instanced from a stack that remembered dying than from a backup scanned a day before I died.

Yeah, me too. At least, I‘d have a far easier time thinking about it.

Well. Likely at best you'd remember the few seconds leading up to the accident, because our current fleshbrains WILL fail to record the moment of impact.

Well, it would be the stack's sensors that recorded the experience rather than the meat-brain, wouldn't it?

Oh, it will record up to the point of „seriously scrambled brain.“

I was in a nasty bike smash once and I still clearly remember all the events from when it started until ~2 seconds before the moment of impact, and then my memory is utterly blank until it was all over and a stranger was demanding to know if I was alright while prising me free

More likely your own brain‘s gonna autocensor to keep that pesky trauma from breaking the conciousness areas of the Ego.

or brain having more important things to do than record

Also, @Morgrim Moon, I have to point out that what you desribe is the transition from short-term to long-term memory.

As I understand it, the meat-brain loses that because it doesn't have time to transfer it from short-term to long-term memory before getting, um, smacked. But if the vector stack is recording short-term contents every snapshot, it should pick 'em up and theoretically restore them. (In canon, reinstantiators usually trim the last chunk of short-term memory off the mind-state and hand it to you in a separate file. Sure, you might need to know how you got dead, but if you don't, there's no point in giving yourself PTSD about it.) (edited)

1

And the gaps which can often appear in long-term memory due to brain trauma of some kind

09:37

Yeah

09:38

Especially if you got crushed or something.... your death is not gonna be nice. Lungshots or other such wounds would be especially nasty.

09:40

Moreso because while rationaly you know you have a stack and a back-up, you‘re still gonna go into panic „must-survive“ mode and your brain is going to run finalShutdown.exe regardless.

Yeah, there's some of that even in the modern era in which panic reactions are one of the things modded out of the alpha baseline (on "those make it more likely that you'll die stupidly, and we prefer to die smart" grounds) and crisis management parapersonalities are a thing.

1

You can‘t edit self-preservation instincts out however. Or rather, not without a replacement. Same way a computer will trow error reports you‘ll have to live with your own Blue Screen of Death - Or rather, the Kernel panic that preceeds that

What you can do, though, is make them susceptible to veto. (I mean, some baselines manage to do that; plenty of people stay at their posts to save other lives or complete important tasks despite knowing that doing so will kill them.)

preparing for disaster scenarios can drop that instinct-gap down to a few seconds though even in baseline humans, and still have you functioning 'reasonably' for the minutes beforehand. Which is enough to be invaluable if you can hack it into brains automatically

The relevant alpha-baseline tweak is basically to give (and universalize) the prefrontal cortex the ability to tell any arbitrarily strong motivational signal to sit down, shut up, and not overpower the thinking brain.

1

09:53

So you still have an instinct screaming at you that the corridors are filling with live steam, the dosimeters are pegged, and you're about to die -- but it can't compel you to not stay at your desk and scram that pile, belike.

1

That sounds about sensible for Veto overrides.

@Overmind, Liberty and Progress seem quite appropriate. You don't need one-word ones though; a example character has "Fight like a corned rat" instead of "self-preservation" (which is the core value everyone gets for free).

Do the values necessarily have to be in English? If not, you could just ask a certain generous author for the relevant Eldraic words with all their long glosses and nuances.

I would not think they have to be in english, but if they aren't, your gonna have to spend a bunch of time explaining their meaning to your gaming group - invoking your core values is one of the basic ways to do well at something in this game.

21:33

I was kinda considering doing it anyway.

21:33

You get self-preservation (which you can rename, if you want), two from your civilization, and one free choice, as a starting charecter.

is it always the same two from the civlizaiton,or is it more of a "pick two from this list of five" ?

Same two from the civ, from what I see.

The words you'd be looking for would be ”Miríë. Idaharis. Jírileth." As for longer nuances, well, here: https://eldraeverse.com/2012/05/15/purpose/

Alistair Young

Purpose

”Miríë. Idaharis. Jírileth. Order, progress, liberty. These are the principles to which we have dedicated ourselves, we of this new-forged Empire. ” ”But not the externally-imposed kórasmiríë o…

MonitoRSS joined the server. 12/21/2017 1:48 PM

Merry Christmas, folks!

And the same to you, dear Sir! Frohe Weihnachten! everyone @here!

@Overmind One question I have been bugging myself about: How do they achive relativistic velocities for the mass drivers in the Eldraeverse? And what are usual projectile masses?

Shitbucketfuls of energy?

12:52

More serious answer: shitbucketfuls of energy and in the modern era, a little help from the ontotechnological vector control equivalent of the "mass effect", with a side note that relativistic velocities in this case tends to mean "a few percent of c , not 99% of c ".

2

Ohkay

12:53

Given the firing ranges involved I was always like "shots fired at 0.9 cee"

12:53

Because you know, light minutes of effective engagment range.

(starship weapons) Projectile masses vary from "toothpick" to around 24 kg, with some special higher-mass variants. (edited)

2

1

12:55

Probably looking at more like 0.12c at the high end, originating-ship-relative, for the big-ass spinal mounts.

3

1

but lasers have a much longer range

As for range, while the outer engagement envelope begins at 1-1.5 light-minutes, the inner envelope begins at more like 1 light-second, and you want to be in the inner envelope for you to get a firing solution with a decent chance of hitting. In the outer envelope, you're mostly just firing to make your opponent expend energy, heat capacity, and point-defense resources - not expecting to hit with anything but a golden BB.

1

With the big differences that lasers don't start to be effective at under 100 kilometers

@Enderminion My laser assumptions have it that for practical starship mounts (constrained by mass and waste heat), beam spread doesn't make them very useful at more than a light-second.

1

13:01

Also, for reasons involving thermal superconductors in the armor, their primary uses tend to be pumping heat and point defense, not as a primary weapon. Although if you can close to sub-knife-fight range, they can slice-and-dice quite nicely.

1

13:03

Although that all being said, the guys who figured it was a good idea to pick a fight with a Lucifer -class starwisp tender - which is to say, an 864-terawatt highly-collimated phased-array laser - did indeed learn that some lasers can be very effective as primary beams.

3

1

Why do I have the feeling the Primary Laser Officer made a point of preserving the piece of adaptive-paint-covered hull displaying the spacecrafts name so that it may be displayed as Evidence Of Stupidity Of The Highest Degree at some combat academy?

is that 864 in base 10 or 12?

10. I usually translate the numbers.

ok

How do you even express 864 in Base 12?

"600".

600

Or, using my local nomenclature, "six dodecen".

oooh, I like that stealth joke you have there

15:51

that 864 is a round number for them

Emanwe joined the server. 12/28/2017 11:19 PM

Ey, Manwe.

waves.

Ave et tu, Emperor Marcus. And thanks for the invite, Sir Cerebrate.

Exspecto aliquem qui latinam dicere posses.

Quidquid in Latin dictum sit, altum videtur.

Sic latina optima lingua discipulis discitu

Latine non loquo. Me paenitet.

*latinam Loquor Not that I️ notice these things...

Getting the Latin wrong when I say I don't speak it feels like a bit of a Q.E.D. moment.

I️ know, but that doesn’t mean it can’t leave a little grammar lesson behind while we’re at it

Romani ite domum

Ein frohes neues Jahr, @everyone!

I'm still in the past, for another 9 hours or so

2017 says hi, @Unknown

And with that, a Happy 2018 to one and all. May we drink deep, feast well, and kick entropy in its nadgers for another year!

To the fight against entropy!

NHO joined the server. 01/01/2018 2:54 AM

Hello

02:56

There's a lot of gushing about Good Doggies, but do Eldrae know of the cats?

02:56

Also, yes, Happy New Year

one presumes so. If they have a tap into the local 'net then they should be aware of the madness of cats

oops. The barge holding fireworks at Terringal caught fire and set off the lot in one go

That's pretty. And pretty explosive.

Shades of San Diego. I hope no one was hurt?

two technicians with minor injuries, they dived off the barge and swam to safety

04:10

other than that looks like only crowd panic, the evacuation plans went off smoothly

That is good. Nasty accident.

So, can I dump summaries and opinions on Sci-Fi books that no one here would most likely read, because it's written in Russian? Or better limit discussion to Eldrae-verse?

I don't think people would mind much. You'll either get ignored or pressed for explanations, though.

I at least wouldn't. If required, it can always be moved to #random or another channel.

Random is good thought.

That's also a possibility.

On different note, is there any expectations for third book?

08:02

There was a message that it would be. What I am interested in is not "When" but "No sooner than that?"

On the former, I have no objection, and #random is probably the best place for now. If book summaries/reviews in general turn out to be things a lot of us are interested in, I'll whip up a dedicated channel for them.

Ok

11:10

Thanks.

11:12

I have a bunch of tangle-related questions, but that would wait until I become a patron.

On the third book: it's in process, but is currently waiting on (a) I and my lovely editor finding enough time to finish the editing; and (b) the cover art. More news when I have it.

4

Yay!

I put that as "revisit the question in the middle of February"

I've been re-reading the specs of CMS Greed and Mass-Energy, and there were a few things I was wondering about: 40,000 (metric?) tons of cargo is... suprisingly unfitting for a base-12 system. Moreso because it just doesn't really distribute across six symetrical faces evenly. Or did I miss something?

14:52

Second, how much more fuel than cargo does she carry, and in what state (read, density)?

I would take a stab that them not using tons to measure mass.

Tons of LH2 displaced?

Now I’m wondering if this is another one of his base 12 Easter eggs and it converts to a round base 12 number when you convert to Eldraic units

That's what I would hope.

20:32

But I don't know how they do mass.

gives a subtle elbow nudge

@Unknown It is mentioned as tons displaced.... Which is a volume measure. I suggest liquid hydrogen because it is fuel and what was used in Traveller ship design.

A little over 14 ⅛ m3 to a metric ton of lh2...or a cube with edges a little more than 2.4 m long (edited)

A first disclaimer: if you're looking for hard numbers, you won't find them here because the post in question ( https://eldraeverse.com/2014/05/22/in-lieu-of-in-lieu/ ) was a quick verbal sketch and I haven't actually sat down and computed out the hard numbers.

Alistair Young

In Lieu of In Lieu

Well, I was going to post the second part of The Shipping Trade today, except that writing it didn’t happen because of day job, and so forth. Then, I thought I might post a sketch of the ship…

01:43

That said, @john dougan(his grace/his grace) is exactly correct in that that "roughly 40,000 tons displacement" is a volume measure; and for that matter, in the post in question I was actually using Traveller displacement tons as a familiar measurement.

01:44

(What they use in-universe on the ship's papers are "displacement talents", which are a very similar measurement except based off the Imperial system of measure and a specified mass of liquid deuterium, rather than liquid hydrogen.)

1

As far as propellant mass is concerned, the mass ratio is somewhere in the 1.2 - 3 range; this miracle is made possible by fusion torch drives and vector-control cores (messing with the ratio of gravitational to inertial mass since the early fourth millennium!), powered by your friendly local space magic. (edited)

1

01:55

(The fuel is a 2H-3He blend, stored as supercooled slush.)

1

Once upon a time I used the Traveller Book 2 ship design rules to test the capability of early spreadsheets. (edited)

4

2

Traveller is an awesome system for that

With the Generation 1 spreadsheets, like VisiCalc for Apple ][, it was a genuine challenge. (edited)

On another note, I’ve been watching this (the successor to Top Gear ) recently: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01J94A5GQ/

Gear Top

After the beach-buggies-across-Namibia episode - well, I’ve got to speculate what these three would get up to in a place where the cars are nuclear powered, the engineers are already slightly mad, and you can take pretty much anything on the road with sufficient tort coverage...

Solar sail racing in a homemade ship?

I’m seeing the first ever nuclear-pulse drag race.

I'm trying to imageine what Jezza would be like around their 'test track"? POWEEEERRR

20:11

I bet they get a bulk discount on clones

Ha!

That, or one of the clone vendors is a major sponsor.

If you haven't seen it already try Googling for Swede Mason Jeremy Clarkson beatbox

Will do.

they'd face the challenge of "do we get something functional-but-ugly and then make it pretty" vs "do we make something pretty and then figure out how to make it go?"

For larger projects they'll use teams of clone forks (edited)

Project Binky type sbows would seem to me to be an eldrae perennial: Project Binky - The Series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGSOZAHg1yQHU1tc_3Y5MTQg1qjtxA_nq (edited)

Project Binky - The Series - YouTube

Playlist of the main shows.

Project Binky is awersome. British humour, and rebuild of poor rusty Mini into something with actual structural strength.

09:08

IN COLOR

No,...it is IN COLOUR

20:10

That said, I do love the Police Squad/Quinn Martin opening (edited)

I just... want to share a result of old SB brainstorm. When, very very stupid question of "I want to kill the lampreys. How to do it?" resulted in Little Boy. Bacterium with UHMWPE cell wall that eats most organic things. https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/4119417/ https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/4125933/ It's designed to shut down whole biospheres and be generally total pain in the ass to deal with while infected substrates while transforming said substrates into plastic and shitting paint thinner. (edited)

Tactics: Let's conquer an alien planet. | Page 33

How about 'criteria to release information not yet met'? Will stir up all that stuff about "what should we do to meet the criteria" etc. A whole...

Tactics: Let's conquer an alien planet. | Page 34

i've gotten a little bit lost as to where we are, other than we've yet to start our decel phase and we've voted against using RKKV spam to fuck up the...

1