Random Questions Thread

How do you characterize an character as an idealistic character who believes in Rousseau Was Right applies to humans and Theriomorphs using a single, elaborate conversation that will stick and interest readers.

For the full version, basically Warren wants to explain his worldview to Meredith Young at the hidey-hole in Chapter 2. He wants to dispell the Meredith's view of humans, who she sees them as enemies who try to kill and some knowledge of Megiddo.

Plus, I want to see how to create a conversation that goes with Meredith scoffing at it a few times before she is genuinely conviced by the end of the chapter. Adding onto it, I want to delve some things about Megiddo at least the basic idea of it.

huth, we can help answer general questions but we can't write for you.

Wrong place. Sorry.

Here's some math stuff: Roughly how big would a vacuum balloon need to be to lift 100 tons (around 220.5 thousand pounds) of weight? Ignore the engineering challenges and the weight of whatever the balloon itself is made from.

Well, the article you cited discusses the lift formula for displaced air: 1.28 g/L. If you ignore the weight of the materials used to construct the balloon and the engineering problem of how to build a balloon that could withstand the external pressure, then the calculation is quite simple.

100 T = 10^8 g. 10^8 g / 1.28 g/L = 78 million liters of displacement, or 78,125 cubic meters. If I'm doing the calculation correctly, that's a sphere approximately 26.5 meters in radius. ( r = cube root of (3/4 * V/pi) )

Edited because I made an error in the formula the first time.

edited 17th Apr '18 11:34:52 AM by Fighteer

Thanks. I'm trying to figure out how feasible it would be to construct one of those standard steampunk airships where the gas bag only makes up maybe half the volume of the vessel, if even that, without using some antigravity handwave.

And as the article itself goes, it isn't all that much better than using gasses, given the introduction of the extra durability question.

You can pretty much toss that: they aren't realistic in any way whatsoever. Either you need an inflation material with negative density or you need some other mechanism to provide lift.

The other problem with a complete vacuum as a lift mechanism is that there's no way to give the craft additional lift once you've completely evacuated the space. With gas, you can heat it. With vacuum, there's nothing to heat. You can let air in or pump air out, like a ballast tank, but the latter requires a lot of energy.

edited 17th Apr '18 12:12:23 PM by Fighteer

Managed to take this picture at a sports gear store in regards to bra sizes (this is for serious research, thank you very much). Now, I imagine the bra sizes used here are Western, so what would they be in Japanese? For example, what would a 84-91cm/32-34B be in the Japanese cupping classification?

edited 17th Apr '18 12:35:58 PM by HallowHawk

Why?

Because I like coming up with details that are mostly All There in the Manual.

For people familiar/local to London, are there any areas where the skyline is dominated by tower blocks/council flats? Alternatively, are there any other areas side from London that might fit what I'm looking for?

I was trying my hand at writing poetry and, when I paid attention to the meter, I noticed that my lines had three amphibrachs (unstressed syllable, stressed, unstressed) followed by an iamb. Example:

It seemed very natural to me, so I was wondering if there was a name for this form of metrical line. Googling it turned up nothing.

When there's a word limit in a writing contest, do they consider any symbol you use for scene breaks and dashes in between words ("ten-story" as an example)?

I don’t believe they would. On Microsoft Word it doesn’t count symbols in the word count unless you’re using a hyphenated word (which changes the count from two words to one). The symbols in and of themselves have no impact.

Now if there’s a character count for the contest, symbols are a different story altogether.

How plausible would it be for a humanoid species at a roughly Neolithic level of technological development to make use of wooden barrels?^note Do note that IRL barrels are at least as old as a few centuries BC, being already known to the Celtic Gauls by the time the Romans reached their lands; also, they were originally made with wooden hoops rather than the metallic ones used in later eras.

Fairly plausible considering that barrels are largely used for storage. A neolithic society would have recently discovered farming, and would be developing tools to make agricultural work easier. I think crude baskets or crates would be more likely than barrels, but assuming they have barrels then they could use them for storing surplus crops or tools.

Want to write a war story featuring a combining mech but I got a few problems:

1. I have no idea on why or how two people are required to control the same robot

2. Need there a reason for there to be at war

3. How is this war solved

If anyone knows about some good war documentaries on Netflix or Prime Video that I can use for inspiration, please recommend them.

What about storing surplus water in something sturdier than a sack made of animal skin?

Anyone know offhand of complex marine life, aside from whales, that can live at a wide range of depths in the ocean? My Google-fu's failing me at the moment.

I'm working on my setting's Fish People, called the Okedra, and I'm trying to work out if it would be half-plausible for the same subspecies of Okedra to be able to live both in coastal areas and deep on the ocean floor. I know that sperm whales can dive pretty deep, and it seems that they manage this just by being big enough to withstand the pressure, but I want to see if there's other ways nature has made this happen. Gotta look at all your options, and all that.

Sharks, probably. Though they tend to be specialized, it's uncommon for one species to occupy a large range of depths, even though some of them can be found as deep as 1.5 km down below.

Off the top of my head, I can think of the elephant seal, leatherback sea turtle, and Greenland shark. You might want to check out this article. It highlights some physiological adaptations in deep-diving mammals, such as lowered metabolism at depth/low temperatures, increased oxygen storage in the blood and muscle (causing them to be thicker with a high haemoglobin/myoglobin percentage), a decreased oxygen transfer rate in the lungs (preventing CO₂ poisoning from holding their breaths for extended periods) and collapsible ribcages. As for the Greenland shark, it's a fairly sluggish scavenger/bottom feeder that tends to migrate to warmer waters and shallower depths in the winter. Some other species, like the whale shark and the basking shark, have been spotted at depth, but aren't really adapted to live there.

Ah, I see. It would make some story fuel to, in addition to the coastal traders most land-dwellers picture when they think of Okedra, also have some largely uncontacted Okedra subspecies adapted to life in the deep, until some humans from the north start building oceanotrains. Thanks, guys.

My question is really specific, and really strange, but here goes nothing:

If a person of just-above-average height were to transform into a creature about the size of a hamster over the course of about a month, how long would it take him to notice he'd lost a few inches?

As soon as they notice that their clothes don't fit them.