The Quick Questions About World Building Thread

I'm trying to create a derived unit, not a base SI unit. I know it cannot be a base unit as far as I'm concerned, since it's expressable via base units.

edited 30th Jun '15 7:03:44 AM by ironcommando

I figured you meant derived, I was just gushing my whole thought process.

An example of what I meant just occured to me: on the Disc a Thaum is the the amount of magic which is needed to create a white pigeon or three billiard balls.

Ooh, that's a great example =). I'd probably base one unit of mana to be the amount needed to create something or cast/move something (haven't decided yet).

edited 30th Jun '15 7:47:54 AM by ironcommando

What wounds are very painful without being too life-threatening / crippling ?

No, it's not for torturing someone. I'm working on a setting with sort-of werewolves whose transformation is triggered by intense pain.

ive heard a stab to the gut can be excrutiating even if it doesnt harm any internal organs.

Would it be possible to do that reliably ? The idea is for the not-werewolves to have a way to trigger their transformation. Avoiding everything vital when stabbing oneself in the gut sounds a bit hard.

well usually extreme pain can be seen as being caused by pretty much any significant injury; breaking a bone should itself be enough, especially the first time it happens.

tearing fingernails off is one of those things that makes people cringe, and ive yet to see any depiction of it without a shitton of screaming, so i assume that hurts enough to trigger a transformation, in addition to not really putting you in danger of death

Meteorites as a primary source of unusual metals, would it work? The planet is probably surrounded by an asteroid field on located in one. And a bountiful 'harvest' of metal would fall around Summer or something like that.

I'd like the meteor showers a bit more local, though. Is it feasible to have magnetic weirdness going on that attracts the meteorites to a specific locale?

As I am new here...I am looking for reference material (and help organizing) for these areas:

Christian Mythology (Keys to Solomon, Eldritch Angelic Horrors, non-Greek-influenced stuff...) Canaanite culture (So I can understand the mythology I read) Umm...in general as many languages/cultures/mythologies as possible... Civil War (and Appalachian and Cherokee culture/mythology)

Err...just would like organization so as to progress on these things without jumping around topics like a professional yo-yo champion...

What would the precise effects of an unlimited energy source be? It's not actually unlimited (it's a small fusion device about the size of a fist), but it's close enough that if introduced in the modern world, we'd have unlimited energy for quite a while until all the sci-fi things that need even more energy get invented. But what exactly would immediately be improved?

So far I've got gasoline suddenly being unnecessary, blackouts being nonexistent and power lines being taken down, infrastructure in developing countries suddenly becoming easier, and water shortages suddenly not being a problem as desalination becomes cheaper. Not to mention the environmental benefits of no longer needing any messy fuels. Am I missing anything major?

Does "unlimited" mean "can be freely taken from an easily transported zero risk easily replicable device"? Non-supply constraints are very important in practice.

Yes, it's pretty much just plug it in and go. Basically, it's a generator that runs off of air (hydrogen, specifically). Made out of reasonably common materials, no special phlebotinum. Let's say it's two hundred dollars for a unit that can power a house or a car. It will basically last forever; parts will eventually wear out, but no worse than usual. Say each unit is rated for twenty years.

People will try to make nukes out of it.

Hmm... I imagine that some avenues of experimentation—in physics especially, I suspect—might become far more feasible, and far easier to get approved and started.

Without electricity bills, I would imagine that energy usage might skyrocket in general; this could have some environmental side-effects, I suppose.

"Basically, it's a generator that runs off of air (hydrogen, specifically)."

What hydrogen ? There's hardly any hydrogen in the air (about 1 ppmv). All the hydrogen in the entire atmosphere would be just enough to power the USA for two years.

EDIT : That's assuming dihydrogen-dioxygen combustion. You might think nuclear fusion would be the answer, but it is surprisingly inefficient : 2.14*10^-12 J/mol (of dihydrogen), versus 286*10⁺³ J/mol for the combustion.

edited 29th Aug '15 1:11:45 AM by Aetol

Hey guys, I'm just making sure my math works out: I have a lost continent that was subject to a massive hurricane transported from our world to the Otherworld about 4,000 years ago. While it managed to avoid total destruction, it was still heavily depopulated and the infrastructure was 40-70% gone, so it needed 1-2,000 years to get back to their pre-catastrophe levels of society. Additionally, the magic in the land started changing over a few decades in the Otherworld, so they got stalled figuring out how to integrate the changes into society.

All in all, they're somewhere around late-medieval era by now, and one major kingdom is just on the edge of their Renaissance equivalent—it has the largest city of 200,000 on the borders of two other kingdoms (another major kingdom and a minor kingdom).

Cultural interchange with our world is difficult because the magic's diverged so much that transportation between planes takes a week or two (and the continent's time flows twice as fast as the mortal world), so while mages and other educated people know that the mortal world is more advanced than theirs by now, they're too few in number and often in the wrong fields to enact large-scale tech breakthroughs.

Does that sound okay or should I modify things?

edited 14th Sep '15 7:14:20 PM by Sharysa

One or two millennia to get back to pre-catastrophe standards ? You're not looking at 70% destruction I think. More like over 99%.

Okay, nearly total destruction works because now I can use it as a creation-myth in the current story! As for human survivors, would a few thousand per region be enough to avoid inbreeding, provided that there's some inter-kingdom migration/settling as well?

According to the Toba Catastrophe Theory, human population was reduced to 3,000 - 10,000 around 70,000 years ago, and recovered from that bottleneck (obviously). So yes, that's not impossible.

edited 9th Sep '15 1:02:07 PM by Aetol

Yep, that's one of the first things I looked up. Thanks!

I have a set of characters I'm trying to Theme Name after existing characters best known for being hard to find. So far I have Carmen, Wally, and David. I need two more male names and one female name, but all the other elusive characters I can think of either have names too unusual to keep the theme as subtle as I'm going for (which is the reason I'm using Wally instead of Waldo), or more obscure than I'm comfortable refrencing in this context, or has a name too similar to one of the other characters in the work. Any suggestions?

Jason.

If you want to go with an Odd Name Out, antagonist, or Sixth Ranger, then consider Bryan.^Reference "I will find you, and I will kill you."

edited 25th Sep '15 7:05:06 PM by AwSamWeston

Possibly also James, he was a habit of disappearing frequently.

Would Amelia Earhart be too on the nose?

Considering he mentioned that he's using "Wally" instead of "Waldo", yes. Though derivatives like "Amy/Ami" would work.

as an alternate try "Sue/Susan"

What would be a good name for a werewolf ? (It's for a D&D character)

I'm looking for something meaningful but subtle. Right now I've got "Wulfang", but it feels a bit too antiquated.