The Quick Questions About World Building Thread

The reduction will be minimal though, at least in striking. You'd be better trying to develop a gravity-inducing field to increase momentum.

Eh. The frictionlessness of the weaponry is mostly a side effect of Required Secondary Powers and not all that relevant, I just wanted to see what the hivemind thought on it.

Sounds like it could make the weapon less effective, if it would easily slide across the armor, deflecting the blow better. Do the edge and/or tip have to be frictionless too?

Yah, the edge has to be frictionless- the people waving these weapons around are Super Soldiers with significant superspeed, so the frictionless envelope is mostly to keep them from catching fire when moving at speed. I'm not sure that a frictionless surface would make a glancing blow *more* likely to glance off, though... might make it transfer less kinetic force when it hit, but I don't think it'd make it more or less likely to cut. Really not sure, though.

No, he's right, with no friction, a glancing blow against a smooth surface is less likely to do anything.

Eh, not a major worry- the only enemies fast enough to give the people wielding these any trouble don't have any smooth surfaces to speak of. Something is going to get lopped off. But interesting nonetheless... thanks for the feedback.

And now for a question of literal world building: Is it believable that a planet's geography could be arranged in such a way that hurricanes and tornadoes simply never occur? (Sufficiently Advanced Aliens have been involved here.)

edited 7th Mar '12 3:26:26 AM by Yej

Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.

I can't think of a way to do it. They're both just spinning storms, and storms like to spin. Only way you'd prevent them is by preventing storms from forming, which is 1. really really hard and 2. a bad idea if you could do it.

Shinigan (Naruto fanfic)

They're also really only tangentially affected by geography. They're primarily atmospheric, and unless you change the dynamics of air movement, the atmospheric conditions that spawn them will still arise — for tornadoes, at least. Hurricanes do require a large body of water to develop over, so you might be able to do away with them by eliminating any sufficiently large areas of open water...

edited 7th Mar '12 9:16:25 AM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

M'kay. I'll basically abandon that idea, then, since the SA As aren't powerful enough to change how atmosphere flow works.

Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.

Alien invaders that use tripods and flying saucers and other various "50s science fiction" elements, or alien invaders that use bug-themed vehicles, like pillbug tanks and giant space wasp fighters?

Tripods are inherently unstable when moving, I'd suggest any war machines having 4-6 legs.

Unless the aliens in question are having a laugh at our expense.

Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.

Never mind that Wells' tripods walked about on what were effectively tentacles (a detail which virtually every later production missed in one way or another), and were not actually as bulletproof as later version showed, indeed two were taken out by the torpedo-ram HMS Thunderchild.

While true, it is far funnier a joke for the aliens to match the pop cultural image of the Martians than it is for it to be accurate.

(Also, Technology Marches On has made the "non-bulletproof" thing problematic - transplanting the story to a modern or future setting requires that Martians to be either completely invincible, or a pushover. The power of modern weapons eliminates the middle ground.)

Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.

It depends really, the lasers the Martians originally used was able to slag a torpedo ram in short order, which would probably mean melt-vapourising several inches of steel, and we've got nothing like that heavily armoured in our modern arsenals. Of course, aircraft and missiles might trouble them, but then again they might not, a laser (heat ray) that can melt through inches of steel in a few minutes will fry an aircraft much quicker.

edited 8th Mar '12 10:10:05 PM by MattII

^ One thing about that — Lasers are line-of-sight only. Missiles are not. Lasers are also far less effective against ceramic armor than they are against steel, and ceramic armor is in much higher use than simple steel plating.

edited 9th Mar '12 5:43:04 AM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Also, some of the munitions in question are supersonic; unless the Martians now have god-like trigger fingers and reflexes, they can't shoot down everything. (And even if they do, large amounts of now-boiling-hot slag hit them anyway.)

Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.

CIWS units are strictly Lo S as well.

There are significant non-ceramic parts on any vehicle, even tanks, and these generally include the weapons.

I didn't realise modern anti-missile systems required manual aiming.

Of course, the reason Thunderchild worked in the story was because the Martians didn't realise until too late what its intentions were.

edited 9th Mar '12 11:48:45 AM by MattII

Modern systems don't, but the Martians (quite expectedly) don't have access to automation of any kind, and if they did, they wouldn't really be Wells' Martians anymore.

Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.

At no time after aircraft came on the scene could you do Wells style Martians completely accurately.

For sure, Wells' Martians would get curb-stomped by modern militaries. I particularly liked how the Tripod Series handled that. I think it's not really possible to have a sensible alien force that is advanced enough that humanity is clearly the underdog, yet primitive enough that we have a chance to beat them at all; the capability of launching a ground invasion across even interplanetary distances at all implies space travel sufficient to control the high ground and KEW the hell out of any groundside belligerents. To have an alien invasion that's at all a fight requires quite some stupidity on the part of the invaders. (Out of the Dark handles the latter well, I think.)

Shinigan (Naruto fanfic)

Well the Italians managed to stuff up Greece, despite having the advantage in both numbers and equipment. Also, just because we could send a man to the moon 40+ years doesn't mean that we can now send a tourist ship up every other week.

Also, the Martians may also take the viewpoint that if you look like you're going to lose you might as well give up and save yourself the pain, which while logical, is not the way humans play it, and superior equipment does not necessarily lead to a superior force.

edited 9th Mar '12 11:43:09 PM by MattII

This particular question is spinning off into enough of a discussion that it should probably get its own thread if you want to continue it. This is the "Quick questions about World-building" thread, after all, and is intended for just that — quick questions that have quick answers, not extended discussion.

edited 10th Mar '12 8:55:14 AM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

I have a society where most of the nobility's marriages are arranged, and so it's common practice for people to keep concubines. Men and women in this society have relatively equal roles, so I want women to have concubines as well. However, they wouldn't want to risk the purity of their bloodlines, so they would need some form of contraceptives. I was considering having them keep post-pubertal eunuchs as concubines. I just wanted to know, does this seem far-fetched in any way?