The Quick Questions About World Building Thread

Crap, I meant "Would it make sense for transportation technology to be a bit Schizo Tech?" Sorry about that.

edited 3rd Jul '12 12:57:27 PM by Sharysa

What?

Because the Unicorns are to hard to catch and ride?

Well, they've been domesticated, but wild unicorns were hard to tame and long-lived enough that domestic unicorns have only been around for a few thousand years.

Hence, riding tack has only been in use for a couple of centuries (it's still too expensive for anyone but the Knight in Shining Armor and Blue or Royal Blood), the chariot never really went out of style, and bits were never needed since that would make it hard for the unicorns to talk.

edited 3rd Jul '12 6:32:13 PM by Sharysa

Question: what would exposure to hard-vacuum to do cloth?

In a sci-fi story I'm developing, the Space Activity Suits are used by most groups that operate in space. However, as skintight activity suits are neither modest, nor that practical (they lack pockets) conventional cargo utilities are worn over them.

What would happen to those clothes? I'm thinking they should be fine, but this is not my area of expertise.

Well..

The clothing might steam slightly as any trapped moisture within it starts to boil.

Pretty much nothing.

thanks, I was thinking as much, but wanted to do the research.

If your people have a more or less Stone Age level of technology, what material would you use for sails on boats? Animal skins?

Yeah, pretty much.

Keep in mind that they'd be very stiff and heavy. Also, they wouldn't be very well-sewn.

Random question: can you imagine how would the world look, say, some five hundred years after Nazis won the War? I remember it being given as a possible explanation of Planet of Hats phenomenon in fiction. You know, "if they're all so uniform, perhaps there is some reason for that", that kind of reasoning. So I was just thinking on it, how would it look in practice.

Nazi regime would crumble under itself in half a century, probably sooner as ambitions and rampant abuse of population was probably even greater than in the Soviet Union. For a while, you'd get quickly changing Fuhrers, and finally someone would get pissed off and destroy the whole thing. Of course, many more would die to death camps which would start encompassing any non-Aryans (not just Jews and Gypsies and an occasional protester), but overall, we'd be having some sort of democracy by 2012 anyway, not to mention 500 hundred years in.

If you want to suspend your disbelief reaally hard and say somehow Nazis survived 500 years, it'd be some sort of technocratic, transhuman dystopia where virtually everyone is identical. The views of Nazis might even make them easy pickings for an overbearing AI which would become "the Eternal Fuhrer", claming to be Hitler himself.

Even if Nazi rule fell, it would still be kind of relevant. Many cultures and phenotypes would still get exterminated, so in the end, even as a democracy, such a society would be much less diverse than our own.

Communism didn't have much say in the end, and it did survive for over 50 years. While multiple nations would get nearly exterminated (I don't believe in a possibility of complete extermination of an ethnicity) and it would hit the global culture, we'd have some sort of democracy by now. Possibly even more egalitarian than ours because decades of opression would press people together.

I have a vague idea to write from the perspective of a Eldritch Abomination of my own design imprisoned underneath Stonehenge.

The only problem is that I have no idea what the creature or what it even does.

All I know for sure is that it's name is Yillorlog and its imprisonment is modeled after the myth of Fenrir.

Feel free to toss around ideas

Dunno how many questions you get like this, but:

How many atomic bombs/nuclear weapons would it take to devastate all of Russia, Eastern Europe, Malaysia, Most of Asia, (not including Pacific Australia) and North Africa, creating nuclear winter?

Probably hundreds of them. I dunno how many you'd need for a nuclear winter, mostly because the scaling seems fishy to me (NW scenarios seem to start at improbably low scales)

Hey, uh, how does the density of the Photosphere of the Sun compare to that of water?

About 5 million times less

Ok, thank you.

I was wondering if I'd read that right. This pertains to a certain form of alien life. Soft Sci-Fi, but fun.

Is it possible that a space-faring culture could develop with no knowledge of nuclear weapons?

In this verse, the main power source is a fuel (unnamed ATM) If combined with a catalyst, this fuel can release enormous amounts of power at a relatively controlled rate, meaning nuclear reactors are not necessary to power FTL drives. (similar to tyllium from new BSG)

Also, the culture in question developed low-orbital craft very quickly, so dropping rocks was the WMD of choice.

First off, keep in mind that there ain't no friction in space. Second, depending upon the way their FTL works it might need either little or no energy (One of my fictional 'verses features FTL that needs approximately as much energy as an armband watch battery) or a whole load of it.

Yes, it isn't necessary to know nuclear fission, although you'll need nuclear fusion for the higher-energy schemes.

Thanks. The overall tech-level is roughly neo-BSG.

The reason the aliens have no knowledge of nukes is so Cold War earth has a chance against them.

That, combined with the alien's preference for horizontal take-off boosters causes them to overlook missile silos in their opening bombardment. The aliens think a culture would have to be insane to ride what's essentially a directional bomb into orbit. (And since missile silos are hardened against weapons falling from above, they don't take much damage.)

Long story short, the human superpowers hurriedly cobble together space fighters from whatever tech they have lying around, arming them with nukes powerful enough to scrap an alien cap ship.

(can you tell this ain't that terribly hard SF?)

EDIT: perhaps the best way to put it, is this setting is a Reconstruction of the Easily Thwarted Alien Invasion.

edited 3rd Aug '12 11:31:10 AM by Borkless

In terms of economic utility, what's the major difference between sheep and goats? I know sheep provide wool, and that sheep and goats have different dietary preferences (with sheep being grazers of grass and goats browsers of taller foliage), but why keep goats when you have sheep?

IIRC, goats are very hardy compared to sheep — more intelligent and able to eat more things.

edited 11th Aug '12 7:44:23 AM by KillerClowns

I agree with - basically, sheep seem more thoroughly domesticated than goats. This has advantages, like being a higher-performace and/or higher-quality source of meat and wool. And it has disadvantages, like being considerably higher-maintenance in terms of food and terrain, as well as being a lot more reliant on husbandry in all kinds of ways.

—-

ETA: In my setting, the only domesticated animal is the Woolly Mammoth (give or take). There are several different breeds, and one of them fits the sheep-niche quite closely: Bred for meat and wool (and ivory), and quite dim-witted, compared to its wild ancestor. The latter is partly the result of the sort of "atrophied intelligence" one generally finds in domesticated animals which have no real function except to eat and grow, and partly deliberate so that they go docilely to the slaughter. The downside of that docility is that these easily fall prey to the abundant nocturnal predators if left unattended.

To prevent that, there are other varieties which are bred for things like strength and size and used as beasts of burden and siege engines. These retain most of their natural intelligence and at least some of their natural aggression, and are more than capable of running off said predators. That's not exactly the goat-niche, but since donkeys and mules can fulfill a similar function, that's probably mostly just a matter of size.

I'm not entirely sure this ETA is going to be of any use, but I'll let you decide.

edited 11th Aug '12 9:52:36 AM by kassyopeia