The Quick Questions About World Building Thread

My fictional particle shouldn't change the laws of physics to a greater degree than the equally fictional Minovsky particle that lends its name to the Minovsky Physics trope.

You're exaggerating. The way an N2 warhead is depicted in the show is evidently no different from a clean fusion bomb; it causes a massive explosion well within the range of real-life nuclear weapons, has no radioactive fallout, and generates an EMP. And in the Neon Genesis Evangelion: Anima light novels, the same tech can be also be used for energy generation through "reactors". How does any of this break reality?

Edited by MarqFJA on Aug 31st 2021 at 9:39:42 PM

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Because the "technology" comes out of a writer's pen, not a scientist's paper. The rate of neutron production in fusion is well known and thoroughly verified. Changing that requires changing the laws of physics.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Even the titular Minovsky Particle is pretty soft science.

It's a particle that lets power generation be arbitrarily good and it interferes with long range electronic and radio transmissions so clearly the logical step in technological development is to build giant building sized humanoid robots to fight land and space wars.

It all boils down to willing suspension of disbelief and the more attention you try to draw to an inaccuracy and try to create "realistic" explanations for it the less willing suspension of disbelief the audience will give you.

N2 everything and mobile suits are patently ridiculous on their face. Nothing about them works or is even a logical path for technological development to take in the fictional circumstances their universe create to justify them.

But nobody cares, everyone is willing to accept a Gundam or an N2 reactor as is, on it's face, with no objections because they're willing to believe in those concepts for the sake of a great story.

People want a good story, not a scientific dissertation that it's impossible to make airtight enough for skeptics to not tear into.

Edited by LeGarcon on Aug 31st 2021 at 7:25:05 AM

Oh really when?

... You guys act like I asked for a complete list of all the properties of this fictional particle down to the quantum mechanical level. Instead of, you know, only the broad strokes of the necessary properties. It's not like the creators of Mobile Suit Gundam had written a long essay giving a thoroughly detailed profile on the science behind the Minovsky particle, for example.

Seriously, from all the responses that I've had to my various questions over the years on similar topics, I'm getting the impression that there's an unusually strong bias against storywriting questions that rate above Speculative Science on the Mohs Scale Of Science Fiction Hardness, because so many of the discussions essentially end with "what you're asking for is just Magic by Any Other Name, so don't bother trying to give any semblance of scientific plausibility and just trust Willing Suspension of Disbelief". That approach is simply anathema to me, and runs counter to all the examples of "One Big Fat Lie"- and "Physics Plus"-level fiction that is enhanced by the attempt to add a modicum of scientific plausibility to one or more of the setting's central fantastical elements.

There's no "N2 everything"! There are only N2 warheads and the Anima-exclusive N2 reactors.

I guess we are ignoring all the times when storywriters consulted scientists in relevant fields to make sure their fictional technologies are depicted in more plausible ways than they would if they had just winged it.

Or the fact that real-life science is already working towards finding methods of nuclear fusion that reduce if not eliminate neutron production without breaking the laws of physics (you know, as described in the Wikipedia article that I had linked to?), and have some promising candidates being explored, with the main limitation for developing the scientific understanding on the methods' viability being insufficiently developed technology to actually run the necessary experiments. Employing emerging or hypothetical technologies is nothing new to sci fi.

Edited by MarqFJA on Aug 31st 2021 at 9:45:30 PM

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Well you kinda are asking for a lot here.

I'm not sure you understand just how fundamentally incompatible some of this stuff is with the most fundamental and basic physics.

N2 just doesn't work, it's literally magic.

Oh really when?

You keep saying "N2 is magic", but never actually explain how you came to this conclusion. As far as it's been depicted, an N2 warhead functions like a clean fusion bomb. If you want to call that magic, then by definition you're calling every depiction of clean fusion bombs in fiction magic, which is utterly ridiculous.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Actually, you can get pretty close to an N2's effects with a fission-fusion warhead. Airbursts would also keep the fallout to a minimum. However the size of the warhead suggests that it might be a thermobaric weapon instead of a fusion one and there's always the possibility that the N2 is a byproduct of S2 engine research and thus runs on the same reality bending properties as the AT fields.

... I have been under the impression that thermonuclear weapons (which is the term for what you're referring to) still have significantly high radioactive fallout due to the fission stages of the detonation process, particularly the last fission reactions.

That's all well and good, but all nuclear warheads are designed for airburst detonations and they still release tremendous radioactive fallout. And N2 weapons include land mine versions, an example of which is detonated in the first episode, resulting in a shockwave that was strong enough to flip a stationary car onto its side despite it being several (possible a dozen or more) kilometers away.

Both the explosions and the warheads are subject to the Your Size May Vary issue that is unfortunately prevalent across the show. The Evangelions themselves are depicted everywhere from around 80 meters to a staggering 200-ish meters. That being said, I've seen a comment somewhere saying that IRL nukes can have their yield reduced beforehand because it depends on the exact proportions of the reactant materials or somesuch, although the process obviously couldn't be as simple as turning a dial up or down.

I can easily nix that possibility, because N2 weapons are predominantly fielded by the conventional military forces, and it's hammered in that nobody outside Nerv and Seele actually understands A.T. Fields or the S2 Engines, despite the confident claims of the Jet Alone project's spokesman that "it's only a matter of time" before his company unlocks the secrets to the A.T. Field; hell, nobody even had access to an S2 Engine before Nerv managed to obtain one more or less intact from Shamshel's corpse, and that one had ended up being the doom of Nerv's Nevada branch when it was put into Evangelion 04 for a trial run (result: the entire base and everything within an 89 kilometer radius vanished without a trace, possibly due to inadvertently opening a Pocket Dimension that sucked all the aforementioned into it before it collapsed just as quickly), showing that even the setting's supposed foremost authority on all things Angel-related barely has any understanding of the things that it is dabbling in at best.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

See what I mean?

Oh really when?

No, I don't. You're trying to use the unrealistic nature of some elements in NGE as an argument for N2 weapons being unrealistic without establishing a logical connection between the two.

Edited by MarqFJA on Sep 2nd 2021 at 2:54:43 PM

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

There is no known mechanism in physics that can alter the neutron output of nuclear fusion. The "N2" process as you describe it is invented to justify a story with nukes but not large amounts of hazardous ionizing radiation.

What is weird here is why you are pushing so hard to come up with a scientific rationale for this. It's a story. In stories, made-up things happen.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Actually, you can absorb much of the neutrons by covering the entire thing in hydrogen rich materials. Hydrogen absorbs neutrons so submerging a relatively small bomb in something like lithium hydride or fuel oil. In thermonuclear warheads this trick is used to set of a secondary fusion explosion but if you swap the deuterium and tritium for protium then most of the neutrons would get caught up creating deuterium and tritium rather than causing a chain reaction.

Basically, we're wrapping the warhead in radiation shielding.

So how is that shielding supposed to survive the blast?

Oh really when?

It doesn't need to. By the time the blast hits the protium the neutron flux is finished. Neutrons travel at relativistic speeds so all the nuclear reactions happen before the hydrogen has a chance to go anywhere.

But you still need a fission detonation to trigger the fusion in those designs, right? That's going to be dirty no matter what.

I don't know that we have figured out how to build a pure fusion weapon that doesn't use fission as an intermediary.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 3rd 2021 at 8:18:20 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

We don't. I'd imagine one could scale up a fusion reactor and turn the result into a bomb. It'd be quite an engineering challenge and probably far more complicated than a regular fission-triggered fusion bomb.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

I still think it could be a thermobaric warhead. During the battle with Zeruel (mr. origami arms) we see Unit 00 make a suicide run with an N2 mine and carries it like a football. That would make it's size comparable to a small house. A nuclear warhead of that size would have vaporized the Geofront and shattered the Tokyo-3 dome.

Four problems with that idea:

1. The warhead was detonated right into Zeruel's center of mass (specifically into its Core), which means that much of the immediate blast (at least from one direction) is expended into Zeruel rather than into the air.

2. Shortly before detonation Rei raised Eva-00 A.T. field to max power in order to erode Zeruel's own A.T. field so that it doesn't absorb the force of the explosion; logically speaking, the field covers a three-dimensional volume, so only the portions of the field between Eva-00 and Zeruel would be "gone", leaving the rest of their A.T. fields intact. It's quite plausible that those A.T. fields had absorbed a considerable if not majority portion of the blast before collapsing.

3. As I've pointed out beforehand, at least some modern nuclear warheads can have their yields modified beforehand. With all the science fantasy elements in the setting, it wouldn't be implausible to assume that the warhead could've had its yield reduced, whether deliberately by Rei in order to avoid a Pyrrhic Victory scenario or as a standard precaution against accidental detonation due to mishandling (presumably they have procedures to dial it up if proven necessary).

4. What kind of thermobaric warhead would be powerful enough to punch through all the layers of rock, concrete, steel and futuristic shielding that separate Tokyo-3's ground level from the GeoFront's interior, the way the JSDF's N2 weapon did in EOE?

Not all nuclear fusion processes are created equal. You can look up the Wikipedia article on aneutronic fusion (which I've cited several times) to see for yourself; fusing deuterium with helium-3 (the combination with the lowest energy threshold), for example, produces no neutrons, it's just that in practice we have no known way of preventing deuterium-deuterium fusion from happening on the sidelines.

Now imagine if you had a particle that you can bombard the fusion chamber with to inhibit all D-D reactions without affecting the D-³H reactions. The laws of physics weren't violated, you just found the tool that prevents those laws from acting against you, just like how control rods in a fission reactor help regulate the chain reactions so that the otherwise inevitable thermal runaway never gets a chance to occur.

Because I'd like to avoid meaningless Techno Babble whenever I can, and I am fond of works that use real-life science and technology to make their unrealistic Applied Phlebotinum seem actually plausible.

For example, plenty of sci-fi works use time-dilationless superluminal travel and artificial gravity, yet I've never heard of any such work (at least a high-profile one) that explained those technologies the way Mass Effect; it introduced an electroconductive Unobtainium that produces a field that alters the effective mass of any object within it, and then explored the ramifications of such technology, showing that it can be used for exotic manufacturing techniques and safe dropping of military vehicles, while also having the technology possess drawbacks (starship warp drives build up static electric charge, forcing them to vent it periodically to avoid having the electricity discharge into the hull and severely damage the ship).

And then you have Attack on Titan, where the writer worked with an actual engineer to design the fictional 3-Dimensional Maneuver Gear that the protagonists and their comrades use to fight the eponymous Titans, thus making the result a lot more plausible than it would've otherwise been. ^note And before you ask, actual calculations show that the G-forces of the stunts that are routinely pulled off are at the very edge or just a notch above the hypothetical peak of human ability to withstand, so it's not as impossible as some/many may think.

And, of course, there's the Trope Namer of Minovsky Physics... which, surprisingly, was in part the result of actually sound Fan Wank being applied to fill the gaps that weren't addressed by official information.

Edited by MarqFJA on Sep 3rd 2021 at 7:51:55 PM

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

What's your opinion on having multiple races?

Most of my settings are human-centric. If other races exist, it's usually only a couple and they are rare.

However, I feel inspired to tweak one of my settings to include several races. Not so much because I need them or they serve a purpose in the story, but moreso just because I have some ideas for races.

I would say that, if they appeal to you and don't harm the story, then I don't see why not.

Indeed, in a fantasy story they can potentially aid in conveying the impression that the world in question is not our own, I suspect.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Jan 13th 2022 at 9:47:35 PM

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I am kind of wary of such stories because they tend to come with a human supremacist approach much of the time.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

I would love stories with more species/races/beings in them, as long it's NOT a Tolkien-esque thing where the Standard Fantasy Races all need to quit their infighting, join together, and fight a cataclysmic threat.

Folklore has MASSES of sentient beings in them and seeing more types in fantasy (or just expanding on the usual five race's societies OUTSIDE of warfare) would help fantasy worlds feel a LOT more lived in.

Edited by Sharysa on Feb 6th 2022 at 9:30:34 AM

Have you looked at The Song of the Shattered Sands?

While it starts off with only a few species/beings, the count increases as the series goes on, as I've thus far found at least.

And since there seems to be a strong element of Fantasy Counterpart Culture in its nations, it appears to draw from a number of cultures in doing so.

Now, I haven't yet finished the series, so I don't know whether the various nations have to come together to face a great threat in the end, but as of at least book four it's not so.

[edit]
Coming back to this, I realise that you're looking for sentient beings, and while the above series does have some such, it doesn't have that many. I was including non-sentient species!

Sorry about that!

[edit 2]
Actually, no, I half take that back: While the series is perhaps not quite what you're looking for—many of the other beings are either humanlike or of human extraction—it's perhaps still worth mentioning.

Offhand, and with some minor spoilers, there are:

• The asirim
  • More-or-less quasi-undead
• Ehrekhs
  • Sort of like demons, maybe with a hint of djinn
• Golems
  • Each of which seems to have some degree of personhood due to containing a sliver of a human soul.
• Qirin
  • An arguable inclusion: it's hard to say by the point that I've reached how sentient they are. At the least that apparently choose their riders, specifically and actively appearing before certain individuals who are under certain circumstances.
• The desert gods

(There might be one more group, but as of partway through book four they've had little on-page appearance, so I won't list them at this point, I think.)

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Feb 7th 2022 at 7:59:44 PM

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Thanks for the recommendation!

"Sentient" is not a requirement for my magical creatures/races, but one of my stories is basically "fun with worldbuilding / Culture Clash" and "a throwback to Conan the Barbarian," so once I finish the first novel where I set everything up, I'm going to have The Fair Folk (who are mostly humanoid) running around Ireland with centaurs, unicorns, dragons, and various non-sentient creatures. And with my story being about royalty who need to go traveling or to host foreign visitors, different countries ALSO have sundry magical creatures of their own.

About "not wanting more Tolkien-eque world-saving plots," I'm really just tired of 1) "the saving the world" conflicts in general, and 2) all the Tolkien imitators who take all the trappings of his plot/world and especially the idea that War Is Glorious, without realizing that he was a soldier who ACTUALLY thought War Is Hell and that mentality runs throughout the trilogy.

If it's a GOOD war-to-save-the-world plot that actually delves into non-shiny war-effects things, like trauma or disabilities or who has to rebuild after the war is won (although it DEFINITELY doesn't have to take as long as Tolkien did), I'd totally take a look at X or Y story.

Edited by Sharysa on Feb 12th 2022 at 1:52:31 AM

It's my pleasure. ^_^

Okay, fair!

Heh, in that case the game that I'm currently working on may actually fit! Much is yet up in the air, but there's likely to be a mix of various entities, sentient or otherwise, alongside humans.

The plot is of a "save the world" (well, "save the (fantasy) solar systems") variety, but it isn't intended to be a "unite the species" story. (Currently; again, this is fairly early in development.)

However, so nascent a project doesn't make for much of a recommendation!

That sounds like a fun story, I do think! ^_^

Ah, very fair, I do think, and that does make sense! I can understand that frustration, and that desire for something other than the works that you describe there, I do believe.

(I don't think that I have a recommendation to that end at the moment, I'm afraid. (I don't yet know, for one, how Song of the Shattered Sands handles the aftermath of such things because I've not yet reached the aftermath!))

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