Lost in Space
Tolkien did a really smart thing in Lord of the Rings by never pinning down the rules of his magic. That meant he didn't have to worry about "breaking" them.
The Harry Potter franchise wallows in rules to the point of bursting, all so it can wow its (presumably tweenage and thus undiscerning) audience by finding ways to cheat.
Obviously, neither counts as speculative fiction.
Edited by Fighteer on Apr 1st 2024 at 3:38:01 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Honestly, make Avada Kredava a soul splitting spell when you use it. For every kill you make, your soul is further fractured, representing the damage upon ones' self when you engage in such an action.
They call me.... Prophet
To be honest, i do think he did pin down a few important ones. First is that magic is just really a deeper understanding of things. It's something that can be known, though it's generally a difficult skill to learn. There's no risk of one of the Hobbits picking it up as a hobby. The only ones we see *doing* magic are either truly ancient elves and a wizard of unknowable age. Well, and Sauron as an evil being of unknowable age.
The second is that it mostly just makes known things supernaturally better, rather than supernaturally different. A magic sword is a really good sword and a magic armor is really good armor, but you don't have things like a Boots of Flying or an Arrow of Always hitting. It's mostly just really, really good craftsmanship.
Both make it fairly clear that magic exists, and can be useful, but it's not going to just solve all their problems.
Edited by devak on Apr 1st 2024 at 9:43:26 PM
The People's Champion
Isn't that what it does? I always thought Avada Kedavra irreversibly separated the soul from the body, but did not damage the two.
Never mind, was answering the wrong question. Re: soul splitting - considering you need to intend to murder to cast Avada Kedavra in the first plcae, is there any situation it wouldn't automatically split the soul?
There's beauty in even the smallest moments.
Lost in Space
Noting here for the record that fantasy settings are off-topic. They were brought up in the context of justifying/explaining the use of magic in a setting, and should be retired. Let's not turn this into a Harry Potter thread.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Speaking of end of heroic age, for the past few days I've been pondering over how difficult would it be for Gundam to adapt back to long-range combat if active Minovsky jamming were to be banned by international treaty.
I do think wither way of your going to bring magic into a scifi setting, dont do what Star Wars did and give your space mages robes.
Give them actual proper armor, especialy since there is much less "but you need to be able to move" to justify it...
You know what's scarier then a space wizzard? A space wizzard that's inside a suit of power armor.
...
Or a tank.
...
Honestly thats kind of a fun question there, if spells have verbal components could they still function as a tank commander?
Edited by Imca on Apr 2nd 2024 at 5:35:30 PM
Is everything Minovsky particle prohibited in the treaty? Because there were propulsion systems built off of the Minovsky Particle’s properties.
If so, you’d have a lot more limited combat potential of mobile suits. Instead of being awesomeness in a can they’d be reduced to semi-realistic space fighters of carrying standoff ordnance like nuclear missiles to be fired in volley from substantial distances. At least in the anti ship role.
Certainly no theatrics like happened at Loum or A Baoa Qu.
Minovsky Jamming is a byproduct of the fusion reactors. The He-3 byproduct is the minovsky particle which eats up radiation, so to ban that would mean banning the very thing allowing for space combat in the first place, as well as most if not all space vessels in general.
UC warships predate Minovsky fusion.
Somewhat. The mainstays of both the Feddies and Zeon are powered by Minovsky power and its effects. They wouldn’t have their mega particle cannons without it either.
Some predecessor vessels without might exist but they weren’t as common.
It might have been a case of a rushed adoption. The Federation Admiralty just wanted to adopt compact fusion reactors first and didn't bother waiting to figure out how Minovsky Particles would change warfare. I wouldn't be surprised if the Salamis was based on an even older warship design.
If a mass death scenario were to reduce the global human population to the high 8 digits and thus major casualties in war are unsustainable, would these be reasonable additions to The Laws and Customs of War?
- Incapacitated vehicles, especially spacecraft, are considered hors de combat if the crew hasn't abandoned them yet and the enemy cannot be hindered from rendering them assistance.
- The prohibition against No Quarter is extended to retreating/routing enemies as well, ie. if the enemy commander openly announces over radio that they are ceasing combat and retreating, they must be allowed to do so without terms. Attempting a fake retreat is therefore a war crime.
Not really. Damaged vehicles can still be a threat or an asset and are thus a valid target.
A retreat is not a surrender, it doesn’t give any sort of protection. Especially since those combatants may still be a threat especially later.
If human population has been reduced to say 50,000,000, all it does is changes the scale of warfare. Instead of maneuvering armies with hundreds of thousands or millions committed to a campaign it would be like what the world was prior to the 18th century. Major battles might involve anywhere from hundreds to a few thousand combatants instead.
And if the population is that depleted compared to the seemingly limitless manpower that is today’s billions, it means everything is smaller to boot. The cities, the nations, the wars, all of it.
Adjust accordingly.
There were no such rules of war when the world’s population was that low a few hundred years ago or older. Why would there be new ones?
Not being able to attack fleeing forces would actually extend the conflict. The retreating forces would just regroup and attack again in a few days.
The law in the night
Smaller populations make the MAD threat bigger.
One thing is surviving a nuclear exchange when you reasonably believe you can afford the losses by either calculating how many cities you can lose.
When your nation is back to being city states, a single nuke is a lot more scary.
Inter arma enim silent leges
MAD always interests me in scifi context as it is a good way to set up odd rules about why warfare is the way it is. Why are all these armies fighting this way despite having way better tech and methods? Rules and conditions under MAD? Sure we'll go for that.
It also provides interesting context into what could happen if someone tries to break the rules of the treaty.
Frankly, I'll take any excuse to ignore the "RKKVs are the only weapon worth using" crowd.
It always amuses me how in discussions of relativistic anythings, the question of aiming precision is seldom addressed. What good is a RKKV if it whizzes past its target because the launch coordinates were off by a fraction of a second? It's not like course correcting a relativistic anything is trivial.
And for settings with FTL, there is rarely any discussion of its uses in defence.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Or you know that an RKV is going to light itself up like a flashlight and wont actualy travel the speed of light, hell you should be able to see the warm up of one long before it gets going due to the amount of energy needed for acceleration.
And like even if you got it going at 99% the speed of light from the nearest star and some how concealed the acceleration that's still about 3 weeks warning.
...
Just park something else in its path.
At that impact speed it would just dicintigrate past the point of being usless if you can intercept it even a couple days out.
Edited by Imca on Apr 5th 2024 at 6:17:27 PM
Or the target just, you know, sidesteps it a couple hundred meters starboard.
That actually happened once in a Gundam Manga. Only instead of a RKV it was a big fuckoff laser fired from Jupiter pointed at Earth. The thing was struck by the heroes but they only managed a slight degree in change.
When it fired it missed Earth by a wide margin, seems that slight degree adds up a lot in space.
Slight errors do add up.
For example, a deviation in point of aim of one degree, one degree on a protractor as small as it looks there turns into 174 cm of distance if the target is merely 100 meters away.
Say the deviation is a hundredth of that, “only” 17.4mm (1.74 cm) at 100 meters.
Now scale that up to something 100,000,000 kilometers away. (100,000,000,000,000 mm) That’s a deviation of 17400000000 mm or 17400 kilometers. Planet Earth is smaller than that.
Lost in Space
I'd like to clarify that I am not suggesting RKKVs are the only way to wage interstellar warfare, merely that they are one of the most obvious if you can't go faster than light. For a civilization capable of accelerating a projectile to that kind of velocity, aiming at a planet isn't the most challenging part. It's not like the target can dodge.
Other options include stellar lasers, nanobot swarms (aka Von Neumann probes), and bioweapons. If the attacker wants to take the time to travel all the way to the target system, they can redirect comets or asteroids into impactors, drop nukes, etc.
Anything to avoid the dreaded space-opera planetary invasion. It's the most popular but least realistic of all the scenarios to a frankly staggering degree.
Edited by Fighteer on Apr 5th 2024 at 8:41:01 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Speculative fiction is definitely the odd one out. For most purposes you would want to have the rules to fit your story. Magic rarely exists in a vacuum, it usually also has thematic or symbolic purposes. Like in Harry Potter, magic is a way out of his miserable situation. In LOTR, magic is a form of higher knowledge meant to reflect how the heroic age is lost and an age of men is starting. in D&D, magic is a form of utility to create fun stories with.
But i'd argue that even in the case of speculative fiction, you would at least want to do a few sanity checks so your magic doesn't instantly ruin the story. You generally want to build up the exploration of magic in your series, rather than put forward something that instantaneously makes your audience ask "why don't they just do X".
Like, Avada Kedavra is such a powerful spell in Harry Potter that it just makes you wonder why you'd have any other spell at all. Other spells can be blocked, parried etc, but it's an instant death spell with no counter. As a kid i just basically assumed there were some major downsides -it's an obviously evil spell used by Magic Hitler, it has to be- but eventually it's revealed they have none? like you can just do Forbidden Curses, they're really just outlawed forms of magic rather than deeply and inherently evil. even Horcruxes have inherently evil aspects to them that require deformation and shattering of one's soul, and the process is implied to be disgustingly evil that merely reading it made Hermione sick, but Avada Kedavra is just a magic gun.
Edited by devak on Apr 1st 2024 at 9:36:25 PM