Episode #125 of the Stack Overflow podcast is here. We talk Tilde Club and mechanical keyboards. Listen now

# Tag Info

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How about a simple set of rules to prevent this? Teleporting inside and then out takes 10 minutes at minimum. So the easiest way is to have a safe destination pre-coded into the Macaw, run in to grab stuff and teleport out to circumvent the cooldown and you are home free. So the first security measure is that people have to leave their Macaw at the door ...

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Use the cooldown time to your advantage. So, the MACAW allows you to teleport pretty much anywhere you like, with a cooldown of 10 minutes. All you have to do is make the shop's entrance inaccessible. This forces customers to enter your shop by using their teleportation, which means they cannot teleport back out until 10 minutes later. This should ...

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I will answer your question with another question: Why it wouldn't be? Magic is powerful, is empowering, allows you to do marvelous and terrible things. It is certainly adictive, at least psychological addiction, addiction to power.

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To me it seems you are asking two different questions but I will try to answer them both 1. How can the substances be addictive: I would suggest for the same reason as most drugs work in the real world. They make you feel good, not all in the same way and they do not have the same effect on everyone - at least not immedietly. Perhaps you decide that ...

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Cant the addiction be simply using it? How many times havent you wished you could get a drink without getting up? Or for larger scale problems, be able to circumvent things like the hassle of finding someone who wants to be with you if you can force them? Or fix your car without having to go to a garage or learning how the car works? Have you ever moved to a ...

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Power at a price is a very common thing in fiction. You can make it change a person's body or mind, as you like. People who start using magic and can't stop using it, while the magic itself takes a toll on them, would be one example. From your setup, it sounds like human bodies are not really designed to handle something as powerful as arcane magic. But ...

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constant pressure Upon the destruction of the object/caster that maintains the hammer space, the dimensional pocket starts to contract and exerts a force on the items it contains. However, it can only exert a force up to a certain pressure. Think of a balloon, if you put some objects into the balloon, and the let go of the opening, if the object is small ...

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The above answers, particularly Stephen's first one which sets out the total power of the object and shows that it can be achieved while maintaining a habitable planetary system, cover most of what you ask, but you do need to consider the location of the object with regard to latitude and relative position of continents. Atmospheres and oceans will convect ...

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It will look a lot like a zoo Each enclosure will need to be purpose built based on what you are trying to contain. If you need to contain a hill giant, you'll want an enclosure with massive, thick walls and no protrusions to climb on. If you want to contain a creature that can turn into fog, you will need to make an airtight chamber sealed with special ...

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The fundamental problem is that there won't be an ocean left. And evaporating the ocean will destroy the biosphere from the heat. The bottom of the ocean is 1000 bar of pressure. To stop the ocean from flowing in, you need 1000 bar of steam, which requires near star-core scale temperatures (400,000 K). And then you have a star on your planet, which means ...

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Hm... It does sound to me like you will just keep on putting Energy into your planet, which will make the whole system gradually heat up indefinitely even if it is a small ( < 10km) Ball of 600-2500°C. I don't have that much knowledge about the details as some of the others have, but how about this: Try to have it as cool as possible (600-800°C is deep ...

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Let's say your magical sphere has radius $r$ of 10km (so just poking up into the outer atmosphere) and is at a temperature $T$ of 1,250K (so glowing a nice warm yellow). The total radiative heat flux from the sphere is given by: $$Q = \sigma T^{4}. 4\pi r^2 \approx 1.7 \times 10^{14} \mathrm{W}$$ Where $\sigma$ is the Steffan-Boltzman constant. A ...

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There is no scenario in which the biosphere survives long. You have, at best, a few centuries. Say the fireball is as cool as possible while still being a fireball; 100 degrees celsius. All the oceans will continually drain towards the fireball and will boil on contact, as you said. This is bad news for your biosphere, because that's a huge amount of ...

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You are basically cooking your planet on a stove. This magic fireball is an infinite source of heat, so it will sit there continually pouring heat into the planet's system. Water near it will be heated into steam, but the coolness of the water will not cool the fireball at all. This will cause the overall temperature to rise and rise until everything on the ...

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Check out this recent Atlantic essay, which basically answers your question (and the answer is pretty dismal): https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/595795/ tl;dr Given millions of years, our entire society, skyscrapers and all, could be reduced to a thin, centimeter-thick seam in the geological strata, because even steel structures will eventually be ...

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Stainless Steel is very resistant to corrosion, even when exposed to acid, bases, and organic solvents. Different grades of stainless steel have different degrees of resistance. According to this article, it takes 1200 years to corrode 1 mm of stainless steel of type 316(1.4401) in rural conditions. A 10 cm rod or plate of this sort of stainless steel would ...

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You have to limit the solar system to the planets visible by naked eye - or else starting from neptune they would need to rotate around your fantasy earth with more than the speed of light - which is impossible. Stars even increase this dilemma. Your true problem lies in "epi-cycles" ... the visible paths that planets take on our nightsky. Even Ptolomaeus ...

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Assuming that Newtonian mechanics still apply the factor that determines whether the Earth goes around the Sun or the Sun around the Earth is the mass of the sun. If the sun radiates equally in all directions then its total power output must be proportional to its distance from the Earth. Assuming that the mass of the Sun is small compared to that of the ...

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A human gestation can be as short as 22 weeks and still yield a viable fetus. The main difficulties are the immaturity of pulmonary and cardiac systems (and, of course, infections), and all three can be remediated by medicine. So, a little magic would surely allow a human fetus to be born at 22 weeks. It's no great stretch of the imagination to bring it ...

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Wouldn't it be easier to begot a human with a demon soul instead of one provided by God? This is easily done if a witch have sex in a satanic ritual with some dark priest serving as the father. Or perhaps, go into genetic engineering and artificial insemination to assure that a superhuman flesh will begot. However, it have a lot of risks. If the satanic ...

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It would be perfectly possible for an extremely advanced civilization, perhaps humans of the future, to create a geocentric solar system. They could take a rogue Earth-sized planet in interstellar space and create a giant sun satellite orbiting the planet with gigantic fusion power generators generating power for thousands of giant lamps aimed at the planet ...

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The first thing we must understand is that from a purely kinematic point of view, the heliocentric and geocentric models are both equally correct within the accuracy limits of astronomical instruments available before the, say, 16th century. There was no way for an astronomer who lived before Tycho Brahe to bring serious arguments in favor of one or the ...

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Recognizably artificial artifacts? Several hundred million years. People are digging up dinosaur bones. Every now and then, the fossils have impressions of wings, feathers, etc. Now imagine digging up human fossils with wristwatches, gold teeth, pacemakers, artificial hip joints. For that matter, ceramics like toilet bowls should make an interesting ...

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You don't have to change much at all, if you don't force yourself to follow Newtonian mechanics to explain planetary motions. For one, universal gravitation was not mainstream until Newton built his system around it. Until then, it seemed possible that other heavenly bodies might not exert any kind of gravity at all. If you use this approach, then you don't ...

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Not much ... The three key bodies for life on Earth are Earth, Sun, and Moon. The Moon orbits Earth. The difference between the Earth orbiting the Sun and the Sun orbiting the Earth is one of reference frames, which are somewhat arbitrary. The only real difference is explaining the other planets and their moons. In a heliocentric view, Earth is a planet ...

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Hammerspace is like water Boats float on the water. Rocks don't. Submarines have machines that control their density, so they can float or sink. Hammerspace pockets are like underwater rooms. There is a tendency for leaks, but the forces involved are small, and constant, so if you get too ambitious, you just fail. Without ballast, stuff tends to get ...

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Fuzing When matter rematerializes into the world,it will generally try to bump stuff out of the way, but if this becomes impossible, the matter effectively turns on noclip mode (if you're familiar with videogame parlance) and blinks into existence, fuzing with any immmovable objects in the vicinity. So in your steel and concrete box case, say the victim ...

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Mass == Energy If you want to create a pocket dimension, you are going to need a bunch of energy to form and maintain it. This energy is tied to an anchor, which is some physical object that lets people interact with the pocket dimension. Sometimes it is a sleeping bag, sometimes it is a human brain, but there is always an anchor in "realspace" that is used ...

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Bubbles Hammerspace is a core concept in videogaming, and making a player's inventory available after death is a problem that has been resolved. So let's take inspiration from Minecraft. When suffering from death, a player spills out their inventory into the world. However, it doesn't spill out as solid blocks but rather in a pick-up form. In this form, ...

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Objects don't get pushed out of Hammerspace. Hammerspace gets "pulled back". Imagine squeezing several snooker balls into a balloon. The balloon itself is stretched, and under pressure. When you take a pin and burst the balloon, it makes a tiny hole. This hole tears and gets larger, releasing the balls - but it doesn't "throw" them out under pressure. ...

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Two answers: 1) The caster configures the hammer space when it's created or set up. That configuration includes what it's bound to, of course. But perhaps explosive or problematic hammerspace issues happened ages ago, and now, anyone casting a hammerspace, attaches it to multiple objects - the second being a safe space the objects will be released to, if ...

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Here is something interesting you might use to keep the explosive results of Hammerspace dumping down somewhat It has been theorized that most of what we consider as solid matter is, in fact, empty space. There is distance between the nucleus of an atom and it's electrons. There is space between the individual atoms of a molecule. There are gaps between ...

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Your dimensional pocket spells have parameters, and it sounds common enough to be able to be adjusted for a myriad of purposes. Different people will have different ideas of what they want to happen to their stuff if they can't get to it. That combined with the mechanics behind your hammerspace magic will guide your failure effects. You don't have to ...

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There are a few spells and magic items in Dungeons & Dragons that have rules for when whatever they're trying to transport has nowhere to go. What happens as a result is usually one of three things: The objects take a load of force damage, and then land back where they were. This can happen when trying to teleport into solid rock. In your case, this ...

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Hammerspace is complicated The first thing is that it doesn't strictly have a location in normal space, if it's opened then it has a connection to a specific location, but we're thinking in portals, the one is not necessarily anywhere "near" the other. Only the owner can open the hammerspace, theoretically anyway. It certainly can't be opened from the ...

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Hammerspace becomes unstable, but doesn't disappear completely until empty. The bag's contents spills into the available space until it is filled (possibly under pressure), the rest remains in hammerspace. As soon as anyone opens the enclosure, he's met with an eruption (which can be as much or little violent as you want it) of stuff from the hammerspace, ...

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Work it backwards in time: someone in a very compressed situation moving to a more confortable, non-compressed situation. Seems like watching a tape of something being co.pressed by a garbage compactor, but on reverse. Setting it forward again, I think expulsion from pocket space would do just that - objects coming out of the pokéball may become smashed ...

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Lost Portal If a person is tethered to the pocket dimension dies, then the portal is "released" in the sense that it is no longer tethered to that person. Perhaps the portal to the dimension is itself now wandering around, looking for a place to decompress. Because we're dealing with portals and dimensions, the portal is not stuck inside the metal box ...

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This would introduce the concept of a hammerspace pressure bomb "Pressure" is a slightly misunderstood subject, and isn't necessarily as destructive as you might thing. High pressure can deform and rupture solid objects, but that deformation and rupturing doesn't imply an explosive release of energy. Have a quick read up on hydroforming, for example, or ...

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You can make the hammerspace open another portal nearby where there is empty space and disgorge its contents through there. Think of it like a very full bag of water springing a leak as you squeeze the bag smaller. The leak will open up where the fabric is weakest i.e. where there is empty space.

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It's not really a conundrum: Homonculi are this setting's equivalent of fuel trucks: they must consume the same thing which they're responsible for transporting. The simplest solution is that a homunculus' construction will determine its "fuel efficiency". A homunculus produced with inferior materials or by an unskilled craftsman will have poor efficiency,...

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Capacitors. If you can hold x100, x1000 times the amount of energy it burns, it is a large boon. Like capacitors. They discharge, yet they are cornerstones of the electric world. You may get additional benefits using a dedicated container instead of small containers. Water tanks hold hot water more efficiently the more mass they have. Consider square cube ...

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It's not pointless There's a running joke in my family about the pointlessness of my doing the dishes when you're only going to make them dirty again. Sure the homunculi aren't a permanent mana store, but then nor is the person you stole the mana from in the first place. They either die or their batteries run flat, then you need more people to steal mana ...

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Example of Historically Accurate Article of Clothing Assuming setting is based upon the West in its 'Dark Age' Think Baggy Tunics with no 'pants' but sufficient length Probably want the character is wear clothing like tunics that are very long and baggy on the character normally while tending to tight (but not too short of course) for any natural seeming ...

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Tights They've been around since the medieval time periods, and they're stretchy. You're good to go. And some Jesters had whole suits made of the stuff, he wouldn't even have to have it specially made. Just buy a Jester's suit and ditch the hat.

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Use a diamond-knit woolen inner layer, to which an outer shell of interlocked cloth (or waxed cloth, or leather, depending on the need - or more wool, which is way easier) sections are sewn. The woolen layer should easily accommodate the growth, and the nonelastic sections will slide one over the other. When the guy decreases in size, just shuffling a bit ...

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Pleating! Are you aware of the winner of the 2017 James Dyson Award, "Petit Pli"? They are clothes that are designed and carefully pleated to 'grow' up to 7 sizes - this means that clothes worn by a newborn baby will still fit at 2 years old - that's a change from 20" tall to 35" long, or a 75% increase in size! This is almost 5 times as much stretch as a ...

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You are chasing a non-issue. Unless you are wearing a leather belt medieval clothes do not have anything tight enough to matter for a small change like you want. They didn't wear anything we would call pants and clothing tended to be fairly loose. Here is a great video of medieval peasant getting dressed. The only thing that will give him any trouble is ...

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Probably, he just wears oversized clothes? And its not so suspicious, because fashion can be funny sometimes beggars and lowlives wear clothes they can get, not ones, they bought. So its not so unusual to see beggar in oversized coat/shirt/etc...

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His clothes do get very tight. In his muscular form, his shorts are extremely brief and revealing and his too-short Tshirt shows most of his chiseled midriff. One of your other characters suggests that he get himself some clothes that fit. Another more appreciative character suggests that he not.

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