New answers tagged reality-check
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There are animals with genitals on their heads, but none of them are mammals. I can see no evolutionary pressure for a horse like animal's genitals to migrate to the head region.
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They wouldn't
The sudden sapience onset would probably be dismissed as a parasite. This is because there is a reason that rabbits aren't sapient, and that reason is food. The rabbits would guzzle through their fat stores at near-human rates, but would still feel full after a rabbit-sized meal. Eventually, this would catch up to them, and they'd starve to ...
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Cranial genitalia are a reality: Phallostethus cuulong is a species of fish which has its genitalia under its chin. It doesn't seem impossible that such a system could be placed on the forehead or come about in a mammal. One minor problem is that it would probably result in the female organs also being in the head, which would provide a limit to the size of ...
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Cosmic rays come from all directions, they possess an enormous spread of possible energies
(from under 1 ev up to 10^20 ev, although we only really call those from 10^9 ev upwards by this name)..
So any device to harvest them will need to be quite versatile, able to handle energy levels from the subultraminimicroscopic, up to some serious stuff.
And they are ...
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The issues I have with the system are:
The length of the tether & getting any form of nutrients up and down
such a long tether.
The atmospheric pressure of 92 bar, compared to 1 bar on Earth, plus
460 °C temperatures are extremely hostile to any forms of life and how does the plant not burn under such conditions?
I also question how would roots ...
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The energy content of cosmic rays really is tiny. Quick glance at the numbers tells that the frequency of particles by energy drops faster than the energy increases. So 100 times more energetic particles are more than 100 times rarer. Thus the lower energy spectrum carries ~all of the total energy.
In the low end, 1GeV particles arrive at a rate of 10^4 ...
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I may not be able to answer the biochemistry of this plant, but I came up with some of the basic answers:
How the OffSpring grow its tether?
Take the example of the banyan tree, It has aerial prop roots, that grow from top to bottom. Similarly for this plant, an offspring starts its journey as an epiphyte, i.e. a plant that grows on another plant, on the ...
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One example where it could work is country like China, where "old" combat styles were still in use in first half of XXth century due to combination of many factors.
What you want could be a huge empire, too big to be threatened by it's neighbors but lagging behind major powers abroad. Those powers are too far and have too small population to ...
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It could be that the precursors to gunpowder were not found on your aliens planet. So they only found it on other planets but by then they had already developed other tech so didn't see the point.
If your aliens don't like especially loud noises then they may shy away from gunpowder.
Finally it's just really cheep for us to produce guns and ammo as compared ...
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In order for pike and shot to remain viable, you need a few things:
Cavalry. The main job of the "pike" part of the formation is to keep the cavalry away from the "shot" part. If you aren't facing cavalry, you get more out of your force by arming everyone you can with a musket.
A low rate of fire. Cavalry can only overwhelm musket-...
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A few Thoughts:
Your question is a little open-ended, so I'm going to give an open-ended answer. Hopefully it gets to the spirit of what you're looking for.
Just a thought. You like the pumice island idea, so maybe a native plant-organism has evolved to deposit a waxy coating on the pumice, intercalating pumice islands into a sort-of matrix of wood and ...
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Riff on coral!
Sediments will not be as big a deal with no land to wash them out of. I think it would be tough for the poor mangroves. There are going to be serious, serious winds in this world with nothing but mangroves above the water.
I think your photosynthesizers should be animals with endosymbionts: coral, sponges and jellyfish. Instead of trees you ...
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Not only possible, but actual historical fact
Although rifling was invented in the 1500s ...
The problem with rifles was the tendency for powder fouling to
accumulate in the rifling, making the piece more difficult to load
with each shot. Eventually, the weapon could not be loaded until the
bore was wiped clean. For this reason, smoothbore muskets remained ...
answered May 12 at 18:12
chasly - supports Monica
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YES, in Theory
I believe you're going about this the wrong way. Instead of asking how the military side of things could be "slowed down" ask instead how the manufacturing side of things could be sped up! The great breakthrough of the 1700s was the Steam Engine and by extension manufacturing, trains, and all the rest. But the technology for such ...
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They haven't had a real war recently.
Wars force change on the military. Without actual combat, generals can delude themselves that the old way still works. Even with actual combat, it can take some time for the lesson to sink in.
So assume that the military tradition calls for regiments of pike and regiments of shot, to be merged into mixed brigades only ...
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Your fiction occurs in a time of flux.
You know a lot about military equipment and tactics for this period and you have ideas about how tech changed that. You need to use all that for your fiction.
Have your army like Cromwell's New model Army - mid 17th century and tricked out the way you want with armor, pikes and muskets. My understanding is that the ...
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Of all the electoral systems that have been in wide use and documented, none are exactly like what you proposed. By the way, according to that Wikipedia page, "the study of formally defined electoral methods is called social choice theory or voting theory, and this study can take place within the field of political science, economics, or mathematics, ...
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The Sand of your deserts is actually the dried silica shells of the "Sand Plankton" A long time ago a new organism evolved a silica shell for protection. It is an extremophile for both hot, cold, and dry conditions. Sand Plankton grow in patches in the desert, usually near Oasis, and also grow at the edges of the desert.
On Earth, cellulose based ...
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MAYBE!
Sticking strictly with terrestrial biochemistry, no. Given the extreme diversity of life and the extent to which is has colonized every conceivable Earthly environment, and some that were not conceivable until we were surprised to find life there after all, I think it's safe to say that if sand plankton were possible to evolve starting from the kinds ...
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Sand plankton may be possible as a niche organism (after all, ice-worms are a thing) but they are going to be very limited in number simply because light does not penetrate sand to any great depth. So while they may exist I argue they do not exist in great enough numbers to support mega-fauna. (Even filtering sand to extract plankton may well be an energy-...
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An ammo round is very self contained. A gun is very simple.
Downsides:
It takes time to traverse the distance between, so is less useful in long distance combat. Compare to a laser which is line of sight for miles. (Although one intense enough to do damage gets fuzzed out by air and dust.
It has recoil. Using a rifle in zero G will be challenging.
...
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All types.
Your city its very large, in fact larger than any on Earth today.
You should expect a city of 60 million, no matter the location or configuration, to need to deal with all aspects of modern day cities in terms of infrastructure - but even to a more substantial degree.
These include:
Transport: how do citizens commute not just to and from it, but ...
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The aliens have simply no idea how human weaponry works.
Oh, believe me, the aliens WANT to use the humans' weapons. They just have no idea how to make them. They've tried reverse-engineering them, they have strange components made of even stranger materials. They've tried stealing the weapons, they don't have the proper knowledge/body structure to use them. ...
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Deserts are seldomly devoid of life - many deserts are inhabited by beings such as ants, badgers, kangaroo rats, lizards, snakes and camels. Each of these beings carries a microflora and a microfauna inside. As those animals defecate in the desert, their droppings spread microbes around.
Many microbes die from the excessive heat by day or excessive cold by ...
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Your election system is affine, which means adding 1000 to every candidates vote total doesn't change the result. The highest value wins.
We can translate your vote from -1/0,0,0,0/+1 to 0/1,1,1,1,1/2 and get the exact same result. Except now we can see why it results in strange results when there are many candidates.
If you like party A and think you have ...
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In a two-party system you would see even dirtier election campaigning than you see in the United States. Candidates would not just want people to vote for them as the lesser evil, they also want them to vote against their biggest rival as the greater evil. That would make attack ads even more important for winning elections than they already are.
However, in ...
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There are so many different and well studied voting systems, each one with its particularities. For instance, this site presents a single election evaluated with 4 different methods which gives 4 different results.
Many of the existing methods allows for voting against a candidate, either explicitly or by placing one candidate in disfavor in relation to the ...
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Form. The aliens are quadrupeds. Their exotic guns require a barrel length that's impractical for a human soldier to use, while they can carry it beside their body and aim with a periscope, rather than aiming directly along the barrel as a human would.
While such a weapon could be vehicle mounted by humans the combat normally doesn't involve them because ...
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This is how Australian voting effectively works in practice.
Australia is officially "Ranked choice voting" - You order N candidates from 1 to N, however I can tell you from experience and anecdotally that Australians typically vote "for" and "against" first, and then fill in the blanks between.
So for example, my recent voting ...
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We already have something very similar to that which has been proven to work: Ranked Choice Voting. Everyone chooses their candidates in order from most preferred to least preferred. In this system, the number of offices to be voted divided by the number of voters sets a threshold minimum. All rank 1 votes are tallied, if all top candidates meet the ...
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You might want to look into 536 ad. A volcanic eruption caused crop failures, plagues, and societal collapses from Mexico to Mongolia.
Some people attribute the onset of the dark age to this.
https://www.history.com/news/536-volcanic-eruption-fog-eclipse-worst-year
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If you want something that messes up with the climate for centuries, you are looking for something akin to the Deccan traps
The Deccan Traps is a large igneous province of west-central India (17–24°N, 73–74°E). They are one of the largest volcanic features on Earth. They consist of multiple layers of solidified flood basalt that together are more than 2,000 ...
answered May 9 at 6:13
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The aliens did not invent their weapons, they stole/copied them.
You may be interested in the man kzin wars by Larry Niven. the Kzin did not invent their technology, they stole it from a species that tried to enslave them and found Kzin survived a lot better in their own environment than they did. Thus the Kzin have advanced technology but not all the ...
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/ manless self-operating factories that can mass produce stuff like food clothing and vehicles/
Hide out in there! I like manless because I don't need no sausage party in my hideout, and I like stuff like food even if it is mass produced. I don't want to hide out anywhere that I run out of food and water, ever. Running out of clothes would be ok but still ...
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Worldwide aurora.
The aurora on Earth is produced by interactions between the solar wind and Earths magnetic field, which diverts a lot of the charged particles of the wind and concentrates the rest at the poles. It is the interaction between charged particles and atmospheric gas molecules that produces the light.
Without earths magnetic field, the solar ...
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Let the villains plan and build and pay for the secret hideouts.
Move into one (or more) after the villains are done with them (incarcerated, dead, amnesiac, etc). Block access so that henchmen and previous occupants cannot conveniently return.
When a powerful villain returns and wants their lair back, move on to another "abandoned" hideout instead ...
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There are several excellent examples given throughout the course of the Jumper series by Steven Gould (I highly recommend reading all four books in the main series whenever given the opportunity). The main character's first "base" is simply a nondescript apartment in Manhattan, where he has walled off a closet so that only he can access
He also ...
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Hide it in plain sight.
You seem to have reasonable carte blanche when it comes to the secret base. One problem with the ideas so far is that you could be tracked down by your use of electricity, water or heat. So instead you build an apartment complex with several tenants. You own an appartment on the bottom (or if it's luxurious enough you own the entire ...
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Deep under the ice
The power to teleport anywhere instantly together with an object the size of a small house is very, very powerful. It means the MC (Mutant Character?) can take basically anything she/he desires that conforms to the weight limit.
First go to either the North or South pole and teleport some blocks of Ice away. Next find something like a ...
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Imagine a building and a hidden room, without windows or doors (but with ventilation and with power, if there is still such a thing). Everybody who thinks about complete floor plans (if they still exist) will realize that there is a cavity somewhere, but there will be perfectly logical reasons why it is inaccessible now. Perhaps an elevator was added at a ...
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Kerguelen Islands, Southern Indian Ocean
Situated more than 2,000 miles away from civilization, these islands in the southern Indian Ocean are also known as the Desolation Islands due to their incredibly remote location. Grande Terre is the biggest island in the volcanic archipelago, a French territory consisting of 300 islands covering an area about the ...
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We'll assume that our teleporter can carry at least some light items with them while teleporting; otherwise, establishing a secret hideout is going to be pretty darned rustic.
Were I the teleporter, I'd probably establish my hideout in an inaccessible forested extinct volcano, a place like Mount Lico or the Kahuku Forested Pit Crater. Such places would have ...
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Differences in tactical doctrine
There are a number of reasons why different armies would prioritize different aspects of weapons. Here are some examples:
Weight. One form of ammo is heavier: bullets or batteries. How many shots can one soldier carry? Is one species stronger than the other? How long will a soldier on each side have to lug it around?
...
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The alien energy weapons require Helium, and we're all out of Helium.
With current usage we're likely to run out of helium in 25-30 years. Aliens will of course have their own sources. It's not far fetched at all that the energy weapons require helium in their manufacture, or even usage. Humanity could have access to the tech, and even have a few energy ...
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Equipped for Different Operating Environments
Energy weapons will perform more poorly in many environments than projectile weapons, and vice versa. Atmospheres, especially thick and humid ones, will interfere with beam propagation much more than they will affect a bullet's trajectory. Smoke, fog, heavy snow, or high humidity may significantly reduce a laser'...
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Logically, since Earth-like weapons are effective against your aliens, then those aliens would research how to develop those weapons if they ever had to fight each other. And logically, aliens would research how to defend against Earth-like weapons if those weapons were (or had the potential to be) used against them. In both offense and defense, they would ...
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You don't bring a lead-slinger on a spaceship.
The aliens arrived in spaceships, so they wouldn't have brought conventional projectile weapons with them on the journey. A stray bullet could puncture the hull and depressurize the ship, killing everyone. They'd have energy weapons that can easily do lethal damage to organic matter without posing a risk to ...
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This sounds like variation on "why bring a knife to a gun fight", to which possible answers include:
reusability and lack of re-supply issues;
surprise factor during combat;
the sheer joy of watching from up close as your enemy realizes (a) oww that hurts and (b) oh no, I'm dying.
(Ok, there's not much difference between a crossbow, a gun and a ...
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So it's actually surprisingly simple, as you need to determine which organizations do which jobs. Governments can be classified broadly. First, your nation is a republic... that is a nation where leadership is not heredity familial title, aka a monarchy. (the American phrase "This is a Republic, not a Democracy", Republic means a government ...
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I'm just adding a consideration to add to the existing answes.
Any sci-fi premise where the main combattants are sentients rather than computers and drones is already not based on potential future reality, so for starters if you say that t0he weapons are equal they simply are. Its no bigger leap than having evolved sentients fight each other with almost WW2 ...
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