New answers tagged reality-check
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This resource is INFORMATION. Or unique skills this 15 people possesses.
This 15 people are Guild of Cloud Watchers. They observe clouds all day, and say, when there will be drought, rain or where winds will blow in various kingdoms, surrounding the desert. But, to be honest, their forecasts not always true, but local governors believes them, so, its reason ...
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Prophet.
https://citydesert.wordpress.com/2013/12/09/daniel-the-stylite/
Saint Daniel first lived in the church of the Archangel Michael, but
after some nine years, Saint Symeon the Stylite appeared to him in a
vision, commanding him to imitate his own ascetical struggle upon a
pillar. The remaining thirty-three years of his life he stood for
varying ...
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Of these only the giant scorpion is biologically tricky.
Rodent carnivores. That is a doable deal. The desert southwest has grasshopper mice which are cute, loud, fast and deadly. Instead of sewer rats why not scale up a grasshopper mouse? If there are food sources available such that larger body size lets them access the food, there will be selection ...
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A unique animal to the desert that has to be undisturbed to produce product X.
I'll just use ostriches here to give that thing a name, also because it's used a lot in ancient Arabic poetry and they lived in the desert. But you can change it to Griffins or whatever you want.
Also change the product. I'll just call it X. It can be gold, magical lighting gems, ...
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nothing would change for humanity in terms of biology.
because just this was the state of the world during the last ice age, and humanity survived that no problem.
it also would give us about 25% new land to work with, and would give you the means to walk all the way to Russia from Alaska.
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So, putting myself in the opposing army's shoes here:
The first battle is probably a rout - You've found a new weapon, no-one knows how to deal with them, the Rhino charge wins hands down.
The second battle, being a sneaky medieval commander, I show up prepared. Rhinos have soft feet, so I get my smiths making hundreds of caltrops* to scatter. I cut longer ...
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Human populations can easily double in 30 years in good conditions absent any new technology. 200 years is roughly 7 doublings, so you would expect to have 128 times as many as you started. Your 19 million would have grown to roughly two and a half billion.
Some individual countries are currently growing much faster, eg Southern Sudan with a growth rate of ...
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Current avarage human population grouth is about 1% per year, wich doubling every 70 years.
By this condition your population would be around 20 000 000 * (1,01)^200 = 146 000 000 (almost like Russia)
If you put all efforts in ... breeding, you could get up to 5 grown up children per family. To many children per grownup leads to lack of control and care. And ...
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I would start by comparing them to mounted elephants rather than horses. Elephants are extremely big and scary, but not unstoppable. And logistical reasons mean that it's hard to bring a large number of elephants to the battlefield.
Armies fighting elephants would often pelt them with heavy javelins until the elephants got so scared/angry they went out of ...
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The fact that it's post-apocalyptic is dangerous enough by itself
Firstly the reason for the world to collapse may still be present, or still have consequences:
Nuclear mayhem? You've got nuclear fallout.
Society collapse because it can't handle global warming with fewer ressources? Well, bad news for you, impact of global warming is still there.
Asteroid ...
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The most 'realistic' threat for your survivors to face is simply environmental factors - lack of access to safe water or enough food, and competition for resources against other more desperate and less morally upstanding people.
But from your suggestions, I'm thinking you want something more exciting. Depending on the history of your nuclear war, a good ...
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the Netherlands has spent much of the last century reclaiming land from the ocean
While it's not a natural phenomenon, The Netherlands has been working to reclaim land and protect against flooding for centuries. The projects are called Delta Works and Zuiderzee Works.
Both projects have been seen as extremely successful in both protecting existing cities ...
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Since land is involved and land is valuable, it turns out that measuring sea level has been an important measurement for a long time. Apparently even with satellites etc., we are not that much better at it now than in the 1800's
In fact, the accuracy of the monthly mean sea level observations—which most climate scientists use as a starting data point when ...
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The charge itself? Terrifying. The amount of food needed to feed them, the amount of care and training would be too high for any reasonable state to use them for a long time.
So if you read actual historical campaigns you will find that rarity of fodder is a huge issue and supporting even horses, big or small, was a huge issue.
Sometimes you will slaughter ...
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Rhinoceroses are about twice as heavy as horses. If the hypothetical rhinoceroses used as cavalry mounts truely "behave almost war horse-like" as the question states, then standard tactics developed against horse-riding heavy cavalry will work with minimal adaptations against rhinoceros-riding heavier cavalry. They just need sturdier pikes.
Pike ...
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Medieval times?
One rhino? Terrifying. A whole platoon of rhinos acting together? Complete devastation.
Have you seen what rhinos can do to sizable animals?
WARNING Scenes of animal vs animal aggression in the wild https://youtu.be/liAdulWOWws?t=17
One-on-one, rhinos are only evenly matched by a large hippo. An elephant treats a rhino as a toy. Anything else ...
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Probability-manipulating healer nanites: Unbeknownst to the population at large, alien nanites have crept into our world. The aliens are spreading them to people for inexplicable alien reasons, and they give humans access to alternative dimensions where intelligent beings actively seek interaction with our universe (for fun, entertainment, study, or any ...
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First off, the basics:radiation isn't like the mutagen thing we see in superhero stories and tmnt. Being exposed to large doses will most likely cause mutations, but these are absolutely random. Radiation won't twist you into an alpha predator that can shake off tank rounds. Just look at the theory on death claws from the fallout universe: many assume they ...
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Ineptitude of technology versus efficiency against natural defences. The "humans" in your scenario could be superhuman, and the weapons are simply not strong enough to do any decent damage. Due to some reason or another, the best weapon the technology in your world can create is very inefficient for its purpose, and hardly does any damage to the ...
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So far, the answers have done a really good job of pointing out the realism problems. These creatures sound like a direct rip from Fallout but, you do you. Here are my suggestions for realism.
Scorpians Bigger is not always better. Threats are not always large/giant. Square cube law and problems with your scorpions have already been pointed out. They don't ...
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The way evolution works, is due to a random mutation at some point, a different trait emerges in a species. However it is only called evolution if the trait sticks, and the species stays around with this trait. For that to happen, the trait needs to be beneficial, or at the very least not detrimental to the species. Radiation can speed up the random mutation ...
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Leaving aside that radiation pretty much just kills animals, fast or slow depending how intense it is, three of your critters are on the wrong side of the square-cube law. Of those, the rats and lizards might be adaptable -- they'll have heavier, thicker legs than their prototypes, and likely broader chests (they need more lung area relative to their length ...
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Excessively Armor-Piercing Weapons
Some properties which make a weapon armor-piercing also reduce the damage they do to a soft target. Against an unarmored human, hollow-point bullets are more effective than armor-piercing or full metal jacket because the HP expands and spends energy in the target where AP or FMJ might overpenetrate.
Of course a 5.56mm hole ...
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Warhammer 40k-style Void Shields
A void shield is an energy shield that shunts things of suitable energy/mass trying to penetrate the shield into an alternate dimension (the warp, for 40k, hyperspace or N-space or wherever in your universe) but only as long as the power lasts.
So your gallant heroes arrive at Evil Facility X. They are each equipped with a ...
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Ablative Body Armor
We all think that in "real warfare" it's one shot one kill, but for the past few decades, that have been becoming less and less true. Many armies now equip thier soldiers with body armor that includes ceramic plates that can stop most battlefield ammunition. These ceramic plates are typically rated as class-IV body armor ...
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Inverse Ninja Law
The inverse ninja law is a media trope regarding not only ninjas, but any character type that is shown to attack in massed numbers, such as soldiers, robots, daleks, or vampires (but not zombies). It states that the threat level of any number of ninjas or other whatsits is inversely proportionate to their numbers. Therefore, if you're ...
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Perhaps they are gladiators?
Soldiers in your army will have the best weapons that you can economically provide for them, and will tend to be brutally efficient (and not take stupid risks like walking across an open hangar into gunfire when cover is available).
Gladiators on the other hand are equipped to put on a show. They are given exotic or visually ...
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It's really dangerous until it goes fast enough to get really awesome
For starters, the 'monomolecular edge' isn't helpful at all to actually being an effective sword, it's actually the opposite. Force is just 1/2 mass * velocity, so a mono-molecular blade, which has really little mass, will just have really little force, so once you get past a certain point ...
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Radiation affects fertility in men much more than fertility in women. Like @Willk pointed out, eventually there might only be a few fertile men in high demand.
I'll focus on the second part of your question: What can be done?
Migration
The survivors should immediately try to migrate to a minimally radioactive location, if it exists. If it is very far and ...
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They will be fine.
First - survivors are survivors for a reason. Like they did not have the bad stuff happen to them that happened to all the people that died. So maybe the survivors were elsewhere when the serious radiation went down.
But nay; nay - all of them got radiated to some degree, let us say. Are their baby-having days done? No.
Fertility among ...
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We're probably goners
It's difficult to determine non-experimentally (and good luck getting that grant funded), but there seems to be a loose consensus that the minimum viable population for humans is ~160. You could make a case for this number dropping a bit through careful lineage tracing and family planning, but it gives us an order of magnitude ...
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Make your nation bigger.
Clearly you love the military and all their sweet stuff. And you want what is essentially the US Military to be fighting they way they do now in a near future post apocalyptic environment. That is what you need to have! That is where your passion is.
To keep the sweet military you just need a bigger population. And fortunately ...
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Just answering a part of the question - the crew.
Given the advanced level or technology, you could expect some massive automation and robotisation. The crew size is not a huge problem, imagine a size similar to the (mining ship, so kinda similar) Red Dwarf. And yeah, I know it's a comedy, but the premise sounds plausible to me. And its size (6 miles long) ...
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As Franklin Pezzuti Dyer already scienced out the issue with size/mass constraints, I don't think you'll need an answer on that.
As for what drives the ship - if you want to go with interstellar travel without the use of things like stasis, or making your concept go to science fantasy with the idea of FTL travel (which is impossible according to any theories ...
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A naga could have evolved from an arboreal frog that grew larger to hunt larger prey. They might evolve more efficient lungs, in order to supply oxygen to the body. They would also evolve to grab onto branches, as they would be too large to stick to things. They may evolve to grab prey with their long hind-legs, as their legs would be stronger than their ...
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Two things. Firstly a crewed space ship is in one sense nothing more than a space habitat with an engine attached.
Secondly a lot depends on how 'hard'/believable you want your story to be e.g. are you going to have devices that generate artificial gravity aka Star Trek on the ship or not? If you don't have this kind of device and you want your crew to be ...
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It's feasible to turn the whole solar system into a spaceship if you like. The question isn't how big is plausible, it's how big is economical? It turns out pretty small.
Let's figure out the economics of your world(s). To do that we need to resolve a paradox: shooting trash into orbit is viable, but once in orbit it has value again. Why?
Do I need to ...
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I'm not a big fan of "zombie viruses". 28 Days Later may be the best of these, it's a rabanoid virus by the looks, the zombies eventually die of starvation, and the method of transmission means it might be possible to affect the victims as quickly as depicted. But generally it's a bad plot device.
You've got a few problems with the mechanism of ...
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I think that to get zombie-like behaviour (aggression, esp. biting), you need to combine two different factors.
You need to get rid of normal human inhibitions. Those are quite deep down given by both our genetics and culture. An extreme, unbearable pain could be a good one (also could help you with limited joint movement to get the stiff zombie walk). When ...
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Adding a small idea to all of the rest: You could use "Intertialess technology" like was used in the old EE "Doc" Smith's Lensmen books. It allowed for FTL and huge ships. This may be the answer to some of the "hand wavy" stuff you need to worry about... by not worrying about it.
Thoughts on perturbing the orbits of existing ...
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I'll try to focus on some of the issues I see in a potentially interesting story.
Size
The size of the ship would be story based.
If you want it to be large you can just make up motives for it to set on a long journey through the stars in its garbage.. ehrm recovery mission. Very much like whaling ships in the XIX century.
Motive could be economical, ...
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The biggest constraint for the size of a star-ship is going to be inertia.
This is not a "hard limit" but when you hand-wave away energy and propulsion, I can pretty much guarantee it will be the next engineering limit you will be faced with long before other issues like gravitational collapse or resource availability.
The big reason you can't make ...
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This question is far too concerned about unimportant details; in particular, the mass and size of the ship.
The essential parts of the ship will be:
The crew's habitat.
The engines.
Fuel.
Given that the ship will:
Accelerate very slowly.
Remain in space.
The most obvious configuration is simply to attach large cargo nets to it whenever a new load is ...
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I have written about this type of device previously - there's a chapter in my book Weapons Grade on them. Short answer: not very effective weapons.
The Nazis developed a an explosively driven whirlwind AA cannon which would break a one-inch plank at a hundred metres with a vortex ring. There were a number of nonlethal weapon developments in the 90s ...
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Depends on the level of your civilization - if below Kardashev I (thus comparable to ours), they are not able to undertake any astroengineering projects, such as igniting the brown dwarf, and are limited to exploiting the brown dwarf energy indirectly - much like we are limited to using our Sun.
All depends on how exactly the planet and life developed and ...
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Explosively Generated Vortex
Utilizing a fuel air explosive could generate vortexes powerful enough to knock people over, but that's about it. Air is not a very dense medium to utilize for transferring energy, and vortexes tend to dissipate fairly rapidly. A vortex cannon is an incredibly inefficient way to impart energy onto a target. The only role I could ...
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Interstellar trips
You will have to resort to a lot of handwaving, using FTL on a Star Wars level to get your scavengers to do interstellar travel in months. Remember that the distance between stars is measured in light years!
Franklin answered this in majestic way!
Acceleration in sci-fi
The biggest problem with sci-fi ship acceleration is that most of them ...
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There's a big difference between owning and operating
Owning? No problem.
I see two different questions here. The first is is it possible for the DC government to own this pile of military hardware? The answer is yes. We have room for all that hardware. The ships may have been at sea during the insurrection and out of reach of the enemy forces. One radio ...
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LOGISTICAL HANDWAVIUM: This scenario requires a LOT of handwavium to justify, especially without adding some really extraordinary tech.
Assume the federal government has become an absolute dictatorship, complete command economy where the people are serving purely for the sake of preserving the federal government. Despite the fact the district could be ...
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the largest a ship can get is are 300,000 KM in length, but would require the industry level of a K3 civilization to build. And would only really be practical to a K4 or a K5.
and such ships would be black hole powered as only a small star of a black hole could give you enough power for ships in this size range, and such ship if it was a warship, would be ...
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