New answers tagged transportation
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Intersection control is just CPU scheduling in disguise, for which there is ample research already existent. The limited resource (intersection, CPU) is allocated to multiple clients (cars, jobs) in order to maximize utilization of the resource, among other things. There are costs associated with changing jobs (stopping and restarting traffic), there are ...
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Mixing Money and Public Infrastructure always has unseen results that you don't expect
I'm going to put a different take on this, and refer instead to human nature.
The issue with money being mixed with public infrastructure is that systems become exploited in a way that many in government DON'T expect. 2 examples:
Toll Roads - Private Toll roads in ...
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The big problem here is that it will greatly reduce the throughput of intersections.
A major part of designing intersections is balancing throughput with latency. A traffic light that never switches maximizes throughput in one direction -- vehicles never need to stop for the light -- but maximizes latency in the other -- vehicles wait forever for their ...
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It will cause chaos. One of the things that traffic lights do is restrict the volume of traffic on the road beyond the signal. There is a counter-intuitive characteristic of traffic (typically on freeways, but a signalled road will exacerbate the problem) that when volume gets to a certain point it goes from free-flowing to stopped, and you can make people ...
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I don't think that SPECIFIC situation works because of the nature of an intersection, but let me state the same type of plan in a slightly different scenario:
On freeways I often encounter a ramp to another freeway that backs up (Sometimes for quite a long way). A common response is for people to get out of the lane and into a faster lane, but then to try ...
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It kills one of the main uses of traffic lights
One of the best uses of traffic lights over stop signs is to allow intersections of very large (high volume) roads with very small (low volume) roads. If I am the only car at a stop sign intersection with a 3-lane, packed road, I will never get to go. Stoplights fix this problem by forcing the high volume ...
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This system is probably the way of the future with the exception of traffic lights, which will become nonexistent as soon as we have self driving cars.
Automated negotiation of right of way for autonomous driving is a real research subject. Sadly I can't find the video but my university is testing a system where AI driven cars negotiate in some fashion in ...
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Circular intersection also called "Roundabaouts" or "elipticalbouts".
Also this is not a thought expirement. This is Auction experiment. So - how much you are willing to give for a $1. The best profitable option is of course 1 cent. But if two people are participating the best option would be to give 99 cents.
But people don't think this way. They want to ...
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While an interesting thought, I can see a few major flaws with this system:
You are never the only one to arrive at an intersection. You will almost always be behind someone. They might not have the same financial status or preferences, and might opt to wait instead. This means you might have to pay not only your share, but also their share to get a green ...
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Welcome to your friendly supplier. We got a recent batch mature for employ!
Kidnap a few, say a hundred for gene diversity.
The acepted bare minimum for a viable colony was about 2k. Yet with gene editing you can get a smaller subset and edit away the defects.
Remember stars are light years apart. By the time you reach the other stars of the galaxy, your ...
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Purchase your slaves from other members of their species.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade
Current estimates are that about 12 million to 12.8 million Africans
were shipped across the Atlantic over a span of 400 years, although
the number purchased by the traders was considerably higher, as the
passage had a high death rate... ...
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Skyline's aliens
Considering
1) You can't make your aliens too advanced, because they could build realiable robots to do whatever they want, not aliensweating even a bit.
2) It also needs to have economics in play. They need it to be cheap, because otherwise they would find other ways to do the job, like cloning humans in a lab. War is expensive, so that ...
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Aliens silently made planet inhospitable - they tricked lesser race to believe their planet has global warming, while, in reality, its has ice age starting. After long winters and floods destroyed crops, lesser race will willingly follow anybody, who promise to save them from hunger, even if they had to board big and overcrowded warp ships, that will ...
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If the aliens penetrated society as impersonators using disguises of some kind, and with their tricks, assumed positions of power in the governments, funded space colonization programs, then they could move out people, without being under suspicion, to their home planet.
However, sending 50 million humans on a space colonization mission is nearly ...
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Depends on the technology ...
A sufficiently advanced technology could send warp ships into orbit, beam the people directly into stasis pods, and then fly them to the destination. The problem with that is that a technology which has transporters like Star Trek, and computers to control all this, might not need millions of workers.
An insufficiently ...
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Weapons
You can't kidnap 50 million humans without someone noticing. It's simply not possible. In addition, the amount of logistics and energy you would require in order to transport 50 million humans off-world is such that your fleet would be noticed by the current space gazing infrastructure. Sure, you can bend rules to give your fleet ultra-stealth ...
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There is an analogy with electric current. I you have two wires with current going the same direction, they are attracted to each other.
So if you have two portals going from A to B, then through most of their length they are congruent. This means that anything going through them is split in half between the two destination portals. This can be used to ...
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Enter the solar system on the opposite side of the sun from Earth. Come around the sun and approach Earth on the day-time side. You’ll be extremely hard to see with the sun behind you, and it’ll cover any flare from your breaking engines.
Hang out around Venus’s orbit for a while until you see a really good solar flare head in Earth’s direction. Fire up ...
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You disguise your spaceship as a Challenger 300 aircraft.
https://businessaircraft.bombardier.com/en/experience/profile/sammy-hagar-his-challenger-300
And disguise yourself as businessman, philanthropist, and rock legend Sammy Hagar. You will hide in brazenly awesome plain sight. Your crew will be disguised as his entourage. You can apologize for the ...
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1) Cover the ship in ventablack. That will render it effectively invisible for earth technology all the trip down to orbit.
2) Chose an entry trajectory where you can land (or splash) and pass through few human settlements
3) Hide under the sea.
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Without much manoeuvrability due to only having the main thrusters available, it would be hard to gain entry into earths atmosphere at a low-detection spot. Even then, it would be hard to not be spotted at all, since earth has meteorite detection satellites and radars trained at the sky at all times. With the effectiveness being debatable, still as an ...
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The end result isn't stable. Or pretty.
Maybe it's the one interstellar leyline like Willk's answer. Maybe the portal paths merge like Ted Wrigley's answer. Magi-scientists don't know. The issue is if the portal from Earth to Minbar is has only one entrance/exit on each planet, it is fine and stable. But attempt to open a second portal, and you just get ...
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Identity (peronality,ego,..) of planets
tl;dr; Planets have self-identity, portals connects such identities, so their are unique for each pair, but there are more theory around and some special cases...
Each planet is unique so it is its self-identification (or ego, or personality or call it as your magic tradition is used to call it).
From magical point ...
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Adding to your original idea of having a certain amount of magic in the planet that’s used to make portals, I think you can still use it:
Each planet has a limited amount of magic, enough to create one portal to another planet. But think of it as a different kind of magic/mana that’s not to be mixed with the mana used by wizards to do their regular magic - ...
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The Dark Materials trilogy have this exact setup. A boy finds a knife that can cut portals to other worlds, but in the end they realize that each open portal allows some kind of soul-sucking creature to roam around and, well, suck souls.
An angel tells the boy at the end that only one portal can remain open, and they decide it should be the one in hell to ...
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Making a closed loop with portals slams one or both of them closed. (either limited to 3 portals on 2 locations, and more indirection's fine, or any loop of any size)
Like leaving your front and back-doors open at the same time, and having a light breeze smash it closed.
You could circumvent this by creating some kind of portal-based revolving door. (which ...
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Portals can repel each other along their entire length, but not enough that it matters for two portals each with one end on the same planet but their other ends on different planets.
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The planet with the extra portal is actually two planets that somehow merged into one. The “fluke” portal is on the other planet from the “normal” one.
OR
The fluke was made by someone who found a different method of creating it, so it doesn’t violate the only-one rule of the other method.
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One spot only
For reasons that are too complex to explain, a portal from planet A to planet B must be constructed in one exact spot on Planet A, and lead to one exact spot on Planet B. A portal constructed anywhere else will not lead there.
So, by controlling and guarding the spot, you control the traffic between A and B.
Mages can feel potential portal ...
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Each world has a different 'frequency' or 'flavour' of mana, and these are incompatible. At a portal, you get some minor mingling and diffusion of mana between the worlds - kept in check by the mana pressure of each world - which causes local plants and animals to die off or sicken in the vicinity, and allows some from the other world to slip through.
...
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A simple model:
Portals are not simple tubes. They expand until the halfway point and then contract. (Think of a huge American or Rugby football). Anything transiting them is similarly expanded and contracted, but it's a transient and conservative process that somebody transiting the portal doesn't even notice (or maybe does, as "transit shock" which might ...
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Thanks to all the answers given here, and mostly the ones about having some sort of mana connection between planets, I had this idea that was not mentioned yet :
Planets are connected by a mana circulatory system, with "arteries" and "veins"
Just like the circulatory system in our body, made of blood vessels, the universe has a mana circulatory system ...
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Tangled Portals
Portals have a "thread" of magic in a straight line from each other that the traveller moves down.
The problem is that the thread oscillates and waves around loosely (depending on the precision of the portal-spell) and can catch and even merge with other threads if there are any.
Over short distances, this isn't really a problem, nobody ...
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There is a huge cost to build another portal. Like the souls of 10'000 virgins, or 10'000'000 acorns etc.
It is due to this barrier that no one bothers to make another portal
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Stargates and IP Address Conflicts
Locking an interplanetary portal to a single apparently-stable position is actually a massively complex understanding that Mages simply don't understand very well. If the portal is truly stationary, then it would instantly zip up into the sky (or through the ground) as its planet of origin rotated and revolved and fell on ...
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The portals could depend on physical conditions and eg maths, but the wizards don't tell people that. As John noted in a comment "They could also depend on maths too complex for the wizards to figure out, a lot math had to wait for computers before it became possible to calculate, especially if there are many compounding factors."
So you could posit that the ...
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Part of the fantasy answer will depend on the background of your magics, and of your people.
At the core of the issue, if people do not delve into the interplanetary portals and actively discover that a second pair is possible, then it will be accepted knowledge that it isn't possible to do so. Whether this is because of a propagated lie by ruling parties, ...
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Same reason as why they don't have multiple stargates on a planet in the Stargate franchise: your portals use wormholes, and those wormholes are attracted to each other.
You see, the wormholes have a huge amount of energy involved. As a result, every mage has it drilled into his head at a young age that it is of the utmost importance that you "don't cross ...
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Make your portals (to borrow a term from physics) 'magnetic'. In other words, two magic portals that are too close to each other in space will attract each other and merge into a single portal, and because portals between planets require tremendous amounts of magical energy, they have tremendous 'magnetic' attraction. Two portals that have their origins and ...
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The portals are natural phenomena and already exist. They must be accessed.
Like ley lines or dragon currents on and in the Earth, energy lines already connect every mass in the universe to every other mass; it is part of the interaction by which mass molds space and vice versa. Your mages discover the portals and then build the means to access and use ...
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The portal between two planets can be opened only establishing a connection between the mana of planet A and planet B.
Once the connection is established, the two manas act like one, thus it's impossible for a mana to connect with itself.
If you force this process to open a second portal, you are actually splitting the mana of a planet. Bad things are ...
answered Feb 12 at 16:54
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Ideas:
The target of a portal is somehow related to its location. If you want to create a portal on A that leads to B, there is exactly one place on A that such a portal can be created. (Create a portal anywhere else, and it will lead somewhere else.) There is some fudge factor here, but the fudge factor is less than the size of the portal. Similarly, when ...
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In 2004 there was a man named Marvin Heemeyer, due to his belief that the government was unfairly destroying his livelyhood he armored up a bulldozer and had a night on the town. It lasted around 2 hours before he got stuck in a basement.
From what I recall the authorities were going to call in the guard to dispose of him, but they figured it'd do more ...
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For quick response, armed attack helicopters and / or jets.
There are three weapons that armed attack helicopters provide for use against golems; some of the comments up stream imply that small arms may or may not be effective. (This answer, mildly informed by some QRF operations I was involved with IRL, is aimed at helping you tell your story)
Hellfire ...
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I would think you'd want to chose the portal location based on how effective/fast you want the response to be. And there are further dials beyond that.
LA
LA is just north of "Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton", HumV's galore, LCACs (hovercraft that can take a tank, a few HumVs, or a crap load of soldiers), tanks, artillery, probably some attack ...
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The answers discussing USA response are very good (time to get armor from Hood, etc.)
But I would add that air attack would be very effective (big bombs blow rocky golems apart, heavier canons for golem breaking) and unopposed (lack of golem ranging weapons). Within the day many, many Naval and Air Force aircraft in the Western US and offshore could ...
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These days all Western countries are alert to the danger of a Mumbai-style terrorist attack, involving a significant number of gunmen with automatic weapons attacking a crowded city location. It is reasonable to assume that LA is well-organised and briefed do deal with this. (In the UK, an SAS unit helicoptered in within minutes of a terrorist attack in ...
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Lightly-armed troops would arrive in a few hours. Useful amounts of heavy armor and weaponry would take days.
This answer ignores USAF and USMC fighting response, since the OP asked specifically for Army. (looks like an edit changed that)
Getting troops there isn't the problem.
The nearest National Guard brigade is at San Diego, with subordinate ...
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It wouldn't be an 'all at once' kind of scenario. It would probably go down something like this:
0-1 hours: Initial invasion. Massive wave of 911 calls results in large scale but uncoordinated response by local police.
1-2 hours: Scale of event begins to become apparent. SWAT teams are deployed, but not in a very coordinated way. State Governor calls up ...
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Around the same speed once it crystallizes
All natural honey will eventually crystallize if it's just left on it's own, and it'll be even faster at just the right set of degrees. The ocean is around 62 degrees Farenheit, which is just the right set of degrees. Honey crystallization is due to the overabundance of sugar in honey, which makes it delicious, and ...
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