Well of Souls Forums

They're cross trained, and there was no current need for their Doranzer skills just then?

I am pretty sure the 'unseemly' part was the medic's appearance of extreme youth... too young to have learned enough to be an actual doctor, by human appearances. Humans in the story don't know about Loroi longevity or lack of apparent aging yet, I think.

Star Fleet Battles had ship separation for Federation saucers and Klingon booms. The problem one generally ran into was that, by the time you were in bad enough shape to want to abandon ship, the saucer/boom wasn't really in good enough shape to make it a viable escape method. They did have a specia...

Mizol Lennai Darkspring was glad her friend and partner, Listel Sininran Skybright was with her, as they entered the office of Torrai Soshret Sixwinds, the commander of the mission to Humaniti. She wasn't sure why the two most junior members of the mission had been summoned to meet directly with its...

The orbit of Neptune is about 30 AU out. Light takes ~4 hours to go that far. The higher velocity mass drivers that humanity uses are listed as 400 km/sec, or about 1/750th of light speed. So 3000 hours, or about 4 months, from Neptune to the sun at mass driver shot velocity. To have the Neptune to ...

An Internet 'book' I guess. It was broken up into eight pages. It was supposed to explore morality and what you do when you meet someone whose morality is different to yours. According to humans in the story, the answer to that is "Act superior, hypocritical, run away and blow up stars". So pretty ...

Sigh... the WWII meme that won't die. The Sherman was a death trap, the T-34 a god-tank. The two were actually pretty comparable. Like the Zero, the T-34 made its reputation early in the war, when its opponents were not well equipped to counter it. German infantry units at the start of Operation Bar...

Hmm... I dunno. Zero was agile and long ranged, but very, very fragile. No armor, no self sealing fuel tanks. It established its lasting reputation in a few golden months spent fighting less experienced opponents flying obsolescent machines, but, like the Imperial Japanese Navy as a whole, it's shor...

The truth about where this is all going, about what humanity can do for the Loroi has already been hinted at on page 43.

In a strange reversal of a traditional human fairy tale, it will actually be humans who make shoes for elves...

Elan from OotS would jump right to the real answer: The Good Guy Federation will always beat the Bad Guy Empire in the end. It may take until the end of Act III, but it will happen. The Story requires it!

Care to try Star Wars vs Star Trek next?

The other thing to consider about the relative effort required to extract space resources vs planetary ones: extorting resources from a planetary population costs the Umiak nothing if that population believes they will be wiped out for not delivering. Resources gained with zero Umiak labor involved ...

What can humanity offer the Loroi? _______________.

Cards Against Humanity, Outsider edition....

I was thinking fuel for the aircraft would be considered part of munitions & stores, not ship's fuel, and thus be included in the 'standard displacement' You're right, though, about any savings in weight being eaten up by carrying even more jet fuel and bombs. Nimitz apparently carries twice the jet...

Does a Nimitz's reactors weigh more than a Forrestal's steam generating plant plus a full load of fuel for it, though? Forrestal's full loaded displacement is 80,000 tons, while its 'standard displacement' is only ~60,000 tons. Traditionally, the 'standard displacement' of a ship is its displacement...

The problem the Loroi have isn't producing enough bodies. It is (I think) training them, and building enough ships to fit them in. Even if your estimate that only 10% of the overall population or 50 billion Loroi can give birth to a new warrior in any given year, that means they could be producing 5...

Yeah, none of this really applies to spacecraft, since they're moving through a medium largely devoid of matter. Space ship propulsion should more or less scale scale directly. A 100 meter ship that accelerates at 30G needs pretty much the same proportion of its mass devoted to engines as a 200 mete...

1) Yes, Iowa was unusually fast for a battleship. But still slower than its companion destroyers. Other late build US battleships (built and proposed) topped out at 28 knots, rather than 32-33, while the older ships still serving (built during or prior to WWI) went 20-21 knots maximum. Other navies ...

That, and a few other things. 1) Battleships tended to be slower, so less power as a percentage of size needed to achieve maximum speed. 2) Drag goes up geometrically as speed goes up linearly. Faster is less efficient than slower. 3) Size matters. A larger ship's frontal area (the amount of water i...

It would be more fitting for this one to be titled "A New Hope" given how most of the fans feel about the last three. As to the actual trailer, there's no telling from what we've seen, really. Yeah, the speeder was clunky, but it could be a cargo hauling model disconnected from its load for all we k...