Well of Souls Forums

Arioch just updated the weapons, the ship stuff has been largely the same for a couple years. I expect when he gets around to updating that the numbers will make more sense.

sunphoenix wrote:...what is the convention, conversion, summary or ratio of weapon damage compared to spaceship armor and screen type?

Currently, the various defensive ratings are only useful for comparing to the same rating on another ship; there is not any correlation between the new damage numbers and the current armor or shield rating. I will fix that when I finish the Ship Systems page, but that will take some time.

Suederwind wrote:The question I would like to ask is about that "Security Unit" rating that Terran vessels have. Does one Security Unit equals one (space)marine aboard a ship?

A security unit is 6 marines, but it's an obsolete stat that I will be removing (it's already been removed from the Loroi fleet page).

Arioch wrote:

sunphoenix wrote:...what is the convention, conversion, summary or ratio of weapon damage compared to spaceship armor and screen type?

Currently, the various defensive ratings are only useful for comparing to the same rating on another ship; there is not any correlation between the new damage numbers and the current armor or shield rating. I will fix that when I finish the Ship Systems page, but that will take some time.

Suederwind wrote:The question I would like to ask is about that "Security Unit" rating that Terran vessels have. Does one Security Unit equals one (space)marine aboard a ship?

A security unit is 6 marines, but it's an obsolete stat that I will be removing (it's already been removed from the Loroi fleet page).

Thank you! That's all I needed to know.. I'll just adjust the stats I set for our BESM Game when you finalize your ships stats.

A security unit is 6 marines, but it's an obsolete stat that I will be removing (it's already been removed from the Loroi fleet page).

Thank you for explaining that. I was a bit confused as I tried to figure out how many marines would be on board of a Terran ship.

Edit: Another question related to that RP: Did the Orgus vaguely knew how the Umiak or Loroi look like and if yes, did they share that information with the Humans ?

Do drunk Umiak see pink loroi?

I've been drunk many times, but I've never seen pink elephants, nor do I know anyone who has. I'm not sure how that idea entered the popular consciousness.

Suederwind wrote:Another question related to that RP: Did the Orgus vaguely knew how the Umiak or Loroi look like and if yes, did they share that information with the Humans ?

The Orgus had direct contact with the Umiak, so they knew a fair amount about them, including what they look like. The Orgus had no contact with the Loroi, and so all information about the Loroi was second-hand.

Arioch wrote:I've been drunk many times, but I've never seen pink elephants, nor do I know anyone who has. I'm not sure how that idea entered the popular consciousness.

Seeing Pink elephants is a euphemism for Alcohol-related psychosis, and should only occur when you're suffering alcohol withdrawal as you're physically dependent. So if you're seeing "pink elephants" you are probably in a serious life threatening situation and in convulsions as your brain is making a one way shut down till it stocks up on it's ethanol. Sedative hypnotic drugs such as alcohol, can be easily fatal in withdrawal due to their tendency to induce major convulsions as your central nervous system is so out of sync as it's heavily depressed by alcohol. Abrupt withdrawal will kill you. So unless you're an alcoholic, you probably shouldn't be seeing them any time soon!

The pink elephant, and blue mice was coined by Jack London I do believe.

Would not a Loroi, if inebriated or intoxicated by a potent brewski...
see a Blueish Variant of an Elephant or a Barsam admonishing on the evils of not drinking responsibly ....

I've been sort of curious - we do know that loroi telepathy has more "bandwith" to convey information. But could such a thing (and perhaps did it?) lead to essentially a degeneration of other information venues.

Just consider when we're talking from between each other, there's the vocal information itself, the tone itself (which we know is conveyed in telepathy) but at the same time there's multiple other venues as well.
Including facial expression, gesticulation, demeanor and multiple other ways to convey information. Are they as well developed amongst the loroi and if not are they capable of noticing it amongts other species (human come to mind here, since the loroi cannot telepathically sense them)

Two questions.

First, where did the Loroi get replacements from for the first decade of the war? Our conventional method of training civilians doesn't seem socially acceptable for them.


Second, the Loroi rank structure is lacking something very important: enlisted rank equivalents. Unless officers are doing what we have enlisted doing (in which case their hierachy is a bit trucated), I don't see how their military opperates. Who does the maintenance?

kclcmdr wrote:Would not a Loroi, if inebriated or intoxicated by a potent brewski... see a Blueish Variant of an Elephant or a Barsam admonishing on the evils of not drinking responsibly ....

I guess considering how much damage a drunken Barsam could cause, we would have to assume that sobriety must be accepted as a Barsam virtue.

junk wrote:I've been sort of curious - we do know that loroi telepathy has more "bandwith" to convey information. But could such a thing (and perhaps did it?) lead to essentially a degeneration of other information venues.

Loroi are very visual people, and so I think they'd have a similar sensitivity to physical nonverbal communication as we do. But it's certainly true that most Loroi treat spoken language as a sort of "second language," and so might miss many vocal subtleties that we would notice.

Random Person wrote: First, where did the Loroi get replacements from for the first decade of the war? Our conventional method of training civilians doesn't seem socially acceptable for them.

The Loroi had large reserves of military personnel during peacetime; for every warrior standing on the deck of an actual starship there were probably two or three more at desk jobs training and competing for the opportunity to take her place. Once that pool was exhausted, they would use warriors retrained from other specialties. There was also a small number of new warrior graduates every year -- population growth would have been low in peacetime, but never at zero. And finally, when that bucket was empty, they would have to use civilians for some positions. I think for the majority of the war, the critical shortage would have been ships rather than people, but in 2140-41, things were probably pretty bad.

Random Person wrote:Second, the Loroi rank structure is lacking something very important: enlisted rank equivalents. Unless officers are doing what we have enlisted doing (in which case their hierachy is a bit trucated), I don't see how their military opperates. Who does the maintenance?

The Loroi military has low ranks, but they don't have a class distinction between enlisted and officer; even the lowest-ranking Loroi warrior has been through a training regimen that gives her significant social status. There are always menial tasks required in any combat unit, and wherever these can't be pawned off to some civilian contractors, they will be performed by the lower-ranking warriors (or those who have pissed off their commander in some way). These won't be popular duties, but warriors shouldn't be afraid to get their hands dirty.

The rank list provided concentrates on shipboard titles; ground-based infantry will probably have a greater variety of low-ranking titles, and many menial functions may be provided by civilian personnel. On board a starship, however, civilians are usually not allowed, and the cost of operating such a unit is so extreme that it doesn't make much sense to put anyone but your best available people at every position. Sometimes this will mean that a person with the equivalent of a college education is turning a wrench or cleaning a toilet, but you don't have to look any farther than our own space program to see that principle already in action today.

Also, at this technology level there is a significant amount of automation, so there will be some non-humanoid robots to help with some of the most difficult and menial tasks.

Arioch wrote:I guess considering how much damage a drunken Barsam could cause, we would have to assume that sobriety must be accepted as a Barsam virtue.

...so facing the imminent downfall of their economy due to alcohol-induced collateral damage they chose to become sober space preachers...

...amen^H^H^ahem^H^err, scnr.

Could you perhaps update the pay grades page with enlisted ranks? :3

kclcmdr wrote:...or a Barsam admonishing on the evils of not drinking responsibly ....

Good one.


But to stay on topic. On page 88 our good friend Kikitik-27 mentions "Khalkha divisions". Is "Khalkha" the Umiak name of the sector/solar system those divisions departed from?

CJ Miller wrote:Could you perhaps update the pay grades page with enlisted ranks? :3

Pay grades page didn't he just answer the question regarding the loroi? Or did you mean humans? In that case where is this pay grade page i've seen nothing like that.

On the subject of drunk loroi just what would it take to get a loroi drunk? The loroi have an effective metabolism so toxics would be taken cared off much easier than with humans and soia-liron lifeforms are notoriously robust and durable so i assume they would be minimally affected by the amounts that would normally topple a human.

O2, O3, etc. are pay grades, so CJ is referring to the ranks page. But I'm not sure whether he was joking or not about adding enlisted ranks when I just got through saying that there aren't any.

GeoModder wrote: On page 88 our good friend Kikitik-27 mentions "Khalkha divisions". Is "Khalkha" the Umiak name of the sector/solar system those divisions departed from?

No, it's a descriptive term that's meant to be unfamiliar, and it will be explained later.

Jericho wrote:On the subject of drunk loroi just what would it take to get a loroi drunk? The loroi have an effective metabolism so toxics would be taken cared off much easier than with humans and soia-liron lifeforms are notoriously robust and durable so i assume they would be minimally affected by the amounts that would normally topple a human.

By efficient metabolisms I meant that the system is less wasteful in converting food into energy, and so a Loroi needs slightly less food and generates less waste heat. But I don't think the metabolic processes are necessarily much faster.

I'm not sure what effect (if any) alcohol would have on a Soia-liron organism, and it's not something I plan to explore.

I was thinking, though, that it would be interesting if we had drugs that the body recognized as "beneficial" and didn't try to immediately flush out of our system. As a hypothetical example, if you were engineering a super-trooper, you might want to build a metabolic system that recognized some beneficial drugs such as analgesics and antibiotics, and deliberately left them alone instead of trying to metabolize them, thus increasing their duration.

Arioch wrote:I'm not sure what effect (if any) alcohol would have on a Soia-liron organism, and it's not something I plan to explore.

Because alcohol is almost universal solvent, it hindrace chemical signals of our nervous system and I think it will work same way in any kind of biochemical system.
And because it looks that being drunk is not big part of Loroi culture or survival, like to humans, they may not have our resistance.

"You drink poisonous detergent because you think it is fun? You crazy humans!"

I remember archeological drinking dish found from China. Any liquid put on it was after a hour so poisonous with lead, that the researcher didn't wan't to touch it with bare hands. Yeah, we humans love to poison ourselves and our surroundings.

bunnyboy wrote:

Arioch wrote:I'm not sure what effect (if any) alcohol would have on a Soia-liron organism, and it's not something I plan to explore.

Because alcohol is almost universal solvent, it hindrace chemical signals of our nervous system and I think it will work same way in any kind of biochemical system.
And because it looks that being drunk is not big part of Loroi culture or survival, like to humans, they may not have our resistance.

"You drink poisonous detergent because you think it is fun? You crazy humans!"

I remember archeological drinking dish found from China. Any liquid put on it was after a hour so poisonous with lead, that the researcher didn't wan't to touch it with bare hands. Yeah, we humans love to poison ourselves and our surroundings.

Our alcohol tolerance will save our planet.

http://video.adultswim.com/robot-chicke ... b-invasion

That was something what I did not want to see when I was eating.

Arioch wrote:
I was thinking, though, that it would be interesting if we had drugs that the body recognized as "beneficial" and didn't try to immediately flush out of our system. As a hypothetical example, if you were engineering a super-trooper, you might want to build a metabolic system that recognized some beneficial drugs such as analgesics and antibiotics, and deliberately left them alone instead of trying to metabolize them, thus increasing their duration.

I'm no doctor but "beneficial" is a very deceptive term regarding medicine.

I'm not sure how increased duration would benefit the trooper cause every drug is poisonous to us in the long run. It seems to me to be a far wiser strategy to produce soldiers that can withstand prolonged exposure to alien substances rather than leangthen their duration as we are talking about messing with the natural balance of the body. I can't imagine the damages to the nervous and immune systems.