Well of Souls Forums

Trantor wrote:So sad he already perished.

As far as we know.

But these days we´ll maybe witnessing the downfall of capitalism. At risk of being political, I don't think it's the downfall of capitalism, it's mostly just shifting to a more comfortable position; we've witnessed that a purely socialist system isn't sustainable, now we're seeing that a purely cap...

And how can any planet under Umiak control be safe from immediate Umiak counterattack? First we have to assume three things: 1) The Loroi, independent of how they would treat the local population, would likely treat taking habitable planets with their infrastructure as intact as possible as a strat...

I think you're misunderstanding my timeline of when and how I'd use diplomatic force. 1) Attack the system in question, either destroying the Umiak defense fleet outright or forcing a retreat further into Umiak space. Either way, the population in question must be relatively safe from immediate Umia...

Third choice is pretty much "Surrender and you'll be under the protection of the Terran Colonial Authority and the Loroi Empire." Sure, from a short-term strategic standpoint it would be a bitch to hold and protect a system like that from Umiak counter-incursion, and the client-race in question is n...

I think the first time we stop our Loroi allies from glassing an Umiak client-race's homeworld and instead volunteer support to help rebuild their ruined culture and infrastructure, devastated after decades of Umiak control and likely weeks of orbital combat we'll have just sent a message to every r...

...You also have the ethical questions of whether you should be putting an intelligent, self aware entity in harm's way unnecessarily. As opposed to an intelligent, self aware human? (This is actually brought up in a few Bolo stories; later on in the timeline having a human commander in the bolo is...

TVTropes link for the Bolo-verse. Bolos are essentially giant, AI-controlled tanks, but the author took a unique approach to how AIs would evolve for them. Essentially, instead of making them too dumb to rebel, we made them smart enough that they're treated mostly the same as their human soldiers, ...

Whether to use AIs or pilots has always been one of those weird subjects for me. Objectively, I know that AI's will generally be better than a human pilot in any given combat situation 99% of the time, but my gut just knows that an AI getting all the credit for taking out the enemy flagship is disap...

Well it wouldn't be an MAM-explosion pumped laser so much as a smaller MAM-explosion firing an explosively pumped flux compression generator and using the gigantic pulse generated by it to magnetically direct the main MAM explosion in a useful vector. If you've ever played Starcraft, the Battlecruis...

Actually, if you just directed the explosion in a cone rather than a cohesive beam wouldn't need spot-on accuracy; merely being pointed in the general direction of the target at an appropriate distance would give you a hit. The more focused the "beam", the more of the explosions energy you'd be able...

An MAM Shaped charge... Hmmm. My mad scientist senses are tingling with the possibilities. What if behind the MAM warhead you put some sort of explosively pumped magnetic field generator that focuses the blast forward into a cone or beam rather than a sphere? Even if it lasted for only the barest fr...

There could be factors for why much of Outsider-Humanity hasn't embraced trans-humanism. Perhaps cyborg bodies are expensive to make, buy and upkeep. (Keep in mind that the human body is capable of amazing feats of self-repair. If you break a meet leg, you can slap a cast on it and it'll be fine in ...

I still think an explosion alone like that would be a terribly inefficient weapon in a vacuum... What about a two-stage warhead? As the missile approaches a certain range, it fires a kinetic warhead (Or big chunk of shotgun-like directed shrapnel) using either a conventional charge or a smaller MAM ...

If that's our Light Cruiser, I can't wait to see what our Dreadnaughts look like.

Honestly, at the speeds we're talking about, the Matter-Antimatter explosion isn't nearly as effective as just hitting them with the kinetic energy, Though I suppose if the fuel is kept behind the warhead, the detonation might add an addition kick to a kinetic warhead just before impact, but the exp...

If humanity was anywhere near the prototype phase of an instantaneous communications device, I'd think that the mission would have been put off until such a device could be put on the scout ships, or at least on the Prahbu. And then the political and military decisions would be made on Earth. And a...

Loroi being bad at gound warfare could be a reason why they have a tendency to just glass the entire population of a world from orbit rather than take it intact. Afterall they're generally only interested in the jump points and probably have hundreds of worlds just as nice as the one their turning i...

Actually, putting out a fire or getting rid of noxious gasses in space is a surprisingly simple affair: Close the doors to other, unaffected rooms and vent it into space. (Or if you want to waste as little atmosphere as possible, flooding the area with a non-reactive gas like Helium or Argon.) Assum...

Actually, using areas of a ship that aren't battle-critical is a pretty good idea. (The amount of material that you can cram into those areas will still give you a slightly better bang for your space, though.) I think we could take this idea further, and all critical areas and battle stations and su...