Yeah Yeah Something Random Blah Blah

So I don't care enough to come up with a clever name for a random thoughts post.

• I realized, the barrel length on the M4-based bullpup AR I mentioned in my last post? Yeah, it's 75.6 cm...which is just under 30 inches, or longer than the barrel on the M82 sniper rifle chambered in .50 BMG. Apparently, every Marine will be a sniper at some time in the future.


• So what's with Halsey in Reach, saying the conical bullet was a military game-changer in the 19th century, on par with the slipstream drive in the 23rd? Because, see, there's several problems: the conical bullet wasn't much of a game-changer, and it wasn't widely adopted till the early 20th century (the French won World War I, with a little English and American help, using round-tipped 8 mm Lebel in their Lebel 1886 rifles). More to the point, the big game-changers of the 19th century were cartridge ammo, allowing much faster loading, and smokeless powder, making it easier to see the battlefield. Compared to those two, Spitzer rounds are a footnote.


• So my brother and I have started playing Reach's Firefight mode, and, um, whichever player wants to be the blue team, plays as an Elite. On the same side as the AI Covenant opponents. You gotta try this, it's awesome. Only problem is, the Grunts are so gosh-darn cute, fighting on the same side as them makes you feel a little bad about using them as cannon fodder.
  
  I recommend taking turns being Blue Team, though, 'cause it's really hard to win as the Reds under those conditions.


• So what's with Japanese English and saying "Let's (Noun)"? It's just bizarre, is what it is.
  
  My only theory is, "Let's party"—and nobody explained that "party" can be a verb. The 70s and 80s have carved a charred swath through a number of languages; I suspect this is one of the casualties.


• So apparently some bacteria substitute selenium for sulfur in some biochemicals. Which is interesting—what if there were a life-form that did it all the time? Admittedly I don't know how likely that is, selenium being a whole row lower, but their planet could be odd.
  
  Of course, if selenium stands in for sulfur, routinely, well...you think rotten eggs smell bad? Apparently selenium smells worse in compounds like that.


• So I decided to take out orbit catapults, other than for cargo, in my SF book; the only way humans would survive that would be by using the artificial gravity-based inertia protectors, and I decided the artificial gravity doesn't work very well on planets. It needs to use the Casimir effect to induce exoticity in a plasma shell, after all, and I'm not sure you'd wanna do that in an atmosphere.
  
  Most human planets use orbit elevators; their ships are insulated with Bose-Einstein condensates, so radiation's not a problem. On one, though—a planet orbiting Tau Ceti, which is apparently a messy system—they do orbit insertion with reusable rocket-stages (TSTO, specifically), because the debris impacts would make short work of an elevator. Another, with a 5-bar pressure atmosphere of carbon monoxide and methane, and seas of formaldehyde (it's cold there), uses zeppelins to bring ships high up into the atmosphere, where they take off.
  
  The aliens can use orbit catapults, thanks to how their guns work, but they usually take off with their magnetosphere sails.


• My humans use two different landers, as well: a shuttle-type, that lands like an airplane, and the detachable habitat-section of a fusion rocket-ship, which lands something like the McDonnell-Douglas Delta Clipper idea. Both types, though, use orbit elevators, rocket stages, or zeppelins to take off (they're reusable TSTOs, in other words).
  
  And yeah, once they're in LEO, they rendezvous with the ship that had their main rocket. I'm not sure the second one would necessarily be a good idea (though I do like the image of a ship's habitat section doubling as a lander); it's just a cheap and easy way for me, as the writer, not to have to multiply settings. Actually it's because I initially wrote those scenes with the whole ships themselves landing, and didn't want to have to re-set them at a hotel or something. I mean, all those scenes were taking place in the ship's hab-section anyway.