Blood and Treasure

What? No, this is about writing SF and fantasy, with special emphasis on alien biochemistry, and economics. Why, what did you think it meant?

• So I decided my felinoids have fuchsia blood, based on an iron-sulfur protein instead of a heme-protein. It's yellow when it bonds to carbon dioxide (did you know that's why the blood in your veins is blue? yeah, hemoglobin doesn't just bond to O₂). What's interesting is, though they're immune to carbon monoxide poisoning, they get nitric oxide poisoning, instead. Nota bene, nitric, not nitrous—NO, not N₂O.
  
  Of course, their homeworld has only about 2/3 the oxygen in its atmosphere that Earth does—so they have air sacs like birds, constantly pumping fresh air through their constant-volume lungs. They still breathe out when they relax, though—birds breathe in by default, and have to tense a muscle to exhale.
  
  As Gabe and Tycho said, birds are weird.


• The elves in my fantasy book, and the trolls, don't have blood, they have ichor—they were the objects of human worship, and ichor is what gods' blood is called. I was at a loss for what to have it look like, but then I found out ichor is gold-colored. So when an elf gets cut it looks like molten gold (fortunately they're not prone to emo-ness, because self-harm would be a hell of a temptation if your blood was that cool-looking).
  
  Oh incidentally, Ursula K. LeGuin, while admittedly "ichor" should never just be used as a synonym for blood, I'd have said completely bollocksed cultural appropriation is "the infallible touchstone of the seventh rate". But then, I'm acquainted with actual Taoist thought.


• My felinoids' genetic material is held together by sulfones, not ribose. We've created sulfonucleic acid in the lab, though the new nucleobases we created had problems; obviously, my guys use a set of nucleobases that doesn't have those problems. Now, of course, their metabolism still uses monosaccharides for energy storage, but the different structure of their cell nuclei means glucose is sub-optimal for the purpose (I don't know enough to say which one they use instead). Also, they use a different chemical from the adenosine phosphate sequence in their metabolism, but again, I don't have the background to say what they do use.


• So I mentioned that their main alcoholic beverage is "kumis" (actually blaand, since it's fermented whey); they also drink "beer". Technically it's not really beer, the seeds they make it from are more like legumes...and it's actually its fiber being broken down, like wood alcohol...and instead of yeast-like lifeforms, they use the gut-flora of a ruminant. An interesting cultural-setting tidbit is they consider our wine to be beer, since that's their only word for fermented seeds (and fruits count as "close enough" to seeds, for that purpose).
  
  The other thing they drink is, basically, shellac. It's fermented with those same ruminant gut-flora, but it's made from bug wings. See, chitin (or its alien-homeworld analog) is actually made from carbohydrates, it's somewhat akin to cellulose.


• I changed their agriculture slightly. Though they still grow various plant crops, the storage of which attracts edible critters, I realized that probably wouldn't be enough for a hypercarnivorous species to develop civilization. Plus they have a taboo on domesticating prey animals. But, I'd already decided, they have no problem with preserving prey (a large proportion of their peasantry is actually professional hunters), and, well, do you know what pumas eat surprisingly large amounts of?
  
  Bugs.
  
  Basically, my felinoids now have "preserves" (something like artificial termite colonies) of a bug that's something like a cross between a grasshopper and a termite (looks more like the former, acts a bit like the latter). Since they're not really domesticated, there's no taboo—and suddenly there's a nutrient base for any size population they need. Bugs can even be dried out and then reconstituted, like the shrimp in Cup Noodle.


• So I rented Sacred Blacksmith (Seikon no...Blacksmith), and, one thing I noticed right off, do these idiots really think the only threat a high-placed imperial could make against an independent city would be force? Please. The real threat would be, "Do as I say, or I will reroute all my empire's trade that I possibly can, away from your city."
  
  The other things that are funny all relate to Japanese conceits about smithing. First off, nobody uses black sand iron ore, unless they absolutely have to; it's a piss-poor source of the stuff. Most iron comes from hematite, it's not our fault your stupid little islands don't have much.
  
  Also, though I think the dude's katana can cut through other swords because it's forged and they're cast, a katana is actually measurably inferior to a properly pattern-welded arming sword. First off, the katana, being a backsword, can only block with one edge; a skilled swordsman could break one by hitting the back of the sword as his opponent makes his backswing. Second and more important, slightly later European arming swords had optimal balance between slicing and stabbing—the slightly tapered blade, the fuller stopping several inches from the tip—whereas katanas, being curved, are very counter-intuitive to stab with. That's why merely stabbing often seems like a magic special move, in the annals of Japanese swordsmanship: so few guys practiced their stabbing that few other guys practiced to defend against stabs.


• So, hey, did you know that asteroids are a convenient source of iridium and osmium, and other elements that are extremely rare on earth? Yeah, those are the first and second densest of all elements, so they tend to sink to the center of the body they're in. That makes them inaccessible on a planet, not so much on an asteroid. Among their applications, how about non-radioactive armor piercing rounds?
  
  Also, titanium (also more common in asteroids than on earth) needs vacuum to be refined, at least without costly electrolysis—the processing price would drop drastically if creating a vacuum just involved opening a door. Same goes for a bunch of other metals. Once you get the refinery up into space, it'd eventually pay for itself, especially as we develop cheaper launch methods (and in the interim we could just reroute those flights we already use to launch satellites).


• According to TV Tropes, a bunch of people think there can never be a world currency "because it wouldn't allow enough flexibility when regional economies fluctuate". Which is, of course, why California and Texas each issue their own currency, right? Because otherwise, people in Texas would be forced to buy things at California prices, right?
  
  Oh, no, wait, none of that happens. If your regional economy has made something more expensive, then you pay more for it—in whatever denomination—than someone does in a place where it's cheaper, even if they're denominating their payments in the same currency.