517 is 11×47, the sum of five consecutive primes (97+101+103+107+109), and a Smith number, which is where the sum of its digits (in decimal) is equal to the sum of its prime factorization's digits (5+1+7=13, 1+1+4+7=13).
- Reading up on birds is almost certainly an absolute requirement for anyone that wants to do xenobiology and alien psychology. Birds are every bit as advanced as mammals—actually ravens may be smarter than any mammal that isn't actually sapient, given they've been shown to hold grudges over attacks at which the individual raven was not present, i.e. they tell each other about threats. Yet their brains and those of mammals diverged a third of a billion years ago. And it shows.
Birds, for example, do not have a corpus callosum. The two hemispheres of their brains, however, are both active during song—all the impulses shoot back into the arcopallium (around the middle of the brain), and even all the way back to the brainstem and thalamus, because those are the only thing linking the two. An experiment with pigeons revealed that the fact birds in the egg are always curled up the same way—and thus always have only one eye exposed to light—is instrumental in teaching their brain-hemispheres to coordinate; pigeons incubated in the dark (i.e., where there was no difference of light between the embryo's eyes) couldn't coordinate data between their eyes (each bird eye only sends information to one brain hemisphere, unlike mammals). (Birds only "learn" images directly with the brain-hemisphere connected to the eye that actually sees them; screw up the architecture of inter-hemisphere coordination, and merely covering one of their eyes means they lose access to all the images that eye has learned.)
Apparently, by the way, all vertebrates use the left side of the brain to process routine behavior, like feeding (including, probably, hunting), while the right side is used to process novel things and emergencies (which includes social interactions and mating). That's the real origin of the "left-brain, right-brain" folklore, so popular with seminars. Birds, since their eyes only map to one hemisphere each, will actually look at things with different eyes, depending on which category the thing goes into. - You know how I keep saying "society" is best modeled as "a method of resolving territorial disputes by agreeing to treat all conspecifics as kin in the absence of obvious hostile intent"? One interesting aspect of it is, if they are kin, specifically siblings—and as I've said, "sibling" is the only relationship that exists when "mating" and "parent/child" are off the table—then some of the acts of "violence" in society are not violations of the agreement to treat everyone as kin. Why? Dominance scuffles.
Some "fights" are better modeled as attempts to modify or reassert "pecking order" within a peer group (which, again, functions as a group of siblings in ethological terms). Now, of course, dominance scuffling can get quite violent when the two are not actually related (remember, that's why we used to think wolves were so violent—in captivity their packs were made up of unrelated animals), but it is still a fundamentally different activity from making, or fending off, territorial incursions. You know how you used to be able to fight out your differences under certain circumstances, without the cops getting involved? There were some sound ethological reasons for that mindset. - That people fundamentally do not understand that a lot of the use of force is dominance scuffles—or that war is "politics by other means"—is why you get the idea, in science fiction, that war with aliens would necessarily involve one of us annihilating the other. They think (because they are either fat happy peace-drunk fools, or craven physical cowards—possibly both), that the goal of fighting is to kill the other person.
The goal of fighting is to remove the threat posed; or actually to impose your will on the other person, even if your will is only "not to be annexed/robbed/murdered/raped/whatever". (Defensive fighting is still fighting: you are both imposing your will by force. That isn't always wrong, all your tribal prohibitions notwithstanding. I'm sorry ethics is more complex than a Kazimir Malevich paint-by-number.) - Alien senses make a big difference to their scientific and technological development, as I've hit upon. The khângây, for instance, can distinguish individual sounds from a group of several, meaning among other things that their informal conversations don't involve stopping to let the other person talk, because you can both follow each other just fine (in formal situations, of course, there are etiquettes about turn-taking). It also, however, means they simply can't throw white noise onto a digital recording to smooth the jaggies (when I get tired, I can't listen to digital music—I notice the white noise, and it's actually quite unpleasant). I think they therefore use, instead, nano-scale optical analog Hi-Fi. That means digital media is largely moot to them, and their potlatch intellectual-property views; a big part of why file-sharing works for us is MP3s usually sound good enough.
Zledo don't have quite that problem—at high enough resolution, they can actually use white noise to make digital audio work. But in earlier times, before digital media, they didn't actually start publishing music recordings till they had Hi-Fi, because with their hearing (which has a wider range than khângây, both in terms of frequency and faintness, but can't pick out individual sounds as well), they find the "noise" of Lo-Fi audio recordings too distracting. Now, I don't know how much that would've slowed the development of recording technology; after all, the big reason we kept doing Lo-Fi for so long was because that was "good enough" for many people (possibly just the sheer novelty of recorded music carried it for a while—remember how awesome we all thought the first iMac's version of Quicktime Musical Instruments was?). Presumably once they started converting sound waves to electric ones they then started working on making the electric waves produce sounds they actually liked hearing. - I think I have a good enough justification for parasite space-craft being used in battles ("space fighters", though the thing they launch from is a mother-ship, not a carrier). You distribute the launch points around your mother-ship, so it can lob missiles, bullets, and beams from many directions at once, and you want them controlled internally, because—ask anyone who's played Team Fortress (or heard their brother screaming at the computer while playing Team Fortress)—lag kills. In space, anyone close enough to a remote weapon system to operate it without lag, already is aboard it for all practical purposes.
As for "why not put an AI on the ship", well, remember how I compared the cost of developing AI to the Space Shuttle program? Well, extending the parallel, even after the initial development (which, if it cost as much as developing the Space Shuttle, was the equivalent of $38,277,033,135.80), an individual AI costs the equivalent of $450 million (the entire 2012 defense budget of Armenia). Not to put too fine a point on it, but three highly trained pilots are a hell of a lot cheaper than that.
The human ones launch by electromagnetic catapult; their engines are for maneuvering and slowing down, as much as possible, after the battle. Then, I think, the mother-ship or a dedicated retrieval craft either picks it up or tows it back to the mother-ship, respectively. Presumably there's a beacon on the craft, to aid in pickup once the battle's over. The zled ones have metric-patching engines, whose operation-range stands to rockets as nuclear submarines stand to diesel ones; they can return to their mother-ship under their own power (they can also land, using plasma sails, since the difference between them and the entry-vehicles is armor, weapons, and crew-space, not atmospheric capability). - Remember how I said every attempt to portray a species with more than two sexes is always actually male, female, hermaphodite, and neuter—"a, b, both, neither" but never "c"—with varying degrees of fluidity between them? I recently came across another option, where the multiple "sexes" have different roles to play in the life of the offspring, things I would describe as "passive defense" and "active defense" and various other things.
But...no species that reproduced like that would survive; the complexity of mate-selection increases exponentially with every extra member, since every prospective partner must be compatible with all the others. Besides, no such species ever answers the "every intelligent alien represents a biosphere as complex as Earth's" issues—how do four-sexed cockroaches or lizards or birds behave?
Also, plenty of terrestrial organisms do everything described by that system, and without deliberately hamstringing the efficiency of their reproduction: it's called "caste". Ant workers or termite guards aren't another sex, they're just non-reproductive (usually) members of the same sex(es) as their reproductive caste. - The reason animals have leg-anatomy like chickens and wolves (i.e. "digitigrade stance"—their knees don't bend backwards, that's an ankle, and they walk on their toes) is that the strength of a muscle is proportional to the cross-sectional area divided by the length. Walking digitigrade (or with lengthened ankle bones forming a third leg-joint, like frogs—and zledo) lets an animal have longer legs, and thus longer strides, without sacrificing strength—because it increases the total length of the leg without increasing the length of its individual muscles. All of that is well and good, and quite likely to show up in alien anatomy. But...why does it show up in mecha? The power of a hydraulic or pneumatic cylinder is primarily a function of the pressure of the cylinder's working fluid; while a very long cylinder obviously needs more working fluid to pressurize, it's nothing like what's experienced with muscles. Think of the kinds of loads hydraulically activated cranes regularly move, on sections far longer than the typical mecha's limb-joints. No, I think the chicken walker is a purely aesthetic thing.
Realistically, of course, the optimal layout for a walking tank is probably something like the Scarab from Halo, or some other "spider tank". You want to be able to walk (so you can go on that 40% of land-surface wheeled and tracked vehicles can't traverse), but you also want a stable platform for artillery. On the other hand, though, part of the appeal of any kind of walking machinery is psychological—bestriding the battlefield as a colossus—and a spider tank just doesn't give that (but a humanoid tank can go most places a spider can). Also, despite what Gundam would have us believe, two places where there is absolutely no reason to use mecha are space and underwater. You really wouldn't even have them be able to fly. You don't need legs to go everywhere you need to in the air or in space or underwater, planes/helicopters, submarines, and rockets are adequate to our needs in those environments. Just like how you only need legs for locomotion on the ground, your machines would only need them for that, too (although you might build a mecha that runs for a takeoff, as a heavy attack-plane, I suppose—the psychological factor is probably useful for close air support).
Also? Dear DeviantArt: when I search "realistic mecha", by what possible rationale do I get even one picture of Cheetor, from Beast Wars? Inquiring minds want to know. - In case you wondered, it's quite doubtful that an alien species would not have brain-hemisphere "decussation" (crossing over—the left brain hemisphere controls/responds to the right side of the body, and vice-versa). Decussation is apparently topologically superior, in terms of wiring; it reduces the likelihood of connection errors, which become a significant problem as the number of connections increases.
Of course, nothing says your aliens have to map their hemispheres the way we do. Flip 'em, if you like—have 'em process routine behavior with the right and emergencies with the left—or divide the functions each hemisphere processes on a different basis. Maybe their optic nerves don't cross (despite vision's importance, the eyes are connected to the brain by relatively few nerves, so there may not be a risk of connection error), or maybe their whole bodies are wired like mammal optic nerves, and some impulses go to the opposite side.
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