Sierra and Two Foxtrots

Science fiction and fantasy. Most of the latter is related to RPGs.

• I had wondered if I could get away with having one of my planets have no life, and yet have an atmosphere humans can breathe. See, oxygen is highly reactive, and ordinarily bonds to other things; it is only found on Earth in a free state because it's exhaled en masse by all our photosynthetic organisms. Things weren't always so, for life on Earth, and in fact the Great Oxygenation Event is believed to have caused a mass-extinction that makes the Great Dying look like a rounding-error, because almost everything then living on Earth was anaerobic. (The presence of free oxygen is a trait exoplanet searches look for, because it indicates a planet might be host to life of the stage after a Great Oxygenation.)
  
  But, fortunately, the planet in question is in orbit of a K-type star—it orbits at .25 AUs, which is the particular K-type star's Goldilocks Zone. And apparently, M-type stars, at least, might have planets whose atmospheres have free oxygen without life. See, while M-stars are much dimmer overall than Sol, they give off almost the same amount of far-UV light. Far-UV breaks up many oxygen compounds on contact with the upper atmospheres of planets. The amount of light in any wavelength falls off with the square of the distance, so a planet orbiting an M-type star in its Goldilocks Zone is getting far more far-UV than a planet orbiting a G-type star. This probably has little effect on its surface—atmospheres are almost entirely opaque to far-UV—but in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, oxygen is being freed from compounds by radiation, at a rate comparable to that done by organisms on Earth.
  
  I think I can brazen out that the same process is in play in orbit of a K-type star, although they're intermediate between M and G; certainly their Goldilocks Zone still gets a lot more far-UV than ours does, even if it's not quite as much as an M star's does.
• It seemed silly to me that the scythe was listed as a martial weapon in 3e D&D, but on reflection it makes sense. If you aren't careful with a scythe, you'll chop the ankles of bystanders or possibly yourself. Plus you have to learn to sharpen it—you use a dry whetstone, and go by the sound. You can also do all kinds of things to a scythe by using it wrong, from loosening the handle to scratching it on the ground.
  
  And then it occurred to me that the typical human commoner wouldn't have to waste his one feat on Martial Weapon Proficiency (scythe)—because humans get two feats at first level. And of the PC-race humanoids (what we grognards reflexively call "demihumans"), only halflings are likely to need to scythe—elves, dwarves, and gnomes don't farm, at least not the kind of farming that requires scything down grass to make hay.
  
  If you read that Belloc essay, by the bye, you will discover where Tolkien got the Hobbits: the aboriginal inhabitants of Britain. Belloc says of them that it "is on account of their presence in these islands that our gardens are the richest in the world." He also says they "love low rooms and ample fires and great warm slopes of thatch", which is a Hobbit-hole summed up in twelve words.
• I discover that a zled vocal apparatus isn't as much like a bird syrinx as I'd thought: since a bird syrinx is in the chest, at the bottom of the trachea, instead of in the neck, at the top, like human vocal cords. And, come to think of it, a human's vocal cords are as "hyoid" (y-shaped) as bird ones are—you have a vocal fold on each side of your windpipe—with the bird's lateralization actually being something different.
  
  So I guess zledo actually have a vocal apparatus wholly unlike anything found on Earth, instead having two layers of cord, one to make complex "speech" sounds and the other basically only trilling. The latter, I think, might be down lower, allowing a zled to almost deepen trilled sounds like a subwoofer—or like the only-partly-ossified Adam's apple of the pantherines, which can stretch out and vibrate much more deeply to let roars become louder.
  
  I'd already had zledo use trilled shouts—roars—which can carry for miles, for premodern military signaling. I would imagine that, for one thing, the need for military buglers wouldn't come up: your sergeants can literally bellow like lions. Lion roars can be heard five miles away, after all. (For more surreptitious signaling, the Signalers' Sodality used heliographs, which are still one of their symbols.)
• Slightly redoing the zled year. I'd been using the "simple" way of calculating where a planet orbits: stick it at a spot where it gets the same amount of sunlight Earth does, relative to its star's luminosity. But you have a bit more wiggle-room than that, since habitable zones are often almost a whole AU wide; so I decided to stick Lhãsai a bit further out, giving them a year 532 Julian days long—shorter than their year was when their primary was 59 Virginis, but still noticeably different from Earth's.
  
  I also discovered that I can't stick the khângây at ν Phoenicis, which is where they'd been; its current estimated age of 5.7 billion years is a bit too old. Changed their primary to "HD 211415", AKA "GJ 853 A, HIP 110109, HR 8501, LHS 3790, LFT 1702, LTT 8943, SAO 247400," and a couple of other designations about as memorable as a ZIP code for a place you never send mail to. But, I think it might also be "37 G. Gruis"; that name shows up a bit in literature, and HD 211415's number, in the catalog the Gould designations (that's what the G. stands for) are from, is 37. It's in Grus ("the crane"), too, so I think that's its name (for some reason the genitive of grus is gruis—it's third declension, but most third-declension nouns don't end in -ús in the nominative). In my setting, the human colonials refer to the star as "Three-seven Golf Gruis"—when they don't just call it the khângây word for "sun", anyway.
  
  I had had the khângây have never thought their star went around their planet, but that might be unlikely: even at an orbital distance like the one I gave them (they have a slightly longer year than the zledo), the parallax of the nearest star to them (which is only about 1.2 light-years away—which probably changed their space-development substantially) is about 3.9 arc-seconds. The maximum naked-eye resolution for a human is .6 arc-minutes, which is 36 arc-seconds. Thus, they would need over 9.2 times the visual acuity of humans, and while their vision is markedly superior to that of humans in some respects, they have no need for the same eyes as a hawk, because they don't hunt anything like how a hawk does.
• Was looking into a few things in Pathfinder. I kinda like their hybrid classes, although they're basically just doing what I was doing with 3.5's gestalt-class alternate rule, except neglecting paladins and psions—and incorporating the utterly superfluous oracle, witch, alchemist, and gunslinger. (Actually, I might give you alchemist.) But their decision to give wizards and sorcerers d6 hit-dice just doesn't sit right; mages should be "glass cannons". Sure, hybridization/gestalting can get you mages who use some other class's bigger hit-die, but when you go all-in for spell-power (the gestalt wizard-sorcerer, which is the hybrid class called "arcanist"—but also gestalt wizard-psion or sorcerer-psion), you should still be rolling d4s.
  
  "'Tis the duty of the wealthy man/To give employment to the artisan." Let those fighters and barbarians earn their keep by acting as bullet-sponges for the mage, dagnabbit!
  
  And seriously, anyone who has different stats for margays and cats, or parrots and kakapos (or, for that matter, for parrots and ravens): you are officially OCD. Give the cat a climb speed and you have a margay, or an ocelot for that matter (I'd give the margay the same climb as its run, and knock 10 feet off for the ocelot); give the raven an eagle's bite damage to make a parrot (actually regular ravens should have no claw damage at all, but should do 1d4 peck damage—they're not raptorines and don't use their talons, if their claws are even worthy of the name); take the parrot's fly speed away and you have a kakapo. You also don't need separate stats for deer and stags, since, y' know, stags are deer, and all.
• I don't care for Pathfinder's flanderization of the races. Snooty elves, dirty ignorant goblins, workaholic dwarves? Why, what a bold new direction you're taking things in! If I were to do something that stupid (which I wouldn't), well, how about do it to humans for a change? Give every other race (except orcs and ogres) a +2 bonus to Spot checks to find humans—because of the smell. And make humans take penalties as if they were multiclassing even in their first class—"jack of all trades is master of none", after all.
  
  Personally I find it much more interesting to take the stereotype in a new direction. I've talked about my dwarves having a gift-economy, for example; that's something I hadn't seen people do with the "really love craft and wealth" stereotype. My goblins are a combination of the bugbears' stealth with the hobgoblins' warlike ways (and my "bugbears" are just the biggest, full-grown male hobgoblins). They are, however, still lawful evil—their stealth functions a bit like the Predator hunting-code. (My goblins don't eat intelligent beings, though, whereas my ogres—which includes orcs—do. Ogres and orcs just don't eat each other.)
  
  The elves in my campaign sometimes trick humans into dangerous situations, possibly including deadly ones—but only in adolescence, an age when (as an elf points out in the story I'm setting in my campaign) humans kill each other in duels over winks at bar-maids and break their neighbors' skulls in armed raids. My elves have some elements in common with Warcraft trolls, like axes and pointed teeth (though not tusks—and I made them the same height as humans now, though much lighter; bigger than humans was weird). I think their stealth, too, functions by a Predator-like code (cloak of elvenkind, anyone?), though of course it applies to fewer targets than the goblins'.
• Decided that triangular casings on zled lasers requires just too big of triangles. A 6-centimeter (or, actually, 6.435—aliens, they don't use nice round numbers of our units) lens, to be inscribed in an equilateral triangle with a minimum "tube" thickness of .32175 cm (which is a nice round number relative to a zled unit), requires a side-length of 11.14575 centimeters. So decided that all their weapons are hexagonal; that means the 6.435 centimeter laser is only 8.17354 cm wide, which is much more doable (being almost exactly three centimeters less). (The hand-lasers, with 3.2175 cm lenses, are now only 4.4583 centimeters wide, where before they had been 5.5729 centimeters.)
  
  Also decided not to bother with scabbards for their swords: or at least, not fixed scabbards. Instead, both the swords and the lasers have retractable sheaths, which, in the swords, slide down from the hilt when a control is activated. The same control whips the sheath away as the sword is drawn, so it's out of the way when the speed-draw strikes. The guns, on the other hand, just have retractable lens-covers (which may well retract entirely into the casing when the laser's in use—ultra-advanced materials don't have to be all that thick to protect the lens). Both laser and sword have some kind of automated hook-up that attaches them to weapon-belts, or to attachment-points on armor or spacesuits; part of what this change means is the speed-draw just became a much simpler motion, "unhook and attack" rather than "clear holster/sheath, attack".
  
  Pity I can't keep my long-gun iaido idea, though.
• Female characters' armor being sculpted to their boobs does not offend me because it's sexist. It offends me because it's apparently a really bad idea; it's basically like sticking a splitting-wedge right over your sternum. And there are ways to have armor that doesn't have that problem while still making it look appealing. The "sweater-girl" look doesn't have a noticeable cleavage, and it's not exactly a burqah; armor can conform to feminine curves without being a liability. See, e.g., Cherche, from Fire Emblem: Awakening. And also Flavia and Sully.
  
  Incidentally, the "girl in skimpy armor" thing is not the same kind of problem. While it is a vulnerability, in real life, lots of people did fight like that. Watch a samurai movie sometime. There's always guys running around with only kote and suneate, and maybe a happuri. Armor, after all, is itself a liability, that's why we stopped wearing it for quite some time (in the West: east of, oh, Slovakia or so, people were wearing armor till right up into the 19th century). It's hot and heavy. That makes it a pain to slog around, especially for the smaller-framed (which, while it means your armor is smaller and therefore lighter, also means that so are your muscles). A woman would be quite likely to shed the heavy breastplate and just keep the armor for her arms, legs, and head.
  
  Yes, I just decided "to slog around" can be used transitively.