Swords and Plowshares IV

Material culture thoughts, though also some language ones. Hey, languages are classed as tools in Swahili (and I think other Bantu languages)—kiSwahili "coastal language" is the same noun-class as kitab "book". (Both, incidentally, are Arabic loan-words, though interestingly kitab treats the first syllable of the Arabic word for "book" as if it was the Swahili classifier-prefix for tools.)

• Decided to redo my zled units so the dhaelã is 1.2 billion Planck masses, or 26.1174 kilograms. Sounds big, but it's very close to the Attic talent of 25.86 kilograms. This makes the heigõsu equal to 6.188627 newtons, the yadhõplai equal to 0.392984 joules, and the dothã nal-yadhõplai to 0.759143 watts (oddly close to 1/1000th of a horsepower).
• Turns out that the animacy system in Navajo (which ranks nouns according to something like nine degrees of animacy—weird feature, gods and babies are less animate than adult humans) is a part of its direct-inverse system, also known as a "hierarchical alignment" because nouns are classed (usually in relation to transitive verbs) according to a hierarchy of things like saliency or animacy. Apparently even the linguists are still researching this stuff, but keep abreast of it, it could be cool for conlangs.
• While reworking zled armor I've decided that their inner and middle suits are different. The innermost suit is just a mechanical counterpressure spacesuit; their skin is so loose that they don't need to stuff any extra padding in anywhere. Then the middle suit is artificial silk (or rather "cocoon-protein fiber", since silk is a specific one from Earth) soaked in a dilatant gel, with a heat dissipating lining—but that one's just graphene, which also has antiballistic properties. Then the outer suit is the metamaterial foam with both the second-sound and CMF properties, sandwiched in a layer of boron nitride nanotubes coated with a diamond-hard organyl-protected peptide (since zledo aren't from Earth, they don't use phenylalanine).
  
  Think the zled uniforms are the same stuff as the middle layer, artificial silk ("cocoon-protein fiber") soaked in dilatant, with a heat-dissipator graphene lining. The uniforms also have a layer that adsorbs (not absorbs) odors, so as to conceal the wearer's emotions. I also decided that zled soldiers wear cloaks made out of auxetic foam, to protect them from blasts—that had been what the middle layer of their armor was, but being under the hard outer layer would probably prevent it from expanding properly, which is how auxetic blast protection works (and would probably actually channel the force of explosions directly into the body).
  
  Their civilian levies (something like our National Guard) wear the same middle layer, but not the pressure suit—their civilian spacers do have a pressure suit and they can put levy armor over it, which is also what pirates do. The outer layer of civilian armor is just an advanced CMF armor, so it doesn't have the laser resistance of the military's stuff. (Most military body-armor is designed for shrapnel rather than direct small-arms fire, remember.)
• Both civilian-levy and regular military armors' outer layer is powered, though only enough to negate its own weight—zledo don't need any particular help beyond that, what with being able to throw a small car, split a skull with a single slap, leap 10 meters horizontally or 5 vertically, and run 40 kilometers per hour (11 and 1/9th meters per second, in the space colonies where only SI is used), and all.
  
  Human troops (not the VAJRA powered-armor wearers) also have power-lifting systems, worn under their armor, to let them "hump" their packs and armor more easily, and also boost their strength a bit—enabling them to do a four-minute mile (6 and 2/3rds meters per second, in the colonies). Not sure exactly how much raw strength boost that gives; probably enough to let them control the recoil of a SAW without a tripod, though.
  
  And yes, my human space-colonies express their traffic's speed-limits in meters per second.
• Damn but boron is important in my setting though, eh? Boron nitride nanotubes in zled armor and the springs that power all their stuff, boron carbide as the backing of the plates in humans' VAJRA armor; maybe I should add boron filaments in something like a civilian armor jacket or something, round out the list. I guess, like, leave instructions for your descendants to invest in boron, on the commodities exchange, starting around the 2200s. Make a killing.
  
  Lot of foams, too—composite metal foams, quasi-crystalline metamaterial foams, anti-blast auxetic foams—and gels, like the dilatant and magnetorrheological gels used in armors, and the gel that is the metal-air batteries. (The composite metal foams are like "styrofoam", incidentally, not, like, soap bubbles; the auxetic anti-blast foam is like "foam rubber", except not as fine-textured—and some auxetic foams are made of metal.)
• I really need to get down to brass tacks about my robots' batteries. I keep seeing wildly conflicting reports for the energy density of silicon-air batteries, from 8.47 kilowatt-hours per kilogram to 14.23. Might have to go back to lithium-air ones, at 11.14 kilowatt-hours per kilogram, which is comparable to gasoline's 12.2. (Silicon-air being 16.6% better than gasoline was probably a pipe-dream, actually. Maybe by the 24th century, but still.)
  
  I had actually done my computations of the battery-requirements for my bots based on lithium-air, I think; and 24 hours of activity on a single charge is actually unnecessarily strict, not least because the bots can eat to extract chemical energy à la EATR, and then use the energy gained that way to breathe, and re-oxidize their metal-air battery. (EATR reminds me: have I mentioned lately how much I hate your society's "we don't know fiction from reality" panicking over every robotics development that comes along?)
• I try to make it clear in my books that the five major zled languages are not their only ones. One of the characters occasionally talks to members of his nation (mostly country people) in their pre-imperial language, and their major language is not the same language as the one the empire speaks even though it derives from it. (Zled linguists theorize their old language is related to one of the big ones, but the similarities could just be areal.)
  
  Two of the other zled civilizations/ecotypes have an official language and then a bunch of related languages, which I should probably make clearer. Think something like Hindi plus all those other Indic languages, or Arabic plus Berber, Neo-Aramaic, Hebrew, and the Ethiopian languages. Or Mandarin and all the other Chinese languages, only the northern examples of which are "dialects" (here we repeat the mit an Armey un Flot quote).
• I honestly should probably rewrite my whole setting to use something slightly more realistic than the topological confinement fusion drive, since those airframe materials as light as aerogel now make it feasible to have a ship with almost any mass-fraction you want. (Though the big determinant of a ship's top speed is exhaust velocity—but a high exhaust-velocity, mediocre-thrust engine, like magnetic confinement fusion, suddenly gets a lot more feasible.) A ship's mass can be little more than that of the crew and environment systems plus the engine and propellant tanks (and any armor its role might require), with the rest of the structure accounting for a tiny percentage of the whole. I'm not going to rewrite that part, though, partly because it's a huge headache but also because topological confinement fusion is a Cool Idea. I like those in science fiction.
• Turns out that the khângây use of tone, as grammatical rather than lexical, is the typical use of tone in African languages. Where languages like Chinese, Thai, or Vietnamese use a difference of tones to distinguish words, languages like Maasai, Igbo, or Dogon use it to distinguish things like case. Of course, nobody couples that system with a Mesoamerican style agreement system (where verbs are a chord of their subject and object notes), because humans cannot produce chords with their mouths.