De romanicorum theoriarum XVIII

Spec fic thoughts.

• Discovered, the frog ankles zledo have are actually also similar to the ones on a tarsier. Which…makes sense, tarsiers also being arboreal obligate hypercarnivores. Still it feels weird to find out evolution had the same idea for a cool alien you did (tell me a tarsier is not an alien, I dare you).
• Realized I was doing the elves' chief gods, in my setting, backwards. I had had them as the god of the branches and goddess of the roots, of the World Tree. But the elves, flowers of the World Tree, grow from the branches, so it makes more sense to have her as branch and him as root, when she's the elves' mother-goddess.
  
  One thing this might mean is elf females can have their branching tattoos on their foreheads instead of under their cheeks, for her branches instead of his roots. Before they both had the root ones and it felt weird for the guys, but I also felt weird with the guys having them on their foreheads. I for some reason feel it's okay for gals to have them on their foreheads (I think I just thought the guys would look cool with them on their cheeks).
  
  Ooh I might make it so married ones tattoo a copy of their spouse's tattoo, on whichever part of the face they don't have their own tattoo…
• Realized this coming up with the binary my snake-people use, but certainly useful for other contexts: binary can call numbers pair, quartet, octet, hexadectet, and duotrigestet (2, 4, 8, 16, 32), and then you go up to hexadectet duotrigestet (512).
  
  But since "duotrigestet duotrigestet" (thousand thousand, but actually myriad myriad since 32 is 2⁵) is stupid, then you go quadrate duotrigestet (1,024), from an old word for "squared". Then you have cubic duotrigestet (32,768), biquadrate ("square squared") duotrigestet (1,048,576), sursolid duotrigestet (33,554,432), bicubic duotrigestet (1,073,741,824), and second sursolid duotrigestet (34,359,738,368). Since 34 billion doesn't come up too often in fantasy I only need to take it that far.
  
  Similarly my gnomes' vigesimal can go "score twentyscore" for 8000, but then 160,000 is quadrate twentyscore, 64,000,000 is cubic twentyscore, 25,600,000,000 is biquadrate twentyscore, etc. I don't really need anything beyond that, since numbers above 25 billion don't come up much in fantasy.
• Going to change references to handhelds in my SF to "device". Because "handheld" is already starting to sound like saying "motoring" instead of "driving". And "smartphone" is dumb because they're already more computer than phone, and that trend is only going to continue—already referred to the phone as a part of the handheld, e.g. "his handheld's phone rang". (Come to think of it that should probably be "his handheld's phone notification sounded".)
• Kept trying to figure out how, exactly, zled lasers interact with their ring-grip—like does the ring just seamlessly grade into the "barrel", or does the cylinder stick out behind the ring? But then I decided, no, the ring is in the middle, behind the "barrel", like the ring-grip on the sword is, and it widens out from the lens to the same width as the ring. It looks a bit, in other words, like a symmetrical version of the top half of the Waking Vigil hand cannon in Destiny 2: Forsaken, with the grip around where the cylinder is.
  
  Of course, this raise the question of how the break-top reloading works. What I think I'll do is have the symmetry break down there, and have a hinge at the bottom that it breaks on, to insert new spring cartridges. Not sure how much of it will move when the thing breaks. Maybe change it to swing-out like most modern revolver cylinders? I think break-top is cooler, but I always sacrifice the Rule of Cool to plausibility and good design.
• Having a ring-shaped grip with the barrel centered also lets me have really bananas firearms for them, back when. Namely, the magazine loads into the ring-grip from the side, and is ring-shaped, with the cartridges perpendicular to it, similar to the pan magazine used in the Lewis gun, but with the cartridges facing out not in.
  
  One thing that would mean is that it's relatively simple to belt-feed almost any weapon, though your belts aren't going to be very efficient (dedicated belt-fed weapons would just have it load through like ours do).
  
  Also presumably means the difference between a revolver and a semi-auto was more academic, like clip vs. magazine to many of us. Had thought the semi-auto might also have the advantage revolvers do, that if a round won't fire you just advance to the next one. But I don't think the semi-auto fires directly from the magazine, you chamber each round separately.
• Still torn over the humans who have evil clerics, and whether to have them be witches in all but class. On the one hand a bunch of others call them witches; on the other all the other evil deities are very explicitly opposed to witchcraft. I had had the dark elves and dwarves have witches before I shifted it to evil druids and clerics (respectively). Could do something like the dark elves in Warhammer Fantasy, who hate Chaos worshipers but also summon daemons a lot.
  
  Another thing I decided is that rather than worshiping a pseudo-divine undead sage, the dark dwarves worship an outcast god. I had had the younger generation of dwarf gods (their parent gods are Earth and Fire) be different ways of working minerals with heat, namely Forge and Kiln. So I thought it might be neat to have the outcast one be their sibling Crematorium, who was tricked and seduced by the undeath-power. I have a bunch of benevolent death gods (technically the parent gods of most of my pantheons are also death gods), but I can have bad ones too.
• I mentioned wanting a "two-handed martial but one-handed exotic, 1d10 damage" hammer, for dwarves. Might have it weigh a whole ten pounds, which seems heavy but the waraxe is eight and the bastard sword is six, and they don't depend largely on their weight to do their job. Not sure what to call it; "war maul" comes to mind, though. Oh, ooh, or battlehammer, like Drizzt Do'Urden's friend.

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.

Sierra Foxtrot 14

SF thoughts.

• Had considered using the parallax microradian as the zled equivalent of a light-year, and then maybe the picoradian for in-system measures and then "ten yoctoradians" for a day-to-day one. But, I hadn't considered that the "parallax" in question is from Earth's orbit, so I'd need to calculate what a parallax radian is from Lhãsai's orbit, instead (from Earth's you just convert arcseconds to radians). Apparently I never wrote down the orbital distance I had decided for Lhãsai around mÕskoi, and while trying to re-calculate it online, I discovered that science had determined 18 Scorpii, which I'd been using as mÕskoi, to be too young, by at least half a billion if not a full billion years.
  
  Fortunately I found that λ Serpentis is a similar star not that far from 18 Scorpii, so they don't have to move that much. And it has a nice Bayer designation with a Greek letter—lama in the Greek radio alphabet, which, for extra cool, means "blade". Its Chinese designation, similarly, is (Tiānshìyòuyuán)Shǔzēngyī, the First Shǔ Addition (to the Celestial Market Enclosure). That'd be Shǔzēngyāo on the radio, and thus in space-colonies. It's definitely old enough, at 3.8 to 8.7 billion years; I can also still fit Lhãsai's old orbital period inside its habitable zone, which saves a huge headache in rewriting.
• Self-driving cars won't be. They will be driven by an algorithm, by the existing traffic and road conditions, and to a large extent, by tech conglomerates like Google. It will be like if you could get into a carriage and tell your horse your destination, but had no reins—and your horse is controlled directly by the goddess Epona or Demeter in her guise as Great Mare. (You might be able to take the wheel, but I wouldn't count on that being the normal procedure.)
• Still wanted to give the zledo some sort of 'natural' unit. Turns out the zled "parsec" is just the semimajor axis of Lhãsai's orbit in AU, times our parsec, which means their "parallax radian" is also that much bigger. The old "parallax microradian" was 0.67275 light-years, or 6,364,666,884,499.273 kilometers; the zled parallax microradian is 7,078,947,990,186.918 kilometers. The parallax picoradian would be 70,789,479.902 kilometers, and the parallax yoctoradian would be 7.079 millimeters, ten of which would make 7.079 centimeters.
  
  But having realized that the parsec (or any other unit based on a parallax angle) isn't exactly a natural unit, it occurred to me that 100 million Bohr radii is 5.291(772) millimeters. Obviously that's not a very useful unit on its own (half a centimeter), but multiply that by 12 (1.2 billion Bohr radii) and you get 6.350 centimeters, which is about half the old zled unit, the bãgh, which was 12.87. 100 of them is 6.350 meters, a good length for e.g. surveying. And then 10,000 ("one myriad") bãghã, 12 trillion Bohr radii, is 635.01 meters, roughly comparable to a kilometer. A million-bãghã, 1.2 quadrillion Bohr radii is 63,501.265 meters, comparable to the Byzantine "day's journey" of 47 kilometers. A hundred-million-bãgh/120 quadrillion Bohr radii is 6,350.127 kilometers, and then a "myriad million"-bãgh/12 quintillion Bohr radius one, 635,012.563 kilometers—the latter two useful for things like low planetary orbit and lunar orbit.
  
  For larger ones I'd go with a trillion-bãgh one, which is 1.2 sextillion Bohr radii and 63,501,265.296 kilometers, or 0.424 AU—not quite three-fifths of a zled AU. 100 trillion bãghã is 120 sextillion Bohr radii, 6,350,126,529.6 kilometers or a little over 42.448 AU—38.165 zled AU. "1 myriad trillion" bãghã, 12 septillion Bohr radii, is 635,012,652,960 kilometers, 4,244.797 AU (3,816.488 zled AU) or 0.067 light-years; finally a quintillion bãghã, 1.2 octillion Bohr radii, is 6,350,126,529,600 kilometers, 424,479.740 AU, or 6.712 light years, just a little over two parsecs.
• Come to think of it, the zled mass unit, the dhaelã, is 2.22 kilos. But the Planck mass is 21.7645 micrograms; 100 million times that, is 2.17645 kilograms. So I guess I can "metricize" their mass unit, too. Maybe 120 million, so it divides by 12 more easily? That's still relatively close at 2.6117 kilos—also almost exactly 7 Troy pounds. Then 100 of those, 12 billion Planck mass, is 261.174 kilos.
  
  Deriving the equivalent of newtons, joules, and watts from all this was a bit of a headache, but the result was interesting. Even though the mass unit was bigger than the kilogram, the length and time units being much smaller than meters and seconds made the derived units a lot smaller. Their newton is not quite two-thirds, closer to seven-elevenths, of ours, and then their joule is like a twenty-fifth of ours. Their watt's something like three-fortieths ours.
  
  I'm just naming their derived units "thrust", heigõsu and "work", yadhõplai, and then I'm just calling their power unit "dothã of work".
• I'll leave their time units, the dothã, the aech (120 dothã'o), and the zbeihõlt (120 aecho, alone; in their colonies they derive those from the rotation-period of the planet they're on. The "standard" dothã is 1/172,800th of a Lhãsai day, because they make it twelve zbeihõlto each of 120 aecho each of 120 dothã'o (and, again, their "stellar" aech is the same length as a "stellar" minute).
  
  Though 10⁴³—10 tredecillion, or, if you're continental Western European, 10 septillion—Planck times is a similar length, at 0.539121 seconds. But just like how we define the second as exactly 1/86,400th of a Julian day (1/60th of the minute that's 1/60th of the hour that's 1/24th of the day), because it's useful to astronomers, zledo define the dothã relative to their "standard" day, and don't worry about anything else. (The zled day is about 166,000 of the "10 tredecillion Planck times" unit.)
• Turns out there are contact-lenses you can wear for up to 30 days without taking them out, now, so you probably wouldn't need to do nano-bot eyedrops all that often while wearing the filter ones. That certainly saves on rewriting, though I am gonna add zled military and police occasionally being glad of their filter-contacts. (Presumably they're a form of photochromic lenses, since they don't stop you from seeing color—maybe they're like ballistic ear-plugs and kick in instantly when they're hit with sufficient intensity of light.) Also occurs to me that zled signalers, their computer techs, might wear similar ones, but for filtering out certain light-wavelengths from screens.
  
  Another bit of safety equipment that's widespread in my setting, is suppressors: decided all my firearms are integrally suppressed. The sonic boom from supersonic ammo still makes a gunshot noticeable (though I don't think it's loud enough to be a hearing-loss risk), but it no longer gives away your position as much. (A big deal, fighting zledo.) Even their revolvers are suppressed, by just sealing the cylinder gap in such a way as to allow the cylinder to still rotate freely—presumably they have to be lubricated regularly. I was worried they might not be able to suppress shotguns, but as it turns out, we actually have suppressed shotguns now. (You'd still want shooting earplugs for blast noise, though.)
• Apparently the projected energy density of carbon nanotube springs is 3.4 gigajoules per cubic meter. But apparently boron nitride nanotubes are an order of magnitude stiffer than carbon ones. 34 gigajoules per cubic meter is slightly higher energy density than gasoline, which is 32.4 gigajoules. Um…do zledo actually need to power anything smaller than a spaceship or a city with anything other than springs? I think I might have 'em even power their powered armor with springs now. Certainly their semi-feudal, subsidiarity-preserving social order would likely prefer to power things like cars with BNNT springs rather than with beamed power, since BNNT springs preserve privacy so much better. (Though they don't have quite our concept of privacy—with their hearing it's not really a custom you'd acquire.)
  
  Anyway. At a laser efficiency of 85%, the hand laser's sixteen shots, which are now 3,143.825 Joules (80,000 yadhõplai'o) each, requires ((3,143.825×16)÷.85=)59,177.882 Joules. That, with BNNT spring energy density, has a volume of 1.74052 cubic centimeters, and, with a cross-section as big as the hand laser's lens, is 0.220 centimeters high. Meanwhile the long laser's 48 shots of 10,060.240 Joules (256,000 yadhõplai'o) each, comes to ((10,060.240×48)÷.85=)568,107.689 Joules, which comes to a spring volume of 16.70904 cubic centimeters; with a cross-section as big as the long laser's lens, that's 0.528 centimeters high. The hand laser's spring cartridge (the proper term is "barrel", but in the context of weapons that would be confusing) is much more casing than it is spring.
• Had to change references to superconductors in my descriptions of zled armor, since "superconductor" normally means electricity, not heat. Heat superconductivity is a thing, though, it's called "second sound"—so named because the heat propagates through the material analogously to how sound propagates in air. It occurs in superfluids, like liquid helium, and certain kinds of crystals. Basically zled armor changes its structure instantly, or at least in microseconds, from one like composite metal foam (vs. kinetic attacks) to one like those crystals, presumably somehow without changing its volume. They use lasers because lasers can, from close enough, put enough energy into a small area fast enough that the structure can't cope with it—though a laser shot still takes several hundred microseconds, i.e. an appreciable fraction of a millisecond, so the laser has to be within a certain range, to concentrate the energy into a small enough dot. Lasers can go through CMF like it's not even there; a 1.5 kilojoule laser, in a 1 millimeter diameter dot, having to penetrate a 1-inch-thick CMF plate, is 75,229 megajoules per cubic meter…whereas CMF can stand up to 68.
  
  Actually leaning toward changing all the references to "adaptive" armor to just "metamaterial" armor. Say, a dielectric foam "quasicrystal" with Umklapp scattering low enough to enable second-sound heat transfer, that can also deal with kinetic attacks as well as composite metal foam? If it's a metamaterial its composition is less important than its structure—because if I knew what kind of dielectric foam had that kind of thermal conductivity and the armor properties of CMF foam, I'd be patenting it. (Also apparently no second sound heat conduction has ever been observed at anything hotter than 120 Kelvin, i.e. -153.15° Celsius or -243.67° Fahrenheit.) And then I think sandwich the foam between layers of boron nitride nanotube weave, the outer side having a coating of n-tert-butoxycarbonyl-protected diphenylalanine, to stop blades (BN also stops neutron radiation). Then after a fight you use a nano-assembler to check for damaged BN nanotubes and fix scratches in the BOC-protected Phe? I think a foam that manages to have both properties, with an outer layer that imparts two others, is somewhat more plausible than an armor that can shift between all three.

Kind of a High End Gift Shop III

Speculative material culture. Mostly military but a lot of it has civilian applications (and implications).

• I was looking at the absorbency of EM radiation in water vapor, for zled lasers—since one of the main planets in my book is really rainy—and turns out, the optimum wavelength, with the lowest absorption, seems to be in the blue and green wavelengths (which is part, I believe, of why water looks blue-green). At least at "small arms" range, within 5 km or so. Nice thing with lasers is if you can see your enemy, you can basically shoot them, assuming your setup can focus a beam out to their range—they actually do work like Hollywood sniper rifles.
  
  Of course, using visual-wavelength lasers means eye-protection becomes important, though of course even human medicine let alone zled medicine can repair retinas. Prevention is still preferable to cure, though—and presumably needing your retinas regrown means you have to redo all your biometric logins. (Not an issue for zledo, who use the pores in their noses, of course.) I may have to add in mention of all their combat personnel (which includes their cops) putting in filter contacts every morning.
  
  Or maybe they leave them in and put in eyedrops every morning to protect their eyes? Ooh, nanobot eyedrops? That's it!
• Redoing my handgun round. Now instead of 8.16 millimeter it's exactly 8 millimeters, and instead of the propellant going 18 millimeters up the side, it goes 13.96. I based the revamped version on the 8 millimeter Kurz round used in the Sturmgewehr 44, which can get a muzzle energy of 2,197.55 Joules from a 6.998 gram bullet, using 1.847 grams of propellant—which comes to 776.1 milligrams if you replace the nitrocellulose with denatured ONC.
  
  776.1 milligrams of ONC has a volume of 392.168 cubic millimeters; the "shoulder" diameter of 8 millimeter Kurz is 11.4 millimeters. A propellant "casing" of that diameter thus has a thickness of 1.7 millimeters around an 8 millimeter bullet, and goes 13.96 millimeters up the side; its designation thus becomes "8 × 14". A normal 8 mm Kurz bullet (pointier than most handgun rounds) is 24 millimeters long, which means the overall length of this thing is 25.7 millimeters, or just over an inch.
• Since I think I did my handgun round different than I did my rifle rounds, let's double check. My rifle bullet is 7 millimeter by 31 millimeters. The propellant "casing" sticks out from it 1.6 millimeters, for a diameter of 10.2 millimeters—it was 1.85 millimeters and a diameter of 10.7 millimeters, but I'm using the "shoulder" diameter of the model cartridge (6.8 Remington SPC) now. Its 1.497 grams of denatured ONC propellant has a volume of 726.699 cubic millimeters. That, calculated the new way, goes 21.9 millimeters up the sides of the 31 millimeter bullet, resulting in an overall length of 32.6 millimeters; I guess we'll change these to "7 × 22" rifle rounds.
  
  The antimateriel round is 13 millimeters by 60 millimters and its 15.966 grams of ONC propellant has a volume of 7,750.68 cubic millimeters. Going with .50 BMG's "shoulder" diameter of 18.7 millimeters, we have a "casing" that sticks out 2.85 millimeters on each side and goes 54.4 millimeters up the side of bullet, resulting in a 62.85 millimeter-long round, which I guess would be called "13 × 54".
• Apparently power of a cartridge rises with the fourth power of propellant mass. Which is interesting, because another thing that rises with the fourth power of something else, is the efficiency of a heat-radiator, which increases with the fourth power of temperature (but only linearly with area, so you really want to make your radiator as hot as possible—hence why I make mine out of magnetically-constrained plasma).
• Some impressive people at MIT and the Lawrence Livermore National Lab are working on a metamaterial that's only as dense as aerogel, but thousands of times stronger. What this will eventually mean is you can replace a lot of the structural parts of a space vehicle or aircraft with something 17.56 times lighter than aerospace aluminum alloy (0.16 grams per cubic centimeter vs. 2.81).
  
  Now, you can't replace everything with this stuff. Armor, for example: density is at least partly non-negotiable, for that—especially for armor against energy weapons. But you can make all the other parts of a vehicle out of something that weighs only 5.7% as much, which means you might as well just have to pay for the fuel to move the armor and engines (and fuel/propellant tanks—aerogel is highly porous, so you can't really use it for that).
  
  Occurs to me that another application is the frames of tanks, including the walking kind. You might well be able to have an M1 Abrams-equivalent tank with the mass and therefore mileage of a Bradley (given the armor alone on the Abrams seems to be over 20 tons).
• Let's crunch the numbers for a walking mecha. Atlas, the Boston Dynamics walking robot, masses 150 kilos and is 1.8 meters tall; scale it up to 10 meters and its mass becomes 25,720 kilos. Except that if you swap out the structural meta-aerogel for the alloy in its frame, which seems to be a titanium-aluminum one (like TC4, density of 4.43 grams per cubic centimeter), you drive the weight down to a paltry 928.94 kilos. Where before it took 634.43 kilowatts to power it, it now takes only 22.9. So basically the only major power-constraint on the mecha becomes the weight of its armor and weapons.
  
  Suppose we take the Advanced Bomb Suit used by US military EOD as the model of mecha armor, EOD suits being about the only full-body armor we make. That masses 27.2 kilograms when made (almost entirely) of Kevlar; a composite metal foam has one-third the density of typical tank armor, which is made of (among other things) steel alloy with a density of 7.8 grams per cubic centimeter, which yields a density for CMF armor of 2.6 g/cc. Kevlar's is 1.44, so an ABS made of CMF would mass 49 kilos; scaled up for a 10-meter mecha and you get 8,420.97 kilos. Moving that plus the 928.94 kilo frame—total mass 9,849.91 kilos—still only uses 242.97 kilowatts.
  
  If we give that the equivalent of two M261 rocket launchers, each holding the equivalent of 19 Hydra 70 rockets—each massing 470.38 kilos, so total mass 940.75 kilos—and a 1,282 kilo tank gun like the L7 used on western tanks, plus 40 rounds of the equivalent of M829 anti-armor shells, total weight 744 kilos, we still have a mass of only 12,816.66 kilos, requiring only 316.15 kilowatts of power.
• Of course, the tank-guns I'm using for a model aren't electromagnetically accelerated, and the ones on this weapon-system would be. A railgun is apparently only capable of about 50% efficiency in converting power to muzzle energy; given the muzzle energy of an L7 gun is 20.9529 megajoules, and 10 of those shots per minute is a net power of 3,492,150 watts, i.e. 3,492.15 kilowatts. You can do that four times when the tank carries 40 shells, which comes to 13,968.6 kilowatts—a power requirement of 27,937.2 kilowatts given 50% power-plant efficiency. That increases the total power-requirement to 28,253.35, of which almost all is the guns.
  
  Suppose that we give it the same size of power-plant as on Atlas when it has a battery, which (given it can run off a 3.7 kilowatt-hour battery for 1 hour, and the average energy-density of lithium-ion batteries of 182.5 watts per kilo), presumably masses 20.27 kilos—which comes to 3,476.33 kilos on a 10 meter version, bringing the total mass up to 16,292.99 kilos, say 16,293 for simplicity, and an energy-requirement of 401.9 kilowatts (28,339.1 with the railgun). Going with the energy-density of optimized silicon-air batteries, 14.2286 kW·hr per kilo, 3,476.33 kilos yields 49,463.31 kilowatt-hours—21,526.11 not counting the railgun. That's enough to provide 53.56 hours of operation.
• Hell, 16,293 kilos is far under the 27,400 kilo max takeoff weight of the V-22 Osprey: let's slap a pair of 440 kilo airplane engines (but not turboprops) on there, for a weight of 17,173 kilos and a powerplant requirement of 423.6 kilowatts. You'd also swap out the 2,026 kilos of tank gun and shells for 529.5 kilos of an M61 Vulcan equivalent plus feed system and ammo, but that only brings the total power requirement to move the thing by 37 kilowatts, to 386.6.
  
  Of course the Vulcan is also electromagnetic, with a muzzle energy of 54 kilojoules and a fire rate of 6,600 per minute, which comes to an energy of 5,940 kilowatts, 11,880 with 50% efficiency. Except it can't fire the full 6,600; it carries a fraction of as many (an F16 carries 511, for example). That brings the actual practical energy requirement down to 919.8 kilowatts, for a total to walk around and fight with the thing, of 1,306.4 kilowatts. That'll let this model walk around for 125.57 hours.
  
  But, this is the flying one—something along the lines of the OZ-07AMS mobile suit. And its engines would require (assuming an average improvement over internal-combustion engines of 3.5×, and the Osprey's engines having a power output of 4,596 kW) 1,310.29 kilowatts, each, and it has two, so 2,620.56 kilowatts; of course, it either flies or walks, never both. Flying and shooting requires 3,530.36 kilowatts, and the thing can fly around for 18.52 hours.

Mélange V

Random thoughts. Title seemed appropriate given I talk a little about Dune at the end.

• Recall a few posts back, when I said it's dumb that anyone assumes humans are from a particularly hardcore planet, when it's entirely possible that aliens are from a Pleistocene or even Mesozoic biosphere (or a Snowball Earth glaciation)? One variation on the "humans would be really hardcore" idea, is called "Space Australia".
  
  Which is appropriate, because Australia? Nowhere near as dangerous as North America. Lazy pop culture stereotypes aren't always (or even often) based in statistical reality. Four people a year die from black-widow bites, in the US; nobody has died of a spider-bite in Australia since 1979. Now, there are 13.3 times as many people here as in Australia, so more chances for spiders to kill someone, but that still means they should be having one death every three years or so—not one in forty. And then there's how they have a handful of deadly snakes, two kinds of deadly croc, one barely deadly spider and maybe a scorpion or two, a couple sharks, and jellyfish.
  
  The US has almost as many deadly snakes, a couple kinds of deadly gator or croc, one very deadly spider and at least one deadly scorpion, a couple sharks…and then also wolves, wolverines, pumas, bobcats, lynxes, jaguars (though those haven't killed anyone here), three kinds of bear, a couple kinds of pinniped, at least four deadly species of deer (most deaths of any wild vertebrate), peccaries (one of the most aggressive animals on the planet), buffalo, and arguably some wild sheep or goats though those probably haven't actually killed anyone. (We also get the same jellyfish as Australia, the irukandji, but only in Hawaii, which is cheating.)
• Was trying to come up with something to make my setting's dhampirs stand out, and thus researched the dentition of vampire bats. Turns out, Nosferatu wasn't insane, giving their vampire "buckteeth" fangs: vampire bats use sharp front incisors to open veins. Though they do also have sharp eyeteeth. But it's definitely something to keep in mind with vampires: give 'em six fangs, not two or four.
• Apparently Anthem is a Destiny clone entirely by accident. This is mentioned in the now-notorious (because extremely important and true) Schreier article at Kotaku: it was harshly tabooed, at BioWare (by their own management, not EA), to compare Anthem to Destiny. Which presumably explains why they didn't, as I noted, move one inch out of their way to reduce the similarities: they were forbidden from discussing the fact there were similarities. (They were also apparently forbidden to compare how other looter-shooters handled things like classes or weapons, or what the MMO "industry" as a whole considered reasonable drop-rates for various types of loot.)
  
  It actually makes sense that the similarities are unintentional (though some of them are downright eerie, like the backstory involving Iron Lords in all but name, or the midpoint of the campaign featuring the protagonist making a deal with shady characters who have pretensions to royalty). While BioWare are hacks, who mistake middle-school creative-writing tawdriness and hamfisted identity-politics preaching for depth, they're not the kind of hack who would point-by-point copy a competitor's product. At the very least they would disguise the mimicry better. The similarities are so blatant they were almost certainly accidental.
• Tangentially-relatedly, bunch of people are whining about the SJW-soapboxing on Twitter of developers involved in the fourth Dragon Age game. But if you put up with Inquisition, and fans of the Dragon Age franchise almost all did, you have forfeited the right to complain. They already splashed this slop into the trough once before, and you happily trotted over and gobbled it up. It's a bit late to pretend to have a discerning palate now.
• I have also used the slop-trough imagery in reference to Star Wars, and how The Last Jedi had managed to alienate people who stuck with the franchise despite the prequel trilogy and the novels of Karen Traviss. Someone on Facebook responded to my use of that comparison by calling me a Star Wars fanboy, which is odd; does one often refer to one's own people with a pig metaphor?
  
  The fact is that Star Wars fanboys were almost impossible to piss off, until Rian "Taken King" Johnson decided to desecrate a hundred beloved characters from his director's chair, and observe the change in the chair, and how the universe shrank from him in terror. The Worm his god—to give postmodernism its true name—was pleased: "A film-franchise is a fine flesh, oh director ours. Let us feast of it."
• I considered, inspired partly by the "hand cannons" in Destiny, having my SF setting's revolvers (mainly used only by cops as a backup weapon) use "annular" (ring-shaped) magazines to load their cylinders. Presumably they'd have a "chambering" mechanism, like on a more conventional firearm, where the round is lined up with the barrel in order to be fired.
  
  However, the idea of firing directly from the magazine actually seems sort of dangerous; I think instead I'll keep it as I'd had it, with there being something that holds the caseless rounds in the revolver-cylinder's chambers—maybe a moon-clip. (I incline to use break-top revolvers; there was at least one chambered in .357 magnum, so it's definitely possible.)
  
  You know come to think of it, it's sort of unclear how exactly hand cannons work.
• It's only recently that I got the hang of the romance mechanic in Kingmaker (though I already got the, ahem, Harrim ending). Gotta say, not terribly impressed. I've romanced, in various playthroughs, Octavia, Valerie, and "Kaessi". Octavia is passive-aggressive in the extreme, while Val is more straightforward but still pretty messed up. If you say you want a more serious relationship (which seemed in character for my paladin), she gets mad at you and either ends her "route" or at least stalls it—fortunately you can reload the scene. That's some deeply questionable shit, though.
  
  And you have to sleep with the lawful evil tiefer twin, Kanera, to get the "flag" for the chaotic good one, Kalikke—whose first flag triggers when her sister changes places with her while sleeping next to you, which is pretty screwed up if you think about it. Maybe things are better if you go gay male (for Regongar) or straight female (Regongar or Tristian)? I mean Reg is at least almost certainly not passive-aggressive; and Tristian is a cinnamon roll. Maybe hold out for Nyrissa's route, but apparently her flags only trigger if you don't go too far down anyone else's route.
  
  Also it feels like an ulterior motive for a paladin of Sarenrae (my preferred PC) to save someone for any reason other than emulating the mercy of the Dawnflower.
• So apparently people think the Game of Thrones theme is "epic". Uh…how? It sounds like they left a synthesizer on demo-mode, set to "vaguely medieval". Like, if you had a character humming or whistling it, in something else, nobody would say anything like "oh they're whistling that because there's cutthroat dynastic politcs afoot". They would say "that character is whistling some generic formless tune".
• Speaking of smutty subscription-TV soap operas, The Handmaid's Tale is, as I've said somewhere if not here, The Turner Diaries for people who read The New Yorker. But it's also a ripoff of Dune—it basically copies the framing device wholesale, and the "Handmaids" are (a boring version of) the Bene Gesserit, but victims of Evil Patriarchy™ rather than agents of their own multigenerational Foundation-esque conspiracy.
  
  Now I don't know if Atwood actually ripped off Dune, but I think it's reasonable to think she did. Admittedly Dune is probably very challenging (in every sense of the word) for a litfic hack, but it's also one of the very few works of science fiction a litfic hack might be expected to have read. (And desperately deny that it is science fiction, despite the telekinetic FTL drives, energy shields, nuclear-power aristocracy, and genetic-engineering cults.)

Sierra Foxtrot 12

Post #600, SF thoughts.

• I know I've mentioned (what is incontrovertible) that Rey is easily as much a Mary Sue as Korra (or, before you embarrass yourself, as Ender Wiggin, Harry Potter, Kirigaya Kazuto, or Alucard). And that The Last Jedi was mean-spirited in its treatment of Luke—and Snoke. But I haven't mentioned how it makes the previous eight movies completely incoherent.
  
  If Force-ghost Yoda can lightning Luke's shrine, why couldn't Force-ghost Qui-Gon lightning Palpatine? If you can use hyperdrives to kamikaze capital ships, why does anyone ever do anything else? This is a setting where droids are cheap, plentiful, and generally considered less-than-persons; every battle would just come down to who mobilizes their droid Tokubetsu Kôgekitai first.
  
  Also seriously those bombers at the beginning: where are your Y-wings and B-wings? The Rebels Pirate Monkeys Resisty already have bombers that aren't sitting ducks while they attack.
• Absolutely the champ of this anime season is Cells at Work, which has no business being as educational and entertaining as it is. About the only way it could be better is if viruses looked like Angels from Evangelion, and then vaccines were giant robots for fighting them, made from the same material. (I don't know if moe anthropomorphisms of cellular biology count as SF, and I don't care, either; I just needed to mention how great Cells at Work is.)
• I was thinking that maybe the widespread gun-control in (the human parts of) my SF setting might not be possible with things like 3D printing of weapons, although doing that in such a way that the weapons are worth a damn is likely to remain relatively expensive. The "Liberator" (which can't actually beat metal detectors) has been compared to "holding a centerfire cartridge with a pair of vice grip pliers and hitting the firing pin with a leather punch".
  
  But then I realized that, given their firearms use caseless ammunition, and non-caseless isn't much good against their armor, they can enforce gun control by requiring a taggant in all caseless propellants, as we now require it in plastic explosives. It's likely to be very hard to make your own denatured octanitrocubane, after all. Presumably the high-end black-market gunrunners make their own taggant-free propellant, as do assassins.
  
  Of course, just because all the firearm propellant involves taggants doesn't mean they'd be stupid enough to stop using metal detectors. My future UN is an oppressive regime, not a straw dystopia.
• Zledo don't have any gun-control; it's technically legal for their civilians to own artillery, up to things designed for taking out fortresses. It's never an issue, though, because they aren't allowed to store the ammunition in residential areas. (All their arms manufacturing takes place outside population centers, to reduce collateral damage in wartime—their Weaponeer Sodality all live outside of "city limits".) Even if they own isolated land where they can stockpile ammunition for their legally-owned artillery, the costs are still prohibitive. Aside from how artillery shells ain't cheap (one standard round for the M109 howitzer costs about $650), the liability and other forms of insurance would quickly outstrip any private budget.
  
  Technically speaking, the Second Amendment in our constitution applies to artillery; privately-owned cannon were once commonplace. About the only weapon it doesn't actually apply to are WMDs, because those can be used to overthrow a constitutional order, including the one the 2A is a part of, whereas the Confederacy wasn't even able to use artillery to quit this constitutional order. (And nowadays, just like zledo, it would largely be moot if we did legalize it, because of the insurance and liability costs involved—like, tens of thousands of dollars in premiums per month, if fire-codes actually allowed you to have it in a residential area at all.)
• My NotUsingTheZWord approach to SF writing—where I say "volumetric display" instead of "hologram" and "fighter with prosthetic enhancement" rather than "cyborg"—might have some research to back it up. Apparently, interpreting that study with the appropriate sodium intake, reading words that indicate something is science fiction causes readers to read less carefully.
  
  That other study mentioned in that article, claiming lit-fic made its readers more empathetic, is utter nonsense, of course. People who read lit-fic can't even get inside the heads of the inhabitants of "flyover country"; SF readers can get inside the heads of Kzinti. Did the study get a false positive because lit-fic involves so much more silent-film pantomimic emoting?
• I was unsure how to have Zbin-Ãld express the concept "for themselves" or "their own", since my other reflexive involved putting both the ergative and absolutive particles on the same word (yes they mark the absolutive—Indo-European originally marked all of its cases, too, and so does Japanese when it's bothering to mark them at all). "For themselves" is benefactive (not a marked case in Zbin-Ãld, it's the oblique case and "for") and "their own" is genitive (that one is its own case).
  
  Then it occurred to me I can make a word for "self" from the word assigned to "nature" (as in "natural world") by the word-list generator I used, since zledo have no concept of "nature" in that sense as a distinct thing—where you say "naturally" they say "expectably". Basically the construction in "for themselves" is something like "for their same self", and then "their own" is the genitive of "same self". I don't think "self" inflects for its referent's number, though, unlike in English.
• Decided to give Zbin-Ãld gendered pronouns for all three persons. Or rather to inflect all their pronouns for noun-class/paradigm: although male names are in one paradigm and female in the other, they're not exactly "masculine" or "feminine" grammatical gender (their names are respectively "blue paradigm" and "red paradigm", among zledo, after the moons and the two colors their markings come in). In the singular, when referring to specific people, you use the one that goes with their name, so it matches their "gender" in that sense, but when speaking of a common noun ("a child", "the noble") or in the plural ("zledo") you use the one for the word that goes with whatever noun you're referring to.
  
  Thus if you say "people" (or "mortal men"), sõ'ã, which is in the same paradigm as masculine names, you use the "masculine" pronouns, but if you say "zledo", which is in the paradigm for feminine names, you use the "feminine" pronouns. It gets counterintuitive for Indo-European speakers when they leave the referent implicit and use one or the other paradigm seemingly at random, based on what particular word they were thinking of people as. I was thinking I might get some rhetorical effect out of it—like when you count humans with the marker for "small animal" in Japanese, to add oomph to concepts like "just one man"—but with only two paradigms, roughly evenly distributed, you can't really do that.
• Between Life having "thinking muscle" and Annihilation having a telepathic, reality-warping fungus, can we just make a rule that you're not allowed to have the damned Gravemind in your SF movie? I mean come on people. Come up with something else. At least rip off a different video game (although even video games—*cough*—rip off the Gravemind). You haven't tried zooplankton that learned to fly by Social Darwinist witchcraft as your totally-science-fiction-and-not-fantasy antagonist or plot-mover, yet. Or a space pirate who was born a bug-lizard and became an immortal dragon.

Sierra and Two Foxtrots V

Fantasy and SF thoughts. Mostly the former because it's a broader subject and I've been working on my Pathfinder setting.

• Decided to go with two-tiered elf and gnome equipment. The ordinary stuff is just equivalent to masterwork steel, wood, or leather, with the Sunder resistance of a curve blade and weapons also having the curve blade's Weapon Finesse eligibility. Maybe they weigh only 75% as much? And then the high-end stuff is mithral or darkleaf cloth (in terms of hardness and hit points), except you can make "wooden" shields, and still with the Sunder resistance and Weapon Finesse eligibility. Dwarf stuff would just be like mithral or three-quarters-weight masterwork steel, respectively—but still made from extremophile coralline algae. (I don't think dwarves will have a darkleaf cloth equivalent.)
  
  Don't know how to price 'em. Figure that maybe the simplest way to price the "mithral"/"darkleaf cloth" weapons is "base plus alchemical silver (or cold iron, in the dwarf-stuff's case), plus masterwork plus 10 gp per pound of base weight" ("half weight" being the only benefit darkwood offers beyond masterwork, to a weapon). And then have the armor cost what mithral normally does. The steel(-equivalent) should probably be just masterwork? Plus 5 gp per pound since it reduces the weight half as much as darkwood would. We're ignoring the Sunder resistance in pricing, because there's no one weapon that's equivalent to a curve blade that we can say the curve blade is the modified form of.
  
  I think gnome "mithral" weapons won't overcome damage-reduction, so maybe theirs just cost base plus masterwork plus 10 gp per pound of base weight.
• I'd had zled spaceship and aircraft autocannons use the metric-patching system, but decided that was still too easily miniaturized; now they only use it for engines and launch-catapults, and use electromagnetically accelerated autocannons (quench guns, I think—a type of Gauss/coilgun). The khângây already use quench vulcans as personal small-arms (not as practical as lasers but the zledo are the soldiers, khângây are artists and artisans and thus more prone to going by the Rule of Cool).
  
  It occurs to me that the easiest way to do ammo for mass-driver weapons is to use iridium or osmium bullets, with a "driving band" of ferromagnetic material. In the space ones they're spherical, since there's no aerodynamic concerns, and have "driving spots" something like the dimples on a golf ball; the ones for use in atmosphere are shaped as Sears-Haack bodies with the "driving band" around the middle. I think the atmosphere ones have the coil set up to impart spin like a rifle, too.
  
  Think zled artillery, too, will mostly be mass-driver based—maybe some lasers for ground- and air-applications. Their missiles, I think, only use metric-patching in space; I'm not sure what their ground propulsion is. Probably some superconducting electric ducted fan, but maybe pulse detonation engines. Which work the same as other jet/rocket engines except that those use deflagration, combustion at subsonic velocities, while detonation is combustion at supersonic velocities—basically a conventional-explosives Orion drive. Yes, they're very loud.
• Zled air-travel, I decided, is accomplished using vacuum-airships for short flights and some sort of electric turbine flight for long flights. A vacuum airship is quite simple: you make the envelop lighter-than-air by pumping the air out. You land by just pumping air back in. It's hard to do without extremely airtight envelopes, of course, but given they're a spacefaring civilization they can store hydrogen, so that's not an issue.
  
  The other issue is that if a vacuum cell gets a puncture, the whole thing implodes; they get around it by using a compartmentalized structure that avoids chain-reactions, and making the cells out of very durable smart materials. Their airships are also aerodynamic, so they can glide to a landing if they lose the vacuum cells; the outer hull and inner envelope aren't directly in contact.
• Not going that route myself, but if you wanted to get rid of verbal components for spellcasting—like if you wanted to make it more like the video-games that are the main source of current fantasy preconceptions nowadays (although canonically most of those do have spoken spells, it'd just get annoying to hear over and over)—you could use a modified version of the psychic magic from the Pathfinder Occult Adventures. What I'd do is still have somatic and material components, but replace verbal with thought components for wizards and emotion components for sorcerers. I would leave divine spellcasters with verbal components, though, since they still pray. I think witches, too, since their personal relationship with their shadowy patrons is fundamental to that class's "flavor".
  
  I also think that, if you're going to work out (e.g. for fluff-text) how incantations work, the arcane casters should use very different types of spells from the divine ones. Weird and abstruse is the way to go for the arcane ones; think of the spells in Bleach, for example (which I think are based on the real chants sometimes used in onmyôdô). Stuff like "Scattered beast bones! Spire, crimson crystal, steel wheels! The wind if it moves, the sky if it stops, the tone of the spear striking fills the lone castle!" Meanwhile the divine casters (and witches) should probably have more Slayers-like incantations, since they're invoking powerful beings like in that setting. The same spell might thus be "O source of all power, O thunder that roams the sky, gathering in my hand, become a power!"
  
  Of course a lot of the time those might be shortened to, say, "Hadô 63: Raikôhô!" or "Dig Volt!" (Or "What I seek is thunder: Izuchi!")
• Apparently opioids don't work on reptiles. Or not the same; they have an effect, but instead of sedating them and numbing them, opioids make reptiles agitated and cause them to increase their body-temperatures (I think by the same means certain lizards and snakes do it, during the mating/brooding season). Presumably related to us and diapsids using some different nerve-channels (see also capsaicin).
  
  This is (of course) an issue for vets who have to treat injured reptiles; it's also potentially of use to SF writers. Or fantasy, which has been rife with reptile-people back at least to the Kull stories and Pellucidar (I consider Hollow Earth—also Sword and Planet—to be fantasy). The cultural associations of opium—opium dens, the Opium Wars, etc.—work pretty well with something like the Serpent People, for example.
• Revised my dragons slightly: their necks and tails have featherlike-scales that spread out in flight to form a wing that almost makes them kite-shaped. (They might have a "mane" running almost their whole length when on the ground, in other words—maybe they have a double fan of the scales on the middle of their back, to act like vertical stabilizers.) They also undulate, vertically, through the sky, like the motion an otter makes when swimming, in order to "flap" with their entire length. Part of this was inspired by the Revered Dragons in Skyrim, whose necks and tails are lined with "fins" that would drastically increase their lifting area.
• Thought I might go with 5e's darkvision, and give it to all my nonhuman races except the animal hybrids (cat-, hyena-, and yak-people), which I think have 3e low-light vision. Where 3e/Pathfinder darkvision is basically immune to darkness, 5e treats poor light as normal light and total darkness as dim light. (For those playing along at home, dim light means that creatures have concealment, imposing a 20% miss-chance on attacks against them, and can use the Stealth skill to, as 'twas known in the Before Time, "hide in shadows".) Low-light vision is kinda meh, but 3e darkvision seems slightly OP. 5e's seems to be a good compromise.
  
  Relatedly (in my day your eyes glowed red when you used the equivalent of darkvision), I mentioned before how glowing eyes would probably make your vision blurry (the night-vision of animals with tapeta lucida is blurry). I proposed a mere ring around the iris, for glowing robot eyes. Maybe for humanoid eyes you only need to have the pupil black? Most glowing eyes (e.g. Warcraft elves) are a solid color, with no pupils (probably the pupils glow as an inappropriate analogy with the tapetum lucidum), but that has got to be artistic license. Something more like the Awoken, in Destiny, who have glowing irises but black pupils, is more plausible.
• I like to think about the basic day-to-day technology of my future society. For example, they affix things to other things using "seta-tape"—"setae" being the bristles on the underside of a gecko's feet that let it walk on walls. Basically it's an adhesive that leaves no gunk. A tokay gecko's feet can support 2.05 kilos of weight, something like 40 times its body-mass; presumably if you have to attach something bigger than that, you just use more tape. And, again, no gunk—you just move the taped object in a certain way relative to the surface it's stuck to, and it comes off, like a gecko taking a step.

Mélange III

The random thoughts are the Spice! The Spice is the random thoughts!

• Discovered, while working on my conlangs, Proto-Indo-European was freaking weird. The vowel is basically optional, its specific quality depending only on stress or accent; it defaulted to *e but could be *o or *[nothing] in some circumstances. The *a, *u, and *i vowels were originally a *e followed by an *h, *w, or *y sound (respectively), not independent phonemes. The same root could also appear prefixed with an *s or *h, seemingly at random; the *h seems to have turned into an *a at a late point.
  
  The fact that the vowels were so variable lends, I think, credence to the theory that Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic (like Berber or Semitic) are related, although the latter can put the vowels around its three consonants in almost any arrangement and the former always only puts them in the middle of its up-to-three before or after. (I'm not sure if *s- or *h- count against the "up to three at the beginning" rule; both seem to have been appended at random. Again, the *h often turned into an *a later on.)
• I'm alternately amused and irritated when anime talk about the Spanish Inquisition as being so horrible. Because, Japan? Buddy? The Tokugawa shogunate killed 100,000-200,000 in 220 years, just at the Kozukappara execution-ground, and another 100,000 at Suzugamori; I can't find any numbers for the Itabashi one (apparently Kondô Isami is as important as every other person executed there put together), but it was probably comparable. And that doesn't count the hundreds if not thousands of harakiri that members of the warrior class were forced to commit. The Spanish Inquisition, aside from using much milder tortures than the shogunate, executed 3000-5000 people in 356 years. I.e., the shogunate killed something like 100 times as many people, in less than two-thirds as long.
• Apparently there's another reason not to use particle beam personal weapons: they're freaking impossible. If the beam's plasma is at a higher pressure than the air, it just becomes a cloud instead of a beam. If the plasma is at a lower pressure, you're putting less energy downrange. Plus, the beam's impact with the air is going to irradiate you—Winchell Chung compares it to "sending a load of red-hot buckshot through a room full of dynamite...when you are standing inside the room".
  
  Looks like a lot of particle-beam weapons would also have inferior penetration to lasers for the equivalent amount of energy, since more of the energy put into a laser beam hits the target (most of the energy put into a particle beam is wasted on getting the particles moving in the first place). Basically the only time you're going to bother with particle beams is when you have big facilities with the power to burn, like how our current laser weapons and rail-/coilguns are vehicle-only. And even then, in space.
• I don't know what to think of Star Trek: Discovery. A lot of people are offended by the political subtext that apparently lies just below the surface, but I mean, Star Trek has always had that element of a children's hospital head-injury ward putting on PSA skits. I kinda like most of the new characters, going from the first episode, though apparently the ship in the pilot isn't the one we're going to be seeing for most of it. I don't know how much of the crew in the pilot is going to carry over.
  
  Now, of course, the Klingon "villains" are clearly 100% in the right, in their resistance to Federation cultural imperialism, but that, too, is not unheard-of for Star Trek villains. One of the people criticizing Discovery actually complained that post-Abrams Trek wasn't "cerebral". I mean, it's not; but the implication was that this is one of its variances from Trek canon. I'm pretty sure the choice between mindless action and mindless tedium in a staff-meeting is simply a matter of taste.
  
  And a lot of people complaining about the politics involved also complained that the Klingon scenes were in Klingon. Um...what? All aliens should talk alien languages all the time, if remotely practicable; complaints about having to read subtitles are quite inaudible to me, I consume most of my television in subtitled form. Similarly, the new look of Klingons? Yes please. They had to do something; the ol' "only a rubber forehead" approach just wasn't going to cut it, when these are the main alien of the second or third most popular science fiction franchise in the Western world.
• On the other hand, the new Ducktales? Holy mackerel is it good. While making Webby just the product of Dipper and Mabel doing the Fusion Dance might not be the most creative choice, Webby in the original was awfully close to Scrappy Doo territory, and that's no way to live.
  
  Having Donald as a semi-regular is a nice touch, though I think the nephews should talk a bit more like him—occasionally in the original they would devolve into Donald-esque squawking if they got angry. Apparently (presumably after Gizmo Duck shows up), they may have Darkwing, which is astounding.
  
  About the only way it could be better would be if they can figure out a way to give Donald elemental magic and a zipper on his hat.
• Another thing that was good was, I just got Battle Chasers: Nightwar. It's a really good JRPG that doesn't happen to have been made in Japan. One thing I thought was funny was that you have the option of putting the voices in Japanese—an option you don't have in most imported games, despite the fact the Japanese audio for those didn't cost any extra money. You don't really have to, though, since the English voice-work is actually really good. Unlike Breath of the Wild, which has some of the worst I've seen in years.
• Mention of Breath of the Wild reminds me of something people say that happens to be the opposite of the truth, namely that doing the unexpected is a good thing, in writing. It's really not, not when the expected thing is narratively satisfying and makes artistic, aesthetic sense. In Breath of the Wild, for instance, the relatives of the dead Champions ought to replace them as the masters of the Divine Beasts. It was the obvious choice—in the sense that the obvious choice in a mystery is to have the protagonist brood in the shower while washing themselves in the manner generally learned when around ten years old, rather than slipping on the soap and dying, and the plot then being sidetracked onto dealing with that fact.
  
  One writer who gets undeserved praise for doing this a lot, is George "Rape Rape" Martin. Whenever something would make narrative sense, whether it be by genre convention or just not being puerile, mean-spirited, and subconsciously misogynist, he does the opposite. Then the kind of people who probably mistake a painting hung the wrong way up for a bold artistic statement lavish him with praise. Except when the expected thing is actually stupid, like people dying only when someone else does something—if your setting is "everyone can die", in the name of "realism", they really ought to die more often in riding accidents or from bad water while on campaign, than murder. That unexamined trope is in full force, though.
  
  As in politics, "subversion" is only a good thing when it serves a definite, genuinely desirable purpose—and is proportional to the aims sought. When it doesn't, it's just vandalism. Or terrorism.
• I had worried about whether zledo having red and blue camouflage markings makes sense, but there could be an explanation. Part is that their typical mammal-analogue prey is as crepuscular as they are; night vision is as monochrome for them as for Earth animals. The main thing camouflage does in that kind of light is break up silhouettes.
  
  Another part is that their non-crepuscular prey—or the main predators of their ancestors, remember that their world is basically Mesozoic in many regards—can see in near-UV, and the markings, which are anthocyanin, might show up in that wavelength the same way that markings on the plants do. No reason their plants wouldn't have markings visible in near-UV, for pollinators, like ours. There are also plenty of things about minerals that are "shiny" in near-UV, so the camouflage would also give some benefit without plants around.
  
  Besides, a lot of animals have better camouflage in brush than in open land, e.g. tigers. Maybe the zled "race" (which I'm now calling "ecotype", since that's what the visible "races" are) that loses its spots in adulthood only had to worry about that sort of predation in childhood, like the predators aren't big enough to take adults.

Sierra Plus One, Foxtrot Plus Two

More fantasy and SF thoughts.

• People keep whining about the idea of "evil races" in things like D&D. But, aside from the fact psychopathy has a congenital component and probably also an environmental one—if you are raised by orcs you'll act like an orc even if it's not innate—there have been cultures that act, at least toward others, like orcs, and others whose internal dealings were, at times, pretty orc-like. Besides, bonobos and chimpanzees are pretty "evil"; if something, like Tree of Life, gave them intelligence without changing their behavior, you'd have orcs, straight up—even without Protectors being psychopaths.
  
  Even if we taboo orcs, the fact remains that the difference between drow and other elves, minus its physical manifestation, happens all the time in history. New nations routinely form from the adoption of a new ideology or way of life. The only difference between Serb, Croat, and Bosnian, or Pakistani and Indian, is religion. The Apache are Navajos who wear their hair down, use more than six types of animal "medicine", and don't bother about the four sacred mountains; the Comanche are Shoshone who got Spanish horses left behind after the Pueblo Revolt and became horse-nomads.
  
  Still trying to figure out how "Germans became evil when they adopted the ideology of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei" is an unremarkable statement but "the Illythiiri became evil when they adopted the worship of Araushnee, now called Lolth" is somehow a hate-crime.
• That O'Neill Cylinder-based space colony is a bit big. Apparently, though, his Island Two—a modified Bernal Sphere 1800 meters in diameter—might also be large enough for weather. A hemisphere of the same volume is only 2,857.32 meters in diameter. That's a base area of 6,412,210 square meters, slightly larger than the city of Falls Church, Virginia, which has about 14,000 people.
• Going back to the 64- and 32-millimeter zled laser lenses; they don't lose that much range relative to the 86- and 43-millimeter ones, and they're a lot easier to design around (like, instead of the long laser being 4 millimeters shy of four inches—as big as a Soviet anti-aircraft gun—it's one millimeter shy of three).
  
  Zledo are a bit bigger than humans, of course, so they can carry a bigger weapon than us—even so, though, a 64-millimeter laser is the equivalent of one of those 50-millimeter mortars from World War II. But you could totally stick some manner of grip or stock on one of those, and carry it as a main infantry weapon, without getting a second look.
  
  Making the anti-materiel laser be the one with the 86-millimeter lens; sniper weapons often look pretty awkward.
• Apparently while helping with the movie (franchise) of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, among the many ways Rowling revealed herself to be unteachable rabble, is she had the skinwalkers be Native American wizards, persecuted by medicine-men because medicine-men are fakes. And what does the Social Justice internet say is the problem with this? Oh, it's cultural appropriation. Really? That's your problem with this "Philip Pullman on steroids" crap? That's like criticizing Nazi Germany for its tax policies!
  
  And as my sister points out, it's a wasted opportunity. They could've had skinwalkers be (what they are) dark wizards for whom the creation of a horcrux is Tuesday—and that be why American wizards had nothing to do with Voldemort or Grindelwald. Hard to worry about anyone else's Dark Lords when you have to deal with dark wizards who've been doing it since at least the 1100s, possible even the 900s. (The cannibalism at Chaco may well indicate such things—skinwalkers aren't originally Navajo, they're the Hopi popwaktu, and in Hopi culture, as in the rest of the language-group, it's cannibalism that makes the witch.)
  
  Ah, but that would involve knowing about things, doing research. They're against that, in Britain. Start researching things and before you know it, you might get silly notions like that Papists are people, and maybe shouldn't be robbed and murdered at every opportunity. And then they have to bring in backwoods German squires to replace entire dynasties dating back over half a millennium, and murder hundreds of thousands of people for objecting to it. Best to avoid the possibility altogether.
• Speaking of people doing bad sequels to their own work, I'm glad that I'm not the only one who noticed how much cheaper lightning- and metal-bending got, in Korra compared to Avatar. Now, admittedly, all bending got a lot cheaper (primary school child masters elements it normally takes Avatars years to master), but lightning bending is supposed to be like, say, Bankai, in Bleach, while metal bending was straight-up Visored-ness. I can see Toph maybe having students who can do it, but a whole police force? Also Toph "Chaotic Neutral" Beifong, as a cop? Right.
• It may have occurred to you, regarding that thing in the last post, that just because objects are invisible in near-IR on the day side of a planet, doesn't mean they're completely hidden. But using any other kind of IR you'd still be competing with a star, and as for radar (a radio telescope would still be "radar" if you're "detecting and ranging" with it, though it'd be a much more impressive kind than we currently use), spaceships can use the exact same kinds of radar countermeasures airplanes use—which would doubtless be pretty impressive for a spacefaring civilization. Plus a spacefaring civilization, since its engines are likely to involve manipulating a lot of plasma, can do plasma stealth.
  
  Remember, while you're trying to figure out what to do about the enemy, your enemy is not quietly waiting. If you use an active radio telescope (much more effective than the passive kind), then you might as well broadcast a locator-beacon to your enemy's weapons. The passive kind, which mainly finds objects by their occultation of background objects, takes time to analyze. And the only missiles a spaceship carries are probably going to be nukes (since conventional explosives, if they work at all, are drastically nerfed in a vacuum). It only took two nukes to force a surrender, on Earth—how many of your population centers does your opponent have to wipe off the map before you capitulate? I'm guessing not all that many.
• Read magic is a staple of D&D, the one spell wizards don't have to prepare. But you know the explanation the post-3e books give, that every mage uses the magical notation in a different way? I kind of see what they were getting at, something like the many different ciphers used by alchemists (Tim Marcoh's Philosopher's Stone notes are a cookbook, remember?...whereas Roy Mustang's are disguised as his little black book). But it's inelegant.
  
  Had a better idea. How about, magical notation is from before writing, possibly before speech as mortals know it? The symbols used for it are not the encoding of sounds or syllables or even words. What magical notation is, is proto-writing. And for that, you need to already know the gist; the symbols act as more of a cheat-sheet. What read magic does, is tell you the gist. There were ritual manuals written along those lines in Mesoamerican cultures that hadn't adopted true writing, like the Nahuatls and Mixtecs. (Those were the main thing the Spanish burned—remember the rituals in question—while doing everything they could to preserve secular history and even religious mythology. Most of our knowledge of pre-Columbian native culture, including religion, comes from writings by Spanish friars.)
  
  Not only does that make for a cooler worldbuilding element, it keeps things like not needing to use it on stuff you've used it on before, stuff you wrote yourself, or stuff whose author is present with you.
• The whole "Ages" thing in a lot of fantasy, usually numbered, kinda annoys me. I think it does come from Tolkien (hey, we found one!); I'm not sure where he got it. Hesiod, maybe? Wherever he got it, the four-plus-one Eras of Tamriel, the five(ish) Ages of Krynn (which aren't usually numbered...at least as a D&D setting), etc., are clearly inspired by him, or (barely possibly) by something like Hesiod.
  
  It's odd to me, because in lots of cultures (pretty much all the Romance-speaking ones, for instance, and a lot of the Slavic, Baltic, and Celtic ones), the word that is the equivalent of "age"...means "century". In French, Latin, Irish, Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian, among many others, we're in the twenty-first "age". No cataclysm, no massive shift in the relations of gods (or Valar) and men—just the rolling over of the calendar.
  
  Now, you can do it that way. Not only Hesiod but the Nahuatls and Hopi have that kind of thing (though the Hopi and Nahuatls actually have different worlds—but a couple of Hesiod's are pretty similar to some of the Nahuatl "suns"). But you don't have to do it; assuming that the "just the calendar rolling over" kind is the "cosmic transition" kind, is how you get the Mayan calendar 2012 nonsense. If you do decide to go that route, know why.

Rannm Thawts Nine

ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin. Post #585—which is 3² × 5 × 13.

• Apparently, calling the stuff that powers magic "mana" wasn't completely random; the term had been used in anthropology ever since an 1891 book on Melanesian religion. However, that doesn't explain why they started using the Polynesian term throughout anthropology—not when they already had the Latin word numen, which gives us the English word "numinous".
  
  I suppose it could just be because anthropologists were not studying ancient Rome. But still, it's odd that anthropologists use a Melanesian term for something that had a European name. One might posit that it's because anthropologists believe Melanesians a fit subject for study, in a way that Europeans somehow aren't. Why do they call the modern Western kinship system "Eskimo" and that of ancient Rome "Sudanese"? Wouldn't it make more sense to call the Eskimo one, say, "Italian," and the Sudanese one "Roman"? The latter terms must surely be more meaningful to a modern westerner.
  
  It also does not escape my notice that the sort of people who make the most noise about institutional racial biases and the "othering" of non-Western cultures (never mind that if you're Western, the non-Western is "other" by definition, that's what "non-Western" means—and that to the non-Western, the West is "other" in turn), never mention things like this. One might suggest it's because they don't actually know any anthropology...
• Crunched some numbers. Given the 68 megajoules per cubic meter energy-absorption of composite metallic foam, it seems like, at the thicknesses typical of personal body armor (6 to 10 millimeters), the minimum "spot radius" for a c. 10 kilojoule laser beam to penetrate the armor, is in the centimeters range—possibly even tens of centimeters. So it looks like the main determinant in what range a laser can penetrate such armor, is the boron-carbide plate.
  
  Thought I'd go with 7-millimeter B₄C plates for the lighter armor worn by Peacekeepers, since those probably ought to be the typical thickness of the hard inserts in our body armor. That, even a zled hand laser with a 4.29-centimeter lens can penetrate from a bit over 280 meters, in near-infrared; in near ultraviolet, the penetration range goes up to over 1300 meters. The long laser with an 8.58-centimeter lens can penetrate 7 millimeters of B₄C from 821 meters away in near-IR, and over 3900 meters in near-UV.
  
  The VAJRA suits, meanwhile, have 10-millimeter B₄C plates, which the lasers penetrate at about seven-eighths the ranges of the 7 millimeter ones.
• You will perhaps recall the aspersions I cast on Ursula LeGuin characterizing the word "ichor" as "the infallible touchstone of the seventh-rate". As I said, the real sign of the seventh-rater is probably something like dressing up drearily overdone hippie-dippy Liberal Protestantism in poorly-understood watered-down Taoism. (This leaves to one side the issue that every combatant vessel below sixth-rate is "unrated" or a "sloop-of-war", and also leaves aside unflattering comparisons between LeGuin and types of ship that are not even accounted sloops—like garbage scows—which was tempting, and would've been gratifying, but was gratuitous. This is me becoming a better man.)
  
  But I think I've hit on a real touchstone, seldom-fallible at least, for detecting writers who fall short of the standard required to be considered sixth-rate, though I remain uncertain as to whether it distinguishes the unrated/sloop writer from the non-combatant writer. Namely, if they mistook lines from Dead Poets Society for serious writing advice, intended for a literate audience. You know why you say "very tired" and not "exhausted"? Because "exhausted" means that you have no energy left—it literally means "burned out". You know why you say "very sad" and not "morose"? Well because "morose" doesn't even mean that, it means sullen and ill-tempered.
  
  Why it's almost like the hack who wrote Dead Poets Society was a half-educated pretentious dilettante who acquired his vocabulary via thesauruses (Devil's catechisms!), rather than through actual literacy. Oh but that can't be right; it's so beloved of shallow English majors. That must be because it's good, and not at all because it panders to their laughably false-to-facts self-conceit as much as Ender's Game or John Green do to the self-conceits of their audiences. (Admittedly, Dead Poets Society and John Green have an awful lot of audience overlap...)
• Not entirely new news but apparently it's 100% official they're making four Avatar sequels. I understand the desire to milk the cash-cow but Cameron is, if possible, more offensively incompetent than Michael Bay, more clichéd than Roland Emmerich, and almost as hamfisted as Paul Verhoeven.
  
  I'm not exaggerating. Go to a fanfic site and read a story about someone's Sonic OC. The dialogue's almost certainly not going to be more sanctimonious than Sigourney Weaver's lines in Avatar, or Sarah Conner's rants in Terminator 2, or the corporate straw men in everything the hack makes. I'd probably pick the "protagonist's mother listing masturbation euphemisms" scene from the first Transformers, if I had to choose.
  
  However, it occurred to me, that if they must found a franchise on this cinematic squirt of foamy diarrhea, the first one would require a retroactive subtitle. Also something to distinguish it from the other Avatar. I suggest "The Last Rainforest". (That's certainly what I intend to call it.)
• Did a little more number crunching. Given the minimum size to be Colossal in D&D, the damage done by a Colossal boulder that falls as little as 30 feet (which is the same as maximum fireball damage, 10d6), the density of basalt (the most common rock), and the velocity an object has after a fall that long in Earth gravity...a maxed out D&D fireball is the equivalent of just under 250 kilos of TNT—but purely as heat, with no concussive effect.
• I know I've mentioned my dislike of "person from our world goes to another world" stories. I didn't get into their most irritating habit, congratulating the audience for the achievement of living in the only morally admirable society/era in all of space and time. (It's particularly irksome in light novels, which are written in a country that would have to acquit about 40 times as many people to be as lenient as the Spanish Inquisition.)
  
  Apparently, though, Kadokawa agrees with me that "going to another world" stories (isekai in Japanese) are lame. Their "Entertainment Novels that Adults Want to Read" Contest, for which the submission deadline is July 16, forbids isekai. It also requires that the protagonist be an adult male—I guess they were tired of the "ordinary high school student", too. (It's actually to appeal to older audiences, but still, that need to shoehorn the Japanese school system into every setting is easily as obnoxious as the "other world" thing.)
• Speaking of, I was watching Natsume Yûjinchô on CrunchyRoll, and I'm impressed by how stupid it isn't. None of this "yôkai are born from human emotion" nonsense here; and when one of them becomes a god, while it's because he used the power of human emotion, human emotion didn't create him. When he dies with his last worshipper, it's not because he was created by their worship, but because he'd invested so much of his power in it (like the One Ring but bittersweet rather than evil).
  
  I think it's so mature partly because it's from a manga. Where light novels, and shows based on them, cater to the ridiculous conceits of neckbeard man-children (hence the idiot phenomenologically anthropocentric "clap your hands if you believe"—as in the West, your Japanese neckbeard is usually a secularist), a manga can take a more intelligent, "we don't know where spiritual things come from, but it probably has nothing to do with our monkey butts" approach. (And remember, Natsuyû is shojo—it's still more mature than light novels.)
• Thinking about it, Young Justice (of which we're apparently getting a third season, finally, sometime this year) is not only a how-to of making a comics adaptation, it's also a how-to of doing animated storytelling. It uses its time-skip so it can meter out how much the audience knows about certain events. It masterfully balances multiple entire rogues' galleries and "families" of hero protégés. It even uses animation, and that with a fairly limited style, to convey the relationship between Dick Grayson and Tim Drake, and of both with Bruce—and the effect the death of Jason Todd had on them.

Sierra and Two Foxtrots III

Fantasy and SF thoughts. Less than half an hour to get it in this month.

• Breath of the Wild is less troublesome than I thought it was going to be, and it's not that hard to get to all of the plot. I don't even mind the item-durability all that much. I do like a Zelda game where I get to craft potions, though I wish that if they were going to give us the item-durability RPG mechanic we didn't actually want, they would also give us the weapon shop mechanic that normally supports it. At the very least let me sell weapons I don't need.
  
  This is my least favorite Zelda, though. Not the game, the person: she's just not very sympathetic. On the other hand I don't actually find her unforgivable, and she does eventually grow on you. It helps that her being a terrible Zelda is literally what caused every problem in the game's story.
  
  All-in-all though, I think this may actually rank behind Skyward Sword for me. It just actually has very little you can do: you have only six items and a camera—and you get them all pretty much at the very beginning of the game; you can fight; you can cook; and that's it. Knowing "that's something I'll be able to reach with an item that I get later" gives you something to look forward to, "curates" the experience as 'twere, and that is actually something that improves the game.
  
  Props for a few (implied) mentions of Fi, though—the most underrated of all secondary Zelda girls. (Midna is better but everybody loves Midna.)
• You know what is the absolute most common "I think everyone in the world is WEIRD" giveaway in modern fantasy? Having characters or cultures choose names because they like the way they sound—or worse, because the syllables have "spiritual meaning" to an individual. Thing is, that's not how most people are named. They're mostly named based on what their name means—literally, lexically, denotation-and-connotation, not "spiritually", means. Divine epithets, averting misfortune, profession names, toponyms, names chosen in hopes they will grant a blessing or inspire virtue in their bearers—those are what most of humanity considers when picking its names (some of those, admittedly, are more common as surnames than personal ones).
  
  Also? Speaking as someone with four teachers in his family...your idiot do-it-yourself spellings need to stop. You hurt everyone involved, from the child you saddled with your paean to your own narcissistic self-regard to the teacher who has to listen to your hellish drop whining that they didn't magically divine how, exactly, you were violating the principles of phonemic writing. Still worse (except I can tie it back to writing) is to name a character in fantasy a novelty spelling of a generic name (let's all pause to scoff at the evil king Jeff—clearly named after the Roman god of biscuits). Or worse than that (somewhere in genocide country, probably) is to name the character a novelty spelling of a trendy name at the time of the book's writing. That won't date it at all.
• Though I can probably leave my service-rifle round alone, as I said at the end of that last one, my anti-materiel rifle's round is probably underpowered. Thought I'd base it on a couple of wildcat cartridges made by lunatics, that neck a 20 millimeter down to .50 BMG. I can't find the propellant load for the necked-down versions, but the typical 20 millimeter cartridge has 38 grams of propellant; that comes to 15.9664 grams of ONC, which has a volume of 7,750.68 cubic millimeters. Sticking a 60-millimeter-long 13 millemeter bullet into that gives us a "casing" 48 millimeters in length, sticking out from the bullet 3.7 millimeters on each side and coming up its sides 44.3 millimeters. So, "13×48 millimeter" is the anti-materiel round's designation.
  
  Incidentally, .30-06 is about as much more powerful than 6.8 Remington SPC as .357 Magnum is than 9 millimeter Parabellum—which was already how my pistols were set up. However, since a part of how a SLAP-type system works is a smaller round (increased sectional density means superior penetration), decided to make the pistol round as much smaller than its model as the 7 millimeter rifle-round is: this gives us an 8.16 millimeter bullet, comparable to the bullets used in the Roth-Steyr pistol adopted by the Austro-Hungarian cavalry in 1907 (the first auto-loading pistol adopted by any national military), and the 8×22 millimeter Nambu pistol used in Imperial Japan.
  
  The "hottest" load I can find for .357 Magnum (what you'd want for an AP round) is 1.5552 grams; with ONC that comes to 653.4454 milligrams. That has a volume of 317.2065 cubic millimeters. Assuming the dimensions of 8×22 Nambu (case, or rather rim, diameter 10.5 millimeters, bullet diameter 8.16), but the bullet-length of the 7.92 Kurz (which actually has an 8.22 millimeter bullet—Germans name their calibers slightly differently) of 25.8 millimeters, we get a "casing" 18.91 millimeters long, which comes up the side of the round 17.74 millimeters (total length is 26.97 millimeters). So, "8.16×18 millimeter".
• I am unimpressed by the push for "representation" and "diversity" in fantasy, because the result always winds up looking like modern industrialized republics—and the acronym that describes those people is "WEIRD" for a reason, in case you think that doesn't make them basically worthless for "representation" or "diversity" purposes. I live in a place where not getting witched by a shape-shifter is not an unheard-of excuse for being late to work, your breathtakingly shallow (literally skin-deep) tokenism simply doesn't impress me.
  
  It's especially irksome because if you want to have African cultures in fantasy...you basically wind up with the Rohirrim, except infantry not horsemen. The only difference between most African chiefdoms and European feudalism is feudalism was less absolutist; you don't even have that difference if you're talking about New World ones like the Powhattan Confederacy. Meanwhile Mesoamerica is ancient Greco-Roman decadence, except the competitive spectator sport that winds up with people dead is a ball-game rather than direct gladiatorial combat. The same basically goes for most of the settled cultures of Africa, though the sport-resulting-in-death is less of an exact parallel—but in some African cultures (including possibly the one that built Great Zimbabwe?) some more ritualistic kinds of fighting can blur the lines between war-dance, martial sport, and death-game.
  
  Since any inclusion of something non-Western is going to bring accusations of "appropriation" (from people who don't object to many things legitimately described that way), let's just let writers stick to the forms native to their own culture. They're not going to be portraying anything actually different anyway.
• Realized, I forgot to factor in that zled lasers are only 85% efficient (over 30% is unusually efficient for ours, though there are a few papers on achieving 71% or 57.7% efficiency, in a laboratory setting), when I was calculating how big their CNT springs need to be.
  
  At 9,991 joules per shot and 48 shots, the long laser requires 479,568 joules just to fire, but in practice, 564,197.647 joules. That's a spring with a mass of 1.881 kilograms and a volume of 165.94 cubic centimeters, which at the long laser's diameter of 8.58 means the spring is 2.87 centimeters long. The hand laser is 3,197 joules per shot and 16 shots, 51,152 joules for working with and 60,178.824 joules in total. That spring's mass is 200.596 grams, and its volume is 17.70 cubic centimeters, which given a hand laser has a diameter of 4.29 centimeters comes to a spring 1.225 centimeters thick.
  
  Of course, the springs have casings the same thickness as the walls of the laser (the springs themselves are the same diameter as the lens); since it's 5.85 millimeters, and on the top and bottom, that makes the long laser's spring cartridge a total of 4.04 centimeters long, and the hand laser's one 2.395 centimeters.
• I do not, myself, care for the Dark Lord trope. Tolkien really did almost all that can be done with it. But because of him, people try to shoehorn it into all of fantasy, even things like Conan where it's ludicrously out of place. (Until people realize that Conan is like the Man with No Name from the Dollars trilogy, or Zatoichi—not someone who is directly involved in good vs. evil plots even when he's clearly the good guy—they will keep failing to make a proper Conan movie.)
  
  Personally, I prefer something like Slayers, or most RPG settings, where there are Dark Lords, plural, and they don't necessarily get along. (Even in Tolkien Ungoliant only sorta works for Melkor, and Shelob doesn't work for Sauron at all; it's less clear whether Durin's Bane does, or if he just got woken up by Sauron reaching out to every evil force in Middle-Earth.) It's just much more satisfying to have more than one possible villain.
  
  Actually the closest anyone ever came to involving Conan in a good vs. evil plot and having it work (other than Chronicles of Riddick, which doesn't count) was the animated show where the villains were the Serpent People of Valusia. It didn't actually work all that well even then; I'm just kindly disposed toward anything featuring the Serpent People. Ka nama kaa lajerama, mammajamma.
• Why is it that, when people make heroines who fight alongside the dudes, they don't give them spears? Or even more, glaives or halberds? A naginata was a woman's weapon in Japan, for a reason; weapon-handbooks on both ends of Eurasia were agreed that that sort of weapon, the spear that can also cut, was worth three swords. Particularly if you're a woman—the leverage on a pole-weapon neutralizes most of a man's strength advantage, and the pole also undoes the reach advantage. Indeed, I think a pole-weapon might actually be an even better weapon for a woman than a bow, since (particularly before compound bows were invented) a bow actually requires significant upper-body strength to shoot more than a few times.
• Mention of glaives reminds me, where did Warcraft get the strange idea that a glaive is a spinny blade-weapon, like a cross between a chakram and a hunga-munga/mambele type-thing? It's Krull, isn't it, and their stupid flying starfish weapon? Sigh. At least I can actually see the night-elves using it, since it's similar to one of the Predator's weapons and night elves, too, are hunters who can turn invisible (at least at night, and only if they're female).
  
  The throwing-blade version makes the fact that modern French uses "glaive" to mean "gladius" look sensible; at least that's actually what the word comes from—or at least it's the Latin reflex of the same Celtic root (cf. Welsh cleddyf, Irish claíomh—both of which end in a V sound, unlike gladius). (Apparently in the medieval period glaives may have been called "faussarts", related to "fauchard" and "falchion", incidentally. "Glaive" is only attested for them from the 1400s; all the earlier uses of that word refer to ordinary mostly-only-stabbing spears.)
• Has...um...has anyone noticed that pretty much the closest thing to an actual science fiction movie last year, was freaking Independence Day 2? Which was by no means as bad as the first one, don't get me wrong; it's just that even when Roland Emmerich makes a good movie—for the first time in his life, as far as I can recall—he still has to give it the dialogue of a bad movie. Because if you take away trite cliché, what does Emmerich have? Characters staring at each other silently, I guess.
  
  It's actually a serviceable sci-fi action movie. It would've been better without the "we uploaded our minds to computers, allowing the production-design department to only have to re-use their alien-designs from the previous movie, rather than coming up with a new one" thing. It would also be better if, instead of the humans (who in this setting, remember, are so stupid, they shoot things the size of cities with air-to-air missiles) being the only ones who ever beat a mothership, the other aliens are just impressed humans managed it without any real space-travel capability to speak of, and decided to come give us a hand.
  
  Did you know humans don't have to be the best at everything? Especially when you can only make them that way by implying even species that can upload their minds to computers can't come up with a virus that could be uploaded from a PowerBook 5300.