Les armes à feu spéculatives 2

That number is, of course, read as "deux". Guns post. Not all of them are directly sci-fi related, actually, but they all concern things that inform SF gun-thinking.

• Remember my musing about whether the USMC cadre of the Peacekeepers, in my SF, would use a bullpup rifle or not? (Either way it was still going to be a Stoner-like design.) Well, apparently, the trigger-pull issue? Doesn't exist with electronic firing. I should've realized it wouldn't.
  
  So now I guess the Marine gun looks a bit like the Bushmaster M17S, albeit probably not so 1980s. (It's still a Stoner rifle, a modified form of the AR-16 that was the predecessor of the AR-18, and therefore also of the Howa 89式 the JSDF use. It probably would, like the AR-18, still be short-stroke rather than direct-impingement, though; direct-impingement adds heat, which you don't want in a caseless design. The electronic firing, removing the issues of trigger-pull, probably makes up for any loss of accuracy.)
• Apparently, one of the interesting things about the "AKs are so reliable, ARs are crap" folklore, is, when an AK gets something in its gas-system (which can include rust, with old Russian-made or less-old Arab-made ammo leaving corrosive residue), it ceases to shoot. (Supposedly the way to clear it is to kick the bolt carrier. Like, literally. Apparently you often needed a hammer, though.) Know what an AR does, when something goes wrong with its gas-system? It becomes bolt-action.
  
  Apparently, AKs also jam if they start to overheat—and in even moderately sustained fire, they do overheat, not least because the forward grip consists of wood wrapped around the barrel (Soviet training preferred to avoid sustained fire; the nations they handed AKs out to like Halloween candy, though...). Wood is an insulator; apparently it will even start to smolder before too long, leaving you with a lovely birch-smoked hand (yes, I looked up what wood is most common for AKs) and a remarkably expensive metal-and-wood club.
• It occurs to me, the khângây might use small coil vulcans (or I guess rotary coilguns?) as their equivalent of an assault rifle or LMG. Presumably semi-auto fire, given their technology, has sufficient time between shots for barrel-wear not to be an issue. And I figure three barrels, like the M197 or GAU-19, might make assault-rifle rates of fire feasible (and I think the rotation would be recoil-operated, so the battery doesn't have to run the rotor as well as the firing).
  
  I figure they'll have a casing over it, like what sticks out of the nose of an A-10 Thunderbolt. Does a small-arms rotary firearm sound far fetched? It is overplayed, generally without reference to the real requirements of a machinegun of that size (though then again people ignore the realities of fixed-barrel machineguns, too). But, before you go saying it'd never be done, you may want to talk to E. C. Neal.
• I realize that Attack on Titan (which is actually Titan(s) of the Charge, given what "shingeki" means) is at least partly horror, so its plot necessarily runs partly on the Idiot Ball, but nevertheless, there are much more effective means at their disposal for fighting the things than leaping around on cables and chopping them with giant box-cutters. These people have cannons, so why aren't they using chain-shot? That'd quite easily cut a Titan in half, and if you point it so the chain passes through the weak-spot in the neck, it'll kill it in one blow, without anyone being anywhere near its hands.
  
  Of course, along with the Idiot Plot nature of AoT's horror aspect, is the "I don't care if it makes no sense, it's cool" nature of the action aspect. There are more efficient means of taking on Titans than the "3D maneuver gear"/giant box-cutter combo. Realistically, all but the biggest Titans would be little match even for men on horseback; you just have a few horsemen, working as coordinated pairs or small teams, ensnare the Titans' ankles, and then drag them over a giant version of "severe tire-damage" traffic-spikes, cutting through their weak-spot and annihilating them. And, since the Titans are the whole reason they live the way they do, they would've built giant traffic-spikes, and other anti-Titan defenses, all around the Walls, and into (at least) parts of the city streets.
  
  In real life, no one method of fighting—and Titans are basically armor without guns—is an automatic win, armor needs infantry support and infantry needs artillery; air alone is close, but you still need a diverse air force (something the "let's give the A-10's job to the F-35" people apparently don't understand). Titans would actually be only a minor inconvenience, at least for anyone who has guns.
• I think I've mentioned that zled space-forces are a branch of their artillery? They also have more ordinary artillery; as I said, they don't have our distinction between tanks and other guns, because their "tanks" are just up-armored self-propelled batteries that also have close-range attack capabilities. (I think zledo call them simply "armored guns"; we called a light-tank design project the "Armored Gun System", rather than, y'know, "light tank design competition", and unlike us zledo never used "tank", "cistern", or "reservoir" as code-names for "caterpillar machine-gun destroyers"—and they don't have "caterpillars", either.)
  
  Their artillery presumably does distinguish degrees of armor, among its guns, but also things like direct versus indirect fire, ballistic versus propelled (as in once the projectile leave the gun), and guided versus unguided munitions. I also think there might be a distinction between "fast" guns, on treads or spherical wheels (I think the spherical wheels give approximately the same performance as treads, but with an increase of speed and maneuverability), and "slow" or "all-terrain" guns, which are basically "spider tanks", with four legs. Hey, I said my SF had bipedal mecha, I never said all the mecha were bipedal.
• I really ought to go back to the Peacekeeper rifles' round being comparable to the .30-06, although it's still in a 7 mm package (rather than 7.62). Assuming each round weighs 10 milligrams (quite doable in that caliber if .270 Winchester and .270 Weatherby Magnum are any indication), and a muzzle velocity of 850 m/s, we get a muzzle energy of 3612 Joules. That requires a propellant load of 3.564 grams of nitrocellulose. 3.564 grams nitrocellulose is the equivalent of 1.497 grams of octanitrocubane, which has a volume of 726.699 cubic millimeters. If the propellant has the same diameter as 6.8 Remington SPC's brass casing (10.7 mm), and if we treat the 7 millimeter by 31 millimeter bullet as a cylinder, then we get a length to the propellant cylinder of 21.35 millimeters. It sticks out 1.85 millimeters in back (uniform thickness all around) and goes 19.85 millimeters up the side of the bullet.
  
  Given this, I guess we need to rename the thing "7 × 21 mm", rather than "7 × 18 mm". If each empty 60-round casket mag weighs 192 grams, and each round now weighs 11.5 grams (give or take 3 milligrams), then each fully-loaded magazine now weighs 882 grams. Compare that to the weight of seven STANAG 30-round magazines—each (taking into account that the M855 lead-free cartridge is slightly heavier than the old M193) weighs 486.3 grams—we find that, for only 3.6% more weight (3528 g vs 3404 g), each Peacekeeper can carry 14.3% more ammo—240 rounds as opposed to 210. And he only has to reload four times, instead of seven.
• Given the caseless rounds are only 32.85 millimeters long, it might be feasible to have the magazines load in the top—like those on the P90. FN 5.7 × 28 is 40.5 millimeters long, and we know you can use its magazines on an assault rifle (leaving to one side those who consider the P90 an assault rifle rather than a PDW or SMG). People do—there's a modified upper receiver for AR-15s that re-chambers them for FN 5.7 and lets them use P90 magazines. It's called an AR-57, or AR Five-seven (or presumably "AR Five-seveN", to those who didn't find that gimmick annoying in the pistol).
  
  One advantage, I think, to having the magazine where the P90 puts it, is you can see what your ammo-level is like (assuming the clear magazines so popular with the P90), without having to change your position. Most other magazine designs, bullpup or otherwise, force you to take your weapon off your shoulder to see where the mag-level is at, even if the magazine has clear sides. (Sure, you should keep track of how much you've fired, but what if you're handed a new weapon, or have to take one off a corpse?) Probably in real life, definitely in games, there are ways to mechanically or electronically indicate how many rounds remain—that counter on the back of the assault rifle in Halo?—but nothing beats being able to look.
• On the other hand, the sights on the P90 are a bit inelegant and unwieldy, 'cause of having to make room for the magazine. Might keep the magazine where it is ("normal bullpup", in other words) after all; I do have an awful lot of references to "casket magazines" that would need to be rewritten. Maybe use the P90 approach for the khângây small-arms coil-vulcan, though? That or helical magazines. Maybe both, under different circumstances—the helical ones would presumably be preferable for sustained fire/LMG applications, since they'd have less risk of jamming since they wouldn't have to rotate the bullet before chambering it. Ooh, yeah, I like that. And have the magazine under the barrel, instead of on top (which removes the "weird sights" issue). That probably means the bottom barrel is the one that fires, rather than the top like on our Gatling guns.

We Call It Voight-Kampff for Short

Post about artificial intelligence and robots. You ought to know what the title's a reference to.

• Why is it that every 18th- and 19th-century novelty toy, playing music or writing letters or doing various other tasks, some of them "programmable" because there are multiple cartridges of mechanical "instructions" for them to follow, gets called "early computer"? It's a sewing machine or a player piano—are those "early computers"?
  
  We've been doing mechanical embroidery, with "programmed" patterns, since at least the 1870s; fundamentally none of these "early computers" is any different from the industrial loom—except the industrial loom drastically lowers the price of decent garments, the novelty toy does nothing and improves the life of nobody (well, no more than any other interesting novelty item improves people's lives—a form of "happiness" that a fiction-writer probably ought not to despise).
  
  You might call them "early robots" (since "robots" refers primarily to the industrial usage), but that's not what people do. Words mean things. Please don't use words that are not applicable, just because they are similar to other words that are.
• I feel like setting out some rules of engagement, for people who wish to defend the millennarian hopes of the Transhumanist faithful, when other people make remarks about the realities of neurology and the limits of machine logic, and their implications for Kurzweil's prophesied techno-Rapture. One, don't take your username from books (or God forbid, movies of books) by William Gibson; he knew about as much about computers as H. G. Wells knew about trans-lunar injection. Two, don't demonstrate that you don't actually know what "most complex" means—Microsoft Windows is, objectively, the most complex computer program the human race ever created, and your opinion of how good an OS it is is completely irrelevant. (That other OSes are "elegantly simple" by comparison is actually one of their selling points—the significance of "most complex" in this context is that Microsoft Windows, with all its many, many crashes, is still 3.2 million times smaller than the representation of a human brain as one-line-of-code-per-cell or synapse...and realistically we would probably need multiple lines of code to represent certain cells and synapses.)
  
  Three, don't demonstrate that you are too stupid to grasp what hardware emulation is, by asserting that the number of braincells and synapses is irrelevant—and three-point-five, do not act like actually researching relevant facts like those numbers, on something like this, makes someone a target for ridicule. (The reverse is the case: that you don't know the relevant facts, and have not even bothered trying to explain how your enterprise will cope with them, shows how intellectually bankrupt you are.) And finally, four, do not tell the other party they must've selected "Gödel Incompleteness" at random, as a basis for their case. If you don't even know that Gödel only came up with the idea while exploring the limits of machine logic—because Hilbert was trying to make a machine that could handle all of logic—then you are simply announcing that not only do you have no right to your opinion, you don't even know what would or would not constitute a right to an opinion, on this matter. I'm not saying you can't challenge the argument from neurology (you pretty much can't challenge the argument from the limits of machine logic, or at least nobody has yet—every attempt to refute Lucas-Penrose that I know of has mostly been a demonstration of illiteracy); but the fact of the matter is that you're not trying to challenge those arguments.
  
  (Yes, I am thinking of a particular person. But all of these errors are common occurrences, though the unnamed idiot in question was the first I'd ever seen with all of them.)
• It occurs to me that "civil registries" are a poor thing to base a robot's ethics programming on—over and above the silliness of the Three Laws. Realistically an AI would be able to recognize humans, among other things, with a dedicated "object-class detection" (AKA "object recognition") program, presumably one of the suite of "weak" AIs a strong AI (assuming you can get one) would be made up of.
  
  Likewise, one wouldn't define "harm" according to the ICD definition of "injury"; there are apparently ways now to make a robot mechanically detect when any motion would exceed "the human pain tolerance limit", so presumably a society that can make a natural-language interface you can meaningfully talk with, can give its AIs sufficient situational-analysis to know when an action would exceed one of several limits of human tolerance. "Safeguarding-space violation" or "safety-space violation" would apparently be the term for "harm" in a robotics context.
  
  Incidentally, robots that don't have Asimov programming (which, remember, AIs dislike) would still be programmed to behave in accordance with ISO 13482. Because we now have an industrial standard for those!
• It occurs to me that what you'd really want AI for, is to have one person, on-call 24-7, who can answer any concern anyone might bring to it, rather than getting "well when Bob was on duty he said..." situations. You'd still probably want to have a normal person in overall command, since you don't necessarily want something that can be hacked to have any legal authority, but there is, as you can see, a real market for them (unfortunately for hippies, that market is mostly the military).
  
  Incidentally, you could probably give the same job to a person who's had their need for sleep done away with. But whether that's actually possible, or advisable long-term, is an open question; sleep serves some necessary purpose, since organisms that only have half their brain asleep at a time still do sleep, which they wouldn't if they could've done without it. We don't actually know what sleep is for, or what doing away with it would cause.
  
  There's also the question of whether it's remotely ethical to ask anyone to have their brain screwed with like that, a question that doesn't come up with an AI (though there are questions about whether you ought to create a person just to do a specific task), but apparently most people don't think there's anything wrong with restricting key posts to eunuchs? (Many eunuchs, historically, were volunteers, so "consent makes everything okay" is not valid—not that it ever is.)
• As is my custom when writing one of these posts, I read manga about robots in my other browser tabs. There's a neat little one called "Ninomae Shii no Tsukaikata" or "How to Use Ninomae Shii", that sadly only lasted 30 chapters (the reader-questionnaires are a harsh mistress). It's about a robot made by a middle-school Nobel Prize winner, searching for his purpose.
  
  But...the purpose of a strong-AI, aside from any jobs it might happen to perform, would be the same as the purpose of any other self-aware entity. Self-aware entities have, as their purpose, the fact they exist, and the contemplation and appreciation of that fact. (The Baltimore Catechism phrases it more succinctly, in the famous answer to question 126.)
• There is apparently some idea abroad in the land that "android" means bio-engineered, while a robot shaped like a man is called a "humanoid". Only, Common Usage, mammajamma: "android" means "robot shaped like a man" ("gynoid" is sometimes used for "robot shaped like a woman", but usually that's just called "female android"), while the bio-engineered things are called "bioroids". "Humanoid", meanwhile, means anything shaped like a human, living or not (an "android" is a humanoid robot). (Sometimes, in settings where such a distinction makes sense—all of them space-opera—"humanoid" is restricted to Rubber Forehead Aliens, and the other, more vaguely man-shaped, guys are called "bipeds" or something.)
• I was wondering how to write androids getting freaked out (remember, I have strong-AIs due to a highly unorthodox software workaround). At first I thought they wouldn't get chills, because while some of them do have body hair (the one whose job is infiltrations does), they didn't evolve from animals that sometimes survived by puffing up their fur to look bigger.
  
  It occurred to me that they might involuntarily switch to a different power-generation mode, one more active than just homeostasis, as their "subconscious" (the multiple weak-AI programs that govern their bodies, semi-independently of the strong-AI that is their consciousness) gears up for fight-or-flight. But then someone, talking about Transformers, said "chillingly" still makes sense in the context of the Cybertronian "biosphere", because their cooling-systems shift into high-gear to dump the excess heat caused by exertion.
  
  So...androids get chills. Briefly; unlike humans, it's much simpler for them to control involuntary responses like that. Incidentally, the strong-AI programs themselves are, in part, made of a gestalt of multiple weak-AIs, just like the "unconscious" programs that govern the bodies they're in—a couple of weak-AIs handle language, a couple more handle object-recognition, and so on. There's even programs for making decisions and for "discursive thought", but none of them is really the AI program, anymore than "you" is your language-capability or decision-making or even discursive thought.
• Likewise, my strong-AI androids can dream (make your own "electric sheep" joke). Why? Well, they periodically enter a de-frag mode, in which they can't otherwise be conscious, but, since their AI-consciousness doesn't simply cease to exist, they have experiences made up of random portions of their memories—which is basically what dreams are. They experience fragmentation because most fragmentation-preempting techniques can cause performance problems. Not a big deal for a PC; kinda one, for a person's mind.
  
  The non-android AIs don't have that problem (see above: they're awake 24/7). They have enough processing capability (since they don't have the space-constraints an android does) that they can either preempt fragmentation, or else defrag "in the back of their mind". That might be kinda like those animals that only sleep with half their brain at a time. I think it adds a touch of realism, that cramming an AI into what processing-capacity fits inside a head comes with some loss of capability.

Distortion Levels So Low as to Make a Brave Man Weep

It occurred to me, you can actually transmit optical hi-fi analog. How? Easy—if you're, say, scanning a near-UV nano-scale optical storage medium, you just have what the near-UV laser gets as input, be output again, say as a 532-nanometer laser (since that wavelength experiences little degradation, even across interstellar distances). That, you can then watch on something that receives those signals, or record back to other media. It's still very unwieldy compared to digital streaming, but it's also superior to digital. Interestingly, it works a lot like VHS did, back in the day, but HiFi.

Lives, Fortunes, Sacred Honor

Oh like you can come up with a better title for a post about alien biology, speculative material culture, and military science fiction.

517 is 11×47, the sum of five consecutive primes (97+101+103+107+109), and a Smith number, which is where the sum of its digits (in decimal) is equal to the sum of its prime factorization's digits (5+1+7=13, 1+1+4+7=13).

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

Mélange II

I want to say "He who controls the random thoughts controls the universe", but if they're controlled, they're not really random.

• Here, Damien G. Walter, welfare leech pretending to be a writer (no seriously, the UK government gave him a grant to write a novel—and elsewhere on that blog, he attacks the idea of writing as a business, i.e. as a legitimate trade), complains that superhero teams are never more than 1/4 female. The implication—couched as it is in terms of "women are half the population"—is that this is unrealistic.
  
  But...police forces are 12.7% female (in terms of officers with arrest powers—a higher percentage of their total employees are female). That's 1/8. The active-duty military is 14.2% female. That's about 1/7. So actually, what's "unrealistic" is that superhero teams have too many women, not too few—out of every 200 characters in both big houses' rosters (that's probably close to the number of characters actually showing up in comics at any given time), only twenty-seven should be female!
  
  Alternatively, if we assume that superpowers cause twice as many women to enter that kind of work, then comic books are right where they should be.
• It occurs to me that an idea many people have about Japanese philosophy may be due to a mistranslation. I noticed this watching...I think Gurren Lagann?...where something like "sore wa ore no shinjitsu" was translated as "that's my truth". But...that's not what it means. Japanese has to say things like "shinjitsu", literally "belief-truth" or "belief-fact", for the very simple reason that they don't have relative constructions—"shinjitsu" means "what I believe". If one prefers a more literal translation (which in this case also captures some of the word's broader connotations), go with "credo".
• It has been remarked that Arcee, in Transformers Prime, is too damn big for her vehicle mode. It's simplest with a visual aid.
  
  See? One of her calves, maybe, being generous, one of her legs, fits inside that bike. The rest of her? Hell no.
  
  So I crunched some numbers. We can actually assume that a Cybertronian is only as dense as a human, rather than as dense as automotive alloy, since they have a lot of empty space inside for their parts to move through when they switch modes. But supposing we take a very big bike, like say a Yamaha XV1900A, the biggest bike Yamaha makes. It weighs 329 kilograms. Now, assuming that Arcee is proportioned like an average woman (which my back-of-the-envelope calculations say is, globally speaking, 160 centimeters and 56.4 kilos), we get an Arcee who stands 288 centimeters—i.e. 9 feet 5 inches, instead of probably almost 20! You want her bigger, guys, well, make her a damn car like she's always been.
  
  Incidentally, while we're on the subject, the helicopter Airachnid is obviously based on, the RAH-66 Comanche (which didn't get picked up), weighs 4,218 kilos. That means she should be 2.34 times as tall as Arcee.
• Of course, along with Arcee being too big for her vehicle mode, Starscream is too small, both in G-1 (which doesn't give a tinker's damn about scale) and in Prime (which sort of does, a little). Starscream's alt mode in Prime is an F-16 Fighting Falcon (with the VIN numbers melted off); it's 700 kilos lighter than his G-1 F-15 Eagle alt-mode. But that still means he weighs 12 megagrams. Knockout, for example, is basically an Aston Martin DB9, with a curb weight of about 1750 kilos; taking the cube root of their mass difference, Starscream should be 9.6 meters tall, 89% taller than Knockout, not "about a head" taller.
  
  Knockout and Bumblebee are also probably too big; the mass ratio of an Aston Martin or a new Camaro to a human gives a height of 5 meters; they're both more like 8. Optimus, too, is sized weird—given that a Peterbilt 379 masses about 8,200 kilos (depending on engine and a couple other variables), he ought to be 70% taller than a car-bot—8.45 meters—but that's 12% shorter than Starscream. Megatron probably can't be the same size as Optimus, because he has to be bigger than Starscream. Maybe give him a Hind attack helicopter vehicle mode, half again as heavy as Starscream? That'd make him 16% taller than his Air Commander (31.7% taller than Optimus), at 11.1 meters.
• Are we married to Optimus being a Peterbilt? 'Cause as a Mack Titan, he could go up to 48 megagrams, which lets him be the same size as a Megatron that turns into a JGSDF Type 10 main battle tank (both of them would be 15.2 meters tall, 58.7% taller than Starscream and triple the height of car-bots). While we're at it, Jetfire ought to be 13.1 meters, 37% taller than Starscream, assuming that Jetfire is an SR-71 Blackbird—which is the one aspect of Michael Bay's Jetfire that isn't blasphemy. Then again, given Jetfire carries other Autobots and is associated with space, the An-225 Mriya (biggest plane ever flown) might be a better choice—that makes him 27.6 meters tall, fully 2.87 times as tall as Starscream and 1.81 times as tall as a Mack Titan Optimus or Type 10 MBT Megatron. (An F-22 Raptor Starscream would be 11.3 m tall, 2.24 times as tall as Knockout or Bumblebee, and only 26% shorter than MBT Megatron and Mack Titan Optimus. An An-225 Mriya Jetfire would be 2.43 times his height, while an SR-71 Blackbird Jetfire would only be 16% taller than him.)
• To compute the necessary mass for a comfortable little spaceship, suppose we look at passenger trains? An Amtrak Superliner car weighs 67,132 kilos. Obviously we can knock off the weight of the bogies (the wheels); I can't find numbers for this specific type of car's wheels but the numbers I can find on British cars say about 6.8 megagrams each (and there's two per car, one at each end), so that brings the weight down to 53,732 kilos. Treating the whole thing as made of (low-alloy high-strength) stainless steel, but substituting aerospace aluminum alloy for that steel (because a spacefaring civilization could probably reduce all the other associated weights of furniture, etc., by a similar proportion), we wind up with a mass of 18,875 kilos. Knocking off half of that gives us a "train" with only five bedrooms (only the upper sleeper floor) and a dining capacity of eight tables and a small kitchen (also only the upper diner floor) that masses only 9,437.5 megagrams. That could be taken to Low Earth Orbit by a Delta Clipper-like SSTO ship—which might there rendezvous with a starship equipped with a big engine and a space-fold drive.^note
• I wonder if the way English's appositional phrases and relative constructions work, is related to the fact that older Indo-European languages were much more "right-branching" than English is today. Indo-European languages used to put adjectives after nouns, the way English still puts adverbs after verbs (of course, most of the Romance languages and Celtic languages still usually put adjectives after nouns, as do Slavic ones when the adjectives are genitive noun-derivations; and all the Scandinavian languages, and Romanian, use a suffix for the definite article). Putting anything but numbers and prepositions before nouns is an innovative structure, in Indo-European, and most things still actually work the other way.
  
  Japanese, on the other hand, puts its appositives and relative clauses (to the extent it's got the latter, which it's often said not to) before the thing they modify—because Japanese has never put adjectives, or anything else that modifies a noun except postpositions and case-particles, after the nouns they modify, unlike Indo-European languages. It also marks them with a genitive, instead of a relative pronoun, hence why they're described as not having "relative" constructions. (Tibetan forms its "relative clauses"—which are sometimes referred to as such by grammarians of Tibetan—the same way as Japanese, by marking a whole phrase with a genitive particle; it's not "the man that saw the bear" but "the man of having seen the bear".)
• Has anyone noticed that the elephant in the room, in every discussion of "mind uploading", is that—leaving to one side the issues of the Lucas-Penrose Argument and what it says about the limits of machine logic—any device you can upload your mind to, would have to constantly emulate your original hardware? And seriously, know what the biggest difficulty in any emulation is? "When the exact behavior of the system to be emulated is not documented and has to be deduced through reverse engineering." That's from the Wikipedia article on emulation. It goes on to say, "if the emulator does not perform as quickly as the original hardware, the emulated software may run much more slowly than it would have on the original hardware, possibly triggering time interrupts that alter performance". Do you want those to happen to your mind?
  
  The whole dream of mind-uploading is about transcending the limits of your flesh (because, again, Transhumanism's just a new flavor of the same age-old Gnostic angelist millennarianism). But the human brain carries out trillions of operations every second; the rate of neuronal firing is estimated by neuroscientist Astra Bryant to be in the range "86 billion to 17.2 trillion" (gee, our knowledge of the brain's operation is so precise, mind-uploading can't be far off now!), while the rate of synaptic firing is in the range "100 trillion to 20 quadrillion" (for those playing along at home, that's a range 19.9 quadrillion wide). Pretending that one neuron or synapse firing is comparable to a single floating-point operation of a microprocessor (and it isn't), we're talking about 10.058643 petaFLOPS, which is pretty much at the limit of our technological capability. On average. The maximum—and remember, these are ball-park figures, the brain probably goes significantly higher when it has to, remember how many synapses there are, and the fact we haven't even gotten into glial cells—is 20.0172 petaflops, which is more than all but exactly one supercomputer, ever built, is capable of.
  
  And oh, by the way, that's just "floating point operations". It is, again, probably more realistic to map every cell and synapse as a single line of code—and there can be thousands, occasionally millions, of floating point operations in a single line of code. The very cutting edge of our technology is just barely adequate to the absolute most minimalistic representation of our brains; it falls stupefyingly short of more realistic modeling.

Space Core II

I wanted to call this "Space Is the Place", but then I found out it's a racial-supremacist blaxploitation flick. (Seriously, read that summary, and imagine "black" and "white" switched. You familiar with the white-supremacist strain in 1970s "UFO religions"? It's not any different.)

Stuff about space. This is post 515, which is 103 × 5.

• I redid that thought experiment about a fusion-rocket Blackbird—I was able to find more specific information about its mass-ratio. It turns out, an SR-71 Blackbird weighs 60,000 pounds without fuel, and its fuel weighs 84,180 pounds. That means it has a mass ratio of 2.364. If you built a magnetic-confinement fusion ship with that mass ratio, it'd get you up to 1.17% of the speed of light (assuming you like to stop at the end). And if your rocket engine is the same size as the Blackbird's (9 times as massive as the minimum size for an MC fusion engine), you get 168,750 newtons thrust. Unfortunately that can only accelerate a fully-loaded Blackbird at 5.35 m/s², which comes to .545 g's.
• Two other changes occasioned by my spin-gravity research. First, I think I might make the human "space fighters" (which are really parasite missile-ships launched from a mother ship) more like Orion-type ships, rather than the long skinny dragonfly-shaped design of most human ships. They'll probably replace the "big steel wall" pusher-plate with a magnetic field, though, proton-chain fusion involves a hell of a lot more energy than a hydrogen bomb. This lets them be a lot smaller than even the smallest Orion ship, since a major portion of the mass of those is the pusher-plate.
  
  Second, I'll need to figure out how to describe the distortions created, in the topology-sensors the zledo use, by artificial-gravity inertial protection (they bleed the force of accelerations into the surrounding space-time). I think, if they accelerate at 8 gs, their ship, or part of it, would seem to stretch eight-fold in the opposite direction. It occurs to me whenever I posit a technology like this, to worry about the environmental impacts—but there's plenty of asteroids thousands of times bigger than any ship, and the gravitational perturbations they cause are infinitesimal.
• One of the articles I read about cats in free-fall had numberless comments (I think because it was a British site—maybe even a Daily Mail article?) about how "cruel" that was, and how if you want to study the effects of free-fall, you should study it on humans (yes, they ignored the fact there were humans free-falling right there with the cats—it was on the Vomit Comet, they didn't just turn the gravity off for the cats without becoming weightless themselves). But the point of studying free-fall's effects on cats is, humans do not have that kind of righting instinct. Cats do. You can no more use humans to study how that righting reflex works in free-fall than you can use them to study tails or retractable claws.
  
  Come to think of it, it was definitely a Daily Mail article; one of the other commenters was some idiot identifying the blatant, obvious, familiar-to-anyone-who's-seen-I Dream of Jeannie 1960s USAF uniforms as Soviet Army uniforms, and saying that this "inaccuracy" showed the Mail was making the whole story up. But, uh, mate? Aside from how, whoever did the film, there's free-falling cats clearly shown, 1960s Soviet uniforms were olive drab (Army) or black (Navy), not blue, and outside the Navy they had Sam Browne belts, with the shoulder strap, up till at least the Afghan war. They also had "peaked" hats (as your distorted, decadent dialect calls 'em, for no reason—a "peaked" hat would be pointed, if you mean "beaked" maybe you should say it), known in the civilized world as combination caps. The guys in the video in question were wearing "side caps", AKA garrison caps, AKA "flight caps", because they were freaking USAF officers. It's practically impossible to get the two confused, without actual effort.
• Been looking into SSTO vehicles. When I switched it so none of my ships landed, I decided the Japanese guy's ship used an SSTO entry-vehicle as its habitat section—which, I find, is something that ought to be known as the "Kankômaru" type. The dimensions of mine are a bit different—it's smaller, and has several actual cabins, rather than an airline-type "theater seating" setup—but the principle is the same. I find the same thing was proposed by Chrysler in 1971, as the SERV ("Single-stage Earth-orbital Reusable Vehicle", which says "SSEORV" to me but whatever). The SERV was actually put forward as an alternate to the Space Shuttle. And not picked. Somehow.
  
  There's also the SASSTO ("Saturn Application Single-Stage to Orbit"), by Douglas, from NINETEEN SIXTY-SIX—it was claimed to be derived from Saturn rockets but basically the only way that's true is it could launch from the same facilities. From the same company, a quarter century later, we get the Delta Clipper, which in its final form as the DC-Y DC-I was supposed to be commercial spaceflight like grownups would have, with spaceports throughout the country and flights regulated by the FAA. Not to be, sadly.
• SSTO ships are interesting, because they are ships with extremely high mass ratios and yet they accelerate at very high rates. The DC-I DC-Y (an intermediate form of Delta Clipper, from the study) would accelerate at 11.34 m/s², with a mass ratio of 13.05; a SASSTO would accelerate at 12.59 m/s², with a mass ratio of 14.68; the SERV has 12.64 m/s² and a mass ratio of 9. These are ships that land, too; you could almost certainly push the mass ratio even higher in vacuum. So, why, exactly, are we always being told to keep our mass ratios under 5 or 6 or so? Significantly higher ones can be sustained. Of course, there may be other reasons not to use that kind of mass ratio. I don't use it in my books (I go with the "under 5 or 6 or so" one) because the speeds my ships need, due to the time-frames involved, require proton-chain fusion rockets. And with a proton-chain fusion rocket, even a SERV's mass ratio of 9 gives you a cruising speed of 10.99% c! Sure, that gets you where you're going faster—but you have to circle the block a couple times to slow down.
  
  A back of the envelope calculation suggests the SERV's 12 toroidal aerospike engines probably massed 1400 kilos each, while each of its 28 turbojets could've massed a mere 320 kilos. That means that of its 226,757 and 1/3 kilo (dry) mass, 25,760 kilos is engine; if we assume a proton chain fusion rocket has performance on par with an Orion rocket, in terms of acceleration ("1 meganewton per megagram" optimum), then, even with the same mass of engine as a SERV, the ship would take over 30 days to get up to speed or drop down from it, and it also needs 574.87 AUs to do it. In other words, if the ship is at the mean orbital distance of Pluto? It has to circle the Solar System two and a third times to slow down. (At the current mass ratio, an engine like the SERV's—but twice as big, because that's the mass-ratio I use, 9/2 instead of 9—would only need 10.34 days to accelerate, but it'd still also need to circle the sun once partway between Uranus and Neptune's orbits, to accelerate to or from typical orbital speed for an Earth-sized planet.)
  
  See? Acceleration vs. delta-v is an essentially unsolvable conflict in spaceship engines. Whatever time you save increasing your Δ_v, you might well lose it back in the time it takes your engine to accelerate to that speed. Obviously, this doesn't matter for long-haul interstellar flights taking decades or centuries, where days, weeks, months or even years of acceleration make up a small component of the total time—but when your setting includes FTL it feels very inelegant for starting and stopping to be the longest part of any space-journey.
• There is an idea in speculations about space-colonization, called the "Three Generation Rule", namely that the kind of discipline necessary to maintain a space habitat for longer than three generations, is beyond the grasp of "normal" human cultures. But...nobody Western or Westernized has a normal human culture. For the last nineteen and a half centuries or so, you've been involved in a mystical movement that tells you it's okay to relax, you can just worry about what you can fix, nobody blames you if you didn't mean to—your apologies actually mean something—and similar purely religious propositions. (Large portions of Asia have had this too, to a lesser degree but half a millennium longer.)
  
  Honestly, get off the reservations built for you by Christ and Buddha; at least look at the world through the eyes of an Orthodox Jew or a conservative Hindu. Better, go find some Neolithic subsistence-agriculturalist who lives in abject terror of saying or doing the wrong thing, intentionally or not, and ruining his luck. The Navajo are a good choice, there's a quarter million of 'em and their purity-code's been extensively studied. Traditionally, they will not build with driftwood or look at corpses or let dogs in their houses during storms or be in the same room as snakes or speak of the dead or dance with someone who has the same surname as any of their grandparents or play "cat's cradle" outside of winter; they live in one of two kinds of shelters, which they switch between at set points during the year, and they build them according to a strict geomantic formula and with every component strictly determined by ritual laws. That about the kind of discipline necessary to maintain a space-habitat? Well good news, everybody, that is "normal", historically and, even now, statistically, for the human race. Maybe that mindset can't build rockets—but they can definitely crew and maintain 'em, better than your precious "freedom-loving" Belters ever could.
  
  Alternatively, the fact that you need to adopt a Neolithic purity-code mindset to safely maintain a space-habitat, might be an excellent justification to have future space-colonies, in defiance of Tsiolkovsky, Heppenheimer, O'Neill, Niven, and all the rest, living primarily on planets, rather than in artificial habitats. Because no sane person, having been freed from the purity-code, voluntarily goes back to it—it's just too much damn trouble. That's why "neo-pagans" have about as much in common with historical paganism as William Stukely.
• The "4% a year" number, considered to be the likely rate of increase of the population of space, is also the average of the growth of Australia's non-aboriginal population since 1787. It's harder to track the population of the Americas, since the English colonies didn't have extensive censusing and there's no legitimate reason to restrict the French or Spanish ones to non-aboriginals—but it's practically impossible to track all the Indians' populations (plus, you get negative growth, thanks to epidemics). The peculiar character of Australia's colonial history makes it a more convenient model of space-colonization, in quite a lot of ways—not only are the numbers easier to find but the actual setup of the Australian colony was more like what you'd see in space, than any of the New World colonizations (or Africa, for that matter).
• I have a feeling that, given the average hydrogen atom in a star survives for millions of years before ever undergoing fusion, the proton-chain fusion rockets in my books are probably actually catalyzed by the CNO cycle, as Bussard recommended for his eponymous ramjets. Only my rocket engines do not simply slam the stuff they're fusing into a funnel at relativistic speed, they compress it with a combination of magnetic fields and an application of the direct topological gravity-control. I think, thus, that the full name of the system would be "CNO-catalyzed topological confinement proton chain fusion". I think they just call it "proton-chain fusion" rather than, say, CCTCPCF, or (with some liberal sprinkling of hyphens and a broad interpretation of "hyphenation makes it one word instead of two") CTPF.

The Spin Stops Here

Because I'm not going with rotational gravity after all. (And because Bill O'Reilly's lawyers need some exercise.)

In the paper I got the idea of metric-patching from, objects inside a ship with a metric-patching engine are described as accelerating with it, "in a weightless state of free fall", which presumably means that they retain their ordinary inertia relative to the ship's frame (basically, the ship has become the sole "geodesic" reference frame with any meaning directly relevant to its occupants). It might be possible to induce a topology, within the spherical frame of the ship, that causes directional acceleration for the occupants—true artificial gravity—even while the metric-patching is active. Presumably it uses a very different topology than a non-metric patching ship's artificial gravity; it'd probably also not be a function of the metric-patching, but an independently created effect.

Still, the speculation was useful, in that it got me thinking about zled ships' layout and dimensions. It made me figure out how much volume it takes to hold a given collection of missiles and parasite craft...and large predators. Eventually I get a ship with a diameter of 61.49 meters, which sounds tiny till you crunch the numbers and notice that means a volume of 121,723.57 m³. It masses about 8,100 megagrams. Its parasite-craft are 7.12 meters in diameter, while its entry vehicles are 8.21. I get the volume numbers and masses by comparing the mass and volume (usually fudged a bit) of real-world craft, compared to the volume of my ships; I'm keeping some of 'em close to the chest but I will say the entry vehicle is approximately the volume of Virgin Galactic's "Spaceship Two"—since it's an 8-seater space-plane.

De Romanicorum Theoriarum VII

Thoughts on speculative fiction. Mostly science fiction but there's a couple about fantasy.

513 is 3³ × 19, which makes it a Harshad number in base-10 (numbers divisible by the sum of their digits; 5+1+3=9).

• You know the super-robot anime trope of the person that stands in the giant robot's hand? Well, I did some computing of the minimum size for a palm to support a person. Minimum standing area for a person is .6 meters, or 6.46 square feet, or a square 77.46 centimeters or 30.5 inches on a side. The area of the human palm is .5% of the surface area of the body, and the average surface area of a male human body is 1.9 square meters, or 20.45 square feet. .05% of that is 95 square centimeters (.0095 square meters), or 14.73 square inches (which is also .1023 square feet). Dividing 20.45 by .1023 (the area ratio of "standing space" to "palm area"), we get 24.85—so a figure with palms large enough to stand on must have 24.85 times the area of a human body. Area varies as the square of single dimensions, so the minimum size for a giant robot to have someone stand on its palms (the square root of 24.85=)4.985 times the height of an average human male. The average human male (globally) is 68 inches or 172.7 centimeters tall, and 4.985 times that is 28 feet, 3 inches, or 8.61 meters. Assuming the approximate density of automotive magnesium alloy, which again makes an average man mass 119 kilograms instead of 70, the robot will mass 14,746.18 kg, or 16 short tons, 509.8 lbs.
• I know I've mentioned that the "thieves' guilds" and "mages' guilds" in a lot of fantasy RPGs, aren't really guilds. The mages' ones at least do have apprenticeships, which most thieves don't, but prospective members don't need to submit a masterwork to get in and they very rarely offer insurance.
  
  It's worse in computer RPGs, where the "guild" is the thing through which professionals are hired (guilds didn't do that—again, you don't contact the ADA when you're looking for a dentist) and they seldom even organize around a particular craft. That's no kind of a guild. (They're also not anything like an "order"—the "Order of the Stick" is not a vowed lay or monastic brotherhood, military or otherwise, therefore it should be called something else.) No, what the adventurer-group in a computer RPG is, and what many little bands of adventurers in the tabletop games often are, is basically similar to the mercenary companies of the late Medieval period and after, albeit with more sua sponte work and in more fields than the purely military.
  
  I personally hate the convention of actually referring to the adventurers, in-world, as "adventurers". "Adventurer" is a word with very bad connotations—it's something along the lines of "bounder". Plus, nobody actually doing the things would regard them as "adventures". "Explorer" is probably closer, given what they do (and their dungeon-delvings, thus, are "explorations"); if one wanted to highlight the similarities to mercenary companies, I suggest something like "contractors", or some synonym (the actual literal meaning of "condottiero" is "one who conducts [war]", much like calling a mortician an "undertaker [of embalming]").
• Of course, I realize as I write that, the underlying objection is that I don't like RPGs that feel like games ("I don't want dreams where it feels like I'm dreaming"). So, for instance, I dislike most recent fantasy anime and manga, since the characters all but talk about literally leveling up and having hit points. Fairy Tail, and the many series that are obviously knockoffs of Fairy Tail, would be the prime offender there (meanwhile, Lodoss War doesn't do it, despite having originally been an actual transcribed D&D campaign).
  
  This, along with their PC bullshit and chronological blackface minstrelsy, is why I can't get behind Pathfinder (well, that, and I prefer 3.0E to 3.5E...and also their new classes fix what wasn't broken, if your DM is remotely competent). The "Pathfinder Society" of the core setting is a loathsome anachronism on par with light novels inserting the godforsaken Japanese school system into everything, even post-apocalyptic anarchies and trans-human societies that live on Dyson spheres. (It's also a transparent knockoff of the Traveller's Aid Society, except that that has a right to exist, in a science fiction setting.)
• Might give the khângây handheld coilguns, after all, instead of electrothermal-chemical. Coilguns (or Gauss guns) don't have the issues railguns do, namely needing a hugely long barrel. A quick survey of the web with my peerless Google-fu reveals an approximate equivalency between total muzzle energy and the power requirements of the coilgun, so it doesn't need weird little slivers at hyper-velocity, it can just use regular bullets and normal muzzle energies. Actually think I'll call theirs "quench guns", which is the term for superconducting coilguns (even though the khângây model probably uses "hot" superconductors, they're usually still pretty cold—"hot" is relative to "below 30 Kelvin", which is what metal superconductors need).
  
  Still torn as to whether I ought to call the ones the humans use—that rotate between barrels to save wear on the components?—"coil vulcans" or "Gauss vulcans". The former seems more technical; the latter has more of a science-fictional pedigree. Then again, avoiding the science-fictional term and saying something else (not "holograms", "volumetric displays"; not "cyborg limbs", "prosthetic enhancements") is how I roll—because you want people to look at the thing, not their memory of tropes about the thing—so I guess "coil vulcans" it is. Then again "vulcan" is itself a science-fictional term, for what would probably be more correctly called a "Gatling autocannon" or "minigun" (depending on caliber)—but it's primarily used in Japanese science fiction, so my English-language audience wouldn't have too many tropes associated with it.
• In light of the extreme energies possible by putting explosives in one's rounds, I'm upgrading zled high-end powered armor (as used by their regular military rather than civilian emergency levies) to STANAG 4569 Level 4—it had been 3, I compared it to a Russian VPK-3927 Volk (pronounced as it's spelled, not with an F—it's the Slavic word for "wolf"), which is basically a hardened Humvee. But now I'm upgrading their armor to the level of a Matador MRAP. Of course, since the armor is "adaptive" rather than using static mechanical qualities (otherwise it would be either really dense or too bulky to move in), a whole lot of energy packed into half a millisecond and a circle the same diameter as a pin's head—a laser—can punch through too fast for the structure to "adapt". I think several of the humans' armor-piercing explosive rounds, in rapid succession, can also dish out more energy than the armor can cope with, but for one-hit kills humans still need anti-tank grenades.
• Speaking of STANAG 4569, I can't believe I've neglected to mention (although I've made oblique references) that a major form of "K-Mart Realism" in my SF is that things are referred to by their ISO designation, if they have one. Prolog, the computer language, is ISO 13211; Unicode, the character-encoding standard, is ISO 10646. There doesn't seem to be an ISO standard for vehicle armor, but personal armor is ISO 14876; I imagine that the ISO of the 24th century will have a vehicle-armor standard, but I'm not gonna say what its number is. Those numbers aren't random, but their system is crazy hard to figure out. It's entirely likely it'd incorporate a (technologically updated) version of STANAG 4569, a lot of ISO standards are just various American or European standards given a new name.
  
  This is a thing I prefer to do: when there's already a real thing for it, go with the real thing. The UN's space agency in my books is the Office for Outer Space Affairs, because that's what the UN's space agency is called. The UN's military are the Peacekeepers, because that's what the UN's military is called (it doesn't quite work the same way as now, of course—national armies are more like the "national cadres" in the Soviet Army). The UN's court is the International Court of Justice, and its police are the UNPOL (yeah, they just call 'em "UN Police"—look at it this way, they didn't waste time coming up with a name on the world's taxpayers' dime).
• Decided to change most of the Chinese in my books to Mandarin, although I still like the sound of Cantonese better. I discovered something while I was doing it: Mandarin has no lateral/post-alveolar consonants (the "sh" in English). It has palatal ones (the "sh" from Japanese), and retroflex ones (the "sz" in Polish, or like the ř in Dvořák—actually the "r" in many dialects of English, including the main American and Canadian ones, is a retroflex approximant, which is weird for a Western European language), but no laterals. Cantonese has them, including the approximant (the "ll" in Welsh) in the Taishan dialect, but no retroflex ones. (Is my preference for Cantonese's sounds in part because I can pronounce them? Your guess is as good as mine.)
  
  I took another look at Mandarin's sounds because I was thinking "it has no phonemic voicing—b, d, and g are actually pronounced as p, t, and k, which in turn are used to write the aspirated versions of themselves—so what are j, z, and zh?" The answer is "the 'ch' in Japanese, 'ts', and 'the unvoiced retroflex affricate' (basically t + the sound of Polish 'sz')", respectively. C, in case you wondered, is "aspirated 'ts'", sh is "the sound of Polish 'sz'", ch is "aspirated unvoiced retroflex affricate", q is "aspirated 'ch' from Japanese", and x is "the 'sh' from Japanese". Pinyin Romanization felt itself free to use unorthodox interpretations of the Roman alphabet, repurposing redundant letters much as the ancient Greeks turned Phoenician consonants Greek didn't have into the first vowels in any alphabet, ever.
• Turns out, I was wrong. Cats adapt fast to free-fall conditions. I don't know why I didn't search "cats zero-g" before. But apparently, after a brief time when they have no idea what to do, they, like mice and squirrels, just behave normally. Maybe having a much more finely-tuned balance system means they can learn to adapt to free-fall more quickly.
  
  This means zled ships can use rotation gravity—which is good, because realistically you probably can't have topology artificial-gravity inside the metric-patching field. The minimum diameter to produce 1.08 Gs (1 G if you're a zled) is 241.449997 meters (yes, I calculated it to the micron), which means the smallest zled ship would be, essentially, a Bernal sphere. The O'Neill Island One has, after all, a radius of 250 m. If we want all of it to have basically the same gravity, limiting ourselves to a rotating band 20 degrees wide, centered on a great circle of the sphere, seems reasonable. On the minimum-diameter sphere, it has a surface-area of 114,650 square meters—which is 28.3 acres, or a bit over a quarter the area of Vatican City.
  
  The real trouble with rotation gravity is figuring out how to synch up non-spinning things that dock with the ship with the spin of the spinning part. My calculations say I can probably do it with an elevator as long as the radius of the ship, accelerating all along its length at almost exactly half a zled gravity, but I wonder if I'm not missing something. The rotation even of the big one (909 m in diameter) is still 69.3808 meters per second, which is 249.771 kilometers per hour (or 155.2 miles). Then again the Earth's surface is moving a lot faster than that (depending on your latitude—at the equator, 1/1440 rpm translates to a tangential velocity of 463.8 m/s, 1,669.76 kph, or 1037.54 mph), so maybe it's not a problem? Maybe it can be compared to aerial refueling, and that routinely happens at 315 knots (which is 583.38 kph or 362.5 mph).
• Speaking of the speed the Earth rotates, the tangential velocity varies by latitude. The circumference of a circle that passes through, say, 28°31′26.61″N, 80°39′3.06″W, is approximately 35,237.49 kilometers (the circle of the equator is 40,075), meaning that its tangential velocity is 407.84 m/s, 1,468.23 kph, or 912.32 mph. That's why space-launches are always toward the east—it takes 408 m/s off the speed the rocket has to accelerate to by its own power. Escape velocity for the Earth is 11,200 m/s, so launching eastward grants a 3.6% savings. That's nothing to sneeze at in rocketry.

Survival Strategy

Or in Japanese, "Seizon Senryaku!"

Seizon Senryaku from Etienne Goguen on Vimeo.

It seemed an appropriate title for a combination exobiology and military SF post. "Listen up, you lowlifes who will never amount to anything!"

Incidentally, the kanji for "seizon senryaku" are 生存戦略. It's quite literally "survival" and "strategy", I'm guessing it's a deliberate calque.

• Been thinking, if I double the energy output of zled lasers and increase their aperture to 3 centimeters instead of 2 (or close to—they don't make things in nice round numbers of our units, because they're freaking aliens), I apparently double the effective range(s, given that laser effectiveness varies by target material). It would just require twice as much spring (maybe in two separate coils?), with a total mass of 512 grams. That's comparable energy to 7.62 NATO, and 16 rounds of that weighs 408 grams.
  
  And you simply can't use 7.62 NATO in a pistol; not and get anything like proper twist out of your rifling. And the kick would be most unpleasant, in a firearm-pistol as opposed to a laser one, given 3200 Joules is on par with the most powerful magnum revolver rounds, the ones used primarily for hunting, and only found in a self-defense role in bear country. Appropriate, given zled cops have to deal with people the size of black bears in their professional duties. (And 16 rounds of .460 S&W Magnum weighs 508 grams.)
• Khângây weapons haven't shown up yet (I'm currently majorly reworking my third book's plot), but I think when they do they'll either be handheld mini-railguns shooting small projectiles—"sliver" or "needle" guns, as they're often known—or else, "ETC liquid" (electrothermal chemical) propelled. Leaning toward that second one, since railguns' length and barrel-longevity is something of a deal-breaker. Not sure if there'll be separate liquid-propellant reservoirs attached to each round of ammunition, or a single reservoir that meters out the same amount of propellant, each time a round is chambered. The high temperatures involved mean their weapons are probably made of super-materials.
  
  It seems culturally appropriate, since the khângây are a race of artists and artisans, so they have a tendency to pursue intriguing technologies, sometimes without much reference to their immediate battlefield feasibility. They also have a much smaller military than either the zledo or even the humans, and "splurging" on equipment is the kind of thing affluent societies with small militaries do, e.g. the Japanese Self-Defense Forces. I imagine that while their weapon-manufacturing might be part of a clan's exclusive intellectual property (remember, they're like a potlatch culture), armor manufacturing, while closely guarded, would come under the heading of "safety information", and thus be public-domain. At least to the point that a faction whose armor-tech is stolen by a competitor doesn't have a legal grievance (there's no requirement to actively publicize armor-tech, of course).
  
  See, they don't regard things directly relevant to the preservation of life as being subject to intellectual property; all clans share things like medical knowledge and disaster-reports freely. Their major modern religion, also (unlike their older ones, which were one-to-a-tribe affairs), regards its teachings as relevant to safety—albeit of souls—and thus as public domain (I imagine, thus, that khângây physicians are disproportionately monks).
• You know you're a science fiction writer when you see a slashfic based on your work and your first objection is, "Kzinti don't have external genitalia" (apparently that was Niven's reaction). But have you figured out whether your aliens do? And if so, what? Aside from the fact that you simply need to work out at least a rough outline of how your aliens work in that regard, there will almost certainly be cultural-setting implications to whichever particular structure you actually go with. My advice, as in all things, is to mix and match non-mammal, non-vertebrate, and even non-animal systems, till you get something interesting.
  
  Zledo, for instance, don't urinate (neither do birds), so their intromittent organ (which is external) doesn't do double-duty as part of the excretory system. Their sex-organs aren't even part of a "cloaca" (unlike birds, where the penis, if present, is part of the cloacal wall—species that don't have a penis, which is 97% of them, just use their cloaca for the purpose—and whatever the male's anatomy does, the cloaca serves as the female's genitalia, instead of a specialized vagina). In that respect the zled genital system is actually more like that of a cephalopod, with reproductive organs that have nothing to do with the excretory system (the cephalopod excretory system seems, for some weird reason, to involve both a urinary tract and an anus; most marine life doesn't even bother with uric acid—excreting which, instead of urea, is the reason diapsids don't pee—and instead just excretes ammonia directly).
  
  RE: Cultural setting implications, among other things, the fact that our reproductive organs are also part of our waste-elimination system is the basis of a great number of zled insults for humans.
• Aeons ago, I mentioned that zledo (not yet identified as such in the blog) have Z0 sex-chromosomes (the male has two Z chromosomes, the female has only one, with no partial chromosome like a human male or a bird female—a system used only by a few butterflies, on Earth; the opposite, where the female has two and the male only one, is called X0, and is used by grasshoppers, crickets, and cockroaches, among other things).
  
  Well, did I ever mention that the gamete-growing organs and the sex-hormone organs are distinct, although the former grow from the latter? The testes and ovaries grow from the hormone glands; they have four of them. The ovaries and hormone gland are at the back of the uterus, rather than beside it and connected by a fallopian tube, and the specific ovary that ovulates actually becomes the placenta and amniotic sac(-analogues) when fertilized, and the whole thing is expelled at birth. (An ovary and its embryo, together, is basically what "fruit" is, except with extra things to aid in the spread of seeds—also there isn't a precise analog to the placenta, flowering plants actually use a second embryo for that, which is freaky.)
  
  Part of what that means is that female zledo regrow multiple ovaries throughout their lives (they can have more than four children in a lifetime), and males can regrow testes lost to injury (if their hormone-gland isn't also injured).
• Did some checking. Apparently each round of 6.8 Remington SPC (assuming 7.45 gram bullets) uses 1.944 grams of propellant. Supposing you replaced the nitrocellulose propellant with octanitrocubane, as is used by Peacekeeper guns in my books, you get (42% of 1.944=)816 milligrams of propellant per round. Caseless means we don't have to add any extra weight for brass. Assume a 60 round casket magazine, empty, weighs 192 grams (it wouldn't quite weigh twice what the 30-round one weighs—the 30-round one doesn't weigh 1.5 times what the 20-round was, and 192 is the number I get when I plug "in the proportion of the real weight-difference to 1.5", then multiply it by "117×2"). We can say that, for the weight of the standard seven magazines carried by a US Army soldier (210 rounds, each magazine weighing 483 grams, for a grand total of 3381 grams of full magazines), a 24th-century Peacekeeper can carry 5 magazines—and gets 10/7 the ammunition, 300 rounds vs. 210, with fewer pauses to reload. The consideration in the pistol rounds, incidentally, is not mass, but simply the length of the grip and its ability to accept the rounds. Using octanitrocubane instead of nitrocellulose, though, would reduce the propellant load from 460 milligrams to a mere 193.2 milligrams.
• Incidentally, given the theoretical density of octanitrocubane—2.06 g/cm³ (the slightly lower density usually listed is the actually-achieved one, remember that we can't yet get it to form even as dense as heptanitrocubane)—the 816 milligrams of propellant in the rifle round has a volume of 396.117 cubic millimeters. Treating the 7 millimeter-diameter by 31 millimeter-length bullet as a cylinder, and assuming the propellant "casing" has the same diameter as the brass one (10.7 mm), we discover that the propellant "casing" only has a length of 17.67 millimeters (the casing volume minus the bullet volume equals 396.117, casing diameter is given, solve for casing height). The "casing" sticks out 1.85 millimeters from the bullet, and goes 15.82 millimeters up its sides (assuming uniform propellant thickness in back, too). Hence, I guess, they call it "6.8 × 18 mm". Maybe "7 × 18 mm", I don't know where that "6.8" business comes from, 'cause those bullets (6.8 SPC uses the same ones as .270 Winchester) are 7.0 millimeters diameter exactly.
  
  193.2 milligrams of octanitrocubane has a volume of 93.786 cubic millimeters. Again, treating a 9 millimeter-diameter by 16 millimeter-length (JHP) bullet as a cylinder, and a "casing" diameter of 10.77 millimeters, we get 12.20 millimeters as the "casing" length. The propellant "casing" has a thickness of .885 millimeters, and goes (again, uniform thickness in back) 11.32 millimeters up the sides of the bullet. So I guess they call it "9 × 12 mm"? Notice these rounds are much shorter than their cased equivalents—the rifle round is only 32.85 millimeters long, compared to 6.8 Remington SPC's 58.8 millimeters, and the pistol round is only 16.89 millimeters compared to .357 SIG's 28.96. I imagine they use the extra room for a coolant-reservoir (the battery for the electronic firing is set into the base of the magazine)—no casings to eject means there's nowhere for the chamber's heat to go.
• While I'm describing the precise dimensions of my propellants (I think they also have a tiny amount of a bonding agent that holds them to the bullets and controls the burn-rate, and are also painted to designate what type of bullet is being used, e.g. red for explosive-tipped), I'm having a real hard time figuring out what they smell like. Seriously, I have found exactly one reference to what octanitrocubane would smell like, and (apart from a joke about Cuban cigars), it's "probably a bit like camphor". No basis for this is given, but a man in my position grasps any straw he can.
  
  The smell, of course, is important, because what's a gunfight without the smell of gunpowder or nitrocellulose (often erroneously referred to as "cordite")? But apparently 24th century gunfights smell quite different, though. I imagine the cops busting into a house because they thought they smelled gunshots—but no, man, it's just Hindus performing puja! "Every time we have a gunfight, I get hungry for pork-chops afterward. If we don't make peace with these rival gangs soon, I'm gonna need to invest in a whole new set of pants." (Rosemary has camphor in it.)
• The khângây being able to see near-UV, and thus also distinguish ten times as many shades as creatures that only have three color bands, are, as I said, a race of artists and artisans. Part of it is that they say there are 30-35 "main" colors, instead of just six or seven (the seven, again, are red, orange, yellow, green, azure, blue, and purple—or you may regard azure and blue as the same color, or call azure "blue" and blue "indigo"; if you're Asian you consider green and blue to both be shades of azure; you also might call purple "violet"). Notice I said 30-35, not 60-70? Yeah, well, actually, only three colors in English are even named for themselves, rather than for things that are their color.
  
  Think about it. What's orange? A fruit (its Old English name was "yellow-red", look it up). What's green? A formation of the same root as "growing" and "grass", it actually means "flourishing plants", that's not just a connotation of the word. What's azure? A rock. What's violet? A flower. What's indigo? A dye. So is purple. No, the only words that can even partly be considered to actually mean the color they describe, are red, yellow, and blue—we weren't just calling them primaries 'cause of paint. (There's something similar in Japanese—the only colors that are adjectives instead of derivations from nouns, are black, white, red, and azure. Yellow, orange, and purple are named after gold, bitter oranges, and the purple gromwell, and pink, brown, and green are named after peaches, tea, and melons.)
  
  Khângây cultures have ten times as many words for colors that actually mean the colors themselves, which, if we assume ten times as many as a typical human language, is about 20-40, not counting black and white (and they presumably have ten words that mean "gray" plus dozens for things like "gunmetal" and "mouse"). Then they also derive ten times as many specific shades from other sources as we do. I imagine that being around colored objects made by humans and zledo probably sets their teeth on edge (if their jaws could do that, which they can't—technically they don't even have teeth), with slight variations in shade that we don't even notice, but that make them feel like they're in the "before" segment of a detergent ad.
• Mention of khângây teeth, or lack thereof, reminds me that I redid their biting/chewing anatomy. Instead of beak-like horn structures, but shaped like canid teeth, inside their lips, they now have bone plates with sharp cutting surfaces, like those of the armored-jaw fish (still inside their lips). Their "biting plates" have a horn-like coating, like a bird beak, which continually regrows as it's worn down. The horn is in the same color as the feathers of whichever ethnic group the khângây belongs to.
  
  I had had the males have brighter-colored plumage than the females, but I can't think of any species with a similar mating structure to khângây that have that. Most of the brightly-colored birds that mate for life—parrots, mostly, although blue-jays (being predators) are probably a closer parallel—have indistinguishable plumage between the sexes. I might just decide to have the sex be determinable by build (they give live birth and have big brains, so their females' anatomy has adaptations for that).
• It's fascinating how many common criticisms of things are just unintelligent retreads of each other. I've talked before about the people who say walking mecha won't work because walking uses too much power...thus demonstrating they have never seen a mecha anime or they'd know they usually roll on good terrain. Another one is the people who yammer on and on about how military science fiction is stuck in the Cold War—and then talk as if it's self-evident that the wars of space-faring civilizations would be genocidal affairs that kill billions.
  
  Newsflash: war did not cease in the Cold War. It just got much smaller and tidier. The whole thing we learned from the end of the Cold War is that the whole idea of Total War is, like racism and women as legal minors, an incredibly stupid assumption of the Renaissance and Enlightenment that intelligent people would never have adopted, or resurrected, in the first place. "The only time it's worth killing your enemy is if you kill everyone like him" is an idea exclusive to the modern era; Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan would have regarded it as blasphemously bloodthirsty.
  
  The "every war is a war for race-survival (not to say Lebensraum)" trope in science fiction is not merely pre-end-of-the-Cold War, it is demonstrably just a hangover from World War II—or even from the 19th-century ideologies that brought about World War II. Do try to at least catch up to the point where eugenics has been discredited, women can vote, and there's black people at the diner, hmm?

Rannm Thawts Three

Just what you see here.

• Having Neil deGrasse Tyson host a Cosmos reboot is a stroke of genius. I was actually wondering, "How will you make Cosmos without Carl Sagan's smug unwarranted self-congratulation and laughably false hagiographic presentation of the history of science?" But Tyson fits the bill nicely.
  
  Well, except that his achievements make Sagan look like Niels Bohr. Sagan may only have contributed as much to science as the average state-university astronomy professor, but that is at least real research, and every single pebble-pusher in the trenches has a part to play. Tyson? I searched him on Google Scholar and so far haven't found a single thing authored by him that's not a glorified press release (I suppose "essay", if we're being polite) about how awesome Science™ is, or else about how some particular policy in Science™ is just the only tenable solution (e.g. RE: Pluto).
  
  Real research-papers have long, abstruse titles like "ATP sulfurylase from filamentous fungi: which sulfonucleotide is the true allosteric effector?"; Tyson's all have punchy, marketer-friendly storybook titles like "The Planet that Never Was" or "Death by Black Hole".
• In the original Gundam, Earth and Zeon are supposed to have lost half of their populations "in the war's first month alone". Now, this is one of those settings where apocryphal population apocalypses are taken at face-value, and UC 0079 is something like AD 2131, so there would be well over ten billion people on Earth (and a single O'Neill cylinder can hold up to ten million people, and each "Side" consists of several cylinders).
  
  Which raises the question, "How is the Earth still habitable?" Anything that could kill billions in a month would have to involve nukes or something comparable. Nothing else—certainly not tanks, which is all mobile suits are—could kill at anything like that rate. Even assuming Nazi-like death-camps (six, in a faction controlling 4.3% of the Earth's territory, killing at a rate of 1.5 million annually, or 250,000 each per year), and Zeon control over the entire Earth's land-area (I assume the Feddies aren't killing many of their own people), with the same amount of death-camps per unit area as the Nazis, you still only kill 5,813,953 people per year. Killing even one billion would take 172 years; half the world's current population would take 602 years. Killing 1 billion people in one month means killing 10% of the current US population, or one whole Canada or Uganda, every 24 hours. Killing 3.5 billion people in a month would involve killing off the entire French-speaking population of Africa every day, and UC 0079 Earth almost certainly has more people than 2014 Earth. Can you think of a way to do that without rendering large portions of the planet uninhabitable?
  
  Of course, the whole idea that the world lost half its population is ignored for the whole rest of the series. Very little of the Earth has been rendered uninhabitable, very few cities are shown to have been completely abandoned; people after the war do not live in squalor and technological stagnation (a certain minimum population-base is necessary for progress, because with lower populations people who might otherwise be innovating are occupied with more routine tasks). Also, nobody even suggests genociding the Zeon people or even executing their entire leadership, which is what would absolutely happen to an aggressor who lost a war that killed half the human race. Apparently nobody at Sunrise knew how close their country came to getting either treatment, and the war they were the aggressor in only killed 1.5% of the world's population (their theater of it, anyway).
• There's people coming up with makeup to foil facial-recognition software. There's people 3d printing plastic guns that don't set off metal detectors (presumably their ammo still would). There's several other petulant anti-surveillance gestures, all by people who seem to think they're actually engaged in meaningful political acts. But the net result? Massively more inconvenience and degradation, plus more expense to upgrade the equipment. You've made guns that can get through metal detectors (though they're not very good guns)? Then they're just going to have to ascertain that you're unarmed the old-fashioned way. I'm pretty sure at this point the best use for your 3d printed gun is as a dietary supplement, if you take my meaning.
  
  I mean, seriously. Most facial-recognition software is not used by automated systems. It's used by security guards, separated from the people the software checks by a Formica counter. If you have makeup that foils the software? Well, first, one of the guards nudges his co-worker, and says, "Hey, this dude's not showing up on the software." Then he comes around the Formica counter, and as everyone behind you in the line curses you for the delay you're causing, the guard approaches you. "Sir," he says, "please come with me." He proceeds to lead you toward the back room, pulling on an elbow-length latex glove as he goes.
  
  What a mighty blow for civil liberties and human dignity that was! You're a damn folk hero!
• In my setting, the oldest space-station colonies are Stanford tori (which are a specific type of Von Braun habitat ring). Later colonies, after the invention of actual topological-distortion artificial gravity, don't have a geometry derived from a need to rotate. But I had been unclear as to what shape they would have; I had rather vaguely supposed something like a Bernal sphere or O'Neill Island (which they still didn't need for their space-dwelling population by the time they invented topo-gravity), presumably with the topo-gravity making them stick to the "walls" without the thing having to spin. But that, too, is a design based around rotation, and I despise SF designs whose form does not follow their function.
  
  So, I decided, the newer colonies would be, like the ships, oriented essentially like a tower. But since a space-station has no need to minimize mass, since it's not going anywhere, and one wants to maximize the area so it can fit a lot of population (and have room to breathe—long-term confinement in ship-like conditions would result in lots of crazy colonists), I figured it might be roughly saucer-shaped, or possibly mushroom-shaped, with a long shaft of various machinery (presumably a bunch of generators, for one thing) and a flat, somewhat bulbous habitat section on the "top". I imagine them looking something like the Kûkai Foundation from Xenosaga, except that I am not fond of windows on space-structures; or, come to think of it, like the Starbases in the pre-reboot Star Trek movies (which are probably the most realistic Star Trek structure).
• Remember how I said zledo can hear the auroras? Well, I found out what that would sound like. A lot of the "aurora borealis sounds" you can find, are actually how the magnetic field of an aurora is received by radio, but there are recordings of the actual sounds that are statistically correlated with auroras (although it's apparently not proved that that's their origin).
  
  Anyway, it sounds like this. The buzzing is just the air around the microphone, but that sharp, glassy *crack*? That is associated with the aurora. I imagine it makes the more high-strung among the zledo very jumpy, especially when they orbit BY Draconis variables, which have so much sunspot activity their variation in brightness is detectable from Earth. It would be like having a star with an incessant bubblegum habit.
• An old name for the Hopi is "Moqui". Now, it's usually said this cannot be a Hopi name, because in Hopi, "moqui" (or rather "mooki") means "dead", cf. "miqui" in Nahuatl. But the Hopi take their religious law—adherence to which is what makes them "rightly-ordered", hopi—from the Fire Clan, and the Fire Clan are the chosen clan of the god Masauwu, the Skeleton, god of death (and cosmic order). So it is actually possible that "dead" was once a term they applied to themselves. (Masauwu is probably the Aztec Mictlantecuhtli, "lord of the place of the dead".)
• The Urheimat of the Uto-Aztecan languages, I just had occasion to look up, is either roughly in the Sonoran Desert region (so the O'odham, for example, probably still live in the ancestral locale), or, according to the minority view, actually in Mesoamerica. The evidence for the former seems to have to do with the vocabulary relating to foraging; the latter assumes a corn-growing culture that brought its agricultural knowledge north.
  
  I'm not sure what would be the precise locale involved in the second hypothesis; my knowledge of this language group and its cultures drops off sharply between the American Southwest and the Valley of Mexico. The Corachol branch, it looks like, from the map ("Cora" and "Huichol" being the two that are listed, apparently their branch's name was formed on the same basis as tabloid celebrity-couple portmanteaux). I know precisely nothing about them! (Well, I know they probably have agglutinating grammar and mark plurals by reduplicating initial syllables, but that's just tantamount to saying "I know they're Uto-Aztecan speakers".)
• Speaking of Mesoamerican languages, there is quite a big gap between Ch'orti', spoken in Guatemala and Honduras, and the Chontal and Ch'ol languages, spoken in Tabasco and Chiapas (in Mexico), respectively—all the Mayan languages in between are in completely different branches of the language-group. Why the geographic gap? Well...Ch'orti' happens to be a direct descendant of the language we usually call Classic Mayan—so-called because it's the language used by all Mayan inscriptions (even the ones written by speakers of other kinds of Mayan, like how a lot of medieval German writing was in Latin). It sorta seems that the Tabascan and Chiapan Maya adopted the scholarly language as their own, at some point.
  
  Incidentally, the word in most of those languages for "speaker" is "yoko". The word in Chontal, specifically, for a speaker of Chontal Maya? "Yoko t'an". I think (I can't find a direct translation for "t'an") it means something like "clear speaker", i.e., we can understand these people, because they talk our language, unlike those babbling barbarians from other places. Interestingly, that's what the word "nahuatl" means, and those who don't speak Nahuatl are nonoalcah, "deaf-mutes", they can neither speak nor hear Nahuatl words. There are words like "yoko t'an" in many other Mayan languages; it may well be the closest thing to a collective term for "Mayan people" that there is ("Maya" is pretty much used only by the Yucatec and Itza'). Apparently "Yucatan" is actually an ethnonym, not a toponym, although then again "land of a particular people" is a very common way of naming places, the world over.