Nyrath Posted November 3, 2009 Report Share Posted November 3, 2009 http://www.sciencemadecool.com/2009/11/what-if-.html The "Dinosaur killer" asteroid impact of 65 million years ago might have been an intelligently directed attack! Well, probably not, but what a great campaign background! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nyrath Posted November 3, 2009 Author Report Share Posted November 3, 2009 Re: The Chicxulub impact or maybe just the last battle between the Dinosaucers and the Tyrannos Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EvilDrPuma Posted November 3, 2009 Report Share Posted November 3, 2009 Re: The Chicxulub impact God did it! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lawnmower Boy Posted November 4, 2009 Report Share Posted November 4, 2009 Re: The Chicxulub impact Ahem. Are we live? God neither admits nor denies responsibility for what He concedes to be a regrettable episode, but which must be taken into consideration along with all the other good things He has done for the world, such as inspiring the highly danceable music of the Osmond Family. His experiments with altering the trajectory of small asteroids to produce interesting astronomical effects will continue to produce episodes such as the Shoemaker-Levy event, which I think everyone can agree was totally awesome. In conclusion, it is clear that extinct species have no claim for compensation, on account of being, well, extinct; but God intends to make a very substantial donation to the Jon and Kate Plus Eight Fund to Fight Childhood Disease in their name. Now, if there are any non-sensational questions about God's purposes and designs, I would be glad to answer them. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nyrath Posted November 4, 2009 Author Report Share Posted November 4, 2009 Re: The Chicxulub impact Ahem. Are we live? Yes, but the Dinosaucers are not. The impacts were obviously targeted at their two largest population centers, which were both coastal cities. Which suggests, to a crafty Game Master, that a deep excavation under the impact sites (perhaps by a vehicle similar to the one featured in the movie The Core) would yield some interesting artifacts. Perhaps even some highly advanced technology. Maybe even technology that can be reverse-engineered... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Neverway Posted November 4, 2009 Report Share Posted November 4, 2009 Re: The Chicxulub impact I opened this thread hoping for a tale of how attractive and sassy young women and have changed the face of gamming; but, in my heart of hearts, I knew it was going to be a Blackleaf joke. It wasn't until I was reading the article that I noticed that I had misread the thread title. Darn that wishful dyslexia. I want to know the chixclub impact. More on topic and less an attempt a "humor", it sounds like the opening volley of someone’s Terra forming project. Drop a couple of big ones on opposite sides of the planet to wipe out the top of the food chain as well as destabilize the ecology, then move in with your seeding project. So, what happened to stop it? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sundog Posted November 4, 2009 Report Share Posted November 4, 2009 Re: The Chicxulub impact I opened this thread hoping for a tale of how attractive and sassy young women and have changed the face of gamming; but' date=' in my heart of hearts, I knew it was going to be a Blackleaf joke. It wasn't until I was reading the article that I noticed that I had misread the thread title. Darn that wishful dyslexia.[/font'] I want to know the chixclub impact. More on topic and less an attempt a "humor", it sounds like the opening volley of someone’s Terra forming project. Drop a couple of big ones on opposite sides of the planet to wipe out the top of the food chain as well as destabilize the ecology, then move in with your seeding project. So, what happened to stop it? At a guess? Miscalculation. Too much damage to the ecosphere; the resultant environment was too harsh for the species they wished to introduce. So, they went away, intending to come back once things had stabilized, but their civilization didn't last that long. Of course, the first xenoarchaeologist to correctly translate their starmaps is going to have a real uphill battle getting anyone to believe it... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lemming Posted November 4, 2009 Report Share Posted November 4, 2009 Re: The Chicxulub impact At a guess? Miscalculation. Too much damage to the ecosphere; the resultant environment was too harsh for the species they wished to introduce. So, they went away, intending to come back once things had stabilized, but their civilization didn't last that long. Of course, the first xenoarchaeologist to correctly translate their starmaps is going to have a real uphill battle getting anyone to believe it... Either that or we're the introduced species.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted November 4, 2009 Report Share Posted November 4, 2009 Re: The Chicxulub impact Mammals did take over, and it dates from that impact. Another way to put the effect of the K-T boundary impact, now associated with Chicxulub, comes from Gene Shoemaker's review back in the mid 1980s: No land-dwelling animal species whose average adult body mass was 25 kg or more survived the event. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lemming Posted November 4, 2009 Report Share Posted November 4, 2009 Re: The Chicxulub impact I'm going out Friday to visit Meteor Crater in Arizona. A much smaller impact. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted November 4, 2009 Report Share Posted November 4, 2009 Re: The Chicxulub impact Yeah, that was (approximately) a 10-meter iron meteorite. Chicxulub was probably a comet in the 5-10 km range. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Clonus Posted November 4, 2009 Report Share Posted November 4, 2009 Re: The Chicxulub impact I have a campaign background where Urizen did it because he didn't like the dinosaurs. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KawangaKid Posted November 6, 2009 Report Share Posted November 6, 2009 Re: The Chicxulub impact I have a campaign background where Urizen did it because he didn't like the dinosaurs. Urizen: "Ooh, I don't like those dinosaurs. They're all so cold-blooded. And they don't have opposable thumbs. Let's give the mammals a chance to screw up the world." Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sundog Posted November 6, 2009 Report Share Posted November 6, 2009 Re: The Chicxulub impact Eh, Mammals are johnnie-come-latlelies on the domination scene. Birds got a shot before we did. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AmadanNaBriona Posted November 6, 2009 Report Share Posted November 6, 2009 Re: The Chicxulub impact This is part of the history of the setting I've been working on, actually. The Mi-Go out at their station in Yuggoth are performing the duty they were stationed there for by the Elder Ones (Their creators; at least in my setting, the Mi-Go are essentially constructs)... diverting Oort body orbitals down to take care of little problems that come up, like the time those dinosaurs (which were evolved by the Yithians as pets and labor animals) became infected with a strain of Zombie Virus after Yithian archeologists accidentally cracked open a Great Old Ones weapons silo left over from the last war between the Great Old Ones and The Elder Race. More grist for my mill... thanks! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kristopher Posted November 7, 2009 Report Share Posted November 7, 2009 Re: The Chicxulub impact I'm going out Friday to visit Meteor Crater in Arizona. A much smaller impact. Yeah' date=' that was (approximately) a 10-meter iron meteorite. Chicxulub was probably a comet in the 5-10 km range.[/quote'] To look at that crater, and realize that the thing that caused it was just a hunk of iron about the size of a house... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kristopher Posted November 7, 2009 Report Share Posted November 7, 2009 Re: The Chicxulub impact http://www.sciencemadecool.com/2009/11/what-if-.html The "Dinosaur killer" asteroid impact of 65 million years ago might have been an intelligently directed attack! Well, probably not, but what a great campaign background! After reading the article, my two thoughts are: is there actually a crater there, and how simultaneous would "simultaneous" be? They could appear to be about the age at first glance, and turn out to be hundreds of thousands of years apart. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Drhoz Posted November 8, 2009 Report Share Posted November 8, 2009 Re: The Chicxulub impact Eh' date=' Mammals are johnnie-come-latlelies on the domination scene. Birds got a shot before we did.[/quote'] and turtles before that. Post K-T, it looked like it was going to be The Age of Turtles Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lemming Posted November 8, 2009 Report Share Posted November 8, 2009 Re: The Chicxulub impact Couple shots from Meteor Crater. I did not a have a wide enough angle lens, but they had this handy aerial shot. I could of stiched together a panorama. A small piece of the original, this chunk is about the size of an small engine and weighed 1406 lbs. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nyrath Posted November 8, 2009 Author Report Share Posted November 8, 2009 Re: The Chicxulub impact This is part of the history of the setting I've been working on' date=' actually. The Mi-Go out at their station in Yuggoth are performing the duty they were stationed there for by the Elder Ones (Their creators; at least in my setting, the Mi-Go are essentially constructs)... diverting Oort body orbitals down to take care of little problems that come up, like the time those dinosaurs (which were evolved by the Yithians as pets and labor animals) became infected with a strain of Zombie Virus after Yithian archeologists accidentally cracked open a Great Old Ones weapons silo left over from the last war between the Great Old Ones and The Elder Race. [/quote'] Cool campaign setting! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AmadanNaBriona Posted November 9, 2009 Report Share Posted November 9, 2009 Re: The Chicxulub impact Cool campaign setting! Thanks. It's been a conscious exercise in creating a workable pastiche setting out of the weird random dreams that've been sort of percolating up out of my subconscious. It started trying to reverse engineer a Girl Genius type Steampunk setting. Rather than do an alternate history, I decided that it feels quite a lot like a "300 Years After" type Post-Apoc environment. I wanted monsters, so I went with a slightly modified Mountains of Madness timeline, put everything through a Charlie Stross "realism filter", started filling in the blanks by borrowing liberally from sources wherever they sprung up. Examples include... The Great Old Ones are an alliance of many member races, all who share one common trait (Psionics to one degree or another). A military support facility of theirs on Mars, staffed by support "personnel" with no biomechanical or nanotech augmentation as was common for the front line troops, survived the bombardment of Mars by the Mi Go in suspended animation. The power source became unstable in the 18th century and they were revived, and began surveying Earth to determine who or what was in charge, who had won the war, and if it was a viable escape route. Mankind has been invaded by these "Martians" several times, but as many of the viruses present in terrestrial life have their origins as anti-Great Old Ones bio-weapons, they haven't proven successful on a long term scale. Speaking of Nanoaugmented Great Old one warriors... One was dug out of the Antarctic ice where it's ship crashed during one of the last attacks on the Elder Race stronghold. It was recovered in the early 80's. Thanks to quick thinking by the station members, there were no survivors. I decided I liked the idea of subverting the 2012 trope, and decided that the Mayan Calendar was actually based on a galactic rotation calendar crafted by the Atlanteans, based on information from their buddies the Deep Ones, counting down until we came back in line with the tightbeam automated encoded signal from the Great Old Ones that would activate all the suspended reserve weapons in silos around the solar system to engage in a retributive strike, either claiming the ruins as a breeding ground for a future G.O.O. return, or else to remove any value it might contain to their ancient enemies. Speaking of viruses, that was the Elder Race's BAG, baby... Micro to nano scale bioengineering. The leftovers supply, many if not most, of those monsters of myth that have a basis in truth. The Zombie Virus, for instance, was designed to increase the durability of a host organism, while parasites, symbiotes, or nanomachines provided intelligence and capabilities, giving rise to legends of many creatures (Vampires, to name one). Much of this is possible because of the "Mother" or "Progenitor" virus, which acts sort of like a backdoor into terrestrial DNA and was part of the original, uh, terraforming of the planet. This is all because I like the dodgy microbiology of the Resident Evil and Zombie Survival Guide series' errr... I'm sidetracking. Fast forward. The Stars are Right, Things start waking up and the world implodes. Mankind fights back in many ways, but the key to survival lies in a DARPA project to enhance human intelligence by creating an artificial savant state in a dis-associative personality matrix. The intervention by the "descendants" of Frankenstein's Monster (who calls himself Adam, while his "offspring" like to call themselves Igors) leads to success in it's final successful development as well as a breakthrough in containing the spread of the various viral outbreaks threatening the species. Rocks Fall, Everybody dies. OK, kidding. Sort of. Out of something either vaguely resembling a respect for human culture, or a "minimum force necessary" fire doctrine, the Yuggoth directed anti-Old Ones strikes were fairly surgical. Even so, there are a fair number of new circular seas (like the one that connects the Baltic & Black Seas), and the "Colour Out of Space" nanoweapons ate most of the biosphere around any major areas of Old One activity. Like Eastern Europe. The US Strategic Near Godlike Entity Reserve, located under the largest masonry protective symbol in the history of such... the foundation for the Pentagon (also the real reason for the 9-11 attack), warrants a nice large hunk of nickle-iron. The groundshock sets off the Yellowstone mega-caldera. Things went downhill from there what with the icecaps melting and all. Long story short, everything left of Earth kinda had to pull itself back up by the bootheels. Humanity is beginning to come out of a Feudal period, because most of the survivors eventually ended up under the flag of a country with access to "Sparks", who have become sort of the de-facto hereditary nobility. Australia came out fairly well, due to being mostly cleaned of Great Old One related sites by the Yithian archeological colony, Europe is a blasted feudal wasteland ruled over by the tyrannical Brittan-that-was (I'm still debating names... I've always thought Gran Bretan was a bit hamfisted... yeah, I'm going Hawkmoon for my Europe). The Americas look more like Austral-Asia these days, and are the "Old Country" as far as the Neo-Victorian world culture is concerned. Africa saw the worst of the Zombie plague and it's following infections, and is dark and dangerous. East Asia and the Middle East, long known to be dabbling in things Man was not Meant to Know tm, got Rocked and are mostly unknown to "civilized" man now. China is suspected to be one of the first vectors for the initial Zombie Outbreak. I'm cribbing heavily from Stross for the "Magic is Math" & quantum physics parts, your site for astrophysics tidbits, assuming the rather wacky "Scalar Wave" theory is in fact the basis for Tesla's work (and Mad Science! in general), and hoping my recall of microbiology isn't TOO wrong. I'm kinda going for a Hard Sci-Fi Post Apocalyptic Steampunk Neo-Victorian Lovecraftian Pulp kinda thing, I guess Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nyrath Posted November 9, 2009 Author Report Share Posted November 9, 2009 Re: The Chicxulub impact put everything through a Charlie Stross "realism filter"' date=' [/quote'] I know you've read it, but any other interested readers who want to craft a similar situation might want to read Charles Stross' A COLDER WAR, available online here: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm Another great resource is Kenneth Hite's books SUPPRESSED TRANSMISSSION and SUPPRESSED TRANSMISSION 2. I'm kinda going for a Hard Sci-Fi Post Apocalyptic Steampunk Neo-Victorian Lovecraftian Pulp kinda thing' date=' I guess [/quote'] And I love it! I'll be cribbing from this. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AmadanNaBriona Posted November 18, 2009 Report Share Posted November 18, 2009 Re: The Chicxulub impact I know you've read it, but any other interested readers who want to craft a similar situation might want to read Charles Stross' A COLDER WAR, available online here: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm Another great resource is Kenneth Hite's books SUPPRESSED TRANSMISSSION and SUPPRESSED TRANSMISSION 2. I still have to get the Suppressed Transmission compendium's, I'd totally missed those. Groovy. More grist for the mill And yeah, what he said... go read A Colder War, like NOW, if you like Lovecraft. And I love it! I'll be cribbing from this. Thanks! This is just an initial smattering of the ideas I've had for this bloody setting. I seem to have a talent of some sort related to crazy-quilting other people's ideas into a cohesive whole. I literally can't type fast enough to get these things out of my head and in a concrete form. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nyrath Posted November 18, 2009 Author Report Share Posted November 18, 2009 Re: The Chicxulub impact I still have to get the Suppressed Transmission compendium's' date=' I'd totally missed those. Groovy. More grist for the mill [/quote'] yes, for what you are doing, those books are solid gold. You must get them. The chapters even have bibliographies if you want to go deeper. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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