Markdoc

Re: Save the American Space Program?! Why? I seriously don't see any reason for a world flag. Without a world government, it means pretty much nothing, and santa's gonna bring me a unicorn before we get anything approaching world government. cheers, Mark

Re: Save the American Space Program?! You keep coming back to the moon treaty ... which as pointed out already, is a failed suggestion from 30 years ago .... that isn't law and never will be. If that's the sum of your argument, you don't have an argument. It sure hasn't had any effect on space exploration. As for signatories to the actual space treaty, you have it 100% bass-ackwards. If you had read the actual damned space treaty that I keep linking to - you would have noticed that the first three signatories were in fact the US, the UK and the USSR - the only three countries which at that date had developed independent space programs. So if they were the only guys who could, why did they do it? They did it to protect access and use of space. The law of space - the actual law of space, not the fantasy version you refer to above - does prevent companies (or countries) simply annexing chunks of space. That's a good thing - the Soviets were the first into LEO, and I'm damned if I wanted them to be able to claim it as their own private space. The reasoning for this is not to prevent commercial exploitation of space, but ensure access for it. The law of space was modelled very closely on the law of the sea precisely to ensure access for as many parties as possible. If you think the law of the sea - which also forbids annexation - has prevented commerce on the seas ... then I suggest you actually look at the reality. The law of the sea is regarded as a great success precisely because it has promoted and protected commercial usage of the seas. It's why the US first suggested it as a model. It's why today, a company can put a satellite up without having to ask permission: because space doesn't belong to anybody. But the satellite still belongs to the people who put it up there and so does all the profit made off it. If the satellite crashes onto something valuable, the liability belongs to them too - meaning everybody's rights are protected. Here's what the space settlement initiative (the people who are lobbying the US government to create laws defining private ownership in outer space) has to say "The ratification failure of the Moon Treaty means there is no legal prohibition in force against private ownership of land on the Moon, Mars, etc., as long as the ownership is not derived from a claim of national appropriation or sovereignty". In other words, if a company wants to exploit a resource on the moon, right now, they can go and do it and there is nothing stopping them. Their rights will be protected by their own countries' laws and even further protected by the space treaty which enjoins all signatories to respect ownership of launched items. The only thing they can't do is prevent other companies from following their lead - and that's a good thing as far as I am concerned. We want more people involved! One thing that we can agree on is that groups like the X-foundation are a great idea. Anything that promotes the development of space technology is a good thing IMO. cheers,Mark

Re: Save the American Space Program?! Dude, if that's all you've got as evidence of "space-haters", then you got nothin'. The Moon treaty, as you note, has been signed by almost nobody (not even the Soviet Union, who sponsored it) in the 30 years it has existed. It doesn't look like it's going to be ratified anytime soon by any more countries either. Since there is no enforcement mechanism for UN treaties and never has been (they re all consensual, meaning they only have any legal weight in the countries that sign and ratify them) any company not based in the 10 countries that have ratified it can safely ignore it. As a bar to commercial exploitation of space, it's a total non-starter. As for the space treaty itself - which is law in many countries including anyone with pretensions to a space program - it's modelled very closely on the international law of the sea. Again, here it is - read it. Article IV specifically states that a company operating in space is subject to it's own nation's laws - so a US company is both subject to and protected by, US law. Yes, you can't annexe the Moon or Mars by simply going there and saying "It's mine!" You can't annexe international waters, either, but that doesn't stop companies operating there, exploiting resources and making money. The bit about "freeloaders" and having to give stuff away is just fantasy: if you'd read the actual treaty, you'd notice that there is no such language in it. It comes back to the main point - right now businesses are uninterested in space not because of some mythical "space haters" but for the very real reason that they can't work out how to make money off it. And let's face it - we're all space exploration fans here and we can't figure out any way to make money off it yet, either. cheers, Mark

Re: Save the American Space Program?!

Re: Save the American Space Program?! Yeah, I'm not up enough on the tech to be able to say how practical or how close that tech is: maybe some of the astro people can inform me. cheers, Mark

Re: Save the American Space Program?!

Re: A nore reasonable option

Re: A nore reasonable option Why put a roll cage on something that's not designed - or legally permitted - to fly over land? All it'd do, in case of an accident, is keep you inside so you sank with the craft. It'd be like putting seatbelts on a bicycle. cheers, Mark

Re: Save the American Space Program?! The delta IV heavy is comparable to the shuttle in terms of lift to LEO, but it suffers from some major problems as a shuttle replacement. First and foremost is the fact that the only way is up, baby. You can use it as a lift vehicle, but that's all. That means no repair work, no space station support, no humans in space unless it's rebuilt. The second is cost - at a quarter billion per launch, it's significantly more expensive than other lift vehicles already in use. For the air force, that's not such a big deal, but it's the reason commercial partners like Boeing have given for dropping the delta IV heavy. So as a specialist lift vehicle it's potentially useful: it has a much better lift to GEO than other vehicles, for example. But a shuttle replacement it's not. cheers, Mark

Re: A nore reasonable option Right: it can fly over land. It's just that legal additions, in the form of posted bonds and a lawyer would offer you more immediately-needed protection if you actually tried. In other words, it's not legal to fly it over land. There is a technical reason not to, as well. You've already noted the lack of braking. But in addition, it's not a plane - it's a ground effect vehicle and they react poorly to sudden changes in the level of the surface they are flying over. Big waves aside, you can reasonably expect the water, wherever you are flying, to be flat. The ground, not so much. The first time you hit a sudden change in the surface (like a ditch, say) you are likely to be toast. It's why GEVs have never taken off (ho ho) even though they would seem to have plenty of military applications. cheers. Mark

Re: Blue Stuff Battery This. The other builds are way too complex and give really strange results: why are we even considering Aid, simply to refill an END reserve? To me this looks like an END reserve with 5 REC - said REC having the limitation 1 charge, recoverable, IAF, Expendable focus, very difficult to obtain: "Blue Stuff". If you find a big ol' bottle o' Blue stuff (not very likely, by the sound of it), you can inject multiple doses and and top up your reserve. If you get 1 dose, you can add 5 END. You don't need to worry about fade rates or anything complex - just how many doses are to hand. cheers, Mark

Re: A nore reasonable option

Re: A nore reasonable option If you want, you can see if it's still for sale: http://www.stuff.co.nz/oddstuff/3389826/Homemade-flying-hovercraft-up-for-auction It actually looks like a pretty practical device, with a range of 225 km and a cruising speed of 90 km/hr. Technically speaking if you lived somewhere like Great Barrier or Waiheke island in New Zealand, you really could commute to work in the city with this. If you added a light canopy (you'd probably gain in improved aerodynamics more than you'd lose in terms of extra weight, with regard to speed and range) it'd be practical in wet weather as well. And it clearly can carry two people .... Sweet. cheers, Mark Edit: yeah, it's still for sale: currently at 27K NZD, which is less than 19 grand US. And as I suspected, as a ground effect vehicle, it's technically a boat, so no special licence is required.

Re: one for the browncoats with big wallets

Re: Of Healing Factors I go against the trend - simplified healing. Why? Because if your regeneration is going to be any use, your defences will be low enough that you going to be taking BOD from time to time and that means you are going to be taking lots of STUN. That means that you will be spending most games lying down, regenerating, but unconscious. Not much fun. Even if you avoid that, you need to blow phases recovering to get your STUN back - also not much fun. There's a variety of ways to handle it: my preference is - - Simplified healing for the STUN (you'll need to buy the recharge time to make that work and probably will want to make it 0 END, uncontrolled. That's expensive, even with self only, so you are only going to get a few dice, but it just needs to crank you up to the point where your REC can take over - Damage reduction - to reduce the amount of damage you are taking, to the point where your healing factor can deal with it. - Slap unified power on the whole package. A character like that won't have much in the way of defences (because you will have blown too many points to afford any!) but will be very hard to put down and keep down. for example, 3d6 simplified Healing (0 END uncontrolled, 1 turn recharge, self only, unified power) will cost you 47 points, plus another 48 for 50% resistant physical and energy reduction (unified power). That means you've spent the equivalent of 93 points on defences - but also means that you are extremely hard to put down and keep down. If you buy just a little DEF you're up to 100 point just on defences. If you had spent those points on 33 PD/ED armour, you'd be essentially immune to attacks under 10 DC: they'll still hurt the regenerator. But you are resistant to big attacks: a 20d6 attack will put 37 stun through onto the 33 PD/ED guy - you'll take about 33 and recover it faster - you'll get 1 BOD back every 4 segments, on average, and 3-4 stun. You're also more resistant to exotic attacks like NND and AVLD. A character like this is viable - he can even go toe to toe with a Brick if he has a good attack, but he's more fragile in some ways (he stuns easy), more durable in others. cheers, Mark

Re: Inspiration: The Jobs Of Yesteryear: Obsolete Occupations I used to do one of those obsolete professions - when I was in high school, i worked as a "milk boy". I'd run alongside the milk truck, taking milk out of the truck, running it up to front gate. People would leave their empty milk bottles (and money for fresh milk) by the gate and we'd grab the empties and put fresh milk there. It was hard work. Not only did you run along with a heavy-two-wheeled milk cart for a couple of hours, but the hardest part (for me, anyway) was memorizing the route - Mrs Hawkes takes half homogenised and half full cream, the Dawsons take one bottle of light milk and the rest homogenised, No. 64 takes a bottle of grapefruit juice with the milk but only Mondays and Thursdays, etc. The pay was rubbish, but I took the job mostly to get in shape for my martial arts classes, so that was OK. And I got all the milk I could drink, which back then was a lot. Sigh. Simpler times. cheers, Mark

Re: Fantasy Art Thread OK, guys, thanks - I'll kick the brightness up by +60 in future. As for why it seems too dark, I dunno. I don't think it's a difference between Apple and PC monitors, because the original looks fine on the HP monitor hooked up the PC at work. As for what's happening, this is my PC from our D20 game (we're playing this afternoon: yay!). The guy with the flaming sword has recently acquired the feat elusive target which means when he is flanked by two (or more foes) he can designate one of them as a "target". If his target attacks him, the first attack automatically misses and the "target" has to roll that against one of the other flankers instead. It's a groovy feat! The picture shows the first time he ever used it - with him springing nimbly over the club of one ogre so that it whacks the other ogre behind him. Although the DM has approved all my build in advance, she forgot about that feat and the look on her face as her NPCs started hitting each other! Priceless! The character himself was a design challenge - to see if I could build (in D20) a tough "light fighter" who doesn't rely on heavy armour, but can still take the sort of punishment and dish out the sort of damage needed to be a front line combatant. I think I have succeeded with this guy: He's mostly Paladin, but with a few levels of monk and sword-sage rolled in. And he's a blast to play - optimized for high mobility, he dashes in among our enemies, hacking away - but also tripping people, getting them to hit each other, jumping over their heads or tumbling between their legs: he basically disrupts any battle line. cheers, Mark

Re: Fantasy Art Thread Hmmmm. To help me in future could you guys let me know what looks best here? I have three gradually lighter versions of the same pic. cheers, Mark

Re: Fantasy Art Thread That's the problem with having your characters do all their combat in caves, or at night! To me, it looks OK on any one of three monitors, but they're all LCDs. Dunno if that makes a difference. cheers, Mark

Re: Fantasy Art Thread And here's everybody's favourite character in our game ... well, he's my favourite character, anyway performing one of his signature moves - running in among enemies and tricking them into hitting each other. cheers, Mark

Re: I love me some xenomorphs! I'd just assumed that they were resting to conserve energy, in the absence of any food: the fact that they woke up rapidly and went straight into action, indicates that they weren't hibernating as we understand the term - by definition, it's a form of slowed metabolism much deeper than sleep. Still, it's an alien life-form: who knows how it actually operates? This does explain where the alien in the original film got its extra mass - though it also opens the question why we never see any signs of them eating anything inorganic - or indeed, why they didn't just eat their way out of prison in the 4th movie instead of killing one of their members. That said, in a cut scene from the first movie, you have this dialog, when Ripley finds Dallas cocooned and the Brett-egg, she says to Dallas, "I'm going to get you out of here" and Dallas replies, "No, it's too late for me, the alien has eaten to much of me already... see what it did to Brett" It's hard to say too much definitive - most of the people taken by aliens in the film are simply never seen again. Eaten? Implanted? Who knows? Interestingly though, it raises one question - if aliens can eat inorganic material, then presumably they could implant androids. That'd be an interesting baby! It also raises the question of why they need biological hosts at all - though if they were a bioweapon, I guess that could have been designed in. cheers, Mark

Re: I love me some xenomorphs! You're thinking biologically: it doesn't make sense in terms of a living organism, but it makes perfect sense in terms of a biological weapon designed for a sudden population explosion, followed by a rapid population collapse. Since I don't know of any movie references that suggest aliens actually hibernate - but the first film definately indicates that the eggs will survive a long time - you get an engineered lifecycle that goes like this: 1. Drop some eggs onto your target population. Chestbursting ensues. 2. Rapid population of Xenomorphs develops and - instinctually driven - the Xenomorphs create a "queen egg" if they don't already have a queen. 3. The queen gets to laying eggs. The xenomorphs scour the surrounding territory and bring prey back to the nest. At some point they run out of prey and the xenomorphs with their rapid metabolism, and short lifespan, start to die off (including, eventually the queen). 4. You now have a depopulated area. Move in and (carefully now!) harvest the eggs. As long as you don't go waving anything big an' meaty near them they'll stay good for a long time. 5. At some point, move back to 1. cheers, Mark

Re: I love me some xenomorphs!

Re: I love me some xenomorphs! It was what - in Giger's original sketches - allowed them to have piston action shoot out jaws. There's not actually a great deal of brainspace in there (and there no real relation that we know of between brain size and smarts anyway), and in the movies at least (I know nothing of the games of comics) they didn't seem a great deal smarter than a large primate - if that. Orangoutangs are smart enough to figure out locks and make their own lockpicks, and I didn't actually see that level of smarts in the aliens. They don't learn to open doors after watching humans do it, they don't seem to differentiate between an armed human and an unarmed one, their response to an automated weapon turret is to simply charge it and die (rather than just, you know, going around ...), they never seem to learn what an airlock is, etc. They're fast and they're tough, they breed like nobody's business and they are even meaner than my grandma was - and in addition they seem to be able to acquire useful traits from their hosts - but smart, they really don't seem to be. cheers, Mark

Re: A senario: ideas and help me flesh it out. Here's a suggested timeline - it's a scenario I ran in my game (inspired by an REH story in Swords of Sharazar), which I later cut down and used as a Con game. It went well, in both cases. 1. Characters get together - somehow 2. Characters stumble across a guy being beaten up - and heroically intervene! 3. If the characters do intervene the beating-up people run off: they not armed and armoured for a full-on confrontation. If they are not the intervening type, the victim makes dash for freedom, brushing against one of them and depositing something on their person before disappearing, thugs in pursuit. Either way (Grateful victim or thing stuffed in sleeve) they end up with a ragged piece of parchment on which is indicated a route to the site of interest. However most of the details on it are jotted in some unknown tongue with only more recent, sketchy translations to indicate that there is treasure! If the victim survives, he can explain he found the treasure map in an old book and when he showed his translation to a group of adventurers to try and assemble a party, they tried to just beat him up and take the map. 4. Site of interest is across the desert and up in some rocky hills - you can make survival rolls to get there, climbing rolls to cross the trackless crags, swimming tests to cross the swift bridgeless rivers, etc. Throw in a few fights with one or two minor threats (snakes, scorpions, a pack of wild dogs or something more fantastic) Make 'em work for their travel. 5. At some point they realise that they are being shadowed - by somebody - but their attempts to set ambushes, etc will fail. (in fact, they are being watched by two groups: the adventurers who tried to steal the treasure map and the hill tribes for whom their destination is sacred). 6. Use the conjurer/afrit thing as described, if you want - at the point some remaining tribesmen will head home for reinforcements. 7. Enter tomb, steal McGuffin (in my case it was a statue encrusted with garnets - the bloodstained god) 8. When the players come out they find the way out blocked by the other adventuring party (in my case the temple was carved into a crag - the only way out was by a narrow ledge, making fighting your way out near impossible with archers covering the path, forcing them into a sniping fight .... with a limited number of arrows 9. The fight is interrupted by the arrival of more tribesmen. The players - there are only two of them after all - should be clear that they probably cannot deal with all these guys alone and of they get trapped in the tomb, they are toast. The smart option is to team up with the other group - in the sure knowledge that at some point, the others will probably turn on them - for a series of running fights out of the tribe's territory. cheers, Mark