Well of Souls Forums

Having wrongly rejected graphite as a moderator and miscalculated the amount of uranium needed to make a working bomb, or a reactor by more than an order of magnitude, Heisenberg doomed Nazi nuclear research. It doesn't matter how much you imagine they focus on it, they are headed in the wrong direc...

far be it from me to stick to an argument when it has more holes in it than the Bismark. Well, the Bismar c k wasn´t sunk by the shells. It´s citadel, and therefor the ability to float, remained intact because the british artillery was too weak to penetrate it. It sunk, because her own crew opened ...

"Mass drivers" make no sense as anti-ship weapons, or even as ship-mounted weapons. They throw dumb rocks that do damage by their kinetic energy alone. The original "mass driver" was the lunar catapult in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress". It has two fairly significant characteristics: it's got an inex...

Continuity in Star Wars.....Don't look for it. Applause. You've got it right. The original Star Wars is a great movie. The best SF we'd seen up to then had been Kubrick's 2001, which was many things, a lot of them good, but cerebral, not an engaging action movie. Star Wars, eagerly anticipated by t...

fredgiblet wrote During and after WW2 there was a massive shift away from full-power rifle rounds to intermediate power rifle rounds due to the fact that most militaries (though notably not the US) realized that the full power rifle rounds were rarely, if ever, being used to their full ability. I t...

Absalom wrote Frank Herbert's Dune is one of the cornerstone novels of the Silver Age. Reworked from two serials in Analog it won a Hugo and the first Nebula for novels, a success with both fans and the SF "establishment". Perhaps you'd know, was his short-story work on average better? Also, would ...

Absolom, addressing just one part of your large post: Crusty old Fan here, who can remember the hoo-hah raised by Dune and its increasingly dull sequels. Frank Herbert's Dune is one of the cornerstone novels of the Silver Age. Reworked from two serials in Analog it won a Hugo and the first Nebula fo...

True. I was once part of the Scouts, a rather interesting organization (a paramilitary group founded to teach young boys how to survive at war, a goal which it has apparently succeeded--in Vietnam, American soldiers who were Scouts survived better than others, I think). HotButton time. I'm a Queen'...

Armstrong is a figurehead and his distorted announcement from the Lunar surface marks a stage in mankinds growth - "to land a man on the moon and return him safely to earth". As his family have said, "The next time you walk outside on a clear night and see the moon smiling down at you, think of Neil...

What is this obsession with mass drivers as spaceship weapons? They make no sense at all in that context. "Mass drivers" in SF all descend from Little David's Sling in Robert Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", one of his better novels (it's one of my favourites). In this context, the mass dr...

A couple of posters seem to think that horses require less supply than motor vehicles. I don't think you appreciate the logistics of horse-powered warfare. Mounted cavalry requires a great deal of supplies, much more than motorised armour. Horses need to be fed even when unused - they can't be turne...

I think Gale crater may teach us a lot about Martian geology, but it seems to me that finding convincing evidence of past life on Mars would take a lot more than a rover scratching around the surface. From what I understand, Mars lost its magnetic field (and along with it most of its atmosphere and...

RationalWiki on Intelligent Design

This is the most outstanding achievement in spaceflight for a long time. The complete success of the complex landing sequence, by preprogrammed systems without remote intervention, is a good sign all around, not only that we are getting better at automated systems, but that we can apply those system...

Mr moderator fredgiblet sir, you clearly have sources of information that I have not been able to find. Stats pages for the Outsider characters in some kind of game. Are they canon, and where are they located? http://i188.photobucket.com/albums/z206/fredgiblet/gurps_beryl2-1.gif Thanks - I should h...

Ensign Jardin is my name And Terra is my nation Deep space is my dwelling-place The stars my destination Good Evening, Gully, glad you could make it. Did you jaunt? Someone finally got the reference. I could hug you over the internet. Even if you're from across the pond. :P I'm a bit surprised that...

I am now taking this thread completely off-topic with a note that the American gymnasts at the London Olympics did an incredibly awesome job. Insert nationalistic bragging A fraction of your population and third in the medal table. Ha! Team GB! and flamebaiting. passée Ensign Jardin is my name And ...

I've actually said this before. Beryl has 5 points of Xenophilia (it doesn't mean what you think it means (unless it does)), which means she is interested in non-Loroi to the point where it can be detrimental to her , whether that means getting yelled at for talking to Alex about baseball instead o...

First post here: I don't know if this idea has been posted before. I can't find anything that looks like it on a brief search. I think that Beryl is pursuing her own agenda, to befriend Alex with the aim of extracting information. I think she's been ordered to do this but she may have decided to do ...