Well of Souls Forums

Siber wrote:I wonder if Beryl was supposed to be that forthcoming with strategic information.

If he's an Umiak spy then he already knows, if he's not then he should be aware of the situation since it's important to understand the capacities of both sides.

Alex is small for a human male. Not really, he's around average for an American today. Granted we are tending towards being taller so he'd probably be a bit short for the 23rd century (assuming the trend continues). He may be a tick taller than a male loroi, though. More than a tick, he's the bette...

Out of interest, would it be fair to say that Winter Tide was built with the possibility of surviving such a critical failure? Sure. If an Abrams gets hit in the ammo storage it's designed to blow out in a way that won't kill the crew. It's entirely possible that the ship is designed with an eye to...

Might as well put it here, part 2 of the scrape of the old forums is complete. https://rapidshare.com/files/458440410/ButAriochSaid....txt There might be some overlap or a few that fell between the cracks, but combine this with the old one and you've got a pretty comprehensive collection (minus the ...

Spoilers? Seriously if you click on the Page thread without reading first you deserve what you get. @Wintermute The amount of energy contained in an average ship is enormous, I would expect that death by breached reactor/magazine is a common occurrence only made uncommon by the time it took for the ...

TheUnforsaken wrote:However, they pulled back almost immediately for no reason I can see

IIRC it was because their forces weren't really mobilized for a full-scale invasion yet. So they wouldn't have had the ability to continue the attack, but they were beyond their defenses, not a good situation for the troops.

Farseeing didn´t work only on the humans, umiak are still detectable. Except that the Farseer onboard the Tempest (and the Farseers in the other 2 fleets) didn't get a good lock on the Umiak here. They know (IIRC) that there are Umiak there, but they aren't able to nail down numbers or locations. H...

osmium wrote:the Loroi are more like a small well trained force and the Umiak are more like hordes of disposable troops...

Russians vs. Germans in WW2.

Additionally we don't know every object because it costs money and there's no money to be made in knowing every object. Astronomers can spend their grant money on something fairly pointless that no one cares about, or they can spend their grant money on something interesting that can advance our kno...

I still say detecting mass driver shots in a battle enviroment, in space..is silly. If they could detect such small objects, their sensors would be beeping 24/7...cause there all kind of crap in space. In a battle environment it would be slightly more difficult, but only slightly. Space is mostly e...

Especially when you start to say that gravity 'pulls apart on pretty much the entire thing equally'. Gravity penetrates through objects, a gun designed to pull things along by gravity at tens of thousands of g s will put enormous strain on anything fired through it. That strain would not likely be ...

Given the drive technology in Outsider (which uses the inertial damping effect to amplify acceleration of reaction mass), I think it's possible to build a decent high-percentage-of-lightspeed mass driver with Loroi or Umiak tech, especially if you're willing to build ships that look like the Gosrot...

Disagree. If they aren't ferromagnetic then the MD won't be able to shoot them. the universe is a very noisy place. If you have sensors that can detect tiny chunks of metal in space, then you have GODLY sensor tech. Not really, WE have sensors capable of detecting chunks of ferromagnetic materials ...

Meh, the magnetic fields required to make a mass driver powerful enough to even consider would make structural integrity a huge issue, anything designed to come apart probably will, inside the gun. Bare in mind everyone and their cousin have what amounts to 'electro gravity' in this world. It's a f...

Hence the shotgun approach. To cover a large area of space. This VASTLY increases the hit-ratio, even if the damage is reduced due to smaller shells. The velocity will still be too low. A HUMAN ship can maneuver out of the path of a mass driver shot at distances of only a few thousand km, and the s...

Well, Stillstorm did say to "reserve nothing," so if she held onto them, she'd be disobeying orders I guess. I don't think that means "fire everything at this very second", rather I think it means "don't keep reserves, use all your ordnance at the most opportune time." Immagine a cailgun/railgun sh...

I believe that the last time it came up I made the analogy of a Chinese person taught English by a Brit trying to talk to someone in the Deep South.

For instance, how wide would the beam be? How wide do you WANT it to be? But the desired effect of the laser beam is delivery of energy. So would the thickness of the laser beam alone have any effect on its performance as a weapon? Very much. The wider the beam the more dispersed the energy is. Tha...

I don't know how much the author has thought into it, but taking the universe at face value it would also be valuable to use speech for recording purposes. He knows. but since telepathic signals can't currently be recorded or retransmitted, spoken language is also used for radio communication and f...

So yes, it would be great to have a "master archive" from the old system, if that's something you'd be willing to spend time on. I'll start working on it this weekend (which for me is Tue-Thu), it may be hard to figure out exactly where I left off so some might slip through the cracks but I'll do m...