Some questions about outsider

Discussion regarding the Outsider webcomic, science, technology and science fiction.

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Karst45
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Re: Some questions about outsider

Post by Karst45 »

Mr Bojangles wrote:
Karst45 wrote:
Mr Bojangles wrote: Guys, guys. We want to get rid of Bieber. If he's in Canada, or Japan, he's still ultimately here. This is a forum for a sci-fi webcomic. Surely one of us is into big rockets, or knows someone who is. I say, strap him to the biggest rocket we can find, point it in a direction away from Earth, and hit the launch button. Problem solved. :D
*bieber is send back 10 year later with a foreign message*

Keep your garbage with you. Next time we will consider this an act of war!
Hmm, point. Solution: aim the rocket at the sun.
lets just hope it wont make the sun implode. (you know because he suck a lots)

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Mr Bojangles
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Re: Some questions about outsider

Post by Mr Bojangles »

Karst45 wrote:
lets just hope it wont make the sun implode. (you know because he suck a lots)
Touché, Karst, touché. :lol:

Solemn
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Re: Some questions about outsider

Post by Solemn »

William Golding wrote:Fancy thinking the Bieber is something you can hunt and kill!
With these words, Golding lays bare the concept at the heart of his classic work The Lord of the Flies. It shares something in common with the concept of the Eternal Recurrence, and with Campbell's conception of the Monomyth; the notion that some things, some stories and narrative patterns and concepts and events, are so natural and innate (to the world or to humanity or reality) that they cannot but be part of an ever-repeating cycle, albeit with variations and deviations in detail.

The Bieber is far more important as a concept than as a specific entity within the work, and we find that, as a concept, it is inescapable; had it not come about in the way that it did, it would have evolved through a different means, because the things the concept addresses, such as the need to externalize an antagonist to fear and hate--and, yes, in certain ways and for certain people, even to venerate and worship--are part of the human condition, the human conception of reality.

Whether or not a Bieber actually exists as a discrete entity, and whether or not such an entity is actually literally the Christian Satan, is entirely irrelevant; if the Bieber did not exist, it would have been necessary to create him, because he is part of us; he answers a deep need within human nature, and we can never fully be rid of him, not even if we leave all of civilization and all pre-existing embodiments and understandings of the Bieber behind. Think of all the uses of a concept similar to the Bieber society has made even within your own time.

Because it appeals to some base human instincts within the dark hearts of so many, the Bieber is a matter of Eternal Recurrence; so long as humanity exists, so too will the Bieber. Whatever happens to the current form, the current embodiment, or even the current specific concept is irrelevant; to divest ourselves of the current civilized and controlled construct of society's current Bieber may simply loose a more primordial, more direct, and even more terrible Bieber upon us all, because society exists at least in part to control the power of this eternal idea.
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Razor One
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Re: Some questions about outsider

Post by Razor One »

Karst45 wrote:and what a trap waitress?
Allow me to explain :)

A "Trap" is any man who has the appearance of a woman and can easily (and forgivably) be mistaken as such. Transgendered persons would be one particular flavour of a trap, but doesn't encompass the entire meaning. The reverse situation, a woman whom can easily and forgivably mistaken for a man, also applies, though some tend to try and differentiate this particular flavour by applying "Reverse Trap".

A trap waitress would be a man whom has dressed up as a waitress and convincingly looks like a woman.
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ed_montague
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Re: Some questions about outsider

Post by ed_montague »

Razor One wrote:
Karst45 wrote:and what a trap waitress?
Allow me to explain :)

A "Trap" is any man who has the appearance of a woman and can easily (and forgivably) be mistaken as such. Transgendered persons would be one particular flavour of a trap, but doesn't encompass the entire meaning. The reverse situation, a woman whom can easily and forgivably mistaken for a man, also applies, though some tend to try and differentiate this particular flavour by applying "Reverse Trap".

A trap waitress would be a man whom has dressed up as a waitress and convincingly looks like a woman.
Right. What you said.

I wonder if Bieber will still be popular when we make contact...
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NOMAD
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Re: Some questions about outsider

Post by NOMAD »

ed_montague wrote: Right. What you said.

I wonder if Bieber will still be popular when we make contact...


I hoe not :oops: I mean the young man is successful but I don't think he would be a good "representation" of earth music.

as for hairy eatable things, the list could include deer, bears, mouse, buffalo ( very hairy) and other mammals as well.

as for a hunter society, I don't they would be picky ( except if the spider were HUGH)
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Michael
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Re: Some questions about outsider

Post by Michael »

Karst45 wrote:what your plan? cause we just planned on crating him and shipping him to England.
by plane? cos we have a state of the art anti-aircraft vessel in the Falklands....if you could see your way clear to, i don't know, maybe chart a flight plan so he does a fly over? im sure fleet command will allow a "training exercise" at just the right moment....
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junk
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Re: Some questions about outsider

Post by junk »

Mr Bojangles wrote:
ed_montague wrote: Aw. There goes the idyllic rural lifestyle. Something of a shame, no? (Of course, you've got to have people tending to the farms and stuff, which preserves some hope for good ol' country living.)
To feed 25 billion-plus people, I imagine massive automation and controlled conditions for food growth. I'm envisioning aircraft carrier-sized aero-/hydroponics farms tended to by robots. On the other hand, all those people would need employment, and you'd need lots of farms to meet demand.

As for good ol' country living, well, who's to say the population hasn't become incredibly agoraphobic, à la The Caves of Steel? But, if everyone lives in kilometers-high arcologies, what land isn't being farmed would likely be preserved. I would imagine camping would still be a possibility.

This makes me curious. Just how do humans live on Outsider Earth? There isn't much info in the Insider.
You technically don't need employment for those people. You just need to keep them busy. There's a lot of ways how to keep a lot of people busy as long as they get their 3 meals a day and entertainment.

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Mjolnir
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Re: Some questions about outsider

Post by Mjolnir »

javcs wrote:The problem is that when you look at the in-universe descriptions of the 'binary' language, one finds that if you're not a droid, you can neither speak it nor fully understand it (though you can get the general gist of what's being said), as 'binary' could accurately be described as a form of high-speed, high-density, sonic-based data transmission that covers a range that extends both above and below the normal auditory range. Which means that a vocabulator capable of generating 'binary' ought to be capable of handling just about any 'normal' auditory language.
Not to mention that one of the primary purposes of the "vocabulator" would be to interact with non-droids, and other droids illustrate that handling normal speech is not difficult, expensive, or in any way limiting. It appears to be something so standardized and widespread that it would likely be used on a deep mining droid that might never speak to anything but droids in its entire existence, just because nobody bothers to make a version that doesn't support normal speech.

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Grayhome
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Re: Some questions about outsider

Post by Grayhome »

I'm curious if anyone knows the length of time a Loroi fighter can stay in action, how many times they can fire their beam weapons etc.

Solemn
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Re: Some questions about outsider

Post by Solemn »

EDIT: Damn, I seem to have misread the fuel definition in the Combat Sim.

Edit 2: And my math was wrong too. Go figure.
Last edited by Solemn on Sun Apr 01, 2012 8:19 am, edited 2 times in total.

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Arioch
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Re: Some questions about outsider

Post by Arioch »

Grayhome wrote:I'm curious if anyone knows the length of time a Loroi fighter can stay in action, how many times they can fire their beam weapons etc.
The limiting factor is fuel, so the endurance of a fighter depends on how aggressively it's consuming fuel. The light interceptors probably have enough fuel to run at full thrust for only a few hours; the ballpark fuel values I have listed in the tactical sim translate into about 3.3 hours at full thrust (fuel is consumed per turn, not per segment)... I haven't done a lot of work to see if that's the right answer, but it's probably less than 8 hours. A larger fighter or attack craft has double that fuel endurance. But that's at full acceleration; a fighter that's just keeping station uses very little fuel and can probably stay out for days at a time (though the pilot(s) may want to carry additional life support consumables for a long-duration mission).

The lasers draw a lot less power than running the drives, so while firing the weapons will consume fuel, it translates into a lot of shots.

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Grayhome
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Re: Some questions about outsider

Post by Grayhome »

Thanks for the speedy reply to the fighter question, here is another: who is Estennia? The Loroi girl in the 2001 Halloween greeting art.

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Arioch
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Re: Some questions about outsider

Post by Arioch »

Grayhome wrote:Thanks for the speedy reply to the fighter question, here is another: who is Estennia? The Loroi girl in the 2001 Halloween greeting art.
The 2001 Halloween pic was a collaboration between myself and Jeannie Lee (a.k.a. Juno Kim), whose page I was hosting at the time. Estennia was one of her characters (and not Loroi).

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Grayhome
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Re: Some questions about outsider

Post by Grayhome »

Oh, I thought she might be the navigator we have yet to meet.

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Re: Some questions about outsider

Post by javcs »

Grayhome wrote:Oh, I thought she might be the navigator we have yet to meet.
Navigator? I think you mean Farseer.

CaptainChaos
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Re: Some questions about outsider

Post by CaptainChaos »

I was going through the insider info dump and I had a question about Stillstorm. Just how "big" of a big shot is (or was) she in the Loroi military? Its’ been mentioned that Stillstorm was a supporter of the prior emperor and as a political enemy of the new Emperor she was basically left on frontline duty indefinitely as a way of getting rid of her; either by way of enemy fire or simply keeping her away from the corridors of powers (I’m not sure which), this seems a pretty severe means of dealing with a critic who is also a valuable military commander, so I imagine Stillstorm must have been a significant threat to the new Emperor (or Greywind just really hates her guts). If nothing else, Beryl claims that Stillstorm is one of the most illustrious and skilled commanders in their military. Lastly, if Stillstorm wasn’t that important in the Loroi military command, just how common is it for the Loroi leaders to purge political rivals and their supporters by assigning them to “dead-end” posts like this?

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Re: Some questions about outsider

Post by discord »

mr chaos: the one does not exclude the other, good combat commander, political enemy? assign her to combat duty(where her skills should be used anyway) might die which is not big loss for a politician AND keeps her out of the halls of power, it's a win win win situation as far as politicos think.

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Re: Some questions about outsider

Post by Arioch »

Stillstorm has long been a political opponent to the current Emperor in the sense that she opposes the Emperor's policies, but was never a "rival" in the sense of being herself a candidate for that office. However, Stillstorm's current situation is a little bit more complicated than just a case of being a political opponent.

At the time that Greywind came to power in 2140, things were going very badly for the Loroi, and there had been bitter disputes within the government about whether or not to increase the powers of the Imperial office in the name of war necessity. The Loroi Axis was a "loyal opposition" party that had traditionally opposed expansion of central authority, and so they were very much against approving emergency powers, whereas others (of whom Greywind was an outspoken example) advocated the argument that such powers were essential if the Loroi were to stand any chance of avoiding being overwhelmed by the Umiak. The previous Emperor Eighth Dawn had conservatively resisted such reforms, but when she was killed in action, there was a major political power play within the Diadem, and when the arm-twisting was over, the expansionists had won and Greywind was appointed to replace the deceased Emperor.

Knowing full well that Greywind intended to declare martial law and nationalize large sectors of the Loroi economy, a group of Axis leaders along with some loyalists of the dead Emperor (and some civilian industrial magnates who stood to lose much in such reforms) actually attempted to overthrow Greywind in the months following her accession. However, since Greywind's faction was backed by the Mizol, they knew this move was coming, and the internal conflict that ensued was short and one-sided.

Stillstorm at that time was an up-and-coming senior captain (already more than 100 years old, as most of the senior members of the officer corps then were) who was a known member of the Axis, but not a major political player and not tied directly to the revolt, so she survived the purge that followed. Afterward, Stillstorm proved a loyal and capable officer, serving with distinction under Sunfall in the controversial Tithric campaign, and though her political affiliations were never forgotten, Stillstorm continued to rise in rank and influence.

However, the catastrophe that ended the Semoset offensive in 2146 was devastating to the Loroi military, costing them nearly a third of their fleet and the cream of their officer corps. Stillstorm lost most of her comrades, including both of her daughters, and she herself sustained near-fatal injuries when her command cruiser Silver Cloud was shot out from under her in the Battle of the Tasinei Ways. She spent several years afterward recovering, during which time she was declared to be psychologically unfit for duty. At one point she cut off her own hair, which is a symbol of expulsion from the warrior class (and the reason why she currently has such short hair for so elderly a Loroi). The consensus was that she had simply been pushed past her breaking point.

At length, Stillstorm eventually recovered sufficiently to return to duty, but she had been demoted during her hiatus, and she had a great deal to prove to convince her superiors that she could still be effective. This is when she agreed to be assigned to raider duty. Stillstorm proved very effective as a raider captain, and it was not long before she was restored to her full rank of Lashret (rear admiral) and given Tempest as her flagship. However, Stillstorm was never again the same person she had been before Semoset. Her personality had become brittle; she gained a reputation for harshness bordering on cruelty, and was sometimes given to erratic behavior or taking seemingly unnecessary risks. She also became more vocal in her opposition to the actions of Greywind's government. This together with her excellent performance in her current assignment made her superiors reluctant to promote or reassign her. So she remained on raider duty, surviving against the odds year after year and racking up statistics that made her legend grow, even among the Umiak. But even this legendary status began to work against her, as it fed the whispers that had first begun when she survived the loss of Silver Cloud that she was bad luck (that is, draining luck from those around her) and that to be assigned under her was a death sentence.

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Re: Some questions about outsider

Post by CaptainChaos »

thanks for the reply and background information on Stillstorm Arioch! No surprise that Stillstorm is a bit harsh given what we've seen in the comic. But i wonder what will happen when she shows her cruel side - short answer nothing good for the Umiak!

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