Well of Souls Forums

An interesting discussion I saw online about warship CiC designs prompted a question about the loroi: Does having multiple parallel sanzai conversations in a small area run a risk of 'interference' between them, as with multiple humans having a spoken conversation? E.g. the bridge officers on Tempes...

For what it's worth, in sci-fi settings where they can quite casually break physics already (FTL, artificial gravity, *time travel*, etc.) I think that heat dissipation is among the least-implausible concepts that these settings handwave away. To use your Star Trek example, if that setting has 'warp...

Good catch! I'll fix that right now.

Also, I'm glad that you enjoyed the story enough to reread it!

How would a 'pen pal' sort of friendship between a loroi warrior and a male be looked at in typical loroi society? E.g. a case where a warrior's hobby (what she does on her downtime, say, carve traditional Daiam wooden flutes or something) lines up with a male's area of study (a historian whose area...

On the topic of names... Are there any 'institutional' nicknames/slang for different warrior positions among loroi? For example, we see Talon refer to Tempo as 'mother' (not to her face) during the shuttle scene; is this a bit of wit unique to Talon, or is this perhaps analogous to the common IRL ni...

Airplane wings are substantially *heavier* than radiator panels: they are structural members that support the aircraft rather than simply their own weight. And even then, the main limit on the wingspan of modern aircraft isn't the strength of the wings, but physical size that would make taxiing too ...

I suspect that you may be mistakenly assuming that radiators all have the same form-factor as those currently deployed aboard the ISS: a mast-and-sails approach that stretches thin panels out directly away from the main hull. That's the most mass-efficient design *for a static structure*, not for a ...

Here on Earth we already have systems that can quickly detect and plug such a leak - that's not much of a challenge to address. Assuming the radiator is designed well, there will be multiple alternative routes for coolant to be routed through in order to reach the main dissipation areas. And for any...

It's worth noting that while radiator panels are vulnerable, they're also *cheap* for any star-faring civilization. I would imagine that warships consider radiator assemblies to be essentially 'consumables' much like ammunition: you know going into combat that you're going to lose many, so you keep ...

Haha! I love it! Poor ~ten diral-kids, lost on an alien world... (And poor Egypt, Mycenae, and Hittites, having to fight them!) Pharaoh Meneptah, seeing ten rather fierce (and very blue) young women aiming spears and bows at him: "[What in Thoth's good name am I looking at, here?]" Also, come to thi...

Neat! And with that in mind, how does the 'average' Deinar Traditionalist group view such wayward members? Is a son/daughter who so leaves their home and family likely to find themselves in a 'you're dead to us' sort of situation, or would that be more 'come visit us on leave when you can'? Or is th...

Two questions, one specific and one more general: 1) Given how old she is and how the war's been going, does Stillstorm still have any family left? Any that she personally knows, that is. 2) With there still existing a few clans/tribes on Deinar that choose to live in a sort of pre-modern existence,...

For the Rings themselves, spacing them rotationally does still require some overlap at two points, but given how magnetic forces drop off with distance it's still quite doable to space them apart enough to minimize interference. You also don't have to make the Rings perfectly concentric: a Ring can...

{Orbital Ring and Shell World} That doesn't make sense. In order to be in orbit, a ring has to be spinning around the center of gravity of the planet -- you can't stack them to the left and right to make a mesh. You could space them rotationally, but then they will intersect at two opposing points,...

For what it's worth, a Shell World (Put the gun away, Talon, not *that* kind of 'Shell'!) is conceptually simple enough to support. Each layer rests upon a mesh of interlocking Orbital Rings, which counteract the weight of the layer above. Orbital Rings, for reference, use a stream of magnetically-a...

Reading through the PDF, I get the impression that they've deliberately (and wisely, IMO) broken down the 'Moon Base' goal into as many intermediate steps as they can manage. That increases the chance that at least some of the machines/technologies resulting from those intermediate steps can survive...

And in regards to some of the Loroi we've seen already, have you ever come up with an idea as to what some of them sound like? I know there's that French actress for Beryl, but what about Talon, Spiral, Tempo, or any of the others? Because I've imagined a certain Stillstorm as sounding like a witch...

That makes sense. I dare say that Alex is certainly happy that Beryl was so combat-trained! Speaking of specialist castes, is there a 'seniority' in terms of which caste a loroi born with multiple rare talents would be assigned to? Say, a child with both a listel's perfect memory and also useful psy...

A question on loroi castes and stereotypes: given that loroi warriors represent (IIRC) ~50% of all loroi, any group that large is likely to include some who want the social respect of being warriors but would be less-than-enthused at the prospect of getting stuck into a combat action. Are there any ...

On a completely different topic, a question about Stillstorm: What rank/command did she hold at the beginning of the war? Has she been a strikeforce-Lashret all the time, or is that a promotion (or even a 'demotion' or less prestigious command?) compared to where she'd worked her way up to during pe...