Well of Souls Forums

Animals have very specific requirements for domestication: they must have some kind herd/pack/social behavior that you can exploit to control them, and they have to have an appropriate temperament to be handled and to breed in captivity. Yeah but when you're a fantasy species with telepathic powers...

Why do male loroi crave sexual intercourse so much?

So, you're definitely correct when you say that it's analyzing source images, however, it's not doing that in real time. It's already "digested" the hundreds of millions of images from it's training data, and it - along with other diffusion models - seem once trained able to operate without a conne...

I remember a story about an isolated village in which everyone was happy, healthy, and prosperous, save one - a person who had been taken from his parents and placed in a cell, where he was never held, never spoken to, and never had direct contact with another human being. His misery somehow enable...

The higher infant mortality rate and the percentage of women dying in childbirth may have played a role, too.  When everyone has survived at least one child, sibling, spouse, or parent before old age (at 30-40 years) takes them, it is almost guaranteed that most survivors simply accepted human mort...

Hmm. Pure speculation, but I would presume that some degree of cognitive sophistication is required for the Loroi to connect at all, else they would never get sick ("Stay back, viruses!"). But too sophisticated might create resistance, due to the will of the individual. I have no idea where the lin...

If you dont mind my asking, where is that second picture from? The "General Products" hulls in Niven's books are made out of a transparent material, which is described as being in fact a single molecule of exotic matter. While they allow visible light to go through, they are fully opaque to the res...

The Humans in the comic are so puny, why would the Hierarchy take them seriously? Because they are described as paranoid and therefore would refuse to underestimate any potential threat until it has been thoroughly analyzed and either integrated into the Hierarchy as a productive vassal state or en...

I say nearly because realistically they would pass out along the way from lack of oxygen and either fall to their death or wake up to fly straight instead of splattering all over the ground. While the Loroi have a lower body temperature, I think they'd still be hindered by the freezing cold before ...

How does it defeat it's purpose. Perfect if your misfortune hits a completely alien race you know nothing about, instead of hitting your own race.... Because the item will not bond to the alien! The diral-seii works on a diral; on a non-diral person it will not be able to connect. That's Alien Magi...

More or less, except with a circle in it. I actually wanted a pendant with a compass rose on it, but the chaos symbol is easier to carve, I think. I think the arrowheads would make it more complicated than a compass rose, actually. Typically a compass rose (like the one on the NATO emblem) is four ...

I would say that with multiple languages in play it makes it harder to have a single ruling government over all. The Loroi do not have that issue because.... SANZAI! So if anything they would have an easier time coodinating their effort and sharing information accross Loroi cultures than we ever ha...

They're for freight only. People were allowed to use them in the beginning, but they kept going insane after having to listen to elevator music for 6 hours straight. And then there was this one time that it got stuck halfway and it took the fire department 30 days of climbing stairs to reach the ca...

Attraction and romance are an area where the loroi are quite alien to us. There's no such thing in loroi society. They don't do pair bonding or families. Sexuality is overseen by a caste of matchmakers who operate mostly on eugenist principle: a few noteworthy loroi will be rewarded with the privile...

About hair length, remember the magic words: "artistic license".

You're entitled to your opinion, I'm entitled to mine. I will leave the debate for those threads dedicated to the topic, so as not to hijack this one. I'll only say this: the Loroi have committed genocide. The Umiak are attempting the same against the Loroi. Is actual genocide worse than attempted ...

@ARIOCH: Relatively speaking, how easy is for a Farseer to detect an Umiak Mind from several AU away? How adversely does post-jump disorientation experienced by the Umiak affect detection? Do the Umiak have mind-numbing drugs to help them mitigate jump sickness? Does close proximity to a white dwar...

For option 1, they don't need Farseers esp., and Loroi captive who met the new humans could tell them about the blocking effect. From there, it doesn't take a rocket bug to wonder what effect it might have on those damn Farseers. But then that means the Umiak SOP when encountering a new kind of ali...

It could even be human derived, if they captured one of the other scouts, and reverse engineered our ability to block detection. Problem with that is that this requires them to know that humans escape Loroi far sensing. And I don't see many ways they could have that knowledge. In fact, I can only s...

Picture this.... a large belly lander SSTO, using reusable chemical rockets for VTOL to get in the air, and then it starts to nearly flip backward before firing it's main rear engine which has a single, thick bodied nozzle. Is it truly an SSTO if it uses rockets for take off ? If you mean it has in...