Lady Wisdom's Favorite

[...] and brushed the edge of it in the spaceship rules of various SF RPGs, that there are ships in science fiction that don't run on rockets. Which, except for the relatively few reactionless drives, is [...]

[...] ?" I realized that the trend of my recent edits to my book, one that I think all science fiction should follow, is toward the realistic portrayal of advanced technology. I.e., very [...]

[...] to the Falmer (who are blind...) grows glowing mushrooms, but you don't see it much in science fiction. Why shouldn't some alien species' streetside trees become streetlights, at night? I'm giving [...]

[...] Thoughts on speculative fiction. Mostly science fiction but there's a couple about fantasy. 513 is 33 × 19, which makes it a Harshad number in [...]

[...] weighs 60,000 pounds without fuel, and its fuel weighs 84,180 pounds. That means it has a mass ratio of 2.364. If you built a magnetic-confinement fusion ship with that mass ratio, it'd get you up [...]

[...] , not "about a head" taller. Knockout and Bumblebee are also probably too big; the mass ratio of an Aston Martin or a new Camaro to a human gives a height of 5 meters; they're both more [...]

[...] rounds as opposed to 210. And he only has to reload four times, instead of seven. Given the caseless rounds are only 32.85 millimeters long, it might be feasible to have the magazines load in the top& [...]

[...] . This allows each round to require only 67.2% as much propellant as is used in the G11's caseless rounds (which use RDX), and 42% as much propellant as the equivalent nitrocellulose-propelled round. [...]

[...] the Japanese Self-Defense Forces, yeah, you're gonna have to hunt around a bit, 'cause the Wikipedia article? It's got the English and the kanji, but romanized Japanese? Nope. The formatting for those [...]

[...] of rockets that move things along at a plot-friendly clip. One of them is that, as the Wikipedia article on constant acceleration puts it, "where the vehicle acceleration is high [...]

[...] , apparently, might actually be organic polymers, according to a theory mentioned in the Wikipedia article on "room-temperature" (really "above 0°C") superconductors. Or at least [...]

[...] is not documented and has to be deduced through reverse engineering." That's from the Wikipedia article on emulation. It goes on to say, "if the emulator does not perform as quickly as the [...]

[...] of the question I often ask, "Why do they continue to base fantasy stories on lies about medieval Europe, when there's so much else in the world?", there are certain developments in the [...]

[...] by "revolution", actually. People had had factories from Roman times, and medieval Europe had mechanical saws and cam-driven automated hammers . But it wasn't the basis of their [...]

[...] diet and I hope they use you as a protein supplement.) In Rome it was lentils and wheat; in medieval Europe it was peas and wheat. In Southeast Asia, Japan, Korea, and southern China, it's rice and [...]

[...] apparently does) that "the most common coin is the gold piece". In much of medieval Europe, the only coins were silver pennies and some copper subdivisions like farthings (1/4 [...]

[...] SIG's 28.96. I imagine they use the extra room for a coolant-reservoir (the battery for the electronic firing is set into the base of the magazine)—no casings to eject means there's nowhere for [...]

[...] to be a Stoner-like design.) Well, apparently, the trigger-pull issue? Doesn't exist with electronic firing. I should've realized it wouldn't. So now I guess the Marine gun looks a bit like the [...]

[...] of CIP literally?) might designate caseless rounds with a C, or maybe with an E to indicate electronic firing, the way they indicate rimmed cartridges with an R. Actually, more likely, late-21st- or [...]

[...] Paleolithic, either. Gender feminism and transhumanism are, both of them, attempts to undo Behavioral Modernity, the former by dispensing with sex-role specialization and the latter by modifying the [...]

[...] of their muscle-masses. Apparently archaeologists actually find all the traces of "behavioral modernity" in Homo sapiens-associated sites at least as far back as the Middle Paleolithic. [...]

[...] space-travel, although I wonder about some details of their setup (and their total lack of propellant tanks). But the plot has some glaringly silly choices. E.g., a 2159 space mission is not going to [...]

[...] by having my spaceships accelerate at the same rate no matter what the mass in their propellant tanks was. But no, it just means I was going with constant acceleration trajectories, which [...]

[...] 'll only get eight and a quarter hours off the charge. Then again 22.4 kg, the amount of lithium-air battery you need to get a day's activity, isn't unworkably heavy. It's basically slightly more than [...]

[...] ). They probably won't use methanol for robot mules, instead going with the same kind of lithium-air battery as the smaller robots (which means their robot mules breathe!). Methanol is too inefficient [...]

[...] shot, 18 shots per battery, gives 28.8 kJ, or the equivalent of 6.34 g of TNT—the propellant load of a single round of .300 Remington Ultra Magnum. A 50-shot, same power long laser ( [...]

[...] accept the rounds. Using octanitrocubane instead of nitrocellulose, though, would reduce the propellant load from 460 milligrams to a mere 193.2 milligrams. Incidentally, given the theoretical density [...]

[...] a muzzle velocity of 850 m/s, we get a muzzle energy of 3612 Joules. That requires a propellant load of 3.564 grams of nitrocellulose. 3.564 grams nitrocellulose is the equivalent of 1.497 [...]