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Mushroom Kingdom
09-14-2015, 10:34 PM
Mushroom Kingdom exists to detect and discover potential Mushroom Farmers before planting their first Crop, along with potential routes rogue Mushroom Farmers may feasibly use to plant Mushrooms, so that they may be cut off before any Crops are Yielded.
Rule 1 of Mushroom Kingdom: You do not discuss Mushroom Kingdom with outsiders
Rule 2 of Mushroom Kingdom: You do not discuss Mushroom Kingdom with outsiders.
Rule 3 of Mushroom Kingdom: Nobody Joins Mushroom Kingdom. Mushroom Kingdom Seeks out its Members.
Rule 4 of Mushroom Kingdom: A Farmer becomes eligible upon independant discovery of a viable method to Plant Mushrooms.
Rule 5 of Mushroom Kingdom: A Member shall not knowingly assist another Farmer in the discovery of a viable method to Plant Mushrooms.
Rule 6 of Mushroom Kingdom: No member of Mushroom Kingdom may intentionally plant Mushrooms without due legal authority
Rule 7 of Mushroom Kingdom: All members of Mushroom Kingdom must do their utmost to ensure no Mushrooms are planted in Civilised Space.
Rule 8 of Mushroom Kingdom: The Penalty for Transgression of any of these rules, is banning from life.
Do you, who have learned the sin of Mushroom Farming, understand and agree to these rules?
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I really wish I had a better name than Mushroom Kingdom. Subtley is not my strongpoint.
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Do they have some sort of bizarre rivalry going on with the Sonic the Hedgehog fen?
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And the Lollipop Guild and the Lullabye League.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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I think that list of groups is mushrooming...
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Rob Kelk
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Of course,
Only one Mushroom Farmer has ever succesfully Yielded a Crop publically in Fenspace.
Only two characters are confirmed to have the capability of Planting a Mushrooms, both from a scientific, technical and material standpoint. Of course, there're likely several more who've accidentaly stumbled across the dark secret of Making Mushrooms.
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Oh, of course! Duh!
That one farmer worked for Noah, didn't she?
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Rob Kelk
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Perhaps.
I like the idea of a group of people surroptitiously working to keep nuclear weapons out of fenspace. At least, I want to give an answer to the question beyond 'We don't do that', or 'Nobody can do that' - those can be unsatisfying answers.
Not by geeking would-be bombmakers, but actively finding methods to build weapons with commonly available transuranics or materials, and eliminating the technical path by pushing for a recall or other quiet adjustment. Or at least making it obvious to the Patrol that somebody's doing something nasty. Sort of an atomic version of vulnerability patching.
That membership of such a club be highly limited to those Mads who've known Sin, is a given. Limiting it to people who've discovered a secret by themselves, means less dissemination of the secret.
While still retaining the technical knowhow, in case some big X-threat wanders in and the Godzilla threshold is passed, the Inner Sphere invades or Elon Musk wins election to the head of the Mars Terraforming council.
Seemed like an idea. I think I might've been drunk at the time.
As for the other members.....
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Well, that's why I came up with Kaboomite in the first place - nobody else could create nukes during Seasons 0 and 1 because Noah and Kohran had gathered up all the easily-accessible fissionables already, and Noah didn't like using them. Once we got past the Boskone War, the Space Patrol could take over looking for mushroom farmers who get their fissionables out of rocks instead of out of space probes... and as much as Kohran complains in-universe, taking nuclear capability away from StellviaCorp is a Good Thing.
EDIT: A couple of quotes for the inevitable FenWiki page, courtesy of WikiQuote:
It is only when science asks why, instead of simply describing how, that it becomes more than technology.
When it asks why, it discovers Relativity. When it only shows how, it invents the atomic bomb, and then puts its hands over its eyes and says, "My God what have I done?"
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Stalin in the Soul", in The Language of the Night, 1976
When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you've had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.
- J. Robert Oppenheimer, testifying in his defense in his 1954 security hearings (page 81 of the official transcript). Quoted in Charles Thorpe, Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect. University of Chicago Press,2008 (pp. 223-4).
RE-EDIT:
Quote:As for the other members.....
Not The Professor - he publishes all of his notes, so if he could farm mushrooms, so could everyone else. (People who've heard of the Mushroom Kingdom and don't know The Professor's habits will assume he's part of the group, of course.)
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them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
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Okaaaay... Dartz, until you were slap-in-the-face obvious about it, I had no idea what this was about. Now that I do... Hmm. I'm not sure it's 100-percent practical, but it's certainly worth trying. The price of failure or a mistake, though...
-- Bob
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The Oppenheimer quote's already on Mackie's page...... It fits his attitude to a lot of things.
As it is, Mackie stumbled across his method while trying to figure out how to build a system that couldn't be turned into an atomic bomb.
It's not really practical since Mushroom Farming is 70 year-old technology - it's getting enough high-quality material that's the trick for most methods. And doing it without getting caught. By knowing these paths and the signatures towards them it's easier to work with the Patrol and actually intercept anything before anyone adds a new crater to a planetary body.
On a peculiar note, technically, Ford's plasma guns might also count as nuclear weapons - they use a very small nuclear explosion to propel the bullet.
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Wolfboy is completely out of the mushroom market because he just doesn't see the point of it. "MAD" was stupid when it was thought of, and still is today because all that has to happen is one idiot to decide that either they can win, or don't care about winning the war that they start. And once you realize that no one is going to open fire with these weapons, then all you have is the escalation of "I have more or more destructive ones than you do.
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i seem a bit lost on this tread, but why the heck are nukes being talked about in dealing with raising mushrooms and eating them?
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Quote:ckosacranoid wrote: i seem a bit lost on this tread, but why the heck are nukes being talked about in dealing with raising mushrooms and eating them?
Making mushroom clouds. It took me a bit to draw the link myself.
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ah.....making nuke weapons then.....
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To be fair, nuclear explosions only form mushroom clouds in an atmosphere over a gravity source. In most of Fenspace, they just form really big fireballs (which is a contributing factor for why nobody connected the dots after the Kaboomite Incident).
It is, however, the iconic image of an atomic explosion.
(EDIT: I had originally typed "the Kabbomite Incident" - which draws to mind a completely different Mushroom Kingdom. Between Kohran and Mackie, which one's Mario and which one's Luigi? )
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It's not even a fireball. The nuclear fireball is just the air surrounding the bomb being rapidly superheated by the intense radiation emitted from the bomb itself, which in turn creates the shockwave.
In open space, a nuclear weapon is more like the brightest flashbulb imagineable, an intense burst of gamma and x-rays which fall off at the cube-root of distance from the weapon. It's not really an explosion - more an intense energy pulse.
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Now I feel foolish... I thought you meant fungus. *blushes*
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Yeah, the first post succeeded a little too well at subtlety.
Igh. The Mushroom Kingdom would have more than a few pointy words with the NLR around 2020-ish. They came across high-grade shoom fertilizer while pulling a Moria to help fuel their dome, and planted a shroom to deal with a very unhelpful individual off in another star system. It might, maybe have something to do with the reason why that flagship that doesn't exist named 'Defiant came home several dozen crewmembers lighter, with a lot of armor burned off from a nasty re-entry/missing a nacelle and a rather unfortunate chunk of her engineering hull.
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Hmm. NLR bronies are a bit more militant due to much more fervent persecution dirtside in Fenspace?
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''
-- James Nicoll
Foxboy Wrote:Hmm. NLR bronies are a bit more militant due to much more fervent persecution dirtside in Fenspace?
Part coming up in the middle of the Boskone War, part one of their leaders being US Army engineering vet, part 'some nations and fen-nations have a great many legitimate issues with them due to said person taking out a few terrorist groups without permission in africa', and many other parts. When I get a chance, they'll be written up as the ones who really got the African Renessance going, as helping to end other people's suffering is a major part of their joining philosophy. Which includes recruiting from the poor all over the world, helping those they can't house, generally being one of the bigger faces of the fen dirt-side. That, and generally not seeing eye to eye with OGJ and several other parts of the fen over-arching structures of law enforcement due to the distinctly un-harmonious elements like troubleshooters that they don't want in their territory. That, and said vet's sister eventually heading up a major Boskone faction out-system after getting discredited in the public eye of the USA, which leads to... well- No, River Song! You can't come in here and start saying 'Spoilers!'
As for the actual mushrooms waiting to be planted that they may or may not have left over, any that might exist would be code-named 'Elements' and kept under the direct control of the sisters for use only in the direst of circumstances. (Read: Immenent Catastrophic Threat against the nation, the sisters themselves, or Fenspace as a whole)
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