Quote:Reeaally? Huh. I'd had no idea it was that close... In which case, certainly they'd be capable of cyberlimbs.
Current human tech allows for replacement arms that feel heat, cold and pain as well as pressure. I can't really seeing us losing that tech... Star Wars fanboy engineers. We have some guy in England who has subdermal implants that let you control robotic arms by thinking about it. So okay, no cloned limbs, but currently the remote arm guy is thinking he'll have neural chips for surfing the web in a decade... I don't know how close that really is though. Regardless, we have most of the tech for replacement limbs already... grafting them instead of strapping them on is not quite their yet.
Quote:Ah, I see the problem. No, Jumpships most certainly do not go down and land planetside. However, Terra really doesn't have the kind of off-world industry needed to create even the basic frame of a Jumpship, let alone the umpty-bazillion small (or not so small) finicky parts in its Gate Core. Even if the ship is being built in orbit, all of the needed factories are planetside...
On the jumpships verses merchant/military.... I'm saying that jumpships going planet side is a stupid waste of resources. You have smaller ships that land on planets... and you build the jumpers in orbit/space as you can mine asteroid belts and moons, then drag the resources to the construction sight. Not landing the big ships is a matter of cost. It is far too expensive to be worth it. I'll give you the that the jumpers fail to differ military/merchant, but it is unwise to send your pack mule into combat if you can help. So they'd be ship haulers and transports with guns, but in system military vessels make more sense.
And no, Jumpships are not intended as actual combatants - they carry armarment because they're critical strategic assets and you don't leave something like that undefended.
Going back over another point, the reason Jumpships are so huge relative to, well, pretty much everything else in space, is that the Terran version of FTL takes an unbelievable amount of power - Jumpships are mostly engine, and I'm not talking about the sublight ones.
Quote:The Jump itself is measurable in femptoseconds - essentially instantaneous. However, the jump points where jumping out to a particular other system is possible are all in the outer system - say as far or farther than Uranus.
How long does a jump take? That effects a lot of technical desisions for me. If a jump takes less than a week its going to carry less in-flight supplies than a month or year long voyage. It looks like a really long time from what you said so far.
Quote:...Huh? The fact that these people happen to have furry ears or funny colored hair really has nothing to do with their cultures. But they do have funny colored hair, they are human, and their cultures are different.
Basically, unless your going with the genes causing sentience being constantly tweaked or the old ones actually being intelligent DNA your going into bad plot device genetics here.
Quote:*blinks* *checks Wiki*
I meant they had sensitive equipment do to the moisture on their own ships, so they like compartmentalization. I'm thinking swampy home worlds for the spiders (correct me if I'm wrong here). Electrical devices tend to spark during testing and methane explodes/burns well. What percentage of methane do they breath? On Earth oxygen it is 21% and 78% nitrogen. What kind of mix is their methane environment?
Okay, my bad - I'd thrown out the 'methane' thing mostly because it's not oxygen... ie, now that I've thought about it, they'd likely rely on, say, chlorine instead.
In short, Spider biochemistry might or might not use carbon the same way ours does, but it does not use enough oxygen for them to included in their life support mixes...
Quote:I don't know. It hasn't been decided yet... I'm sort of stumped for where to go with that, see...
What are the base tenants of the faith.
Ja, -n
===============================================
"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"