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classicdrogn · 03-27-2006, 06:33 AM

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That is true of any new tech. People are going to do three basic things with new tech. Come up with a military use for it. Come up with practical non-military use for it. Come up with an amusing/entertaining use for it. These 3 may over lap.

True dat - take explosives for example: you can blow other people's shit up, you can blow shit up because it's in your way, or you can blow shit up just for the hell of it.
(fails to keep a straight face and breaks down laughing)
Sorry, sorry, I was having a Oneshot Wong moment. The thing about useful space drives is entirely true, though, and one of the head-smacker plot holes in the few episodes of ST:Voyager I caught that made sure I didn't put much effort into catching more - the crew found this warp-capable giant missile flying along and aiming at a planet somewhere, and as the climactic finale they render the missile hamrles... by disarming the warhead. GDWTF!? Ignore for the moment that it has a functional antimatter fueld warp core, just slamming a planet at high impulse with a few thousand tons of drone is an extinction-level event, if the planet itself doesn't get cracked open. There's no need for a warhead in the first place.
I challenge you to find a military application for Tickle-Me-Elmo-style talking plush toys, though. No, air-dropping them on enemy encampments to break their will does not count.
- CDSERVO: Loook *deeeeply* into my eyes... Tell me, what do you see?
CROW: (hypnotized) A twisted man who wants to inflict his pain upon others.
Dr. Akagi will recover. Observe, Rei smiled. Shinji-kun, are these your clothes?
Ritsuko shot up like a spring loaded meerkat. What? Shinji-kun is naked?
See, Anata? Dr. Hentai is alive and well. - Innortal's _I Do_
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

Valles · 03-27-2006, 07:00 AM

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Go ahead and do that if you want... just remember that unless someone or something is tweaking genetics regularly that can't happen naturally from species that evolved so differently and so far apart. Which is why I wondered if the Seeders turned into or still tweak everyones DNA. The sheer unlikelyness of a successful mating is going to cause experts and mathematicians conniption fits of epic proportions.

...Oh. Oh, okay, I see your problem.
No, that's not what happened.
Timeline -
100,000 years ago: Modern human species 'finishes evolving' and starts to spread across Earth.
80-50,000 years ago: somewhere during this period, our magic Precursor aliens come along and look around at every seeded world in the this part of the galaxy, then decide that archaic humans represent the most promising of the available potentially sapient animal species. They scoop up substantial sized breeding groups and drop them on about a half-a-dozen other fairly ideal worlds.
~45,000 years ago: Local spacetime begins to crystallize into the mostly immutable form we know and recognize today.
~30,000 years ago: The above process finishes.
~20 years ago: Stresses from other portions of the expanding universe exceed the ability of crystallized hyperspace to endure, and the whole shebang, well, shatters, producing an abrubt change to certain underlying constants.
~18-10 years ago: Most other human (and non-) populations finish development of their stardrives and set off exploring and expanding.
12 years ago: Fanatic Sect explorer starship stumbles across radio transmissions from Earth and relays location to home command. An invasion force is promptly dispatched to subdue the heretic planet and begin a forced conversion process that will give them a leg up against the other sects.
10 years ago: Fanatics are forced off of Earth amidst furor, riots, pitched battles, and not a few glassed cities. Much bad feeling on both sides.
9 years ago: First Terran Jump Core tested. Head of Fanatic Sect begins calling for a crusade against the demonically controlled nation which humiliated his people before it can finish corrupting the (surviving) population of the Earth into literally selling their souls to the machine.
7 years ago: Short, ugly Terran-Paladin war as the UTN begins its expansion program.
6 years ago: First sponsored mercenary groups begin to appear.
Now: Terran date 203X, player characters are allowed into the game.

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Thus the militant ones decide to get rid of those loony humans before their society crumbles in the wake of thei stupidly random things these people are capable of. Most of their race things that the militants need to chill out.

*considers*
No... I don't think that that really... feels right.
I don't want to make them directly congruent to any real world religion, but the more militant phases of Islam's expansion would be a definite parallel to what I'm sort of picturing.

Drogn:

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I challenge you to find a military application for Tickle-Me-Elmo-style talking plush toys, though. No, air-dropping them on enemy encampments to break their will does not count.

Dropping them on enemy encampments to break their necks... ie, from x-teen-thousand feet up.
You could hide land mines in them.
Any turbine that sucks up one of the ones you've conveniently scattered all over is going to have a seriously bad day.
Ja, -n

===============================================
"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"

03-27-2006, 07:12 AM

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I challenge you to find a military application for Tickle-Me-Elmo-style talking plush toys, though. No, air-dropping them on enemy encampments to break their will does not count.

A few years ago my parents bought addtional lots to our family summer home. On this land was a house. House had a living room. On the living room floor was... a rug. A rug made out what can only be described as hundreds of skinned Elmos sewn together into a shag carpet.. minus the seems. So urban camoflag in the 1970's.
You can rig them with explosives... or as a detonator so if someone hits it or picks it up it blows them up with a Death Cry of 'That Tickles' followed by maniacal laughing. If you leave stuffed animals in the woods/battle zone someone will eventuall move it.
Furbies can be used as spies... but they aren't technically Tickle me Elmo style.
You can throw them grenade style behind people as a distraction... movement and voices behind something. That or tie them to a remote controled item so they speak in the background as ditractions. You can jam them into machery as a method of sabatoge. You can use them to smother people with them. You can burn them to make a smoke screen. You can probably use one as a silencer for a gun.
I'll stop now, because I'm off topic.

VladimirTherin · 03-27-2006, 10:58 AM

The thing isn't that you can use the "tech" from any space drive to naughty things.
The statement is that if you have a drive that has anything resembling high enough performance to be useful, it can be used directly as a weapon.
Think more along the lines of bludgeoning someone to death with a hammer, and less along the lines of using metallurgy to forge a sword.
The only thing I can think of comparable using "Elmo" is stufing it down someone's throat so they choke.
Edit: if you want them to fight, but they are not after the same real estate, why not make it over a particularily rich asteroid belt?
Go farther and make it over some spacial anomoly like a natural wormhole that offers tremendous near/mid-term advantages either for research or tactical reasons.
Say, a one-way wormhole that goes from somewhere in the back and beyond directly into/near some fortified/sacred/taboo position.

Valles · 03-27-2006, 12:48 PM

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Edit: if you want them to fight, but they are not after the same real estate, why not make it over a particularily rich asteroid belt?

Mrrg. Sort of in that direction, yeah.
To illustrate what I'm thinking for FTL, a jump point is an orbiting phenomenon associated with a given star of stellar class K7 or higher. Any given jump point will grant the ability, assuming the proper drive, to 'jump' to another, specific and unalterable, jump point associated with another star nor more than about five parsecs distant.
Sol has eight - Tau Ceti, Epsilon Indi, 61 Cygni, Procyon, Epsilon Eridani, Sirius, Alpha Centauri, and Groombridge 1618.
Which last has a well-developed Paladin mining colony, specifically controlled by the Fanatic sect.
The Paladin 'homeworld' is three jumps from Earth, and that colony is on the shortest route. Coincidentally, the Paladins never really got in the habit of using radio communications, which was why we've never heard of the folks, and the next nearest homeworld is on the opposite side from theirs - and about twenty parsecs farther.
Hmm. That would be the Battletech people, I suspect, and wonder if a sufficiently plausible line of bullshit could be produced to include a 'Space 1888' style steampunk group in our already established set...
Mrgh. Inconvenient radio transmissions. Dealing with them requires either a handwave of higher quality than I'm up to producing at this time of night or a considerably greater distance than I'd prefer.
Thoughts? And, now that I'm back with my Jovian Chronicles sourcebooks, I'll try and do some write-ups for example machines...
Ja, -n

===============================================
"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"

VladimirTherin · 03-27-2006, 02:03 PM

"Inconvenient radio transmissions."
Well, maybe they just had a REALLY short window when they were actually using unshielded transmissions before moving to tight point-to-point?
Or their homeworld has an atmosphere that effectively absorbs/reflects/distorts radio.
Or their is a nearby stellar object that is emitting over the easiest to make frequencies, so radio-tech was stillborn.
Or their atmosphere/environment made other alternatives easier/cheaper/more effective in the short term.

Florin · 03-27-2006, 02:03 PM

Small black hole eating all the radio transmissions? Or maybe a pulsar on a line with the nearby star systems, I imagine that would swamp out any long distance radio waves.--
I have the power to channel my imagination into ever-soaring levels of suspicion and paranoia.
--
If you become a monster to put down a monster you've still got a monster running around at the end of the day and have as such not really solved the whole monster problem at all.

VladimirTherin · 03-27-2006, 03:58 PM

The problem with a pulsar is it *pulses* in a regular manner.
So it would be distorting the signal, but only for brief periods followed by longer moments of relative clarity.
A conventiently placed blackhole would eat the signal, but then it would also start munching on the neighborhood.

And really, its a non-issue.
Say that the other guys have had radio tech for 200-300 years.
If their star is over that distance away in light-years, whatever early-signals they might have sent off will simply have not reached any possible reception on our end.
Even proxima centauri is over 5 light years away, just make it so that "jump points" are relatively sparse, or that they form more of a tangled skein than a web.

Xenoproctologist · 03-27-2006, 04:46 PM

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I challenge you to find a military application for Tickle-Me-Elmo-style talking plush toys, though. No, air-dropping them on enemy encampments to break their will does not count.

Smallpox Teddy Bear (from The Parking Lot Is Full; www.plif.com)

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80-50,000 years ago: somewhere during this period, our magic Precursor aliens come along and look around at every seeded world in the this part of the galaxy, then decide that archaic humans represent the most promising of the available potentially sapient animal species. They scoop up substantial sized breeding groups and drop them on about a half-a-dozen other fairly ideal worlds.

A half-dozen separate populations all reach roughly the same level of technological complexity at the same time after 80,000 years of natural disasters, ice ages, population bottlenecks, and inconsistant rate of advancement? Hard to swallow. All it would take is a 1% difference in advancement (800 years behind: dark ages; 800 years ahead: like unto gods) to completely unbalance things.
The cleanest fix I can think of is for there to be a large collection of seed worlds, of which the relevant six are exceptionally advanced. Otherwise, you'll need to either push the date of the population transplant way up, or put an artificial control/assist on technological advancement.

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12 years ago: Fanatic Sect explorer starship stumbles across radio transmissions from Earth and relays location to home command. An invasion force is promptly dispatched to subdue the heretic planet and begin a forced conversion process that will give them a leg up against the other sects.

A thought:
The relative proximity of the Fanatics' newly-established mining colony to Sol allowed them, for the first time, to pick up the radio chatter from the Sol system. There were a whole slew of audio broadcasts, but they weren't particularly useful -- it'd take decades for their linguists to make anything of them. Likewise, there were vast quantities of digital information flying around, but their computers would take forever to squeeze anything intelligible out of that. And then, there were a number of analog signals which appeared to be on an easily decypherable carrier. In fact, they appeared to be some form of video...
The glaringly inexplicable lack of anything even remotely resembling human remains in the fossil record past 80,000 years ago might be quite the hot-button to a group of fanatical extremists who's religion is firmly grounded in knowledge of the self. And when the first thing they decypher is a Discovery Channel "Origin of Man" special showing obvious proto-human remains....

03-28-2006, 03:27 AM

Genetic drift of this nature only takes a few hundred years... that means that a thousand on the outside. Your literally claiming genetics stayed steady for 100 times that long, you can fudge the numbers a bit, but I think your badly misinformed on how long genetics takes. Or maybe what genetics evolution involves.
Again fudge it if you want, but it will end up a sticking point for some people. Or make the potential cross breeding a side effect of the basic inoculations they give everyone regardless of species to prevent obscure new plagues. Basically it sometimes goes all retrovirus on their reproductive genetics.

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I don't want to make them directly congruent to any real world religion, but the more militant phases of Islam's expansion would be a definite parallel to what I'm sort of picturing.

Um... what are you talking about? Phases? I analyze religions based on two tenants: 1) What do you get for following the religion?, 2) What do you have to do to get it?
The Muslim religion is best summed up as: Convert or die. That is the entire religion in a nut shell.
So the answer to 1) is: Almost 70 virgin half bird spirit women as a harem in the afterlife (though they can take their wives with them if they want.)
And the answer to 2) is: Kill non Muslims. There are passages to wave off the entire rest of the instruction manuel as long as you are killing non Muslims in the process.
The way into their afterlife is through killing non Muslims. Everything else is there to breed more Muslims in better conditions. Everything else is literally ignorable as long as you are killing non Muslems. The idea of getting along with other people who aren't Muslim is a new idea to them... by their holy books definition a bad Muslim is someone who doesn't want to kill non Muslims.
There are only two major groups of truly radical Muslims: 1) Those with a live and let live attitude and 2) those that kill other Muslims while killing non Muslims. If you don't believe me: Read the instruction manual that they wrote.
Resent events have had a man in a capital punishment case for one of Islam's greatest sins: he converted to another religion. Though foreign pressure got that waved (he is looking for asylum in another country now) this was in Afghanistan. That is a moderate Islamic country, he got a trial first, rather than public stoning.
What I suggested was that the humans did something that so missed the entire point of the exercise (knowing yourself) that it lead to a build up to factions attacking the offenders. Only if you count other people existing as an offense does this analogy of yours work... which means have to stretch to make that same thing point work. The Paladins are attacking for academic reasons in mine and Xeno's scenarios. In the Muslim case it is to get hot bird woman nookie in the afterlife.
Anyway, the fossil record issue could also work... the spiders go "Ah, that explains things". The cats go... "Ohh... giant killing machines of old" and you get the Utahraptor and T-rex squads and those wonderful scent gathering plushies as an import (now they can smell the rest of their group, smells in space yeah!). The Paladins are berserking because they again not knowing that they are a spin off group. Give them a We are the first race, the rest of you are the spin offs to bring into the fold tenant mixed into their beliefs. They will have attacked the spiders in a previous war over the offense of proving alternate evolutions actually have happened.

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Hmm. That would be the Battletech people, I suspect, and wonder if a sufficiently plausible line of bullshit could be produced to include a 'Space 1888' style steampunk group in our already established set...

Im not familiar with this reference either so Ill be general, Just make the Steampunk group on one of the random world connected to Earth within 2 or 3 jumps they just only have 1to 3 jump point in their solar system and just never invented jump tech as theirs are far from everything they care about so they are bound in system effectively. That flash of bright light in the middle of nowhere got their curiosity going though.
Ive only seen 3 major races and humans so far so minor ones can pop up at random. Not everyone has to deal with everyone.

Valles · 03-28-2006, 06:30 AM

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Genetic drift of this nature only takes a few hundred years... that means that a thousand on the outside. Your literally claiming genetics stayed steady for 100 times that long, you can fudge the numbers a bit, but I think your badly misinformed on how long genetics takes. Or maybe what genetics evolution involves.

A few hundred?
Er, what?
*goes away and does some research - most of which confirms what he'd been thinking*
What size of population are you talking about here - I'd been thinking a fairly even distribution, call it ten thousand individuals per world (no, I hadn't thought of Toba specifically as being a cover for this, but it's a nice coincidence.)
These seeded worlds aren't all that different from Earth, really, aside from being smaller. Certainly not enough so to count as a catestrophic change.

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Um... what are you talking about? Phases? I analyze religions based on two tenants: 1) What do you get for following the religion?, 2) What do you have to do to get it?

Hm. Sudden thought - the answer to 1, for the 'Paladins', is, 'You become a god yourself, and can get all those nice things you always wanted'. 2 varies from sect to sect, but will always include something about supporting and taking care of other members of the overall religion. Which was why it was successful enough to become so dominant in that culture in the first place, because no matter how many things its followers might disagree on, they'd always work together against outsiders and usually didn't go as far as fighting internal wars.

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Anyway, the fossil record issue could also work... the spiders go "Ah, that explains things". The cats go... "Ohh... giant killing machines of old" and you get the Utahraptor and T-rex squads and those wonderful scent gathering plushies as an import (now they can smell the rest of their group, smells in space yeah!). The Paladins are berserking because they again not knowing that they are a spin off group. Give them a We are the first race, the rest of you are the spin offs to bring into the fold tenant mixed into their beliefs. They will have attacked the spiders in a previous war over the offense of proving alternate evolutions actually have happened.

Sounds good, maybe with a side of being miffed that the Terrans have been so insulting as to not only not convert, but be so insolent as to blow their philosophies off completely when their faith brings them so much closer to divinity than any mere infidel... Sure, some of the other cultures they've run into have ignored them, too, but even the wierd chlorine monsters were at least polite about it. (One or two of the more moderate sects have likely pointed out that they hadn't invaded any of the other homeworlds, but they don't get listened to much.)

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Im not familiar with this reference either so Ill be general, Just make the Steampunk group on one of the random world connected to Earth within 2 or 3 jumps they just only have 1to 3 jump point in their solar system and just never invented jump tech as theirs are far from everything they care about so they are bound in system effectively. That flash of bright light in the middle of nowhere got their curiosity going though.

Hmmm... I like that.
Anyway, I'd misremembered the title of the game - it was called Space: 1889. If their 'homeworld' happens to be one of several planet-sized rocky moons of a gas giant in or just outside of their star's liquid water zone, that'd even give us enough possible habitable planets in that system to make them a 'major destination' in their own right.
Mwahah! I just had a brainstorm - this is obviously going to be a 'different' universe than ours, so why not just answer the question of why Earth hasn't gotten radio transmissions from at least one of the other planets by saying that they have...

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Ive only seen 3 major races and humans so far so minor ones can pop up at random. Not everyone has to deal with everyone.

Everybody's human.
Anyway, lessee...
Terrans - A human faction who like Spiders, dislike Paladins, and live mostly on Earth. They build relatively 'hard' military SF mecha, circa FMP or Gasaraki.
Spiders - coalition led by chlorine-breathing Real Wierdie aliens, use LAMs. Get along well with Terrans, no other political data at this time.
Blobs - naturally invertebrate and amorphous, but capable of secreting - and reabsorbing - most sorts of internal organs - bones, stomachs, etc. - according to genetic data from their own chromosomes or an outside source, if needed. The process takes several hours. Their outer skin is naturally transparent but also highly chromatophoric, and is backed by an organ which performs most of the same functions as muscle. Neural tissue is distributed evenly through the fluid that makes up most of their body mass. In short, your classic sci-fi shape-shifters. Their approach to mech-design is to create distinct structural modules which then link together.
Imperialists - A human faction who inhabit a binary system particularly rich in habitable worlds, but have no natively developed FTL technology. Their overall technological level is without a doubt the crudest, but the scale of their civilization tends to make up for it. They use battlemechs.
Paladins - A human faction, they have the oldest continuous civilization of any group and are at the forefront of most fields. They are expansionistic, and for religious regions, much of their technology is executed in the medium of genetically engineered plant life rather than inanimate metal, plastic, or composite. They were first to develop an FTL drive, and as a result have the largest sphere of influence. Eureka SeveN and Escaflowne/Rayearth influence on their robots.
Feudalists - Kings, dukes, lesser nobles, Gundamesque planet-or-orbit capable mechs. Etc.
Felines - Modern descenants of an advanced civilization that developed during the 'Slow period', modified their own genetics extensively, then wiped themselves out - turning their homeworld into a Pyhrran hell-world in the process. Militant, for obvious reasons, and have an emphasis on power-armor and other personal-scale military applications.
That makes seven, right?
Ja, -n

===============================================
"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"

***Bob Schroeck*** · 03-28-2006, 05:14 PM

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Blobs - naturally invertebrate and amorphous, but capable of secreting - and reabsorbing - most sorts of internal organs - bones, stomachs, etc. - according to genetic data from their own chromosomes or an outside source, if needed. The process takes several hours. Their outer skin is naturally transparent but also highly chromatophoric, and is backed by an organ which performs most of the same functions as muscle. Neural tissue is distributed evenly through the fluid that makes up most of their body mass. In short, your classic sci-fi shape-shifters. Their approach to mech-design is to create distinct structural modules which then link together.

I'll say it again in case it got lost in the shuffle on the front end of this thread. I designed a race very much like this in GURPS Shapeshifters, and you are welcome to use it, either as-is or revised to fit your needs.

-- Bob
---------
For Jor-El so loved the Earth, he sent his only begotten son...

03-29-2006, 12:38 AM

You know... if the other races have broadcast signals we've received and we've broadcast signal they've seen... considering the spiders have both a sense of humor and regenerating limbs... Why do I see one of the cultural reason (instead of just the resource reasons) that Spiders and Terrans get along is because they both enjoy slap stick comedy. In fact Terrans are the first of the races the spiders have run into which made their own slap stick. The other races are all too serious for them to really get along with quite as well. Not that some other races don't think its funny, but laughing at physical comedy doesn't really require understanding the language. So even before they can officially communicate they have something in common.
On the genetics I honestly don't know your resources here. The thing about the most genetically modified race being compatible with humans sits wrong with me. I think its to the point we'll just disagree on it. Not that I'm trying to stop you, its a cause issue for me.
Try adapting the Spiders to a Venus like environment... Chlorine is a noble gas and fails to play well with other elements.
I think you need to sit down and work on the interactions between races now. Start off with how the groups interact. For instance the Felines have trashed their home world and I doubt they got along afterwards. So make a good portion of them somewhat nomadic, yes they have faction home worlds, but some of them are going decide that not being around them is a better idea look what happened last time.
Perhaps a group settle agrees to live under Terran rule and thats why we have crossbreeds I mean they managed to point enough fire power to level their home world 14-18 times over at each other for decades and managed to not obliterate it. The Feline home world obliterated themselves with only enough to do it three times over. The Terrans have great strength, are capable of being as violent or more as they are, and yet proved to have a level of restraint they just didnt. Or maybe its just they decided that the Terrans great strength and comparable physiology makes them hot.
The blobs I have nothing on culturally so cant comment. At least one other group is locked in its own system and considering the only way they could expand is into Sol, they can stay there and like it. Fleshing out the factions of the groups is going to require a base line. Also its easier to flesh out the factions and races if we can play them off each other.
Forgot the blobs entirely as they only came up once I meant 4 main groups. Anyway we can fill in more groups as we find slots for the to fill. So maybe we should take it a race at a time in block posts. That or start brain storming on what the blobs are like I mean they do naturally collect bits of other peoples and species for personal gain after all.

classicdrogn · 03-29-2006, 01:34 AM

Not that I have anything particularly useful to add to the setting, but Clorine is decidedly not a noble gas - those are the ones on the far right of the Periodic Table that have thier outer electron shells filled and therefore don't generally react with anything - Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon, and Radon - while chlorine is very reactive indeed, one column to the left of argon, and only beaten out by flourine if I remember my HS chem lectures correctly.
- CD
ETA:

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Or maybe its just they decided that the Terrans great strength and comparable physiology makes them hot.

It's the ears - the cat chicks just dig those cute little round ears, man. Buttermelt, they say. Rrrrrowl, they say. I swear, I can't walk through the mall on Luna Station without three or four of 'em hanging themselves all over me. When at least half of the population thinks humans are Teh Smexxy, it'd be hard to mess up bad enoguh to have poor relations.SERVO: Loook *deeeeply* into my eyes... Tell me, what do you see?
CROW: (hypnotized) A twisted man who wants to inflict his pain upon others.
Dr. Akagi will recover. Observe, Rei smiled. Shinji-kun, are these your clothes?
Ritsuko shot up like a spring loaded meerkat. What? Shinji-kun is naked?
See, Anata? Dr. Hentai is alive and well. - Innortal's _I Do_
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

deadpan29 · 03-29-2006, 02:23 AM

My $0.02 on subjects raised here:
Oxygen doesn't play well with other elements. Rapid reaction with oxygen tends to give off lots of heat and is called combustion. Slow oxidation is the basis for rust and the eventual degredation of many other materials. The fact that it reacts so readily and can trigger the release of energy while doing so is what makes it a viable basis for a biological metabolism. If you are going to put together a fictional non-oxygen ecosystem, then something else with those properties (like clorine) is needed to fill in for the oxygen. I don't know if you also need something to replace water (which is H20 after all) if you are doing this. I think Earth had oceans before it had an oxygen atmosphere, so I would guess not.
Sillicon-based lifeforms are popular in sci-fi, not only because of the chemical similarities between Sillicon and Carbon, but because having a rock-like creature is neat. However, carbon's role in biology is largely due to the long-chain molecules it forms, which sillicon is less prone to doing. Make of that what you will.
On the subject of genetic drift, the American Continents were isolated from the rest of the world for about 12,000 years and the locals were able to breed with Europeans when they showed up. According to this Wikipedia article, the founding population of these people was fairly small as well. Of course, any genetic tinkering going on increases the rate of change considerably.
The part that wories me about this is the rough technological parity between the races, which someone else brought up. If the Precursors did their thing 80,000 to 50,000 years ago, then a 1% variation in rate of technological advancement would be an 800 to 500 year edge for someone. 500 years ago we didn't even have steam engines and guns were just starting to edge out muscle-powered weaponry. Going the other way, Startrek the Next Generation is only set 360 years from now.
----------
No, I don't believe the world has gone mad. In order for it to go mad it would need to have been sane at some point.

Valles · 03-29-2006, 03:12 AM

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On the genetics I honestly don't know your resources here. The thing about the most genetically modified race being compatible with humans sits wrong with me. I think its to the point we'll just disagree on it. Not that I'm trying to stop you, its a cause issue for me.

I don't see why - if one assumes that one of their design goals was to maintain cross-compatability with the base strain, then that continued fertility makes perfect sense.

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I think you need to sit down and work on the interactions between races now. Start off with how the groups interact. For instance the Felines have trashed their home world and I doubt they got along afterwards. So make a good portion of them somewhat nomadic, yes they have faction home worlds, but some of them are going decide that not being around them is a better idea look what happened last time.

I was thinking more along the lines of 'bioweapon hell' than 'glowing glass', but the idea of them taking any excuse to emigrate was there in the background, yeah.
Please note that I said that the Imperials had no native FTL technology - since being contacted, they've bought a number of working drives from the Cats and Feudalists, and are expanding into the systems immediately surounding their own. Their home system is two jumps out from Sol, which makes for a fairly serious contest for ownership of the system in question.
As for the 'technological advancement' question... The Cats, as covered earlier, had an extremely sophisticated technology at one point, then lost most of it and are currently clawing their way back up. The Paladins have limited themselves from further advancement in many fields because they are, as a society, unwilling to take the neccessary steps - their technology hasn't changed for quite some time. The Imperials, thanks to a couple lucky breaks with the local biota (a tree-anologue whose wood compares favorably with many modern composite materials, and a flower that knows how to repair its own DNA) and a visionary scientist or two, have managed to cobble together a 1950s-era nuclear technology and go moon-hopping about seventy years before they really should have if they were going the same way Earth did.
Mrg. That's not really satisfying, is it? Hm. How 'bout this - there is indeed a roughly 1% variance in the rate of technological advancement between worlds... and, overall, Earth is well towards the 'fast' end of the bell curve. The seven Powers we've been discussing are the societies that were advanced enough to build or copy the technology needed to begin establishing interstellar spheres of influence. There are more than a few worlds that weren't so far along...
Ja, -n

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"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"

03-29-2006, 08:09 AM

Ignore that... I somehow got Chlorine mixed up with Xenon and can't for the life of me figure out how. I should have checked the table, I knew I said something stupid. Still modeling their worlds after Venus make sense.

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On the subject of genetic drift, the American Continents were isolated from the rest of the world for about 12,000 years

Wrong. We got desiccation mummified white people showing up before the Asians showed up and killed them off (It was in a Discover magazine article in the '90s) and most of the large fauna. North America was a lot more than like Africa species wise before the Indians started hunting by running entire herds of cliffs for the meat from 5 or 6 animals. Every once in a while a new boat load of people randomly came to America from some where. One of the theories is Atlantis was South America and those pyramids in South America did show up about the same time as in Egypt. If you want isolated there is Earth's official middle of Nowhere, Easter Island.

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500 years ago we didn't even have steam engines and guns were just starting to edge out muscle-powered weaponry.

The first steam engine we have recorded of is from ancient Greeks... hell one of them literally was using a tower mounted solar, mirror based laser to set enemy ships on fire. The problem was he wrote everything on trays of sand (and we all know how good etch-a-sketch are for long term preservation of data). That guy and his small group of students literally double or tripled the siege length for a city of those resources. Some inpatient Roman grunt ran him through for not respecting his authoritay. The inventor was deep in a math problem on the beach and was ignoring thee actual wall breaching invasion. The grunt had specific orders to take the guy alive to (after over a hundred pieces of Mad SCIENCE that the Romans had had sicked on them that guy was the point of taking that city), but apparent said grunt didn't know who it was. If he didn't kill that guy we would be far more advanced then we are today.

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I don't see why - if one assumes that one of their design goals was to maintain cross-compatability with the base strain, then that continued fertility makes perfect sense.

SO there is the constant tinkering I mentioned before... or at least an 'intelligent' version of universal DNA.
You'll also want to have races that races other than Earthlings have to deal with, unless Earth is in the geographical center of the races. You also never mentioned if the 18(?) jump points in the Sol system was a large, small, or average number.

Valles · 03-29-2006, 08:41 AM

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Wrong. We got desiccation mummified white people showing up before the Asians showed up and killed them off (It was in a Discover magazine article in the '90s) and most of the large fauna. North America was a lot more than like Africa species wise before the Indians started hunting by running entire herds of cliffs for the meat from 5 or 6 animals. Every once in a while a new boat load of people randomly came to America from some where. One of the theories is Atlantis was South America and those pyramids in South America did show up about the same time as in Egypt. If you want isolated there is Earth's official middle of Nowhere, Easter Island.

Settled sometime in the 1200s, IIRC. Either way, please refer to Deadpan's posted link - the number of people coming into or out of the Americas is actually irrelevant, since they didn't produce any serious contribution to the landmass's gene pool. AFAIK, genetic speciation can occur as quickly as you're suggesting, but only under the most extreme pressures. Which humans were in a good position to beat even before we got all smart and stuff.
I don't see how other species or human effects thereon are relevant to the impact of genetic drift on the human population of the Americas between initial settlement and the beginning of extensive contact with the Eurasian populations.

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The first steam engine we have recorded of is from ancient Greeks... hell one of them literally was using a tower mounted solar, mirror based laser to set enemy ships on fire. The problem was he wrote everything on trays of sand (and we all know how good etch-a-sketch are for long term preservation of data). That guy and his small group of students literally double or tripled the siege length for a city of those resources. Some inpatient Roman grunt ran him through for not respecting his authoritay. The inventor was deep in a math problem on the beach and was ignoring thee actual wall breaching invasion. The grunt had specific orders to take the guy alive to (after over a hundred pieces of Mad SCIENCE that the Romans had had sicked on them that guy was the point of taking that city), but apparent said grunt didn't know who it was. If he didn't kill that guy we would be far more advanced then we are today.

Well, the real problem would be that the attitude of pretty much everybody with any learning was, 'why build machines when you've got slaves', so a tremendous amount of time was wasted both before and after.
Actually, the rate of technological advancement has been a shockingly smooth exponential curve for as far back as I've heard any suggestion of measuring it. I don't think projecting a similar technical level for several other societies is nearly as problematic as you're suggesting, especially if, as already stated, they're merely the most advanced of some larger selection.

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SO there is the constant tinkering I mentioned before... or at least an 'intelligent' version of universal DNA.

No. There is an isolated incident of a single population making certain changes to themselves without going so far as to reduce fertility between modified and unmodified individuals, and even then occured within historical times. The Precursors are gone, and there has been no constant deliberate influence on human genetics, preplaced or otherwise. Allotropic drift isn't fast enough to cause problems, at least in a species with generations as long as humans', and it's very hard to puncture the equilibrium of a critter that keeps changing its environment to suit its whims.
ETA:

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You'll also want to have races that races other than Earthlings have to deal with, unless Earth is in the geographical center of the races. You also never mentioned if the 18(?) jump points in the Sol system was a large, small, or average number.

Eight. And that's a perfectly ordinary number for a star to have - K or better stars within five parsecs of each other = jump connection. Quite simple - the only reason I haven't gone farther in my mapping is that, frankly, I have no idea how to start looking for or calculating distance data centered on stars other than Sol. The positions of every system within I think at least a hundred parsecs is known fairly closely, IIRC, so the data's there, it just needs processing.
Ja, -n

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"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"

03-29-2006, 01:11 PM

I think you somehow managed to miss how evolution actually works. Youve got some weird view that humans hit a plateau evolution wise in your head. Evolution is a process that can be fast or slow For instance picking up a population and dropping them onto a world with half the gravity, different food supplies, different general climate, different levels of solar radiation etc Every feature listed and more will cause a genetic drift from whatever population of base line Earth humans was used.
The organisms with the best traits for the environment will live longer in greater numbers and out breed the ones not suited. Immunities to diseases will disappear if the disease simply doesnt exist on that world, new ones for local diseases will take their place. The same thing will happen to digestive enzymes and skin tones. More sun? Dark skin. Less sun lighter skin. Long periods without food? More body fat. Millennia of effectively infinite food? Fast metabolism no long range storage medium. Constant cold weather? Layers of fat or fur. Hot weather? Thinner fur or little hair at all. These are relatively minor changes minus the fat or no fat issue.
More changes happen in the case of the halving of gravity. For instance bone density will change with gravity. A heavier frame will be slower for the same area as the higher gravity muscle thins out, which will take a few months. The lighter ones will run faster and get more food/escape more predators, than their heavier counter parts. A heart beating at the same rate and strength as it would in a higher gravity environment will wear itself and the body out faster, as its putting more strain on the bodies systems. Different levels of solar radiation and soil toxins will cause changes as die off and breeding of new generations occurs. Recessive genes go dominant and dominant recessive. A few local bacteria damage their genetics.
Less gravity means that the organisms present will adapt so that they have different structures. Having half the gravity will means that bones can be less dense so that light frames per size exist. A heart that is use to functioning in a higher gravity will find that the body is a bit larger that it is in the lower gravity. As a side effect the heart will beat to hard and blood pressure will increase the body will adapt a bit, however in one generation. The ones with hearts better adapted
Then you have things like: What if there is no flint available? That will mean more animal/plant parts are used in their development or maybe they concentrated on doing things with sheer force of will as the tools arent as available. What if the planet they ended up on had only one land mass? More moons or no moon? No tides altered bio-chemistry, different day night cycles. Heat on the planet solely from the star it orbits and no molten core? Magnetic North wont move around if it exists. The sky green or red tinted? Different eye structures.
Also, how many humans got transplanted and from were did the before race steal the land previously in the Gulf of Mexico and put it in a giant ship and steal it?
Humans and chimps have a difference of around 1.2 percent. It take very little percentage change to make two races into separate species. These little things add up over time. The organism changing their genetics on purpose isnt going to help either. Its just not going to matter if the just swipped half of the same tribe over and over again.

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Well, the real problem would be that the attitude of pretty much everybody with any learning was, 'why build machines when you've got slaves', so a tremendous amount of time was wasted both before and after.

Thats not true the machine just got powered by slaves and animals. And I recall seeing the Romans had lead/acid pottery batteries cant remember if they figured out why though. The Greeks had temple doors that only opened when the correct weight of sacrifice was on them. The whole barbarians take out Rome thing had more effect. The knowledge written down ended up in the hands of priests and the like or just elites for so long. The recent idea of giving the common man a shot at inventing things and educating the unwashed masses is the reason the curve spikes in the past 2-3 hundred years. The Renaissance was helpful for setting the basics its the whole centuries of knowledge hoarding called the Dark Ages that messed things up.
The Roman Age had comparable hospital facilities to today in many cases. They did successful eye surgery that take major precision work. The biggest technological difference between the Roman Empire and today is material science. Today has far more. The internal combustion engine comes second.

Florin · 03-29-2006, 01:51 PM

The very act of creating a society interferes with Darwin style evolution, since societies often work to preserve the lives of individuals who may not have the best DNA.
As to Evolution happening fast or slow, it's obviously going to be slow. After all, they're living on basically Earth type planets, just with less gravity. Since the nessecary genetic modifications were already made when the Precursers dropped them off, theres no need for any fast evolution to increase survivabilty, and if they have a functional society, little to no Darwinien pressures.
A DNA difference of 1.2% is more than enough to prevent interspieces breeding yes, but it's also more than enough to change a tall hairless bipedal mammel into a small hairy primate with a tail. Also, recent research suggest that the difference is more like 5%. Since most of our off earth humans look exactally like us, we can assume that the difference in DNA is much smaller than that between a human and a monkey.
According to this website, Native American tribes probably arrived in Alaska 20 to 30 thousand years ago. Any previous encounter with Europe before Columbus was more or less insignifcant as far as the genepool goes. Yet, as mentioned, Europians and Native Americans could breed just fine. Why? Because puny little differences like skin color and the location of your ears on your head or the color of your eyes aren't enough to prevent reproduction. Otherwise Blacks and Whites and Asians and Midgits and so forth wouldn't be able to interbreed.
The kind of genetic drift your thinking of might be a small number percentage wise, but it would represent a HUGE change to the basic human archetype. The kind of change that just doesn't happen without a massive shift in enviroment, probably resulting in a life form that's merely humanoid rather than human. Thus, wide scale genetic manipulation would be required to PREVENT interbreeding, not allow it.--
I have the power to channel my imagination into ever-soaring levels of suspicion and paranoia.
--
If you become a monster to put down a monster you've still got a monster running around at the end of the day and have as such not really solved the whole monster problem at all.

***Bob Schroeck*** · 03-29-2006, 05:01 PM

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hell one of them literally was using a tower mounted solar, mirror based laser to set enemy ships on fire.

If you're talking Archimedes, then, um, no. That's a myth that originated about half a millennium after the event in question. And the technical feasibility was shot down on MythBusters, twice. Yes, you can set something on fire with reflected sunlight. That something is not going to be a moving target, though.

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Some inpatient Roman grunt ran him through for not respecting his authoritay.

Okay, sounds like you are remembering some awfully garbled version of Archimedes. Most of the really cool stuff attributed to him, war-wise, was actually made up by imaginative "historians" centuries after his death. Don't trust any of it.

-- Bob
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For Jor-El so loved the Earth, he sent his only begotten son...

03-29-2006, 06:46 PM

The thing about Myth Busters is that sometimes they flub things, partially for time constraints. For instance, I saw one this weekend about if it was possible to suffocate on your own gas. Most of the build up made sense... then came the way they calculated it.
1) They took each part of the gas as a totally independent variable, they never added up the individual components (which would have shortened the time in question, even if only a little bit). One of the components only took 36 hours to reach the saturation point... which brings up the oddity that 2) they did each calculation based on the room somehow being vented to normal air quality everyday. The story involves a poorly ventilated room... which means this didn't take one day to occur. 3) They made all the calculations based on men weighing far less than the man in the story, ones in better health with diets no where near as bad. 4) They worked on the assumption that, if the air quality was bad enough to cause issues the guy would have woken up on time... when death by carbon monoxide makes you fall asleep and just not wake up. 5) They never took into account that it was hot which for fat people especially means your not moving if you can help it. Which is worse because they took the calculations of the volume and frequency of flatulation based on sitting in a tub of cold water. This is the opposite of the thermal conditions that will to induce gas and the conditions in the story... so their starting point is flawed. All in all the single worse 'busting' of a myth I've seen them do.
In the case I've only heard of, these were anchored ships getting set on fire. Then again giving their opponents super powers to explain why the siege is taking so long. Either way it means that people have wanted lasers for well over a millennium. I can't remember seeing either episode it question so I can't be more specific on if I believe them or not.
Doesn't change the over all point that the Roman era had a lot of what is considered modern technology floating around. Note I mentioned the Romans doing successful eye surgery.... I'll take your point on time distorting things, but it doesn't really matter for my over all point on technological advancement speed. Not to mention it proves how old the phenomenon of people taking a fictional idea and tring to make it work advancing technology from earlier.

Valles · 03-30-2006, 12:48 AM

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Less gravity means that the organisms present will adapt so that they have different structures. Having half the gravity will means that bones can be less dense so that light frames per size exist. A heart that is use to functioning in a higher gravity will find that the body is a bit larger that it is in the lower gravity. As a side effect the heart will beat to hard and blood pressure will increase the body will adapt a bit, however in one generation. The ones with hearts better adapted

Changes of the degree and type you're talking about do indeed happen, and have happened on Earth. They haven't prevented interbreeding yet - not even close.

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Also, how many humans got transplanted and from were did the before race steal the land previously in the Gulf of Mexico and put it in a giant ship and steal it?

Huh? I have no idea what you're talking about.

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Thats not true the machine just got powered by slaves and animals. And I recall seeing the Romans had lead/acid pottery batteries cant remember if they figured out why though. The Greeks had temple doors that only opened when the correct weight of sacrifice was on them. The whole barbarians take out Rome thing had more effect. The knowledge written down ended up in the hands of priests and the like or just elites for so long. The recent idea of giving the common man a shot at inventing things and educating the unwashed masses is the reason the curve spikes in the past 2-3 hundred years. The Renaissance was helpful for setting the basics its the whole centuries of knowledge hoarding called the Dark Ages that messed things up.

Well... no. The 'knowledge hoarding' practice was in place all across human society long before the fall of the Roman Empire, which, BTW, had mostly rotted from the inside out even before anybody came along to push the corpse over. And that's just in the west, leaving aside the Byzantine Empire, the Persians, the Islamic Caliphates, and anything and everything happening in China and India.
I'm taling about the fact that, for example, no one conceived of something like a McCormick reaper even though none of the parts of the horse-drawn type are out of the reach of your village blacksmith.
Ja, -n

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"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"

03-30-2006, 03:38 AM

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Changes of the degree and type you're talking about do indeed happen, and have happened on Earth. They haven't prevented interbreeding yet - not even close.

I think it was the tens or hundreds of billions of miles separating these transplanted tribes that prevented the interbreeding. After they rejoin there is little to really stop interested parties from boinking each other. My problem is the whole 100,000 years of alternate evolution that with no inter breeding for balancing genetics that occurs in the meantime. They also didn't swipe Romans here or people from modern France... the swiped pre-Ice age man-kind here. Thats before we had that lovely Ice age to cause us to get all the body fat. Ive heard you say that Earth is a cold planet that means to me that there wasnt a recent Ice age on the others. Different reasons people died off means different traits for the survivors.
As a side note, perhaps what caused the cat people to be cat people was that biological apocalypse it cause massive changes to the planets gene pool that mean lots of big nasties and vicious little pack hunters made out of the flora, fauna and the populous. The cat people are the ones that survived the plague relatively unscathed. Tech development at the time went towards power armor and getting off of that deranged hell. Much of their tech was lost, because it wasnt immediately useful in the situation and the planet was to dangerous to go tech hunting on afterwards. Which can make a adventure hook tech hunting on a rather hostile planet.

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Huh? I have no idea what you're talking about.

The humans that got transplanted to the other planets by the precursors. Where did they come from? The time period we are taking about for this extra-solar movement is when we still had at least one other competing major humanoid race running around (Neanderthals, debatably interbreeding is why slavic/Russian groups look so unibrow thugish.) and a few other minor ones too.
If the precursors ran into Earth and went 'Oh this species has potential! Lets drop some off on other planets and see what happens!', then they had to get the people they transplanted from somewhere. Yes Earth, but where on Earth. The thing about The Gulf of Mexico is an example.

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I'm taling about the fact that, for example, no one conceived of something like a McCormick reaper even though none of the parts of the horse-drawn type are out of the reach of your village blacksmith.

Ideas come from somewhere. Reading about said reaper I've decided it was lack of motivation. If you have enough people you effectively own (slaves, serfs, peons, etc..) There is little reason to go through expensive, time consuming R&D for something of that nature. Many, Many societies ran off of the land owner with a shiny title commanding legions of small area farmers. Making that kind of device would have led to the land workers having far more free time which they get ideas like, getting rid of the land owner who nails your tongue to a tree for saying he doesnt like. Much of the power the nobles of the world had was, because of this system. Also, the reaper takes maintenance and an operator this means someone has to understand how to make a device with spinning blades when the peons have free time and mechanized spinning blade machine that spells trouble horse-propelled spinning blades are a weapon of war after all.
For the reaper in question its a matter of who it came from. It came from independent farmers who had enough land to farm for profit. Farm more land, make more profit. North America had enormous areas of land that meant a peon could own as much land as a noble. This not-a-peasant could only work so much of it himself so he produced 5-12 kids for workers (he could higher more also, which means he had enough extra money to pay or buy people to work for him). To make more profit you could produce/higher more people to work for you, or you could get more work from the workers you already have.
Now you have 5-12 kids possibly some workers and itd be great if only two of them are needed for harvesting the same area and its much faster. So a need and a want were established. Which McCormick and his father filled. Look at the different harvesting rates on this sight: www.vaes.vt.edu/steeles/m...vest.html, it explains this in manpower advantages and time save and the like. Look at the out put difference per man involved in each advancement they list that for.
Inventions come around for a few basic reasons 1) A need has to be filled. In this case harvesting grain. 2) You want to do something you are already doing faster and easier. (see that page), 3) your bored and have free time.

Valles · 03-30-2006, 04:21 AM

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I think it was the tens or hundreds of billions of miles separating these transplanted tribes that prevented the interbreeding. After they rejoin there is little to really stop interested parties from boinking each other. My problem is the whole 100,000 years of alternate evolution that with no inter breeding for balancing genetics that occurs in the meantime. They also didn't swipe Romans here or people from modern France... the swiped pre-Ice age man-kind here. Thats before we had that lovely Ice age to cause us to get all the body fat. Ive heard you say that Earth is a cold planet that means to me that there wasnt a recent Ice age on the others. Different reasons people died off means different traits for the survivors.

Point the first, our different strains aren't diverging a hundred thousand years ago, but more like half that.
Point the second, what I've been saying from the get-go is that, now that the strains have been reintroduced to each other, they are most certainly interested.
Point the third, my time range for the pickup falls smack-dab in the middle of the last glaciated period.
Point the fourth, it is a long, long step from 'different traits' to 'unable to breed', especially when an already existant, mutually shared trait (language and intelligence) is working to suppress the need behind the development of those further traits.
Point the fifth, I'm fairly certain that I actively specified at the very start that the people the Precursors had picked up were, indeed, anatomically modern - ie, they practically were Romans or modern French.

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As a side note, perhaps what caused the cat people to be cat people was that biological apocalypse it cause massive changes to the planets gene pool that mean lots of big nasties and vicious little pack hunters made out of the flora, fauna and the populous. The cat people are the ones that survived the plague relatively unscathed. Tech development at the time went towards power armor and getting off of that deranged hell. Much of their tech was lost, because it wasnt immediately useful in the situation and the planet was to dangerous to go tech hunting on afterwards. Which can make a adventure hook tech hunting on a rather hostile planet.

Yep, though the 'massive changes' weren't nearly as random as you seem to be suggested - most of the surviving biosphere was deliberately set up to be as deadly and agressive as possible, and the 'cat mods' were the portion of the human population that managed to survive the resulting ecosystem. And you're certainly right about the adventure hook. ^_^

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If the precursors ran into Earth and went 'Oh this species has potential! Lets drop some off on other planets and see what happens!', then they had to get the people they transplanted from somewhere. Yes Earth, but where on Earth. The thing about The Gulf of Mexico is an example.

Oh, they scooped up a band here, a band there - wherever the particular subspecies they were interested in (Homo sapiens sapiens, ie, us) happened to be. They were patient sorts, the Precursors.

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Reading about said reaper I've decided it was lack of motivation.

That's what I said, yes. Along with a sizable dash of the idea that such menial things were beneath the notice of anyone who was rich enough to afford an education that'd let them actually do something about it...
Ja, -n

===============================================
"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"

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