Yet Another Brain Fart -- err, plot bunny

[Valles]

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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.

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Reeaally? Huh. I'd had no idea it was that close... In which case, certainly they'd be capable of cyberlimbs.

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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.

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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...
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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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...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.

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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?

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*blinks* *checks Wiki*
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...

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What are the base tenants of the faith.

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I don't know. It hasn't been decided yet... I'm sort of stumped for where to go with that, see...
Ja, -n

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

[ECSNorway]

The thing with methane and combustibility is... if there's very little free oxygen in the atmosphere, fire isn't going to be that much of an issue. Because without something to combine exothermically with, you're just not going to get fire.
In our experience, the most common such reactant is, of course, oxygen.
If there's no/minimal oxygen beyond occasional trace quantities in the Spiders' atmosphere, and methan (or whatever) is the most common reducing component...
(Asimov actually wrote a mystery that depended on this. An arsonist from Earth was visiting a facility on Titan, and booby-trapped the wrong gas cylinder...)--
"I give you the beautiful... the talented... the tirelessly atomic-powered...
R!
DOROTHY!
WAYNERIGHT!
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

[drakensis]

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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.

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I'm getting something of a Battletech vibe here. Long spindly jumpships with pods attached? Or long and spindly jumpships with smaller dropships detaching for jump-point to planet travel? Large spherical or egg-shaped transport dropships (to maximise internal volume) and smaller, blockier combat vessels.
D for Drakensis

You're only young once, but immaturity is forever.

[Valles]

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I'm getting something of a Battletech vibe here. Long spindly jumpships with pods attached? Or long and spindly jumpships with smaller dropships detaching for jump-point to planet travel? Large spherical or egg-shaped transport dropships (to maximise internal volume) and smaller, blockier combat vessels.

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Somewhat, yes, or the Dune-verse's Heighliners. Jumpships don't usually just sit at the jump points, though - for one thing, they're even more vulnerable that way - so they usually do the ferrying back and forth from planetary orbit themselves rather than carry along seperate 'lighter' hulls for the purpose.
Oh, and about engines. The Paladins, being as they have forcefields to play around with, tend to go with something that looks about like your standard magnetic confinement fusion engine, while most other factions rely on one flavor or other of nuclear thermal rocket, modulo how well they can deal with radiation poisoning. Terran surface-to-orbit shuttles rely on simple LOH/LOX rockets, and everything else, from the Jumpships on down to the specialist warships they call 'Monitors', well, they do the bang-bang boogie. Aka, Orion.
Yes, everyone else thinks they're crazy.
Ja, -n

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

[Happerry]

Fission, Fusion or Both?

[classicdrogn]

On the subject of nanotechnology - we have molecular-scale logic now. Yay!
- 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

[drakensis]

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Yes, everyone else thinks they're crazy.

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But no one tries to attack the rear end of their ships. Well, not more than once. The big sheet of armour may be a gunnery blindspot but there's too much chance of taking a nuke in the face.
D for Drakensis

You're only young once, but immaturity is forever.

[Valles]

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Fission, Fusion or Both?

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What, UTN drive charges? As far as I know, no one's expecting to be able to put together a 'pure fusion' bomb any time soon - but they do keep the fusion percentage as high as they can, and up the efficiency of the fission 'detonator' as far as it'll go. It's still not something you want to have going off anywhere near where you're going to live, but they use the 'cleanest' bombs they can build.
Ja, -n

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

[Happerry]

Can they be modifed for use as the pump in a bomb pumped Laser?

[Valles]

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Can they be modifed for use as the pump in a bomb pumped Laser?

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Nope. UTN can't build the needed lasing rods.
Ja, -n

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

[Happerry]

What about using magnetic fields to focus the drice's bombs as a extra protective measure after these are nuclear bombs being blwn up on your butt. All they would have to do is focus it a bit more for a nasty radiation blast. Right? If it works I can see every one else becoming kinda paranoid about coming to close while chasing them.

[Valles]

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What about using magnetic fields to focus the drice's bombs as a extra protective measure after these are nuclear bombs being blwn up on your butt. All they would have to do is focus it a bit more for a nasty radiation blast. Right? If it works I can see every one else becoming kinda paranoid about coming to close while chasing them.

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What, shaping the plasma from the explosion using a generator aboard the ship? I'm fairly certain that magnetic fields just don't work like that... and, as covered elsewhere, UTN technology can't build devices with enough shock resistance to work that close to the actual blast.
No, about the only weapons application for these drives is making the other guy's sensors go 'Bright light! Bright light! Owie!' Well, and there's the option of setting one off right close to someone too stupid to mind his seperations, but that really applies to any space drive.
Speaking of jump points, they're small... the actual point itself is a point in the geometric sense, ie, literally no volume, and the zone where your drives count it as 'close enough for jazz' is only a few kilometers across. Probably the only advantage the UTN drives have is that they can be marginally more generous about hitting the exact area - not a great deal, of course, but enough to make for some interesting tactical wrinkles.
The answer to why the UTN hasn't just bought stardrives from, say, the fuedalists or the Spiders, is that, actually, they have, but they haven't been able to properly reverse-engineer the ones they've gotten ahold of, and, 1, aren't willing to accept the strategic weakness of being dependant on an outside source for something so critical, and 2, now that they're already committed to the mothership/parasite model, continuing on in that vein is more cost-effective than trying to switch over.
Ja, -n

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

[Happerry]

I was more thinking Radiation Beam. But on a different note, how stealthy are the bombs before they go off? If they are hard to see can they be set to work as mines? If nothing else you could drop them out the back set to explode in say, ten seconds and it would still make it pretty dangerous to chase after a terran ship.

[Valles]

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I was more thinking Radiation Beam. But on a different note, how stealthy are the bombs before they go off? If they are hard to see can they be set to work as mines? If nothing else you could drop them out the back set to explode in say, ten seconds and it would still make it pretty dangerous to chase after a terran ship.

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*shrug* They're not really meant to be stealthy, but space is big and they don't really radiate worth mentioning until they go off. You can play a few games with their detonation timers, but frankly you're much better off sticking a warhead onto a missile body. These things are meant for a specific purpose, and are quite well optimized for that. Different bombs exist for different missions, and the only time you'd be trying to kludge away that difference would be when you're so desperate you don't have any other options.
Ja, -n

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

[Happerry]

How are they launched into space? If you use the right kind of Launcher you could probably get a high speed going, and if it is launched using a railgun or something similar you have a missile built into the bomb. That is if you can get it to blow up at the right time.

[Valles]

...No. The launch mechanism is basically a revolving chamber and an explosive charge - even a Monitor's charges move too slow to be worth doing something like that in an environment the size of a space battlefield, and their drives can run as high as 5 Hz.
As spectacular as its operating principles - and its failure modes - might be, an Orion drive is actually a fairly poor candidate for application of the Kzinti Lesson.
Let it go, please.
Ja, -n

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

[Happerry]

Ok

[Florin]

I can see humans suddenly finding themselves with effective super strength leading to some interesting accidents...
Prime Minister: So, how did first contact with the felines go?
Diplomat: Well, everything was going fine at first. Then I shook the Empress' hand...
PM: And?
Diplomat: They assured me that she'll regain full use of her arm in a few months, and that the blood feud will only last for 12 generations. I'm fired, aren't I?
On the other hand, you gots to pity the poor infantry that tries to invade Earth or any other 1 G colony world.
Fanatic General: CHARGE!
Troops: AHHHHHHHhhhhh*wheezewheezepantcollapse*
--
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. 

[Necratoid]

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...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.

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Terminology correction issue. Like how sex is a physical characteristic and gender is a mental construct. People use the terms incorrectly. For instance one of the western US' tribes of plains Indians had a rite of passage called Sun Dancing. Sundancing involved putting up a pole and attaching the prospective men to it. By attaching I mean taking a strong stick stabbing it through the front of their chest (between the muscle across the front of the chest) then tieing leather tines between the pole and both ends of the stick. Then they wet the leather and its time to get off the pole. See leather shrinks under these conditions... slowly. This drags you up the pole... to pass you had to become unattached without using your hands. Or still be trying after sunset without giving up. Did I mention it starts at sun up.
Well if you didn't want to participate those anatomically male could end up as a third gender... the wife how never gets pregnant. Anatomical females could participate in this and became a fourth gender the guy (hunter, warrior, husband) who tipped his guy friends off to not being home at a certain time when 'he' wanted offspring from 'his' wives (yes plural).
In western society we have 2 official genders and a few others that get less expectance. Some of our genders feel optional reconstructive surgery is an expression of their identity though its not actually required. The lines get messy here though. I had the anthropology course that this came up in in the late '90s so the details get a bit fuzzy and I think I recall some Earth societies had as many as 7-9 recognized.
Though like many things in sense the idiots of the Victorian era this is a screwed up issue to deal with the specifics of. Like how most illegal drugs are extreme refinements of ritual substances or herbs that were of were corrupted by idiots. Peyote and weed are classic examples of ritual substances used by idiots that ignore there being specific times and circumstances. Cocaine is a extreme refinement of a leaf chewed for stamina (a dental treat mainly).
Races are physically different groups that are all members of a single species that all can freely interbreed with each other. What I'm saying is that your stating that most of these races can freely interbreed. Which considering how quick genetics become uncrossable, it would take constant tweaking for that to work.
See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomenclature_code for further input.

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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...

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Thats why silicone based life is a popular concept. Silicon can be used in all the same chemical bonds as carbon... its basically the next molecule up on the periodic table of elements, but not a metal. Though carbon makes carbone dioxide gas and with silicon , silicon dioxide is sand.
periodic.lanl.gov/default.htm

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I don't know. It hasn't been decided yet... I'm sort of stumped for where to go with that, see...

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Okay. Then tell me what you want them to be doing. I'll see if I can help with that. So far I have them really liking to play with exotic energies (that the other groups think is suicidal)... and them being hard wired enough to brain fry if they try to incorporate not them bits of tech into their bodies.
So far I get a vibe of trying to become energy beings... not AIs, but basically more themselves then they are currently. Which means they have such focus on knowing themselves as they are now that they can't adapt to new parts. Their mental self image is that focused. They developed mental (or whatever they are screwing around with at a personal level) 'phantom limbs' that allow them to use limbs that are physically no longer there. They get exhausted they fall over or can't use that phantom arm to hold things. They still have to be physically viable though... their brain/heart/etc.. gets taken out they can't hold on.
The reason a selfaware AI, especially if they run into one which has digital/animated avatar for talking and a more or less humanoid personality. Nonlife life... they attack because they can't take things that aren't in their world view. They aren't evil just hard wired and hostile when confused.
Again thats from what I've seen so far. It can easily change. I mention that kind of AI, because I don't know the in system speeds of ships. If it take weeks or months to get from planet to planet and jump points are at systems edges, people have to do something. An "AI" could just be a diagnostic or system running program (engines, sensors, communications, the music server) that gives general read outs through their avatar (don't bother the captain with the niggling details, facial expressions work better). If getting minor errors it looks confused. A lot of errors it looks mad. Everything running smoothly it looks happy. System failure panic. Off line do to not in use sleeping. Broken or destroyed injured or dead. Etc... just an idea that hit me. Nothing advanced so much as something bored captains made the staff do for entertainment. Plus on days where your bored and half asleep having a suddenly damaged system icon start ranting prophecies of doom is better at getting your attention. Sound files with program triggers. It'll get more complicated over time... mostly from the attentions of bored crew. These are on upper monitor or a main one or five. That way the captain can look at the monitors rather than constantly distracting people from their jobs in a crisis. The read outs are for the professionals of the stations. That and it will further the idea of the humans being crazy... or an are they are strangely advanced in.

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well, they do the bang-bang boogie. Aka, Orion.

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Lost me here... Orion is a reference to what? Does it even matter?

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But no one tries to attack the rear end of their ships. Well, not more than once. The big sheet of armor may be a gunnery blind spot but there's too much chance of taking a nuke in the face.

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Unless they send an autonomous explosive devise to sit on their engine block then run and remote detonate it. Run away and drop off some stealth suicide drones and you can take out a fleet with a single bomber.
With the gravity though, humans will have to spend most of their time in 1 g gravity zones or with weighted suits on or their going to suffer ill effects. Brittle bones and the like... being in low gravity for too long messes up hearts and the other organs. Thats why space shuttle crews and other astronauts are taken out on stretchers.

[Xenoproctologist]

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Lost me here... Orion is a reference to what? Does it even matter?

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Nuclear Pulse Propulsion
Basically, you lob a nuke a few yards behind you and ride the shockwave. Then you do it again. And again.

[classicdrogn]

(insert surf rock music cue of choice here)
- 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

[Necratoid]

Two stupid questions that failed to answer... How does one steer? How does one slow down, let alone stop?
Make a great missile though... just drop it, use chemical propulsion to get the target lock once launched, and the nuke drive kicks in for the assault approach.
Effectively shoot enormous, solid, crossbow style bolts or a nuclear spear gun... its like ramming them, the shield/armor requirements to stop one would be insane compared to the tech requirements to make one.
Though there appears to be a new American plane that runs on a chemical version of this system and was clocked at Mach 8. Probably why they released the B2's existence smart militaries dont release that kind of weapon to the public domain without having something better. Whatever it is leaves a smoke trail of a solid column of smoke with smoke donuts at regular intervals.

[deadpan29]

The primary way to steer one of these ships is the same way you steer a standard rocket engine in space: Use small reaction thrusters or gyroscopes to spin the ship around so you can apply thrust in the desired direction. You stop by pointing the "back end" forward and aplying thrust in a direction oposed to your current motion.
Of course, this is a little trickier with the Orion than with a rocket, in that you have to be careful not to spin around in such a way that you might expose some part of the ship other than the big armored plate to a blast or the lingering effects thereof.
As an additional note, using this propultion system would probably mean that these folks are better than anyone else at making fission/fusion bombs and warheads, since they get so much practice and use them regularly even when not using them ON someone.
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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]

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Races are physically different groups that are all members of a single species that all can freely interbreed with each other. What I'm saying is that your stating that most of these races can freely interbreed.

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Yes, exactly. Different morphologies and populations, but they can and will interbreed and produce fertile offspring given the chance.
As to the question of divergent evolution, one of the assumptions I'd been making without realizing it was that the 'human habitable' worlds were all using the same rotation scheme for their basic sugars and proteins... presumable another effect of the whole 'seeding' enterprise. That being the case, and given that 1, anatomically modern humans are a tremendously successful species and 2, successful species, as a rule, do not evolve further until they stop being so, no, I don't think that they'd've speciated. The more extreme ends of the scale - like, say, Earth and whatever world produced the cat-people - might've generated a case of a ring species, but then again, they might not've, hard to tell.

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So far I get a vibe of trying to become energy beings... not AIs, but basically more themselves then they are currently. Which means they have such focus on knowing themselves as they are now that they can't adapt to new parts. Their mental self image is that focused. They developed mental (or whatever they are screwing around with at a personal level) 'phantom limbs' that allow them to use limbs that are physically no longer there. They get exhausted they fall over or can't use that phantom arm to hold things. They still have to be physically viable though... their brain/heart/etc.. gets taken out they can't hold on.

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'Transcending the limitations of the flesh', and all that? Hmm. Yeah, that'd fit.
At this point, I'm mostly trying to decide on a sort of basic philosophical question in the game world - do I want to have villains or not? How clear cut, how black and white do I want things? Because, on the one hand, what's the point of escaping when the world you're going to is just like the one you're in, but on the other, if things are too simple it just gets boring.
Either way, their most militant sect is pretty much hell-bent on locking horns with the UTN, and doing a decent job of dragging the rest in behind them.

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With the gravity though, humans will have to spend most of their time in 1 g gravity zones or with weighted suits on or their going to suffer ill effects. Brittle bones and the like... being in low gravity for too long messes up hearts and the other organs. Thats why space shuttle crews and other astronauts are taken out on stretchers.

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My understanding is that there's no small doubt right now just how much 'gravity' is enough to maintain basic biochemical balances - a full gravity might be needed, it might not, there's just not enough data yet. Plenty on why no gravity is bad, but...
For convenience's sake, I'm projecting that anywhere over about half a G is enough to support long term health... although that's not to say that the ambassadorial delegations to Earth don't have some very serious problems.

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How does one steer?

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Very carefully.
More seriously, you can probably get at least part of the effect of a gimballed nozzle by having a mechanism to 'skew' your detonations just slightly off of center of the pusher plate... which is, to say the least, delicate. Another possibility might be squirting reaction mass out on the side of the pusher plate that you want to turn away from.

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How does one slow down, let alone stop?

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Stop burning, flip your ship, accelerate again. Pretty much the same way you do with any other type of reaction drive.

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Effectively shoot enormous, solid, crossbow style bolts or a nuclear spear gun... its like ramming them, the shield/armor requirements to stop one would be insane compared to the tech requirements to make one.

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Welcome to the wild, wild world of orbital mechanics. ^_^
John's Law: Any interesting space drive is a weapon of mass destruction. It only matters how long you're willing to wait for maximum damage. Interesting is whatever it takes to keep the readers from becoming bored.
I've been hearing about Aurora for as long as I can really remember... what, ten years now? But yeah, it might well be the same kind of thing.
Ja, -n

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

[Necratoid]

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Yes, exactly. Different morphologies and populations, but they can and will interbreed and produce fertile offspring given the chance.

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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.

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Either way, their most militant sect is pretty much hell-bent on locking horns with the UTN, and doing a decent job of dragging the rest in behind them.

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Your asking the wrong question I think. Your question should be WHY are they so 'hell bent on locking horns with the UTN'? Are they just jerks that don't like the color scheme of the standard UTN uniform? Do they have just want to kill all life that isn't them? Did they ask one of their great Zen-like unanswerable questions and an engineer solve it in thirty seconds in a way that makes a major tenant of their religion seem flawed or silly? Does there holy book prophesize that a race with the human social and technological specs is going to destroy their society? Did they Grand militant puuba flip a coin on his opinion using some esoteric method that channels his uncontious instincts into it and it rolled into a duct and shorted out the heat to his quarters and sealed the door, thus making him spend 5 miserable hours in a cold, stuffy roof... then took it as a sign?
For example, the Paladins have hit a plateau. They haven't made any major stride in new skills in a few decades. So they release a device to the other races, when the humans pop up they get it too as a gift. Good for relations and they get to see what others will do with the basics. The device is a psionic amp chamber that lets an entity put on a suit and project his/her/its self image into a visible controllable image. Some races used it for a upgrade to controls, some ignore it, the Paladins themselves use the tech as a trainer and a ship control device.
The humans first decide its great for figuring out what is mentally wrong with people. Do they hate their 'giant, Dumbo ears', do they think they are blobs of fat when 80 pounds? Are things from their past haunting them (they can't control the image enough to edit out random flashes of things that weight heavily on their mind.) Then the military works on using it to control things... which may or may not work well for them yet.
Then some bored engineers get hold of it and think... this is the basics of a great new type of arcade game. One that you think up your own avatar for. The tech is adapted easy enough to put 2 or more self images in the room. Next they run the images at each other beat them together until some one looses. Now the images in question are just weird looking and gamers with to much time on their hands evolve their images the fastest. Limiting controls make it so you don't always end up with someone uncontious.
After discovering this helps people gain mental strength and makes better, faster thinking employees it is implemented as a standard feature of space ship. The control booths can be set up along with the emitters in the standard gym. Sooner or later other races get wind of it and the controls are altered for other races. Thus the Paladin here of it.
The problem is that people want more than one character or have an easier times sicked not them characters on people or maybe their image's outfit isn't cool enough for their taste. So people start altering their characters through force of will. Very few get caught up in this enough for it to change them as mandatory trips to the shrink to monitor for psychosis in the medical machine where the self image isn't easily altered. So a safe game/self improvement method is born of the tech.
The Paladins are impressed with this device and a few units are bought for study and experimentation. The issue though comes with the militant hard-liners. People started adding wings and tails and horns and extra arms to avatars and they manage to control these extra limbs. The problem is that their religion calls for self improvement and these extra parts on their self image avatars are blatantly knowing a not-self self. This is just plain wrong and entirely misses the point of self improvement, you can't just go around making other selves in your self to improve. Improving not self selves is missing the point and makes their heads hurt.
So a split occurs. Most think either whatever or neat let me try and this may be the method needed to reach above their plateau. The hard-liners think that this is sign of a dark society destroying prophecy and if they did something this wrong and weird with the most basic tech.... what are they going to do with the nonbasic stuff.
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.

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John's Law: Any interesting space drive is a weapon of mass destruction. It only matters how long you're willing to wait for maximum damage.

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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.