Zonetrooper

Not to be that guy, but it’s tailstone.

Oooooh. Whoops. I totally misread that.

But, since the gesture is a rough equivalent to a dismissive wave of the hand, the word can be translated “handwavium”.

Hah! I do like that.

Ah, well. It was a good idea!

What constitutes "misuse"?

The big fears are trying to use one as a weapon is the big fear - slamming a barge at FTL into a colony-station or planet would ruin either - or theft by a foreign power. But since any misjump could be catastrophically deadly, any jump which does not match a planned and expected course is treated as potentially dangerous.

There have been attempts at using them for smuggling, quick business opportunities, petty theft, and - in one infamous incident - a crewmember attempting to evacuate his family.

Notes on tallstone production and implications of cybersecurity

Interesting. There's no way to "ping" the "network" and - by physics or other means - determine how many other cards are on that "network"?

Also, depending on how difficult it is to create Tallstone, this creates the possibility that there would be "certified secure" tallstone from well-regarded manufacturers, and riskier-but-cheaper options if you don't care. It also raises the possibility that beyond individual bad actors, governments or criminal groups could set up entire fabs producing batches with access for them.

Refreshing that the defining system characteristic ... seems to be that it isn't a system.

Exactly. One of the themes I'm aiming for in this world is that magic is something intrinsically of the heart and soul; it's not something which can be objectively studied. You can still try and loosely categorize it and observe similarities, but magic can't be completely separated from the person.

fast travel being inherently scary

Really, I just wanted to cut down on the 'easy fast travel' trope and make the world seem bigger... but it's also a cool idea to play with thematically! I like what you're doing with the social angle as well.

Has anybody looked at using automated transport and power-up ships to set up the gates? Or is it a process that is sufficiently complex that it can't be carried out by an automated system?

...conversely, if your explorer ship is bringing a gate with it, can you turn on the gate mid-trip and rotate crews in and out by passing them back through the gate?

Haha, holy shit. Somehow I had never connected that Piratesoftware was Maldavius. Yeah, that explains so, so very much of this entire SKG debacle.

From the sci-fi setting, it's your pretty standard "bend space until both destination and departure points are actually nominally close to each other" kind of drive.

• Time between jumps usually bottoms out at around 15-20 minutes for most drives, but increases exponentially as a function of distance traveled and desired accuracy of your destination point.

• This is because the pre-calculation to compute a successful bend in space-time grows massively more complex the more gravity fields are involved. Extremely long-distance jumps can take hours or days to calculate, but inter-system jumps can be carried out rapidly.

• Intersecting the event horizon of a fold in progress is bad. "You're reduced to a fine relativistic spray" bad. So far accidents have been "minor", as in they didn't kill thousands.

• The exotic matter required for drives is stupendously expensive. As a result, almost no ships have internal drives, but require a "drive barge" or "FTL barge" to exploit FTL. Despite this, barges are common enough that most families can afford to take an FTL trip if needed.

• In UNHA operations, all drives are legally owned by the government and crewed by a detachment of naval personnel, with explicit orders to scuttle a drive rather than allow it to be misused.

In the fantasy setting, it's a little bit different. For one thing, no two fast travel castings work entirely alike. This is because it is a key tenet that magic is a deeply and intrinsically personal thing, and while casters than study concepts to gain inspiration, there's no such thing as a "standardized" casting which can be moved between casters.

For instance, some casters port you through an alternate dimension, and some bend space. Some open a gateway, some transmute you into photons then back, and some encapsulate you in a bubble which moves rapidly.

Even within a broad category, there are subsets: For instance, if they use an alternate dimension, is it one in which points are simply "closer together", or where time flows differently?

It's important to know these things, because different species or other casters being brought along can have... unexpected reactions to different methods.

Like, what kind of dictator are we talking here? Is this a Lord Vetinari benevolent dictator, or your typical generic slimeball autocrat?

Personally, I'd like to think that if they did become the latter, they'd be so far different from the person I love that I would break from them. Thoughtfulness, intelligence, and consideration aren't usually things I see associated with dictators, you know? But people have an incredible capacity to isolate and put on different masks between their personal and professional lives...

It really is an interesting question, yes! Fires started by frictional heating are pretty uncommon in nature, but early humans could pretty readily see that objects placed near a fire would begin to smolder and burn just from radiant heat.

It really depends on when we were able to take intellectual leap of realizing that all heat is equivalent, and fire is not a prerequisite of making new fire.

We don't know. Hell, we can't even narrow it down to a specific place with certainty. There is strong evidence in human settlements for use of fire anywhere from a few hundred thousand to 1 million years ago. When, exactly, is hard to ascertain; for instance, some sites which are claimed to hold the oldest evidence have been criticized as resembling the aftermath of wildfires.

It is also depends on what you mean by "discovered": Early proto-hominids were almost certainly aware of fire and the concept of burning, so are we counting from when they realized "hey, I can take a burning thing and put it where I want it, and it will spread burning there?" Or are we only counting from when fire began to be used as a tool (e.g., for clearing brush or cooking)? Or when humans discovered how to start fires in the absence of a natural source?

I suppose it depends on what you consider "interesting" - I tend to find relatively "conventional" sci-fi stuff like coilguns or advanced missiles, so long as they're fairly well designed! But with that in mind, let me discuss a few relatively unique ones:

• C+ Artillery is... exactly what it sounds like. Actually predating FTL travel by a fair bit (humans... go figure), C+ artillery hurls a massive slug through a sequence of faster-than-light spacefolds, like skipping a stone off a pond. The results are utterly catastrophic: Not only does the projectile bypass armor and interceptors as it "skips", but the target is subject to the unspeakable gravitational shear forces at the event horizon of the final fold... and that's before the enormous slug at .99C slams into it. They're used for cracking fortress-stations and dreadnoughts, and thankfully have never been fired against a planet.

• The typical infantry armor can be outfitted with the SPG-22, a 60mm, box-fed semi-automatic coilgun mortar. This system is mounted pointing vertically on the back, and is fed from a 4-round box magazine. It's most notable for the lack of need for emplacement: If necessary, the operator can kneel, the armor braces itself in place, and the mortar fires as necessary. Typically the user is actually aiming the system using an onboard firing computer, while an assistant operator keeps the weapon fed. In this way, rapid firepower can be pushed down to a platoon level.

• The AGS-202 'Easifa' ('Storm') is a monstrous cluster munition: Weighing in at over 3,000kg, it fragments into several individually-guided petals, which in turn try to arrange themselves for maximum coverage of an area... before they in turn disperse a mix of pyrophoric incendiaries, high-explosive fragmentation, and guided armor-penetrating bomblets by the hundreds. They're meant to erase entire defensive lines, although if you can disperse one over a base, the results are equally terrifying.

In fairness, Microsoft certainly has tried to get the next closest thing with Bedrock. The hosting of server backends through their architecture via "realms" allows them to lock you out of a whole lot, and I still see people getting randomly banned because of their profanity filter.

But yes, if Realms shut down right now, there would always be Java (and even privately hosted Bedrock servers).

I really wish there was a good airsoft group nearby me, but it seems like the only ones who are close by don't play on a schedule that works for me. It's really frustrating.