Like I said, distractions. I know it helped me, that and some counseling.
I’m sure he’ll be busy teaching, training, and dealing with cocky recruits trying
to make fun of his height, I’m sure we all know how THAT’S going to pan out.
That reminds me of what happened when that young man figured out how
to use the grav drives safely in atmosphere. At least this one managed to
shut up the doc long enough to explain his idea!
I’m not as short as Samuel, but I topped out at 5’8″ by I was
13, I was one of the taller kids then, but by the next year I
wasn’t I hit puberty earlier than most and that was the
proof of it… But like Samuel, I was stocky and well muscled.
LOL
And so damn hairy… Guys would love to yank out hair just
to make me jump.
Samuel reminds me of our house mouse when I was in OCS at Quantico in 71. He was just over
the legal minimum height but he was a power lifter and was very nearly as wide as he was tall.
I know his biceps were as big as my thighs. His name was Robert. Nobody dared call him “Bob”
or “Bobby”. He was ” Robert”. He got away with badly injuring a very stupid DI. We were doing bayonet
training with a gunny on a tower with a bullhorn calling out moves. Some nitwit (not one of my
platoon’s DIs) was taunting Robert saying stuff like “Hit me! C’mon hit me!” and dodging just out of
reach. I had already been judged NPQ and was just waiting to go home and was watching nearby. I
In one of those glorious cosmic coincidences that proves the existence of a higher power, the nitwit
stumbled the same time the gunny on the tower called for a vertical smash. We had been issued
M-14s. Nice, solid, wood-furnatured M-14s. Well, the gunny calls “vertical smash”, the asshole
stumbles and 160 pounds of fury drives the underside of the stock of that rifle up into the left side
of the idiot’s jaw. I swear the dumb ass did a complete summersault in the air and landed on his
back. Needless to say training halted while they sent for a helo to medivac him to the hospital at
main base Quantico. Both his upper and lower jaws were broken(whole side of his face was
caved in!) and it took a bunch of stitches to sew up the inside of asshole’s mouth. Nothing happened
to Robert. I flew home the next day. I will never forget watching that asshole do a full summersault in
layout position and land on his back.
My father started out at the factory we worked as the parts room
manager, I still don’t know what his system was NOBODY could find
anything in there, but he knew what and where without hardly thinking
about it. To the rest of us, it was a messy pile of junk. Shelves
everywhere, stuff looked hap-hazard at best. But he knew! LOL
I get the vibe Alyssa is the same way…
President Elect Toxic Deplorable Racist SAH Neanderthal B Woodman Domestic Violent Extremist SuperStraight
Without eggheads like Rutherford, Curie or Roentgen playing around just
because they wanted to discover new things – not really caring about
applications or profits.
Without them you wouldn’t be able to mock them to a non-local audience.
I lost tract of how many times I argued with a line supervisor about
a machine about breaking down or a situation like a fire hazard. One
time one was about to deck me so I just said “Ok, it’s on you.” Not
an hour later the fire siren went off and we had to put out 15 rolls
of pre-product that were 5 ft (1.6m) and 50 ft long. Of course he tried
to blame me “Why didn’t you tell me” and “Why didn’t you do something
about it?” I tried, he wouldn’t let me. After that he never argued with me
again
President Elect Toxic Deplorable Racist SAH Neanderthal B Woodman Domestic Violent Extremist SuperStraight
Much as Drill may be an asshole, he’s an asshole with a purpose.
He’s not a bully, he’s not arrogant, he knows his strengths and weaknesses.
He has ego, but he’s not egotistical.
And he knows his goals and purpose – to train and take care of his men…ALL his men…
God bless Drill Markham.
My father had that roll up until he decided to help out the
motor pool mechanic with an engine change in a tank, so they
shipped him over to Korea as a mechanic until his time in the
service was up.
He’s told me a few things about being a DI but my father is
a kind man and it broke his heart to do what was necessary…
He was a Sargent by time he was shipped home.
That might of been a fear but no proof has been found yet. I think we’ll
find out if any of the core members vote against neutrality…
The ones that do have the tech might break from both the core ruling
body and the treaty.
We’re just talking about de-stabilizing a wormhole, not destroying it.
But that is a real fear for the sake of what you bring up.
De-stabilizing a wormhole while an enemy is in the process of entering
might destroy the ship exiting is all. Like putting razor wire across a
tunnel that your enemy is trying to use. Or like a stargate that the iris
is only partly open… yuk!
Hmm. Still think it would require less effort to directly attack the vessel.
(There can only be one vessel in-transit per wormhole at a given time, right?)
And risking to damage something you don’t quite understand and have not
the first idea of repairing … might be useful as a threat or as a last resort
option, but nothing you should build your go-to strategy on.
Above that: only the Empire has AI personnel, right? All others have a exploitable
sitting-duck period after coming out of jump. Maybe it would be smart to try and
go after that weakness?
Just my two cents as a not-really-good-at-strategy guy.
No, true it would be excessive to risk it, just an idea Bill and I was bouncing around.
A better tactic would be to use grav projectors to drag a ship off-course and into
waiting missile launchers clearing the way for the next attacking ship, having ship debris
floating near the opening of the wormhole would make it rough for friendlies to come
through.
Pity they can’t create a repulser beams, that way they could just push the debris
clear without risking damaging the ship(s) and crew clearing it out. Might be an idea to
explore later on, negative gravity isn’t the same as anti-gravity, it’s like the opposite of
of normal gravity.
Anti-gravity is no gravity, negative gravity pushes rather than pulls. It’s something I
read in a Sci-Fi short story series as a boy. My mother was a librarian at the local
branch so I spent many hours there after school.
How using some kind of giant bag or fishnet made of a super-nano-whatever
fabric and attach a group of small grav missiles to it. Let it collect the debris
(or even better use it just to drag the stuff out of the way and send it to the
nearest star, then re-capture the net)?
That is a nice idea, but the costs of making them plus the clean up wouldn’t
making reusing them practical. It would take a net .5 km circle and then
someone would have to go out and clean off any small pieces stuck in the
netting. The repulsors would be a simple emitter mounted on any major ships.
The net idea was something brought up by NASA about mining the asteroid belt’s
small sized ones. Something about sending a drone mining satellite, capture one,
and mine it while returning to base for collection and refuel.
Repulsors would make an excellent counter-measure defense, change the direction of a missile
then blow it up so what happened to the Pride didn’t happen again.
If this was “real science” the grav effect thingy would probably be
achieved by manipulating a graviton field – thus it should be possible
to induce it remotely in a way that it pulls the target to a distant object.
(In Quantum Theory forces are transmitted by exchanging subatomic
particles – with the possible exception of gravity which hasn’t been finally
integrated into it yet)
That’s the idea behind the wormhole cracker ships, they pass through, recover quickly,
and fire at any blockade ships waiting. Like throwing a grenade into an open door that
might have enemies inside, or flash bangs that the swat teams use.
I wonder if it’s possible to create a backup of an AI in case the cracker ship is destroyed.
It would be a huge help in maintaining trained pilots with out risking them. If it was an
easy thing to do, an AI could simply transfer to and from a ship without giving up the
freedom of having a humanoid body.
AI are pretty much considered full citizens in this setting, right?
From what I’ve seen so far their individuality is as important to them as
it is to us.
In other words your idea would raise pretty much the same ethical problems
as the good ol’ transport accidents in Star Trek (et alt.), or making clones of
squishy sapients.
I don’t know… If i had to go into combat against an enemy that could
very well kill me and the rest of my unit, knowing I’d wake up in the
hospital would make it much easier to deal with.
Of course they would wait for confirmation that I was dead first.
The AI’s have the option for eternal life because of this. They would
also have the option of upgrading their bodies.
Something us “squishies” would never have.
Uh, uh. Backing an AI up before a mission just makes sense. If they could do it for us
“squishies” (Reckon that’s what the AIs call us when it’s only them?) I’d sign up for it.
It would be a jolt waking up seemingly immediately after a backup and realizing you
were a backup and that “you” had died. I’m sure some people wouldn’t be able to handle
it and would trip out. And doubtless some government wonk would get the idea to
download more than a single copy of some folks. It has some interesting story possibilities.
The idea has been addressed in various SF books and TV shows quite a few times.
Star Trek several times recreated people lost during a transporter incident from
pattern buffers – without it ever been presented as an issue.
Until one time, when they returned to some weird energy-doodah-covered planet
and discovered that there was another copy of Will Riker which they had left behind.
Both Rikers didn’t get along that well.
There’s a Doctor Who (double) episode where they’re dealing with “flesh”, sentient
doppelgangers created for hazardous environment which addresses interactions between
‘gangers and “originals” in quite a complex way (“The Rebel Flesh” / “The Almost People”)
[There’s several pairs of Person/Ganger – each with their own way of resolving they issue,
depending on original personality and the events in the show]
(Of course Doctor Who being Doctor Who, there’s other episodes like “Voyage Of The Damned”
where transporter buffer copies are treated like nothing serious, too)
—-
Bottom line: the idea of having a backup somewhere in case someone goes M.I.A. sounds nice –
until you remember that sometimes people do go “missing presumed dead”, sometimes for decades
only to sometimes eventually return.
There’s a few cases where this happened in real life (unless these are “urban myths” or something)
Yeah, that would be a shock and there would have to be very strict rules about
human backups. Star Wars used that trope to max depth making a huge army
of just one guy, we all know how THAT turned out! I was just saying that at the
current tech level that TGW universe that human/catian minds were (as yet)
not saveable like an AI’s mind could be. If they are the size of a 2 lt bottle, it
is a fair bet they could record and move that AI’s memories, thoughts, and
personality to a “blank” AI and recover everything up to the time of the backup.
Downside would be is the loss of what happened and how the AI could learn
from that incident.
President Elect Toxic Deplorable Racist SAH Neanderthal B Woodman Domestic Violent Extremist SuperStraight
Need to read http://www.quantumvibe.com (I think it’s www. maybe not)
Part of the background is the concept of artificial robotic bodies and
backup memories. Just something happens to you, you can be “resurrected”
from your last memory backup.
President Elect Toxic Deplorable Racist SAH Neanderthal B Woodman Domestic Violent Extremist SuperStraight
Like I said, distractions. I know it helped me, that and some counseling.
I’m sure he’ll be busy teaching, training, and dealing with cocky recruits trying
to make fun of his height, I’m sure we all know how THAT’S going to pan out.
That reminds me of what happened when that young man figured out how
to use the grav drives safely in atmosphere. At least this one managed to
shut up the doc long enough to explain his idea!
I know this guy who was a Marine Drill Sargent.
He was shorter than the average American male.
He assured me that it was not a problem for him.
I’m not as short as Samuel, but I topped out at 5’8″ by I was
I hit puberty earlier than most and that was the
13, I was one of the taller kids then, but by the next year I
wasn’t
proof of it… But like Samuel, I was stocky and well muscled.
LOL
And so damn hairy… Guys would love to yank out hair just
to make me jump.
Samuel reminds me of our house mouse when I was in OCS at Quantico in 71. He was just over
the legal minimum height but he was a power lifter and was very nearly as wide as he was tall.
I know his biceps were as big as my thighs. His name was Robert. Nobody dared call him “Bob”
or “Bobby”. He was ” Robert”. He got away with badly injuring a very stupid DI. We were doing bayonet
training with a gunny on a tower with a bullhorn calling out moves. Some nitwit (not one of my
platoon’s DIs) was taunting Robert saying stuff like “Hit me! C’mon hit me!” and dodging just out of
reach. I had already been judged NPQ and was just waiting to go home and was watching nearby. I
In one of those glorious cosmic coincidences that proves the existence of a higher power, the nitwit
stumbled the same time the gunny on the tower called for a vertical smash. We had been issued
M-14s. Nice, solid, wood-furnatured M-14s. Well, the gunny calls “vertical smash”, the asshole
stumbles and 160 pounds of fury drives the underside of the stock of that rifle up into the left side
of the idiot’s jaw. I swear the dumb ass did a complete summersault in the air and landed on his
back. Needless to say training halted while they sent for a helo to medivac him to the hospital at
main base Quantico. Both his upper and lower jaws were broken(whole side of his face was
caved in!) and it took a bunch of stitches to sew up the inside of asshole’s mouth. Nothing happened
to Robert. I flew home the next day. I will never forget watching that asshole do a full summersault in
layout position and land on his back.
My father started out at the factory we worked as the parts room
manager, I still don’t know what his system was NOBODY could find
anything in there, but he knew what and where without hardly thinking
about it. To the rest of us, it was a messy pile of junk. Shelves
everywhere, stuff looked hap-hazard at best. But he knew! LOL
I get the vibe Alyssa is the same way…
Sometimes you have to treat eggheads like mules….
smack ’em between the eyes with a 2×4 to get their attention.
After that, the rest is easy.
Without eggheads like Rutherford, Curie or Roentgen playing around just
because they wanted to discover new things – not really caring about
applications or profits.
Without them you wouldn’t be able to mock them to a non-local audience.
I lost tract of how many times I argued with a line supervisor about
a machine about breaking down or a situation like a fire hazard. One
time one was about to deck me so I just said “Ok, it’s on you.” Not
an hour later the fire siren went off and we had to put out 15 rolls
of pre-product that were 5 ft (1.6m) and 50 ft long. Of course he tried
to blame me “Why didn’t you tell me” and “Why didn’t you do something
about it?” I tried, he wouldn’t let me. After that he never argued with me
again
Much as Drill may be an asshole, he’s an asshole with a purpose.
He’s not a bully, he’s not arrogant, he knows his strengths and weaknesses.
He has ego, but he’s not egotistical.
And he knows his goals and purpose – to train and take care of his men…ALL his men…
God bless Drill Markham.
My father had that roll up until he decided to help out the
motor pool mechanic with an engine change in a tank, so they
shipped him over to Korea as a mechanic until his time in the
service was up.
He’s told me a few things about being a DI but my father is
a kind man and it broke his heart to do what was necessary…
He was a Sargent by time he was shipped home.
Wasn’t there a rumor about the core worlds having other ways of FTL
travel, or opening new wormholes a while back?
If these are true destroying wormholes might backfire since it would
limit your own side more than the opposition.
That might of been a fear but no proof has been found yet. I think we’ll
find out if any of the core members vote against neutrality…
The ones that do have the tech might break from both the core ruling
body and the treaty.
We’re just talking about de-stabilizing a wormhole, not destroying it.
But that is a real fear for the sake of what you bring up.
De-stabilizing a wormhole while an enemy is in the process of entering
might destroy the ship exiting is all. Like putting razor wire across a
tunnel that your enemy is trying to use. Or like a stargate that the iris
is only partly open… yuk!
Hmm. Still think it would require less effort to directly attack the vessel.
(There can only be one vessel in-transit per wormhole at a given time, right?)
And risking to damage something you don’t quite understand and have not
the first idea of repairing … might be useful as a threat or as a last resort
option, but nothing you should build your go-to strategy on.
Above that: only the Empire has AI personnel, right? All others have a exploitable
sitting-duck period after coming out of jump. Maybe it would be smart to try and
go after that weakness?
Just my two cents as a not-really-good-at-strategy guy.
No, true it would be excessive to risk it, just an idea Bill and I was bouncing around.
A better tactic would be to use grav projectors to drag a ship off-course and into
waiting missile launchers clearing the way for the next attacking ship, having ship debris
floating near the opening of the wormhole would make it rough for friendlies to come
through.
Pity they can’t create a repulser beams, that way they could just push the debris
clear without risking damaging the ship(s) and crew clearing it out. Might be an idea to
explore later on, negative gravity isn’t the same as anti-gravity, it’s like the opposite of
of normal gravity.
Anti-gravity is no gravity, negative gravity pushes rather than pulls. It’s something I
read in a Sci-Fi short story series as a boy. My mother was a librarian at the local
branch so I spent many hours there after school.
Hmm … just a crazy idea …
How using some kind of giant bag or fishnet made of a super-nano-whatever
fabric and attach a group of small grav missiles to it. Let it collect the debris
(or even better use it just to drag the stuff out of the way and send it to the
nearest star, then re-capture the net)?
That is a nice idea, but the costs of making them plus the clean up wouldn’t
making reusing them practical. It would take a net .5 km circle and then
someone would have to go out and clean off any small pieces stuck in the
netting. The repulsors would be a simple emitter mounted on any major ships.
The net idea was something brought up by NASA about mining the asteroid belt’s
small sized ones. Something about sending a drone mining satellite, capture one,
and mine it while returning to base for collection and refuel.
Repulsors would make an excellent counter-measure defense, change the direction of a missile
then blow it up so what happened to the Pride didn’t happen again.
If this was “real science” the grav effect thingy would probably be
achieved by manipulating a graviton field – thus it should be possible
to induce it remotely in a way that it pulls the target to a distant object.
(In Quantum Theory forces are transmitted by exchanging subatomic
particles – with the possible exception of gravity which hasn’t been finally
integrated into it yet)
That’s the idea behind the wormhole cracker ships, they pass through, recover quickly,
and fire at any blockade ships waiting. Like throwing a grenade into an open door that
might have enemies inside, or flash bangs that the swat teams use.
I wonder if it’s possible to create a backup of an AI in case the cracker ship is destroyed.
It would be a huge help in maintaining trained pilots with out risking them. If it was an
easy thing to do, an AI could simply transfer to and from a ship without giving up the
freedom of having a humanoid body.
AI are pretty much considered full citizens in this setting, right?
From what I’ve seen so far their individuality is as important to them as
it is to us.
In other words your idea would raise pretty much the same ethical problems
as the good ol’ transport accidents in Star Trek (et alt.), or making clones of
squishy sapients.
I don’t know… If i had to go into combat against an enemy that could
very well kill me and the rest of my unit, knowing I’d wake up in the
hospital would make it much easier to deal with.
Of course they would wait for confirmation that I was dead first.
The AI’s have the option for eternal life because of this. They would
also have the option of upgrading their bodies.
Something us “squishies” would never have.
Uh, uh. Backing an AI up before a mission just makes sense. If they could do it for us
“squishies” (Reckon that’s what the AIs call us when it’s only them?) I’d sign up for it.
It would be a jolt waking up seemingly immediately after a backup and realizing you
were a backup and that “you” had died. I’m sure some people wouldn’t be able to handle
it and would trip out. And doubtless some government wonk would get the idea to
download more than a single copy of some folks. It has some interesting story possibilities.
The idea has been addressed in various SF books and TV shows quite a few times.
Star Trek several times recreated people lost during a transporter incident from
pattern buffers – without it ever been presented as an issue.
Until one time, when they returned to some weird energy-doodah-covered planet
and discovered that there was another copy of Will Riker which they had left behind.
Both Rikers didn’t get along that well.
There’s a Doctor Who (double) episode where they’re dealing with “flesh”, sentient
doppelgangers created for hazardous environment which addresses interactions between
‘gangers and “originals” in quite a complex way (“The Rebel Flesh” / “The Almost People”)
[There’s several pairs of Person/Ganger – each with their own way of resolving they issue,
depending on original personality and the events in the show]
(Of course Doctor Who being Doctor Who, there’s other episodes like “Voyage Of The Damned”
where transporter buffer copies are treated like nothing serious, too)
—-
Bottom line: the idea of having a backup somewhere in case someone goes M.I.A. sounds nice –
until you remember that sometimes people do go “missing presumed dead”, sometimes for decades
only to sometimes eventually return.
There’s a few cases where this happened in real life (unless these are “urban myths” or something)
Yeah, that would be a shock and there would have to be very strict rules about
human backups. Star Wars used that trope to max depth making a huge army
of just one guy, we all know how THAT turned out! I was just saying that at the
current tech level that TGW universe that human/catian minds were (as yet)
not saveable like an AI’s mind could be. If they are the size of a 2 lt bottle, it
is a fair bet they could record and move that AI’s memories, thoughts, and
personality to a “blank” AI and recover everything up to the time of the backup.
Downside would be is the loss of what happened and how the AI could learn
from that incident.
Need to read http://www.quantumvibe.com (I think it’s www. maybe not)
Part of the background is the concept of artificial robotic bodies and
backup memories. Just something happens to you, you can be “resurrected”
from your last memory backup.
“Corporal, you have been given a brevet promotion.
You are now a Sergeant. A Drill Sergeant. Under OJT.”