Vorlonagent

Agreed. I'm not making san rolls here but it just looks "off".

Agreed. I have to tell myself that the girl in this pinup is Susan. She doesn't even really look like Diane. The "Return to Comicon" pinups were much easier for me to accept as Sarah and Susan despite the changes.

..sort of a teacup pony...

I actually liked the one-piece...

Susan's lipstick really weirds me out for some reason...

I may edit this one to give Carol a proper top. And maybe remove the cow elements.

I tend to think shrinking from a brick and mortar store to a vending machine is a more radical shift than just ponying up. It's more like going from an Orca to a penguin (and I don't mean emperor penguin either). It's a radical enough shift that orcas go completely out the (metaphorical) window. You only see orcas where orcas have some kind of advantage sufficient to counterbalance their disadvantages in footprint (flipperprint, I suppose) and upkeep.

Neutronium is a teensy bit unstable in small doses, yes. We may have to drop the mars-mass ball on Mars at once then do the iceball thing to cool it down again. There go all the landmarks but hey we get a lot of real estate out of the deal. If you can terraform, you don't need earth, unless you just mostly like earth an need to terraform it just a little to get it just right. We can assume that space is at a premium in most colony fleets, however. They're not going to bring resources with them that they can get in sol system. And they're not going to bring more difficult-to-get resources than they expect to need to set up a colony capable of providing for itself and maybe a bit more just to allow for mistakes accidents and inefficiency. (Remember we're talking about a colonization fleet that is thinking about retooling itself to be an invasion force not an invasion planned as an invasion from the get-go) They're going to want to hit hard, hit fast, demoralize and deprive Earthers of any hope of resistance before we understand they're actually untrained and short on resources and grab resources for both continuing military operations and making the colony work because they spent colonization resources on warfare. Inspired choice. Just about anything at a high enough velocity is dangerous.

If you don't like him, he;ll grow on you. Like a fungus. An enthusiastic, boss and GM hybrid, rules-evoking alpha-geek sort of fungus.

English's great advantage and disadvantage is it is a mongrel language. You can be very expressive and individual with it if people can figure out what the frell you're saying...

I heard "codswallop" any number of times growing up. Not exactly commonplace but enough that I got the gist of it as a synonym to "balderdash" or other colorful non-profane contradictory assertions. What confused me was I heard "cod swallow" and could not make sense of how the one meant the other.

I'd quibble that video rental stores only survive where they cater to a niche market. The days of Blockbuster herds thundering across the prairie are sadly behind us, never to come again. But in fairness, a town like Moperville where everybody is at least a bit of a geek, could be such a niche.

The tried and true Wapsi Square solution to anxiety and depression: the busty mom hug...even if the busty isn't a mom (though Monica just adopted a spider-girl so I suppose she is a mom now...)

I love Foglio's pictogram-speak. I was thinking of the early days of Larry Nivin's Known Space universe and and one of the first Earth-launched starships known as the Angel's Pencil. A Kzinti warship approached the Angel's Pencil under a gravitic drive using accelerations of hundreds of G-forces while the Earth ship was just plowing along at 1G using a crude photonic drive. Kzinti telepaths reported that the ship was unarmed. The Kzinti moved in for the easy kill. ...And got carved up with the photon drive.

China. Estimates vary widely as to the size of the Chinese stockpile. In 2005, estimates ranged from 80 to 2000. In 2011 a Georgetown University study estimated 3000, which, considering previous estimates, I choose to look at as an upper-limit with a wide range. .Even if 3000 is accurate, it still makes them the largest of the small players since the US and Russia have about 3x that number each. And anyway coordinating a nuclear strike on Russia with China is the least of US concerns. We should be more concerned about how well Russia and China coordinate on a strike against the US. One hopes badly. If I were to guess, the Chinese stockpile is built to dominate the world after a US-Russia nuclear exchange Foiled again by the Exotic Matter Worker's Union... What is "tearing" Mars' core and why wouldn't we want to do it? Mars has a solid core, which is the reason it doesn't have a magnetic field. A steady neutronium drip into the core would heat the core back up really nicely and perhaps restore Mars' magnetic field. You probably don't want to drop a mars-mass worth of neutronium straight onto Mars. We don't need to re-melt the entire planet, just the iron core. The best reason to watch how we install the neutronium is not heating mars up too much. But if we do end up melting the planet, c'est la vie. We'd need to drop a couple of iceballs on it anyway... True. Being able to move troops at 1000C would be better still (Warp 10 in Classic Trek terms. ...but still takes a long time to get around the galaxy, which is why The Franchise used 4th power warp factors) Agreed. The turning point being when Earth strategists realize the aliens are noobs. That just changes the problem. War materials, alloys and such are often unique. A replicator does not create elements, only assembles objects out of a reserve stockpile of component elements. If warfare requires a lot of electronics and batteries, say, you dig faster and more deeply into the colony's reserve of rare earth elements than colonizing an uninhabited world would require. The colony would need to mine more from somewhere or deal with crippling shortages. In the hypothetical novels of professional earthlings vs alien noobs, the noobs want a quick war or they want to seize the resources they need to produce more war materials. Or you produce substandard stuff with what you have. I'm reminded of a 1980s incident where a Soviet fighter pilot defected to the West by landing his MiG in Japan. The Soviets got the fighter back but not before several frezied days of analysis by western experts. One of the more surprising things to come of it was the MiG was made of ordinary steel not some ultra-light aircraft-grade titanium steel as the US would have done and did. The colonizing race would only be changing *who* aborted the other the planets possible sentient races... Then you're screwed unless you're first. Remember how rare it is to run into another race that is actually near your own tech level...

It's not like the US doesn't talk with the other nuclear powers. In terms of numbers there's the US, Russia and everybody else in the margins. With only 2 major players, there's minimal duplication of effort possible even if there is no coordination between the players at all. How would exotic matter help Mars gain surface gravity? The question is how the information gets the remaining 4950 light years back to the aliens. Unless the probe is going to invade earth by itself, the information isn't going to do the aliens any good until it gets back to them and they're still 5000 light years away. If the probe can only send the information back using normal lightspeed communications, the aliens do not get information on Earth's condition any faster than it's coming to them anyway. That's where quantum-entanglement communication would come in. With quantum entanglement, the alien race is seeing what the probe sees as the probe sees it. Now the only problem is how to get them 5000 LY to Earth. A colonization effort would certainly be in a moral quandary. Do they tool up for war and attack? Do they go back home? Can they go back home? Do they have a secondary target they can go to instead, either in sol system or elsewhere? Just because you can make weapons and vehicles doesn't mean you have an army. Warfare isn't just hardware, it's a mindset. It's training. Handing out weapons to your hairdressers, management consultants and telephone sanitizers do not make them soldiers. The colony is going to want some police, hunters and predator killers and those groups will at least know how to handle weapons but they will be at best novice-grade NCOs officers and generals when it comes to fighting a war. The colonizing race is playing the odds. How likely is it that they're run into an intelligent race that the early surveys missed? Especially one which can give you any kind of fight. Intelligence takes a long time to build up and occurs so quickly it's almost impossible to find a civilization that's around where you are at. usually it will be transcendentally more advanced or barely started chipping its stone tools. Why invest a lot in warfare unless you know you're going to fight? That space might be put to better use hauling something else. Here's an interesting thought. If you're colonizing a planet with existing life, it is always an invasion and there's always a native civilization at stake. by colonizing the world, you are potentially aborting any native intelligence that the planet might have ever produce from now to its sun going nova.

EGS is a world where video rental stores are still a thing. Brick-and-mortar retail is resisting death-by-internet better than they are in our world.

Colonization is practically to be expected. Earth has to have something rare that aliens would want badly. A pre-existing compatible ecosystem would be on the short list of such things. My point is that aliens are much more likely to come prepared for an extended safari than warfare.

Nevada is very dry and the salt mines are rather deep. Very low risk of water contamination. Also why I selected the Sahara. Europe especially would be hit hard because population military (such as it is) centers are close together. The US is much more spread out though both coasts are going to get hit hard. You didn't even mention Africa or South America as land that would be relatively untouched... Nuclear arsenals are actually rather seriously optimized. One only thinks there's too many if one makes assumptions that simplify the actual situation. What do we do? We start looking for explanations. Oh wow, we have iceballs inbound aimed right at us and Mars. One iceball aimed at just earth or just Mars is coincidental. Both makes you wonder. If we can image the aliens we begin to prepare for invasion. By definition the aliens have a harder time taking Earth. Some neutronium would work just fine for increasing Mars' gravity. I would guesstimate about the same amount as Mars' current mass. I don't know if that's "exotic matter" by your definition. But why would any race capable of shipping planetary masses' worth of neutronium across interstellar distances be interested in Earth? They could make their own planet out of raw material. Slartibartfast pick up your phone... The exoplanets I'm talking about have surface gravities of between 1.2 and 3 times that of Earth. We're capable of detecting marse-mass planets if they're really close. No need to just do these things They don't exclude other avenues of attack and enhance their effectiveness. Pulling of an EMP pulse when moving at .5 C aimed approximately at the target is a nice trick of timing. Could go wrong easily. On the other hand just pegging the Earth with the empty fuel tanks...much easier and a great idea. Now let's back up and consider one important thing. How would the aliens know they are attacking a civilization? The easiest way is detecting Earths unusual RF output. They have to have detection equipment scanning the proper radio bands within 100 light years of earth AND get the information back to base in time to hit us today before we get too good at technology ourselves. A monster telescope capable of imaging Earth as if from orbit would reveal signs of civilization (city lights at night, cultivated land) much further away. Fist we'll talk about a race with no FTL ability. Let's say their method of travel allows a crewed ship to travel at a speed that works out to 0.25C. If we assume radio output is their clue Earth has a civilization, they cannot be further away from earth than 20 light years. And being as far as 20 out would mean they have the invasion force ready to go at a moment's notice (20 years for radio to propagate outward to the aliens, 80 years for the invasion fleet to get to earth). Even if they can travel as close to light speed as makes no odds, they could not be further out from Earth than 50 light years. Further distance than that and they either haven't heard of us yet or their invasion fleet is still in route. Even a FTL-using race still needs some clue Earth is inhabited in order to launch an invasion. FTL improves the aliens' response time but not the rate at which information is propagating from Earth. A FTL race whose closest world is, say, 5000 or more light years away might know Earth has life but they would not have any clue that Earth is inhabited unless they can get information from Earth at FTL speeds. FTL communication would help a lot. A survey drone could then look earth over and send the results back, If they were able to transmit using quantum-entanglement, they would get up to the minute results. But there's still the question of travel time. If the alien race only crosses distance at 2C, they'll be 2500 years in transit. They would probably have better ways of invading earth by the time they're ready to invade earth. Of they wouldn't need to. Imagine 1500 years into the voyage some super-swift ship catches up to them and calls the invasion off. Bottom line is we're more likely to see a colonization attempt than a military invasion. If we remove the need for the aliens to know in advance that earth is inhabited, we make it much easier for them to show up in our system without phoning first. But then the aliens aren't expecting us any more than we're expecting them. Earth could be detected as life-bearing for 3-4 billion years. Which means galaxies 3-4 billion light years away would know we have life if they have instruments powerful enough to image our planet. There would be no anticipating how quickly Earth's life would become sentient life would become technologically savvy sentient life. Simply playing the odds, a colony would come prepared to deal with megafauna at the worst. Then suddenly they're in-system and...well...carpbaskets.

That's awfully wasteful. Bury it. Nevada has salt mines perfect for this. You could almost just make a big pile out in the Sahara desert and cover it with a really big tarp. Aliens with the ability to move an invasion force across space might have other technological advantages that would be capable of sorting the radioactives out of the soil. The War Games clip was just a visual aid, right? You weren't trying to use it as proof, right? The Hollywood-standard,nuclear war has the entire earth uninhabitable because it's convenient plot point. The hero gets to save the world. In the real world, nuclear explosions are going to be clustered around enemy population centers and enemy military assets. Some fallout will get into the air and water and soil but most of the high radioactivity will be concentrated at the blast sites. Impacts on Mars and Earth might seem too coincidental. Dropping anything on Mars depends on the habitability of Mars to begin with. Bad things happen to humans who are in microgravity for too long. We don't know how much gravity we need to be long-term healthy or if Mars has enough. Aliens would likely have similar issues with mars. Given that many "earthlike" exoplanets we've found are larger than our earth, the problem could be more acute for them than us. If the aliens have done their homework, they would know that a few impacts in the right places could destroy the human's food supply and get them fighting among themselves. Or that a few nuclear-grade energy bursts in our upper-atmosphere will create EMP bursts that will cripple most of our our technology. The finishing touch would be destroying every satellite in geosynchronous orbit. The single largest question is patience on the part of the aliens. The more time they can allow for pre-invasion actions against Earth, especially actions before we know they are even there, the more problems they can make for us before committing to a military invasion. This is Sun Tzu stuff. Don't engage the enemy until he has already lost.

What would take a long time about terraforming the Earth after a nuclear exchange? Fallout will clear from the atmosphere pretty fast, slower from the water supply and will need to be removed from soil, but there ought to be plenty of usable space that is minimally affected. The Earth is not going to be irradiated equally. Not unless we pull a "scorched Earth" move where we make a point of rendering the planet as close to uninhabitable as is possible. Even then the Earth will have its soil, atmosphere, water, and magnetic field. It would just need a really large hazmat cleanup. Invading and taking the earth requires one set of capabilities. Towing iceballs around and dropping them onto dead world to make them habitable requires a different set which takes a lot more energy to accomplish. Any alien race that can terraform mars can arrange a rain or asteroids on Earth before they ever show themselves.

Definitely on the "bad thing" list....

Aliens would have to already be interested in something approximating our planet's chemistry and temperature or they'd just move on and leave us alone. Whatever humans may have done to the Earth, it ought to be trivial for aliens who want to make Earth their home. A little CO2 here, some landfills there...Nothing compared to terraforming Venus or Mars.

Mine are staying on and showing no signs of leaving. I'd like to figure out how to charge them rent.

If the doc is pissed off because you didn't want to pay a medical specialist out-of-pocket, that's incentive to move on.