The Old Hack

There is a road just like that close to where I live. I am willing to take a long detour to NOT ride along it on my bicycle. And like you, I have no idea why it is still there.

You are number three.

Good. I would hate to think that Pompeii got scorched, choked and buried in volcanic ash in violation of tradition. Including the printing of the first typos. One Bible in particular got into trouble for omitting a 'not' from the Seventh Commandment and gained notoriety as being the 'Wicked Bible'. This resulted in the Book of Uncommon Prayer and the Book of Rare Prayer becoming valuable collectibles. Perhaps understandable. Particularly the latter looked a bit anemic.

That sucks. Feel better soon, buddy.

And any violators get to fry.

True, true. But at least the fish can't report you to the cops for fish murder! (This reminds me of one of the Elder Scrolls games where if a chicken spotted you committing murder, it could apparently tell the city guards about it and you would shortly thereafter be wanted for the crime.)

That all makes sense. The thing is, this law applied specifically to firearms. You may still angle, net, paw or even drop depth charges after the poor fishies. It is just shooting them that is illegal. Though in a way that also makes sense. Shooting into water just strikes me as... well, risky. Not to mention that having all those leftover bullets lying on river or lake beds can't be all that environmentally responsible. I can't imagine that they are all that biodegradable.

http://egscomics.com/comic/sister3-310 And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make...

Presumably this doctor goes quack quack quack and flies south for the winter?

No, bits. Possibly also pieces.

That reminds me of a Wyoming law that has made it illegal to shoot fish in Wyoming. But this law applies only to the fish of Wyoming. Fish that somehow migrate into Wyoming from elsewhere are fair game.

We're in agreement about that. It's just that you think that my use of the word 'magic' is insufficient to invoke them, and for all I know you may be right. Let's just let it stand there. Yeah, you kinda need something bigger for that. Or maybe smaller. A collapsar is not very big, size-wise. Then again, I don't like to think what it would take to weaponise a collapsar. Me, I'd just stay away from the darn things.

I suppose it depends on how you look at it. If we look at what science is potentially capable of today, I'd still say he does pretty darn well. Simply take a fair sized asteroid, accelerate it towards the Earth and enjoy the special effects. I doubt mankind has invented a nuke more destructive than what will happen. Hence my use of the term 'magic.' I agree. But as you say, at least it would be new.

There is also the whole matter of showing some respect for your audience at least, as well as genre. Star Wars, for example, uses the trappings of science fiction but is something different. It blends science fiction with the Wild West, swashbuckling, classic kung fu and samurai movies as well as the Knights of the Round Table. The 'science' of Star Wars is eighty percent magic at least and all it needs to do is maintain some rudimentary consistency in order to remain believable. (That it does not always succeed is a different matter, but this is its foundation.) Star Trek, on the other hand, at least has some pretense towards being actual science fiction. While it varies wildly, it at least attempts to pay some respect towards the laws of physics (which they cannae change until they do, a process somehow aided by good whisky.) The technobabble itself indicates this. If they weren't at least trying to pretend to science fiction, they would not bother with it. Star Wars has almost no technobabble at all though it does have a good helping of mysticism, which is not quite the same thing. Also, the believability of Star Wars is usually at its very weakest when they try to make their mysticism scientifically quantifiable. (Medichloreans. Yechhhh.) Now, good technobabble will have at least some basis in actual science and mathematics. Enough so the problem itself is comprehensible and the solution shows at least some ingenuity. As an example, one story I read mixed the magic of a hyperdrive with the actual slingshotting effect of a gravity well. The magic hyperdrive was a given to make the entire setting possible to begin with. Using a gravity well to slingshot your vessel faster into a different direction is at least theoretically possible to the best of my knowledge. That worked. Bad technobabble, on the other hand, will rely entirely on magic to provide the solution. Brannon Braga, unfortunately, cannot tell the difference. His early stories (with which he had the help of good editors and experienced staff writers) tended to be dodgy science-wise but excellent science fiction nonetheless because the science might be bollocks but the solution wasn't. The solution tended to take effort for the cast to accomplish and gave one a sense of actual danger. His later stories, Voyager and Enterprise being notable here, had equally bad science but the conflict tended to be resolved with magic. And unfortunately some of Braga's really good story ideas got killed for potentially costing too much or for taking too big chances for the producers to swallow. (Braga, of all people, wanted to introduce continuity to Voyager. To have damage to the ship stay between episodes and actual harm to crewmembers last. He wanted a whole season to show a Voyager progressively more damaged and beaten down with more and more losses until the climactic season finale. This proved to be more than the producers could handle because they were sure that TV audiences would be too stupid to understand such an advanced concept so it got condensed into a rather weak two parter with magic reset button at the end as per usual. Ah well.) The too long, didn't read version: Soft science fiction and space magic can work on its own. Harder sci fi or sci fi with ambitions towards it needs to at least understand what Sir Isaac Newton, the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space, was talking about. Soft sci fi that pretends to be the hard kind is usually an abomination.

Don't worry, they can escape through a CRACK IN THE EVENT HORIZON! (Honest to God. They actually used that as an excuse to escape a black hole once. Ow.)

OH NO! THE SINGULARITY IS ABOUT TO EXPLODE!

I am very sorry to hear of all your troubles. I hope there will be some improvement in your situation soon. You're in our thoughts, old friend.

Unless you are entirely at sea, it is all relative.

The question is, is the ship a Greek galley or a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier?

And possibly without even noticing them. Okay, that would probably take some willful ignoring. But even sailing past them would be enough to give them a lot of trouble.

Some of the latest EGS:NP posts mentioned old Greek galleys and compared them to ships o' the line. It brought back happy memories of playing Civilization 2. In one game I was kinda sorta WAY ahead of an opponent technologically. He tried to invade me using triremes. I didn't happen to have any naval units nearby at the time so I responded with cruise missiles. It struck me that this wasn't really a fair match but at least it was over quick. One moment the unsuspecting trireme would be merrily rowing along, the next, BOOM and it was a rather scattered mess of toothpicks. But the merciless march of technology did spare a kindly thought for the poor triremes, I later learned. When you invented nuclear power, one effect of this would be to give all your naval units an additional movement point. In one game I had a trireme lying in port that I had completely forgotten about. When I finally noticed it, I discovered that it had one more movement point than it should have had. It took a few moments before I realised that this was due to my Nuclear Power advance. Of course, that raised the questions of how in the world you could possibly fit a trireme with a nuclear reactor and, having done so, make the reactor somehow power the oars. I'd be really interested in seeing the blueprints for that one.

Hrm. The USS Nimitz has a displacement of over 100.000 tonnes. It would outmass the Greek fleet all on its own. Granted, "The face that launched a really big boat" doesn't sound quite as good as the bit with a thousand ships.

As long as you don't have to repeal it first.

Let us all pray sincerely to whatever powers we believe in that Jack Snyder will never be pegged to direct a Pokémon movie.

I hear the iPhone XI will have a compartment you can use to keep superhero uniforms in. An unfortunate side effect of spies and observers delivering inflated reports of enemy losses because OKW didn't want to hear of the actual ones, which were too low. I understand Stalin tried to send the bill to Mexico. They didn't pay for that one, either. A missed opportunity, that. "Only you can keep yourself from getting stupidly mauled by bears" is actually a message with some point to it.