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Can anyone recommend (or not) any of the classic space opera books such as Ensign Flandry, Dorsai, Dhalgren, The Merchant's War and so on? Or how about Harrison's Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers or Scalzi's Old Man's War? (These are books that somehow wound up in my collection.) Star Smashers i...

Anything interesting on the Exar Kun period/Sith War stuff? I always used to like the old Tales of the Jedi comics.

1. weapon firepower- as i know from most 40k starship treads, it varies from gigatons-low teratons(we are talking about exterminatus scale firepower- not tactical bombardments)- still need some clarification Exterminatus often uses technobabble weapons (such as virus bombs), which makes it difficul...

"Mass lightening" in this context has the sound of a desperate ass- pull about it, and I wouldn't take it at all seriously positively. It means that they don't have the faintest idea how much things ought to mass, got the numbers pathetically wrong, and tried to weasel out by invoking a t...

The Tau are somewhat interesting because they appear (as best I know, at least) to use at least somewhat competent tactics at least somewhat regularly. (Not that they are exactly at Desert Storm levels, either, but at least post-WWII for the most part. 1960s-ish doctrine with vastly less artillery, ...

Right, finished the game this night. Not having read major spoilers beforehand. Also played through the first two games a couple of times each. (Though I refused to pay for bloodsucking DLC.) Major initial reactions to the story, obviously including spoilers: *The Reapers, after much huffing and puf...

Chaos as a mentally degenerative and self-reinforcing feedback mechanism is fairly much in the fluff. Where the Chaos corruption is a covert and gradual process, that makes sense. I would think that to some degree, Zou was aiming for the sort of thing you describe in his book. (Most of the rank and ...

Lets just not talk about Henry Zou or Redemption Corps. WHAT? You mean you think 40K didn't need more mentions of Picatinny rails or metrics :lol: I think my favorite was .45 caliber being a 'low power' or 'small' round in 40K or something. I would have thought they ought to be, given the bores of ...

And we get far less tau wanking than you might think Hoare would instil. That would be positively British understatement on your part. I finished this one not too long ago (borrowed it - no more money to evil, price-gouging GW from me :P), and I can only imagine how our Tau haters burst with joy at...

Speaking of throwing stones, how do you explain the line about the Executor bankrupting the empire? The guy who said it was a bloody retard? :lol: Seriously. The quote goes: "I can't believe it," Pellaeon said beside her. "Only the Executor was this big - and that one ship practicall...

...What the hell are you talking about, Darth? I literally cannot remember Starglider ever asserting that "our entire species should (or must inevitably) by replaced by computers." I think he expects it to happen, but that's no more a moral claim than "one day we will have the atomic...

"Novelisation" :D From what I know, Clarke based it on the screenplay he co-wrote with Kubrick when they developed the film together. The film was the original work, the novel the derivative. Hence, calling it a novelisation would appear appropriate to me. And, yes, that seems to be rathe...

The man's communion with a divine... thing. A cosmic object far greater than he is, far greater than anything that can be quantified, something magical, mystical, fantastic. Majestic. Terrific. And it does not deride him. It does not ridicule him for his primitive ways. It embraces him. Insinuates ...

I don't think you're saying anything controversial there. The belief of Darth Hoth et al is that all intelligent species should do their utmost to enslave and exterminate all other intelligent species, because anything else is weak and unnatural. That would not quite be an accurate summary of my po...

I read a terrible alt-hist/time travel series where the main character becomes buds with Allen Ginsberg, Edward Teller, Wernher von Braun, Crazy Horse, George Washington, Richard Sheridan, and gets hit on by Michelangelo, da Vinci, and Wilde. He ends up fighting and killing his evil self from an al...

I freely admit I don't know a lot about the Green Party in Germany, I somehow doubt they wield anything like the power or influence they do in the book, and I'm just about positive that they aren't actually batshit insane enough to want to destroy the human race to preserve the enviroment. If I'm w...

Um, why the backslapping? :? I would have thought this thread was in fact a tacit admission that some critics of your earlier work did in fact have a point of sorts, at least on some issues. "Connor now writes down some of his figures" does not equal "Everyone who ever criticised Conn...

Ghetto edit to the above: I managed to dig out my Lando Calrissian omnibus copy to look this stuff up, and it seems that while the Empire sanctioned the operation, as far as I can tell, the actual intelligence and military legwork was carried out by Centrality forces. I just skimmed the one major pa...

I'm a bit busy right now to really get involved in things, but to show an example of SW army military competence I present to you the Battle of Renatasia Was Renatasia an operation by the Imperial military? I thought it was the Centrality at work there, and they are basically South Vietnam to the E...

The Red Skull makes a throwaway comment about the Fuhrer digging for trinkets in the desert, which of course is likely a reference to Raiders of the Lost Ark , but in-universe that may not actually mean Indiana Jones exists. It is my understanding though that the Nazis actually partook in expeditio...

God, I forget how stupid Orion's Arm is. No no, we only allow 'hard' science, but the manufacture of pocket universes is totally cool. You know, I hate to play Devil's Advocate here, but you know that 'hard science fiction' doesn't mean 'a thing which people think is reasonable'. I mean, really, it...

Here's my perspective. Our bodies are essentially chemical machines; in principle, everything we observe about ourselves reduces to some aggregate of many chemical reactions taking place. This precludes "free will" in the sense that all that occurs is physically necessary. "Free Will...

Wouldn't the general public tend to notice almost every single one of their elected representatives simultaneously going completely batshit insane? Gearing up to liberate some oil-rich tinpot dictatorship into a smoking heap of rubble is one thing, especially in an election year, but China is the o...

Inspired (somewhat) by this thread . A sufficiently advanced alien wants to play Sim Wars with Earth, and the US and China look like they should be the most interesting major players. So he goes to work modifying the relevant minds. As of February 2 2009, the political leadership of the United State...

I would tentatively define faith as belief and trust in an authority of some kind, with an element of emotion and judgment. To be contrasted with knowledge, which is the unemotional acceptance of demonstrated fact. *** Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not se...