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The Charonians from The Ring of Charon and The Shattered Sphere are basically the cyborg* version of this idea. The hypothesis of the protagonists is that they are the result of someone who tried the genetic-data seedship idea, where an unmanned starship upon reaching a habitable planet manufactures...

The Dresden series has an interesting example of a Masquerade within the Masquerade in the form of the Oblivion War by a faction called the Venatori. Many magical entities - the 'Old Ones' - can only access the mortal world if they are known to exist; the Oblivion War is about erasing all knowledge ...

Another nasty one would be the Concordiat/Melconian "Final War" from the Bolo setting. A mutually genocidal war that extinguished both civilizations, destroying most life across an entire spiral arm of the galaxy. For sheer deaths there's the Human/Xeelee war, with tens of trillions of cas...

Weren't the 5th Imperium ships larger and more powerful? Hugely. The one number I could find (admitted in-universe to be a serious underestimate): "In general, their progress may be thought of as coupling miniaturization with vast increases in power. A warship of Dahak's mass, for example, bui...

Pardon my ignorance but who and/or what is the 4th empire and can anyone give any brief(ish) summary as to their overall tech. A partial description by Dahak: "Very well. Please observe the visual display, Commander." Earth vanished, and another image replaced it. It was a sphere, as bron...

A bit longer article : Columbia University researcher and professor Brian Greene is perhaps best known as a leading theoretical physicist and a proponent of string theory. Now, he has the honor of sharing his name with a recently-discovered species of water spider that can surf small waves and hunt...

If you can teleport repeatedly and fairly quickly, you can use it as a budget-basement replacement for flight*. Just teleport faster than you fall. You just have to make sure you are teleporting to a spot high enough that your teleport recharges before you hit the ground. I did that quite a lot in ...

While the other books in the series don't strictly qualify the book The Dispossessed by Ursula Guin does. The next novel chronologically in the series, The Word for World is Forest does occur right after the invention of purely FTL communications but does go into the implications of a expanding spa...

Use mind control to stop mind control. Command the person under your control to obey no other controller, and to obey no other orders of yours save for the anti-mind control order. Use a scrying mirror to target a region in daylight, and use the sunlight from the mirror to fry vampires. If you can t...

Between The Strokes of Night has no FTL, although the planet-bound cultures think the spacedwelling culture does. What they actually have is a treatment that drastically slows down the metabolism & subjective experience of time (and increases the subjective lifespan). So from their own perspect...

It's more that I wouldn't care; I don't support the Second Amendment in the first place, or consider gun ownership to be of value. So, such a list wouldn't matter to me, and I don't think he could do any actual damage with it. But that's due to considering it irrelevant, it has nothing to do with an...

New one up.
Spoiler

Birds can see in ultraviolet , which lets them see various things humans can't. It lets them see animal droppings and where animals have "marked" territory, lets them see many insects easier, and they can see through various kinds of natural and artificial camouflage that doesn't mask ult...

Hm. Maybe starmetal allows you to crit undead? I know it has some special property against them, don't it? It is likely that your sword will sometimes glow with a deadly green energy that is particularly harmful to the undead. I don't recall it ever making his eyes glow green at the same time too, ...

If mass-effect barriers work by slowing down fast moving objects in a "slow blade passes" sense, then they are not going to work worth a damn against phasers. Gou'ald staff weapon bolts appear to move slowly enough that they may consist of physical blobs of particles that can be stopped b...

Interesting. It's somewhere between cool and amusing that they are still finding out significant new things about something as basic as "what happens if you throw something at the ground real hard?"

Merpeople are pretty easy to explain. They went back to live in the oceans, and lost their legs as they adapted to it just like seals and whales did. They kept their hands though because tool use was such an advantage. Ages ago, I figured out a magic-less way to get werewolves in a fantasy-esque set...

They are all actually the same species, a hominid variant that is split into multiple specialized castes like social insects. Goblins, orcs and ogres are warrior caste; they are actually three separate developmental stages of the same caste, as they mature and grow in size and strength. Dwarves are ...

I recall reading many years ago about a synthetic crystal that stopped laser light but let visible light through. IIRC, the coherent nature of laser light set up a resonance in its electromagnetic bonds that changed the nature of the crystal enough to render it opaque, while incoherent normal light ...

In Magician's Ward by Patricia Wrede, it's explained why Latin and Greek are usually used in spells. It turns out that casting magic in your native tongue makes the spell stronger but distorts the effects unpredictably. It's mentioned that a French wizard could cast spells in English just fine, and ...

LadyTevar wrote:I do recall there was a Golem-maker that Haley robbed way back when to get Roy's corpse back. He'd have plenty of reason for revenge, and Bozzok would not mind handing over Crystal to him for a 'upgrade'.

He was apparently killed in a bonus strip, according to the GitP forum.

968 up! So, the real Durkon not being in charge is in fact how vampirism normally works. I was wondering if he was a special case or not. And at least a few mortals know this, so the party might discover it at some point. And we have a hint why Vamp!Durkon wanted to check out the temples in town.

That's the thing, the base augments are exactly that. While it's assumed they'll allow MEC troopers to resume normal lives after the war, it's going to be pretty damn hard to fit into the rest of society unless they at least look and function like normal limbs. Are you sure about that? Have you see...

So, it seems from my vantage point that medical science allows genetic flaws and defects to continue to exist in the human gene pool, rather than being bred out as natural selection might suggest. Does this mean that medical science has halted, temporarily, human evolution? Or am I missing some imp...

General Zod wrote: Please tell me again why voting twice is the most important form of voting fraud we need to be concerned with?

Because it's an almost completely imaginary problem that can be used to disenfranchise the poor and black people.