StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Stuart wrote: "Any word from the Civil Air Patrol?" Captain(V) Artemis Gordon spoke to the radio operator with longing in his voice.

Stuart wrote:It was time to move again. Once again, he looked upwards, peering through his fogged vision to try and detect the little aircraft. For once, the sky was empty, the latest of the aircraft had dropped behind a ridgeline, probably to scan the ground in another one of the canyons. Uriel sensed something else though, an aircraft high up, so high that even with his vision perfect he would not have been able to see it. It was moving fast, so fast that it seemed silent as it passed, the sound of its passage only arriving later in a dull boom.

Stuart wrote:"Not from what I hear." Allansen looked around and dropped his voice. "From what the wind says, the really big brass at Yamantau have decided that these so-called gods are more trouble than they’re worth. After we've dealt with Yahweh, we're going hunting for the rest of them. If they want to live peacefully with us, fine. If they want to throw their weight around. . . . ." Allansen pointed at the laser in the nose of the YAL-1A.

"It'll be slice and dice time – again."

CaptainChewbacca wrote:It'll be interesting to see what happens when we FIND other gods...

*Valhalla, Asgard. Dimensional Realm 1156*

Odin raised a flagon of mead to his lips, enjoying the revelry. Another day of glorious battle had released a flood of energy. Hundreds of thousands of mighty warriors unleashing their rage and fury upon one another in wave after wave of anger and blood... it was a heady brew for any of the Aesir He beckoned for one of his Valkyries to attend him, the comely young thing blushing slightly, trying to cover her revulsion at the thought of her master's touch.

Suddenly, a blinding flash of light erupted in the middle of the room. A great crack shimmered, as though it were a separating fissure in a field of ice. From it, a trio of canisters arced lazily through, and a fraction of a second later exploded in a thunder of light and noise. "MOVE MOVE MOVE!" Came the cries of the attackers, in an oddly corrupted dialect of the Anglish. Men with curious looking steel implements poured through the fissure, fanning out through the room. At the same time, smaller portals winked around the edges of the great hall as giant, nightmarish creatures appeared, dressed the same as the humans but with MUCH bigger guns.

As suddenly as the noise began, the room was covered in a blanket of silence. From the portal strode a single man, slight and gangly, but with great presence about him. He bore no weapon, but was flanked by a quartet of armed humans. He stood before the dais where Odin and the rest of the Aesir stood dumbfounded. "Odin, king of the Aesir. I am General David Petraeus of Earth's Dimensional Exploration Directorate. We have much to discuss."

Baughn wrote:How far into the future are you setting that scene, Chewbacca?

Only, by the time the Pantheocide War started (eg. when it diverged from our reality), drexlerian nanofactories were already considered to be about a manhattan project away from reality. Obviously we haven't had such a project, but they probably would.
... burble blurp!...

Stuart wrote:

Buritot wrote: The last bit about other deities doesn't change much. Except pluralizing the title of the current book.
Pantheocides, heh. The second word of pure awesome I never could expect to come to know.

Pantheocide is the plural - the pre-planned systematic extermination of gods. The singular is deicide, the pre-planned systematic extermination of a god.

Guardsman Bass wrote:You know, that makes me wonder - we know that Satan and Yahweh basically drove off the rest of the Gods a while back, although part of the agreement for their departure was that all their surviving followers would be shielded from torment in Hell.

Simon_Jester wrote:I infer that he means "why aren't your soldiers in power armor?" and chose a very strange way of leading up to it.

Ilya Muromets wrote:oh, and more hints that the Aurora is actually a new aircraft in this story and not just the call sign for a preexisting on. That gets a big yay from me.

Baughn wrote:Power armor (well, full-body armor anyhow) is merely the most obvious manifestation of this. For a story supposedly set in our own future (or close enough), technological progress can't be ignored; not when it's this inevitable.
...
So, to be clear: This is not science-fiction. It's real-life technology; it just hasn't been fully developed yet, but it's getting closer at an astounding rate. The pantheocide universe is still mostly identical to ours, so they would most certainly have access to the same technology, within decades at worst.

How do you co-ordinate your activities with the pilots of the other nanobots? Is there a commander nanobot? Are there middle manager nanobots? Who assigns nanobots to which part of the ruler?

How do you know where to start, ie- how do you decide where one end of the ruler is going to be, and where the other end is going to be?

How do you communicate with the other nanobots? Radio transmissions? How do you communicate clearly with tens of thousands of other nanobots simultaneously? How do you align your movements with theirs? How do you plan?

How much fuel do you carry? That little nanobot vehicle of yours doesn't run on the power of positive thinking, so how much work can it do on a full tank? Where and how do you refuel? How long does it take you to refuel?

What is your propulsion system? You're not getting a free ride in someone's bloodstream like the sort of nanobot which looks for cancerous cells (a more sensible application of nanotechnology), so how do you maneuver about on the manufacturing table in order to help assemble this ruler? How do you jet up into the air to get on top of it if you need to? How much power do you have to combat gravity and air currents?

How do you deal with lost nanobots? In a normal manufacturing environment, air currents, static discharge, and other environmental disturbances could easily blow a nanobot out of the group or seriously damage it. Does the plan adjust automatically for worker turnover? Or must this ruler be manufactured in a vacuum-sealed clean-room environment? This is rapidly shaping up to be a ridiculously expensive ruler!

How much payload can you carry? If you're grabbing molecules or tiny particles and attaching them to this ruler, where do you get them from? How many can you carry per trip? How much energy does it take to weld each chunk of metal to the ruler? Do you realize that if you use larger particles per trip, the resulting ruler will have greater porosity? What are you going to do, weld molten metal into the gaps? Consider the energy costs of doing that!

How do you assure dimensional accuracy of the overall ruler? The nanobot working on the other end of the ruler is (as far as you're concerned) more than 30 kilometres away, remember? How do you know he's not higher than you are? Do you set up a laser-based perimeter system in order to confine your activities within simple geometric bounds? If so, how do you make more complex shapes than a flat ruler? Do you use tooling in order to confine your activities? If so, what conceivable advantage does this process have over simple die-casting?

Baughn wrote:Those are strawman arguments, fortunately.

I'll admit that the original vision of nanotech construction involved nanobots, but that was mostly due to not knowing better. As he (correctly!) points out, there are severe problems with that approach; fortunately, there are better ones.

..rather than explaining, I'll point you at this nice, informative video instead: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqyZ9bFl_qg&fmt=18

tortieconspiracy wrote:The Aesir do have worshippers even in the present day. Chewie's post brings up the question of what happens to modern day Asatruar when they die, especially in combat? I figure some of the them must've died in the Gulf Wars or Afghanistan.

Kodiak wrote:

The Vortex Empire wrote:Well, Uriel's fucked unless Michael get's him out soon. I don't see how Michael could portal through the interference though, unless he's immensely powerful.

He's the number one guy, so if he can't do it then nobody can. I also imagine this would be a good time to bring Uriel into his little cabal, if he wants to.

Simon_Jester wrote:...can anyone spell "strategic overreach?"

This strikes me as a risky decision. If they weren't making trouble before, pointing laser cannons at them and demanding to know their intentions is a good way to get them thinking about how to do it. And we don't have enough information to make reliable guesses on the upper bound of what we're dealing with.

The fact that we appear to be quite capable of knocking over the local alien overlords doesn't mean we're capable of knocking over the random strangers we run into by poking our noses where they weren't invited. What if we come across a culture that has "mythic" capabilities thanks to its kooky laws of physics and high technology with which to exploit those laws? Or if we tick off a civilization at such a high energy gradient relative to us that even knowing exactly where they are in hyperspace, punching portals "up" to them is almost prohibitively difficult while punching them "down" to us is trivially easy?

Or, in short form, what happens if we run into Cthulhu out there?

Lagmonster wrote:

Kodiak wrote:

The Vortex Empire wrote:Well, Uriel's fucked unless Michael get's him out soon. I don't see how Michael could portal through the interference though, unless he's immensely powerful.

He's the number one guy, so if he can't do it then nobody can. I also imagine this would be a good time to bring Uriel into his little cabal, if he wants to.

I would actually enjoy seeing Michael save Uriel, and not only that, do something tremendously shocking to the human forces arrayed to hunt him. Michael is getting through on charisma and guile - a display of incredible telekinetic power would cement his status as the top of the heap.