StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Excellent stuff as always. Although I keep feeling like Canada's getting snubbed, but whatever.

It looks more and more like there could be an entire industry to be had exporting materials and manufactured goods from Hell to Earth.

Nice work, Stu, I like the depiction of the internal politics of Heaven.

Is the command post at Yamantau real? It does sound pretty impressive if it does.
EDIT: Had a quick look via Google and it does indeed seem to exist.

Goddamn I like the notion of detective stories in Heaven. Celestial Noir! And, shit, looks like Micheal Lan might have to get rid of another troublesome thorn on his side now. But I hope it doesn't go all too smooth for Micheal, that Lemuel will actually be clever and, dare I say it, get to the bottom of this.

Fortress Yamantau! And Vladimir Putin on an evil chair of power!

"How do we blow Heaven up?"

Ah, Vlad. You've always got your priorities in order.

Speaking of Putin, I can't help but love the Russian engineering mentality.

"Our command center is buried under six kilometers of stone!"
"Too shallow! We MUST DIG DEEPER!"

Also, not sure if anyone else has noticed this, but there is a subtle distinction between Heaven and Hell's internal politics. While the demons in Hell followed Satan out of fear, the angels seem to follow Yaweh out of honest devotion and belief. Might make it more difficult to force a surrender from them, unless the humans or Michael can assassinate Yaweh.

One of the (many) big advantages the humans had fighting the Baldricks was that they could take advantage of the power structure to fragment demonic armies and split loyalties. I don't think it'll be as easy in Heaven.

I don't know if you've considered this, but early in this chapter an angel mentions that "lines get strange over long distances".

This is actually outright proof that they originally came from a larger universe that's euclidian at visual ranges; their visual-spatial centers have clearly evolved to deal with that, not the lorentzian geometries of heaven/hell.

“Do we have any concept of how this weapon works? Is it a threat.” The Indian Prime Minister spoke with a beautifully precise intonation.

It's the little details like this about characters that really make it a good story and not just a series of interconnected events. As always, thanks!

Baughn wrote:I don't know if you've considered this, but early in this chapter an angel mentions that "lines get strange over long distances".

This is actually outright proof that they originally came from a larger universe that's euclidian at visual ranges; their visual-spatial centers have clearly evolved to deal with that, not the lorentzian geometries of heaven/hell.

Debatable.

Assume that angel eyes are functionally similar to humans, but that they have a higher resolution (which lets them see "microscopic" details up close and gives them useful images of objects at longer ranges). There's still not much use to being able to see with high precision at twenty (fifty? a hundred?) miles rather than ten. Anything that far away is either so big that you don't need much precision to perceive it (storm clouds) or completely irrelevant (animals, rock formations). Failing to make the correction for non-Euclidean geometry won't change much.

The adjustment in mental processing required to straighten out the geometry at distances over which Heaven is perceptibly non-Euclidean wouldn't be much of an advantage. So I'm not sure the fact that they're uncomfortable with the slightly non-Euclidean shape of space at the outer limit of their visual range matters.

It's just as likely that their vision wound up upgraded because it's useful close up (at, say, a few thousand meters). In which case its ability to see at such long distances that space is visually curved would be an evolutionary accident, sort of like the human ability to curl one's tongue. Or it could be a side-effect of genetic engineering aimed at creating something else, sort of like the weird features found in some dog breeds.

Peptuck wrote:
Also, not sure if anyone else has noticed this, but there is a subtle distinction between Heaven and Hell's internal politics. While the demons in Hell followed Satan out of fear, the angels seem to follow Yaweh out of honest devotion and belief. Might make it more difficult to force a surrender from them, unless the humans or Michael can assassinate Yaweh.

One of the (many) big advantages the humans had fighting the Baldricks was that they could take advantage of the power structure to fragment demonic armies and split loyalties. I don't think it'll be as easy in Heaven.

Personally, it seemed more like the majority of angels couldn't think of any alternative to Yahweh's rule. If we humans were to start seriously disrupting things, they'd start asking a lot of questions. The League can only be in some many places at once.

he United States, Russia, China, Great Britain, France, Germany, Australia, Japan, India, Iran, Israel, Brazil, Italy, Thailand and Singapore. The countries that had been in the fight since the beginning and had scored the first kills against humanity’s enemy. There was one great advantage of this council, since it met in secret and its existence was largely unknown, its membership was free of politics. Mostly.

I just got to ask. How do this many heads of state get together without somebody knowing something? I remember the efforts that the Bush 43 Presidency had to go through in order to fly Bush secretly to Iraqi for Thanksgiving. Usually for heads of state, the movements are tracked fairly closely, especially when the leave the country that they lead. It would assume seem easier to use a solution like Cisco Tele-Presence over secure Fiber Optic lines to get together and meet instead of everyone flying to the Russian Doomsday bunker. Also imagine the security implications with all these heads of state together in one conference room even when you are in the world most secure bunker.

Good entry. I did notice one thing - when it described the human slums outside the Eternal City, most of them were described as mud and straw thatch, with a wooden building being in one of the nicer areas. Is wood scarce in Heaven, scarce in that area (and humans are forbidden to go a certain distance away from the Eternal City), or something else? The fact that the slums have it (and presumably they don't get the advantage of picking up building materials from other dimensions) suggests that it does occur within Heaven proper, unless there is some interesting bartering going on with the angels.

From the description, it sounds like Yahweh put his palace on top of an extinct volcano - different from Dis, where it is built around the caldera. If we're talking about blowing Heaven up, maybe there's a still-active lava chamber somewhere below it, and with a few well-placed bombs . . . well, it's a possibility, I hope.

Build a trident in Hell, power it by electricity made in Hell and it throws a bolt for up to two miles. Build a trident on Earth, power it with electricity made on Earth and it arcs to ground within a few inches.

What if you took a hell-made trident with a battery charged in hell (hell-made electricity) and fired it on earth. Will it arc to ground also, or fire straight?

I like the fact that Stuart got around so fast to answering our (my) questions on demon physiology!

Thanks Stuart!

Andras wrote:

Build a trident in Hell, power it by electricity made in Hell and it throws a bolt for up to two miles. Build a trident on Earth, power it with electricity made on Earth and it arcs to ground within a few inches.

What if you took a hell-made trident with a battery charged in hell (hell-made electricity) and fired it on earth. Will it arc to ground also, or fire straight?

Go take a look at Armageddon again, since presumably the baldricks used tridents that had been built and charged in Hell. If I remember right, they still shot straight in the early battles, outside the Portal. That might seem to tie into the overall point about how both Earth's and Hell's laws of physics seem to be under the umbrella of some greater set of natural laws covering the Multiverse.

Surlethe wrote:Great nod to Mike's point about arcing. A point: if the laws of physics between dimensions are different, baldrick electricity ought to behave the same as any other electricity on Earth - i.e., in Armageddon, they shouldn't be able to make ball lightning, right?

Likely, the exact physical make up or construction techniques of the trident is subtly different depending on if it is constructed in Hell or Earth.

An example is a slowly cooling iron mass lined up with the magnetic poles on Earth turns into a magnet, but a forged iron bar isn't.

Or it could be on an entirely different level.

A piece of fanfiction I've been working on (Nanohaverse) has reality as being constructed from planck-cube-sized hardware-less "computers" that were originally just running physics, but were later co-opted into running.. other things.

Now, if you state that the cells get attached to a particular piece of matter, and the individual protons (yeah, I know, there aren't any individual protons. Bear with me.) aren't just passed from cell to cell, then a trident from hell could literally run on different laws of physics than a Terran one. Same with the electricity.

Xon wrote:Likely, the exact physical make up or construction techniques of the trident is subtly different depending on if it is constructed in Hell or Earth.

I think it would have to be something like that. If it's just the laws of physics being different on Hell and Earth then the beam should always arc to the ground on Earth. Unless maybe the Demons can somehow wrap themselves in a little volume of "Hell space" when they go to Earth, sort of like the operation of a Gellar field (40K).

On the matter of the light in Hell and Heaven being a function of the same magic that reconstitutes dead people in Hell and Heaven, that's probably one of the more plausible explanations. I'd say that system is pretty obviously artificial, it's very difficult to imagine it developing naturally. Somebody set it up at some point. It's not much of a stretch to think those same people may have terraformed Hell and Heaven.

The Angels having actual feathered wings is a real head-scratcher. As far as I know, there is no mammal that has feathers, and the Angels are very obviously hominids. The only thing I can think of that could account for it is the direct transplantation of avian genes into the Angel genome while they were being created. That's pretty sophisticated genetic engineering - can Yahweh do that?

From a hard science point of view, it might be better to say that they have bat-like wings covered with very soft hair. Of course, that still leaves the matter of them having six limbs. Perhaps the wings are in fact rib-wings, such as are found on certain reptiles. This essay has a pretty good outline on how you might reconcile a winged mammal with arms and legs with real biology.

Guardsman Bass wrote:From the description, it sounds like Yahweh put his palace on top of an extinct volcano - different from Dis, where it is built around the caldera. If we're talking about blowing Heaven up, maybe there's a still-active lava chamber somewhere below it, and with a few well-placed bombs . . . well, it's a possibility, I hope.

Those would have to be some very well placed bombs. The active lava chamber would presumably be miles underground.
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Xon wrote:

Surlethe wrote:Great nod to Mike's point about arcing. A point: if the laws of physics between dimensions are different, baldrick electricity ought to behave the same as any other electricity on Earth - i.e., in Armageddon, they shouldn't be able to make ball lightning, right?

Likely, the exact physical make up or construction techniques of the trident is subtly different depending on if it is constructed in Hell or Earth.

An example is a slowly cooling iron mass lined up with the magnetic poles on Earth turns into a magnet, but a forged iron bar isn't.

Yes, but there almost has to be more to it than that. The forging process screws up the magnetization of the iron, randomizing it so that it no longer has a net magnetic dipole moment, and can no longer line up with the Earth's field. That's fairly well understood.

But this thing with the tridents is something about electricity that turn-of-the-millenium science cannot explain. Which, by definition, makes it weird, because electromagnetism is one of the few areas where we have a complete, self-consistent system of physics that explains everything in the known universe. We've quite honestly run out of unexplored EM phenomena.

Forgive me, is this Lemuel from the Bible, or from the Book of Mormon?

It isn't quite true that we've run out of unexplored EM phenomena.

Unexplored pure-EM phenomena, yes, but there are a few interesting combinations that have yet to be fully understood. For example, it appears that superconductors can act to couple EM and the gravitational field, by [magic]nonlocal entangled electrons not reacting the same way towards gravitational waves as the conductor itself[/magic]. No, I don't really understand it.

Michael had always said if the humans on Earth could get a foothold in Heaven for their armies, the war would be over. He must have realized the potential of that bottle to be such a foothold. That sublime insight made Lemuel proud to be his friend.

You poor, dumb son of a bitch. I feel sorry for this character already.

Also, it's interesting that even back before humans got Michael hooked on weed, he was already apt to think outside the box.

I like the little dig at waterboarding when they're interrogating Ishmael.

I also thought of something. These are all humans that went through Yahweh's thorough brainwashing and vetting process, and yet still there's an Inquisition of sorts that needs to stamp out apostasy, heresy, and sacrilege. I imagine there must be an enormous feeling of betrayal hidden under the surface of this society, and I wonder how these people will react when Humanity comes knocking on their doors and basically informs them that they're dead set on annihilating their former savior and current slaver...

Richard Sharpe wrote:Excellent stuff as always. Although I keep feeling like Canada's getting snubbed, but whatever.

Canada wouldn't have been in the "Right Place at the right time" compared to the other existing members, all of whom bring more military clout to the table(at least initially) than Canada.

Fair enough. Just a little barely masked national fanboyism, is all.

Edit: Even Singapore? Damn.

Xon wrote:

Surlethe wrote:Great nod to Mike's point about arcing. A point: if the laws of physics between dimensions are different, baldrick electricity ought to behave the same as any other electricity on Earth - i.e., in Armageddon, they shouldn't be able to make ball lightning, right?

Likely, the exact physical make up or construction techniques of the trident is subtly different depending on if it is constructed in Hell or Earth.

An example is a slowly cooling iron mass lined up with the magnetic poles on Earth turns into a magnet, but a forged iron bar isn't.

Not the trident, the electricity itself. It's not like electrons from hell should behave on Earth as they do in Hell (obviously, they do, but still).

CaptainChewbacca wrote:Forgive me, is this Lemuel from the Bible, or from the Book of Mormon?

I have no idea. Wiki says he's a king mentioned in Proverbs and a character in the Book of Mormon.

Morilore wrote:Also, it's interesting that even back before humans got Michael hooked on weed, he was already apt to think outside the box.

That's one of the things that makes him so dangerous, and such a great general too. Remember that demons and angels are not dumb; they are very smart, just working from a completely different set of assumptions. They learn and adapt very quickly - c.f. how Asmodeus came up with a working counterinsurgency strategy in several months, a feat that took the entire US several years to do - and Michael is the best of the best. And not only is he smart, he's also well-informed about human capabilities, unlike the demons. A very dangerous character.

By making Michael out to be such an exceedingly capable opponent, I fear that the only way of defeating him will entail a (pun intended) deus ex machina moment.

The easy way out would be for Michael to be in charge of heaven after Yahweh is eventually defeated, as Stuart certainly has a penchant for likeable villians-Goering and the Cuban Mob in TBO, for example. I'd rather see him offed at the beginning of one of the next sections, rather out of the blue. That would be daring.