A reader recently asked the relevant question: how do they stabilize the muons in muon metals, muons not being known for their stability, and when binding metals together, not exactly capable of being stabilized by moving at very high fractions of c, either? Well, that would be space magic! (Alas.
My Sensors Indicate You Want To Tap That: Well, yes, because sensor technology – including the inborn kind – is very, very good. Even better than most people’s ability to control their kinesic tells or remember to run their face-saving programs. Fortunately, being members of an extremely polite society, Imperials are
My Country Right Or Wrong: Subverted somewhat, inasmuch as not merely the right but also the obligation to overthrow any Imperial government which defaults from the Contract or the Charter is not merely a theoretical issue, but what they teach in civics class in much the same way as in
Today’s vexing aesthetic physics of handwavium problem: INASMUCH as the energy levels and resulting orbitals of muon-proton atoms are completely different from those of electron-proton atoms – WELL, obviously, or what would be the point in making muon metals in the first place – AND INASMUCH as this makes muon-photon interactions
“They’re not aerodynamic, you know. Landing a Drake on a respectably-sized planet is not what you might call an elegant operation. It involves aerobraking hard to shed most of her velocity, flipping her around once you’ve lost enough of it and balancing her down on her tail with
So let’s talk about the layout of that mainstay of the Imperial fleet, the Drake-class frigate. (The numbers are for deck plans. My own sketches are far too horrible to publish, but… well, there they are.) External Like most starships, one could conveniently divide the Drake-class into a pressure
Multicultural Alien Planet: Well, I try. In practice, it varies by species, depending on how much time I’ve spent detailing them in particular, but they’re all intended to be this way, outside the odd Hive Mind, or other special cases like the Equality Concord. As another note, this
First-pass: 400 pages (complete). Second-pass: ~160 pages. Formatting: 75 pages. Cover art: aaaaaaaaaaa! (Which is to say, man, I wish I hadn’t planned the release of this book during the slowest time of this business year, in which I can’t squeeze stock photography out of the budget, never
Multi-Armed and Dangerous: Well, I’ve mentioned the Eight-Legged Legion of octopus uplifts before, for a start, but even the people with humanoid morphology have received the ambidexterity and multitasking upgrades required to at least dual-wield. (A lot of the spacer clades have switched from the two-arms-two-legs model to the
First-pass: 400 pages (complete). Second-pass: 116 pages. Formatting: 0 pages. …progress is still made.
Just to clarify one point on that last: There are various things in their context that I’d be a lot more uncomfortable with in ours. I wouldn’t trust pretty much any Earth/human government with a legal system like theirs, or ubiquitous public surveillance, or the whole concept
And more questions arrive: Here is an interesting what if for you. If you could live in the Eldraeverse would you want to? They had me at immortality. Or at post-scarcity. Or at vastening. Or at forking. Or at the Repository of All Knowledge. Or at, y’know, space. Or