Nyrath patreon

Beta and Higher Patron Notice for 10/02/2020

🕑 Added 2020-10-02 23:13:53 +0000 UTC

Comments

Nyrath

Oh, I like that term!

Maximilian Crichton

For the shorepower equivalent for nuclear rockets, I believe the best possible term is cold-rodding.

Nyrath

Yes, the quote showed how much friction there is when you do not have even a barter token, but are stuck with just plain barter.

Nyrath

Yes, sounded like technobabble the more I looked into it

Nyrath

Well, as to your last question, you don't.

John

For gravity wave communication what's the bandwidth? What happens when there are two sets of waves at an angle? Coming from opposite directions? How would you generate a noticeable enough gravity wave without bobbing a blob of neutronium up and down?

John

Power curves, yeah, uh-huh, created by a non-scientist, probably not D.C. Fontana, but by a script editor or Roddenberry. It sounds like a great idea, but if you ever worked with military gear, they are designed to within a millimeter of efficiency. There's hardly ever any surplus power in any system. I served in the Army Air Defense with an IHawk unit. We had two main generators that powered the entire system and the only way we'd get "surplus power" is if we took one of our vans down or disconnected a launcher, otherwise, we had no surplus power. The idea of "surplus power" comes from folks that never worked with machines. Yes, most vehicles are designed with fairly liberal tolerances, primarily because the engineers know how much their bairns can take. The "redline" on most cars is not the true redline. For that, you'd have to peg the needle. Of course running in the redline, the vehicle will probably not preform as expected...

John

Money, as I've said before elsewhere, is a social construct. Sure, you'll find all sorts of economic-babble statements about money and such, but what it comes down to is that having money means I don't have to give my dentist 12 chickens for a cleaning and checkup visit. (And my dentist doesn't have to figure out what to do with all those chickens, pigs, and cows she gets as well.) Money is simply a barter token and it comes into play when there are things you want that a simple trade of goods cannot acquire. As cities grew and got more complicated, money came into being as a means of trade. A Talent was so many measures of grain (About 32kg) and could be used to buy things. Promissory notes became a form of cash as well, standing in place of a commodity, though eventually they would be cashed in for the promised commodity. Money as we know it is a recent creation. Fiat money, used the world over, further divorces the concept that money has to be backed by something. That dollar bill, euro, yuan sitting in your pocket is worth exactly what someone else will give you for it. And what backs it is that very same belief. Eventually we'll figure out that while money is useful for handling the distribution of items, food, and services, in and of itself it's valueless. The "Credit" will be nothing more than a tally of what you can afford to get beyond basic necessities. And that it's nothing more than a handy dandy means of figuring out who gets what.