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3rd Offensive Book Feedback - constructive with love

Discussion in 'News' started by lord farfhocel, Dec 2, 2018.

  1. kanluwen

    kanluwen Well-Known Member

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    Was it the bit about it taking a shot in the jungle, then within X minutes a hunter-killer team of Bagh-Mari were on a transport en route to deal with the sniper?

    Cause if it was--that's a reprint of Paradiso...
     
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  2. Section9

    Section9 Well-Known Member

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    Thing is, with trains you can have multiple trains all going the same direction on the rails (It's why I specified a loop at each end, so that the tracks are all one-way, either up or down). So you might only have 10 tracks, but you could have passenger trains going every 10 minutes like the Shinkansen. Freight would take a lot longer to load and unload (passengers are self-loading cargo while freight needs someone else to load it), but that just means you need large yards to park multiple trains in various stages of loading or unloading.

    Or, for that matter, you may only need 100ktons of cargo once a day, so a freight train goes up or down once a day (and therefore only takes one track in the yard while it loads and unloads).
     
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  3. Pen-dragon

    Pen-dragon Deva

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    Interesting discussion going into the space elevator. If anyone is interested in going down the rabbit hole, do some research on 'space fountains'

    The short version is, the space fountain is a series of continuously firing electromagnetic coil guns, shooting a stream of pellets up an electromagnetic tube. The pellets are slowed by the electromagnets in the tube, and that slowing provides the lift for the tower. At the top the pellets are guided into a return tube, where they fall back to earth to be reloaded. Electromagnets in the return tube speed up the rate of the pellets fall, in order to get more lift (Newtons 3rd Law) At the base station, the pellets are caught in an electromagnetic net that tries to harvest all that momentum to turn into energy, to be fed back into the system again to fire again. Trains can be attached to these electromagnetic tubes.

    Despite all the electromagnets, if the system can be built efficiently enough with proper energy harvesting, energy requirements can theoretically be kept to manageable levels. It has an advantage over the space elevator because it does not require materials with as high of tensile strength, does not need to be built as high, and is less dependent on equatorial placement. It does however require massive and constant energy, and do to all the contained high energy projectiles is actually devastatingly explosive if something goes catastrophically wrong, so probably not any less dangerous to have than a space elevator.
     
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  4. xagroth

    xagroth Mournful Echo

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    And it's quite... over the top. Expenses incurred by the CA: one sniper. Expenses incurred by the human side: tons. Holes in the patrol created by the diversion: enough for a Shasvastii infiltration team to get into position to do the real job. And now you have a bunch of doctors and nurses exhausted because their R&R was cancelled.

    As for the Neomaterials, those would not impact very much in the construction times, since you still need to do the work, and what neomaterials offer are less weight and more resistance (reduced to the bare basic), and you still need to place the sections, tie those together, etc... Considering how interested the CA is in taking one as functional as possible, I'd bet more about months (if not 3-5 years directly).

    I don't think you can compare, with accuracy, an airport with an orbital elevator considering only those numbers. The fact that you can mantain the orbital elevator working with not much effort in the way of energy, while an airport burns fuel like there's no tomorrow is, I think, extremely important.

    I go with conservative numbers, that way all surprises are good.

    Did so some years ago for a presentation about imagined space structures (like the Dyson Swarm Vs the Dyson Sphere, the O'Neill stations, etc...), and the Space Fountain has, as you say, some advantages (namely speed) and some disadvantages (it depends entirely on being working all the time that "juggling").
    I think it's not the type used in Paradiso, however, since the CA has partial control on one, and the fall of a Space Fountain is not as catastrophic as the one of an Orbital elevator (since it requires less rigid structures, using the energy transmitted by the pellets to stay "straight" and "stable") for the planet, but one of the extremes would suffer greatly (usually, the space one, to let the energy be lost instead of ruining the planet...)
    Point is, the human faction could release all but a handful of pellets and crash those not released on the base to neutralize the fountain and damage the CA's troops, plus removing a source of problems to their orbital station (which now serves as another front against the enemy).
     
  5. Section9

    Section9 Well-Known Member

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    I am familiar with the idea of the orbital fountain, but it's waaaay too dependent on all the pieces working all the time. Stuff breaks, or needs to be taken off-line for maintenance.

    The orbital elevator does need insanely strong materials for the beanstalk, but is otherwise self-sustaining. Also, an elevator is technically always under tension, going away from the planet. With the proper track setup (some variety of linear motors), you can pretty much treat a train going down as the "counterweight" (more properly, 'power generator') for the train going up. Yes, you would need to make up some power, but 80+% of the power required for the train going up would be generated by the train going down.

    Immense cost to set up an orbital elevator, but once they're up you're talking negligible cost of getting into orbit. The food and water needed to keep people alive would be a larger cost than fuel/power!
     
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  6. xagroth

    xagroth Mournful Echo

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    Spanish Book pg 128: maketing error. Several lines or even paragraphs are missing, possibly covered by the Onyx contact force Family Photo.

    I'm finding about 1 mistake per each 20 pages (a funny one was in the OM section of PanO, in which they were having supplies troubles, including having enough ammo...XD)
     
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  7. Alkasyn

    Alkasyn Well-Known Member

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    Yea, it definitely look like not enough attention was put to having a final read of the book.
     
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  8. Mob of Blondes

    Mob of Blondes Well-Known Member

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    We could compare to train stations where all trains are electric. But IIRC technical limiting factors for airports are things like boarding procedures or too few fingers (the load bridges) or runaways, not refueling, so choke points are people or airplanes not going in and out fast enough.
     
  9. Section9

    Section9 Well-Known Member

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    I do think trains are your best point of comparison with an orbital elevator, though airports probably aren't too bad for passenger throughput. The US basically doesn't do passenger trains anymore, the only places they make decent sense is on the coasts and there is an awful lot of country between them!

    Another point of comparison would be an actual port on the waterfront, though the big cargo container ships are much slower to load and unload than a train is (assuming ISO standard cargo boxes). Loading or unloading bulk freight (like an oil tanker or something) would be an even worse comparison.


    Actually, didn't Gundam 00 basically make the orbital elevators look like trains? Been a long time since I watch that one, and I don't really want to re-watch it, wasn't that good.
     
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  10. xagroth

    xagroth Mournful Echo

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    It depends on what you want to do. In the Circulars we already concluded that it was the "passenger ships" the ones who need to accelerate to catch with the Circular, which won't stop in its route (it's, after all, an homage to the Galaxy Express anime, if I remember the title right). The Orbital elevators can work the same way, by having an extra set of "wheels" at each part of the terminus, so you have the "train", always turning (kinda like the fountain mentioned before, but with rigid structures to keep it upright instead of needing constant forces transfer to avoid catastrophic failure).

    Think of it as a chain that goes up and down, and when it enters the cogs in the extremes (the stations, in land and orbit) two other cogs per extreme pick and attach modules:
    For example, you want to go down. You embarck on a cabin with more people, this cabin gets moved (like a sea container) and attached to the Orbital Elevator platform, which won't stop (imagine two cogs rotating, in the contact point the cabin passes from one cog to the other). When you reach down, the cabin gets dismounted, and another one with people and cargo gets attached on the other side, etc...
    That way, the orbital system only needs to compensate for the mass variations between what goes up and what goes down, while the embarcking and disembarcking systems bleed the last bits of speed (since the "train" can't enter at full speed, but its energy gets transferred to the departing unit).
     
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  11. solkan

    solkan Well-Known Member

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    The premise of Galaxy Express is a kid riding the 999 from Earth to the end of the line, with the series about the stops along the way.

    It's a pretty weird homage if you turn that into a train that doesn't stop anywhere.
     
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  12. oldGregg

    oldGregg Well-Known Member

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    So uh ... I get that there weren’t updates to Haqqislam, but damn. I bought Third Offensive and it was almost like we didn’t exist. CB, why would you do that to such a large player base?
     
  13. xagroth

    xagroth Mournful Echo

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    The concept of circulars, to the Galaxy Express. The Circular don't "stop" because that would demand prohibitive amounts of energy (and to start again!), but it has "stops" where the ships that want in have to match its velocity and dock, which means that the cicular would be stopped relatively to the docking ships... :wink:
    No, really, the "homage" part would be Circular == train, with the points in which the circular picks passengers being akin to the stops. Of course, from time to time the homages can be seen for various works.

    Because they will churn out another book in March or so with Ramah, Shasvastii, Tunguska, possibly Tohaa (or NA2Tohaa), etc...

    Why sell a book when you can sell two? It's not as if the actual content of the book is filled with useless purple prose... Oh wait... XD
     
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  14. FatherKnowsBest

    FatherKnowsBest Red Knight of Curmudgeon

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    Now I need more Captain Harlock
     
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  15. oldGregg

    oldGregg Well-Known Member

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    Has Ramah been confirmed? CB seems to like their surprises.I don't think I'd bat an eye if we don't see them until 2020, if ever.
     
  16. Section9

    Section9 Well-Known Member

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    And that weird hybrid between a 1940s battleship and a 16thC Galleon!
     
  17. FatherKnowsBest

    FatherKnowsBest Red Knight of Curmudgeon

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  18. colbrook

    colbrook Grenade Delivery Specialist

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    Ramah have been confirmed as the next Haqq sectorial, so the odds are good they'll be in the next batch.

    I mean, we've had the starter for a couple of years now :P
     
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  19. oldGregg

    oldGregg Well-Known Member

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    Confirmed by who? Do you have a reference?
     
  20. colbrook

    colbrook Grenade Delivery Specialist

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    Confirmed since the release of Red Veil when Bostria described it as "also the RTF starter which will be Haqq's next sectorial" in the BoW video.
     
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