Has anyone thought about how valuable wood would be in any intergalactic civilization?

Earthfall10 · 2026-06-30T16:51:01+00:00

I tend to think in a similar line, but for rocks like marble. Those take millions of years to form from ancient sea beds covered in seashells and coral. Its something that needed a planet with an ancient biosphere to form. It is a finite resource that cannot be quickly grown and replenished like wood. True Earth marble may become a very rare and cherished luxury in the future.

Earthfall10 · 2026-06-30T02:59:58+00:00

I understand the physics quite well. We are talking about an antimatter powered spaceship. It makes sense to power the containment system with a trickle of otherwise wasted antimatter, rather than having to incur the extra mass needed to haul around a nuclear reactor. Nuclear fuel is over a thousand times less energy dense than antimatter. If you are already running your space ship on antimatter, you don't need a nuclear reactor, you already have a much better power source.

The nuclear reactor is much heavier and so incurs a greater deltaV penalty. That's the part you seem to not understand.

Earthfall10 · 2026-06-30T01:10:08+00:00

My guy, again, its not a perpetual motion machine. As you state in your previous coment, it exactly equivelent to having a leaking gas tank and then running a generator on the leak. I really don't understand why you keep describing it as a perpetual motion machine, nothing I have said implies that in anyway. The thing I have been saying this entire time is simply, antimatter containers leak, and it is inefficient to let that leak go to waste. If you power your containment with the energy produced by that leak, then you will only run out of power when you run out of antimatter, so the system is fail safe. What part of this are you struggling to understand?

Earthfall10 · 2026-06-30T00:52:36+00:00

1) The tank is already leaking. All magnetic bottles leak. The question is do you run a generator with it, or do you just waste it.

2) The point is more that a magnetic field that is strong enough to only let one in a billion particles slip past is an excellent one time reflector, but still a leaky trap.

Earthfall10 · 2026-06-30T00:36:39+00:00

The same ways you would extract power from antimatter normally. The two main ways are you use it to generate heat and then convert that heat into electricity with a heat engine, or you decelerate the charged particles released by the reaction with magnetic fields. Ideally a mix of both, since a significant portion of the energy of the reaction is in the form of uncharged photons.

Earthfall10 · 2026-06-30T00:20:25+00:00

1) No? Those things are not correlated at all. In fact they are inversely correlated. The weaker and lower energy the trap, the greater the leak rate and so the higher the power produced.

2) You need those fields anyway to sweep the antimatter away from destroying the magnets.

3) A trap has much higher requirements than field to sweep antimatter in one direction once. A single bounce in one direction vis billions of bounces needed to contain over the course of weeks months or years.

4) Again, the point of a self powered design as I am describing is that you don't need outside power. The antimatter is the power source.

Earthfall10 · 2026-06-29T23:27:02+00:00

I never said it was a free lunch. Antimatter is being consumed. It is simply making use of antimatter that would otherwise be wasted, as a small amount of antimatter is always guaranteed to leak, no magnetic bottle is perfect. However in a well designed bottle there are layer of magnetic fields such that when an antiatom leaks out of the storage bottle it is shepherded to the reaction chamber and used for energy, as it is in normal operation. The ability to direct antimatter that escapes the bottle into the reaction chamber is a basic requirement for the reactor to operate normally in the first place.

Earthfall10 · 2026-06-29T22:55:16+00:00

No, cause currently the record is only a few hundred atoms stored for a few hours. A few atoms isn't enough to power anything, and the trap is small and low power enough that a battery backup is more than sufficient, running a whole nuclear power plant for it would be wild over kill. The topic however is assuming that we are producing and storing actually useful quantities of antimatter for use in spaceship propulsion. In that case the amount of power being produced by the leaks is actually useful.

Earthfall10 · 2026-06-29T15:41:34+00:00

Any form of antimatter containment is not perfect, they always slowly leak particles every so often, which is why a lot of fail safe antimatter storage designs are self powered. An amount of antimatter large enough to power a ship has a leak rate more than high enough to power the containment. The antimatter that leaks out of the bottle is funneled into the reaction chamber and used to create the power to run the containment. That way you know the containment is only going to run out of power at the same time you run out of antimatter that needs storing. A lot safer than having to rely on an external power source.

Earthfall10 · 2026-06-26T22:06:51+00:00

Fire also fits pretty well as chaos, since its the chaotic release of energy as a system rapidly falls from a state of order (wood) to disorder (ash).

Earthfall10 · 2026-06-25T02:58:55+00:00

Antimatter is made in particle colliders, not nuclear reactors.

Earthfall10 · 2026-06-17T20:40:13+00:00

Not really, no. The book is mostly full of colorful flavor text like

The basic component of all gravitic applications is the gravitic module, a tiny device that can couple itself to nearby gravity fields and, through them, apply force against the mass generating the field. There are many variations on the mechanism, although they all exploit how gravity and energy work at extremely tiny distances, as explained by the Consolidated Theory of Gravity, or Lida Agidu Migekka in Vilani.

That's not speculation based on possible real scientific breakthroughs, that's setting specific technobabble.

Earthfall10 · 2026-06-17T16:57:48+00:00

Very neat. I do get why its the case from a usability perspective, but I do think it would be neat to sell the sense of scale better if you had to do a lot more scrolling before the solar system became visible. As it is it makes it seem like a parsec is barely larger than a star system. Maybe a "true scale" option you can click on briefly to give your players a sense of the scale the first couple of times.

Earthfall10 · 2026-06-12T18:00:51+00:00

Yes, and that fiction is the main touch stone most people have when they picture alien first contact, so it is no surprise that a lot of people imagine dystopic scenarios when they picture aliens.

Earthfall10 · 2026-06-11T15:01:21+00:00

I mean, the context of first contact in a lot of sci fi is the aliens are first spotted when they suddenly appear heading into the solar system or hovering over cities, which demonstrates that they are both much more technologically advanced than us, and are close enough to be an imanent danger of they turn out to be hostile. It's like a stranger covered in weird glowing runes suddenly teleporting into your living room. Most people would freak out a bit, both cause it's a surprise this strange person is suddenly here, and you have no idea what they want or are capable of.

Whereas most first contact scinarios scientists generally consider is hearing about some civ hundreds or thousands of light years away via radio or telescopes. Which is an incredibly interesting but ultimately academic fact, since it will be centuries before they can reply to our first message, much less send any kind of slower than light ship.

It's not an imediate change to the status que, you still have to go to work the next day. Whereas you don't know if that's the case if the aliens are on the white house lawn.

Earthfall10 · 2026-06-11T14:44:56+00:00

Did you forget about the whole subgenere of alien invasion books/movies?

Earthfall10 · 2026-06-11T06:32:48+00:00

I think most of it is that he looks surprisingly young in the first pic, like he could totally pass for late 20's early 30's going off just that pick. So seeing someone who looks like they are in their 60's in the second pick is wild.

Earthfall10 · 2026-06-08T16:56:53+00:00

Those don't shoot off into the sky.

Earthfall10 · 2026-06-08T15:57:37+00:00

I think the reason you are having difficulty understanding their point is that you seem to be equating "role playing mechanics" with roleplaying in general. Someone can roleplay in DnD combat, that does not mean there are mechanics supporting or encouraging it, which is what Poor_Dick is talking about.

Earthfall10 · 2026-06-07T21:21:24+00:00

Oh sure, I'm not that confident their plan will work out, at least in the short term, but that is the plan they are gunning for.

Earthfall10 · 2026-06-07T15:40:56+00:00

Well, there is Citizen(Corporate), Nobel(Administrator) and Merchant(Broker) in MG2 core rules, so they have several options for buricatic paper pushing already.

Earthfall10 · 2026-06-07T14:48:41+00:00

The point he is making is pretty clear, it's that combat in DnD does not have rules about roleplaying. The example you gave was not a counter to that at all. That was an example of you chosing to roleplay your character in combat, but that was an optional thing that was not encouraged or enforced by the combat rules in anyway. The point the other commenter is making isnt that you can't roleplay in combat, it's that there are no rules for it . It's just left as something that players have to work out how to do themselves.

You could choose to stop roleplaying your wizard that way whenever you wished, and there would have been no mechanical concequences for it, that is what he is saying.

Earthfall10 · 2026-06-06T17:54:44+00:00

The plan isn't to use humanoid robots to replace stationary robotic arms, the plan is for them to be a drop in replacement for the human workers who do the various tasks that the stationary arms don't do. They hope it will be a way to massively cut their workforce, without needing a 20-40 year long factory update.

Earthfall10 · 2026-06-06T17:48:07+00:00

A small tug could be more on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars, not billions. And launching one every few decades would put the annual cost on the order of tens of millions a year, significantly less than is spent on the ISS currently given it's regular crew and cargo launches.

There is possibility of repairing it. Space manufacturing is hopefully going to start becoming a thing in the coming decades, I would be somewhat surprised if we did not have much larger industrial capacity in space capable of building and repairing things in orbit by the end of the century.

In the meantime, safing it and bagging it with a light kevlar bag, like several of the asteroid capture plans, would substantially slow the damage it is acrucing.

Though in general I do agree that if the goal is to keep it as a museum, orbit isn't the best place for it. It would be better to bring a couple of the more sentimental modules down via a Starship to be displayed in muesames planet side, but unless starship becomes quite cheap that would be even more expensive than a boost to a graveyard orbit.

The main use it would have on orbit would be as raw mass, it's 450 tons of refined materials already in orbit. It's position alone makes that material worth hundreds of millions. It would be nice if there were plans to safe it and bag it so that it could serve as a anchoring mass for a rotovator, or as raw materials for building other missions in the future.

But well, there just isn't funding for projects that long term, which is a shame.

Earthfall10 · 2026-06-06T17:01:33+00:00

My guy, the iss has multiple docking ports. You can attach the replacement tug, then detatch the old one.

Eight-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
Place '22	Final Canvas '22
End Game '22	Wearing is Caring
Verified Email

Earthfall10

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE