Bay 12 Games Forum

A moment of silence for those poor lab assistants who were told by their boss to drink mercury and taste lead-sulfates. I'm really glad I'm alive in an era when we know a little better, at least.

If urban legends are to be believed, that is how saccharine was "discovered". A chem lab was working on a pesticide or some such, and a senior chemist asked an underling to "taste" the substance in error, instead of "test". Said underling chowed down on it, and noticed it was sugary. Suddenly, diet soda everywhere.

I need to ask a question that'll make you think I'm stupid. That's because I'm stupid.

Is a low heat conductivity more important than high melting point? What if I layered something beneath the armor to absorb the heat?

If your armour conducts too much heat through it, whoever is inside it will get cooked. If its melting point is too low, it wont prtect much at all. You want both...

Absorbing the heat, if you have no way to dissipate it in some way, will lead to cooked wearer syndrome. The easiest way to dissipate it would be to conduct it away, presumably into some kind of heat sink system.

MoO3.

Yes, it is a broken mess, and killed the franchise and dented 4x as a genre.

But, fixed to its intended state, as it was by the modding community that grew to fix the fuckups... is it glorious. Subtle. Nuanced. Complex. Beautiful. I still play it at least once a week, on a custom mod build.

In addition, it depends on what sort of war you want to fight. You simply are not going to take a bunch of green civvies off the streets and drop them into state of the art war fighting gear and get anywhere (even though ww2 stories of tanks rolling off the soviet production lines, onto the street to be crewed by whoever was nearby seem pervasive). However, partisan resistance movement? Sure, such things have been formed by experienced soldiers from little more than ragtag civilian groups - granted, often with help.

Quote from: The Moonlit Shadow on March 01, 2016, 12:53:57 pm

Lasers have no recoil though, right?

Photons do have momentum despite having zero rest mass (they are never actually at rest), so technically there is some recoil... but it's negligible unless you're in using impossibly light materials in your weapon.  And probably need to be a vacuum too, since even the air would be enough to dampen the recoil.

... or have an insane number of high energy photons.

An atmosphere in a combat ship could be a liability.

Quote from: MonkeyHead on February 27, 2016, 03:53:01 pm

... and there is also the sun, which via its magnetic field flings plasma insane distances. All one needs is a mastery of how to produce and control strong magnetic fields, and one can literally bend plasma to their will.

Yeah, but the sun produces insane amounts of energy and is so fucktastically large it is able to produce that strong a magnetic field. Trying to contain that in, say, a gun would mean that if the gun was damaged a huge chunk would be torn out of the planet you're on at best.

Well, yes, some handwavium science to scale it down is required...