Crime is not about how hard it was for the perpetrator to commit it. Crime is about intent, or sometimes criminal negligence. "But the door was unlocked" is not, has never been, and should not be a legal defence.
Now, "intent" itself can sometimes be vague or fuzzy enough to leave room for doubt. You cannot be tried with trespassing on land that a reasonable person would not have known was off limits. And the balance of the law, the concept of innocence until guilt is proven, should favour the accused; if there is reasonable doubt, acquittal should be the outcome.
But that was not the case here. There was no doubt as to the accused's guilt, both in the crime itself and the attempted cover-up. Political angles aside, this would have been criminal no matter who the victim was, or what the perp's motive.
I can see another advantage to ethanol, and that's field production. You could set up stills at a forward base for refuelling. Granted, you'd still need biological material to ferment, but that might be available locally. And the alcohol produced doesn't need to be palatable, it just needs to combust. Methanol would also be a possibility, and a fuel cell that could use either would open up a wider range of materials used in fermentation.
Now, I don't know if this makes sense from a cost perspective, but if it could be done, it would eliminate a major logistical burden that powered infantry would otherwise add to the supply chain.
I don't think anyone would seriously consider exosuited infantry necessary for anti-terrorism, for much the same reason tanks aren't needed.
However, I doubt we've seen the last of wars fought where both sides have access to technology more sophisticated than AKs, RPGs and IEDs. An exosuit makes far more sense if you assume the infantry wearing it are going to be up against superior numbers, or foes with air and armour support, or opposing forces with the equipment and training to pose a serious threat.
In point of fact, exploding fuel isn't exactly a huge risk.
This is one of those areas where Hollywood is to blame for the popular perception. Every time a car goes off a cliff, every time a tanker truck catches a stray bullet, every time hydrogen is even mentioned, what follows is an impressive pyrotechnics display.
Doesn't work that way in real life. Mythbusters, who never avoid a myth involving kaboomery, have tested most of the fuel explosion myths and found them wanting. Fuel (gasoline, propane, hydrogen, diesel, etc) can catch fire certainly, but this rarely involves the instant towering inferno seen in film and on TV.
As far as that goes, it's not like the military doesn't use plenty of fuelled combat vehicles already. They know how to make them not blow up every time somebody with an AK cuts loose. Self sealing tanks and armour plating in particular mitigate the risk.
So I wouldn't worry about it. And if fire or explosion is a concern, I'd suggest diesel fuel for powered suits, as it doesn't ignite easily, and pretty much can't explode on its own.
That was implied to be a fusion reactor. I was actually impressed in the second movie where they made oblique references to neutron embrittlement, which is much more sophisticated physics than comic book movies usually get. Mind you, the rest of the movie's physics were still awful, but I'll cut it some slack given the source material and the desire to be faithful to it.
Presuming it was a fusion reactor, you can pretty much forget about seeing them that small anything soon. Fusion power plants scale up better than they scale down, partly as a result of the square-cube law, and partly as a result of components being hard to miniaturize. We don't even have building sized fusion plants that can produce more energy than it takes to achieve and maintain the reaction in the first place. We'll probably have working fusion power in this century, assuming we keep at the R&D and don't blast ourselves back to the stone age in the meantime, but I doubt we'll have it miniaturized to Iron Man levels anytime in the next couple hundred years.
Either fuel cells or a portable generator might make more sense than a battery. Both have a much higher energy density per mass and energy density per volume, plus they are much easier to refuel than a battery is to recharge.
Technically, the fuel cells needn't be hydrogen powered, since you can make a fuel cell that runs on hydrocarbons (which are easier to store and transport). A generator adds more exhaust and moving parts, but is at least proven technology. Either could work.
And for military applications, you don't need to augment arm strength, you can focus on the legs and torso. After all, if the intent is to add plate armour for battlefield use, then carry capacity is what you're after, not super-strength. Now, augmented arms would still be desirable, if only because it would allow for heavier infantry weapons (which you'll need once the other side starts fielding powered exosuits), but for the first-gen version you can skip the arms and just use existing rifles.
Regardless of what the numbers are for the cut Steam takes, they're going to undercut Gamestop in the long haul. They don't have the attendant costs of a brick-and-mortar.
Really, Steam may not be perfect (I really wish more online stores were DRM free), but compared to Gamestop and company, they're practically saints. I know which side I'm rooting for.
And as a final thought: How many games actually need to have Steam if they're being sold as physical copies? Wouldn't it be preferable for the gamers if the game disc just installed single player mode without requiring the user has Steam, with the understanding that they can register their key/install Steam for multiplayer?
Well, I think the orbital solar approach is likely to become practical before floating cities do. Since TFA makes it clear this is more pie-in-the-sky futurism than actual practical planning, it may stand to reason the designers assume that we'll be using orbital solar regularly by the time these become practical (if ever).
Yeah, this comment is offtopic too, but WTH. (Oh, and I have no points today, and thus made none of the moderations in this discussion).
When I get mod points, I usually drop one or two on comments along the lines of "oh sure, mod me down because you disagree with me", or words to that effect. I do this irrespective of whether I was the person to mod down the original comment, whether I agree with the moderation, or whether I think the original comment has merit. I will occasionally mod the original comment up even as I moderate the complaint about the original comment's prior moderation down, contradictory as that may sound.
Why do I do this? Because bitching about being downmodded is noise instead of signal. It's that simple. Better to remove it from the thread by putting it below most thresholds.
I rarely otherwise downmod comments, unless they're really obviously noise, offtopic soapboxing, or part of a flamewar. Hell, I've even held off on downmodding posts that demonstrated massive ignorance on a subject, in favour of upmodding the people correcting said ignorance.
You might want to rethink that "isn't being used for anything" bit. A hell of a lot of photosynthesis goes on in the topmost layer of the world's oceans. Not to mention the hydrological cycle and the oceans role in thermo-regulation. We don't want to halt or significantly alter any of the above.
Now, floating cities will not interfere with those processes, for the same reason building cities on land didn't interfere with land based photosynthesis - the amount of space we need to build something large from our point of view is small when viewed from a global scale. A huge city is still a small blotch seen from orbit.
The Earth has some five hundred million square kilometres of surface. We don't need all of it to be occupied. "Wasted" space is not a problem.
Technically, Tsunamis only rise to their maximum height as they get closer to land. Out at sea, they're mostly beneath the surface. It takes a decrease in depth to force them up into the walls of water we associate them with.
Bearing that in mind, and further considering that we can and do have ships at sea when Tsunamis happen, I assume the problem is manageable, and was probably considered for the Green Float design sometime prior to this point.
Slightly off topic, but did anyone else notice in the overhead pics that these things look fractal derived?
Yeah, I coulda made that clearer. Since I made the sarcastic "news at 11" remark at the beginning, I thought it would be more obvious that I meant "make the major network news" at the end.
Seriously. "Promiscuity linked to sociability among teenagers, news at 11!"
The only thing different about this and the circumstances that were true when I went through high school is the tech angle. Predictably, this will appeal to the Luddite crowd, which means depressingly it probably will make the news.
Does it really surprise anyone that you can link sociability to promiscuity? Especially in teenagers? Pretty much the only difference between this and the circumstances that were true when I went through high school is the tech angle. Which will, of course, result in much hand-wringing among Luddites.
Going by the.za TLD his homepage links to, he's either South African or uses a service provider located there. And SA is considered a developing nation by the HDI last I checked.
A distinction that's lost on many people is that "freedom of speech" in the US legal system applies to the government, not private entities. Put another way, North Korea is a bad point of comparison when talking about corporate policy.
Now, should the protection of freedom of speech apply to corporate policy? I would say yes. In my ideal world, basic human rights would be encoded into the law in such a way that they cannot be circumvented by private entities in any way. But the law in reality does not say that this is the case.
The problem would be if a hunter caught the rabbit and ate it. Then he/she would ingest both the rabbit and the radioactive materials, putting him/her at higher risk for certain diseases (most notably cancer). However, he/she would not be radioactive either.
I agree with your post, but wanted to add something.
Aside from the scenario you set up in the passage I quoted, there are a couple of other ways a contaminated rabbit could cause problems. To wit, the animal could die to some cause other than a human hunter and spread the contamination through other parts of the food chain, via scavengers and decomposition . Or the rabbit could get adopted or otherwise come into contact with human beings and cause health problems via contaminated droppings. Or, if the animal remained wild, its contaminated droppings could find their way into agricultural soil (this last one is a long shot).
The good news is, the total quantity of radioactive material is finite, and will become more diluted over time. And rabbits are not especially radiation resistant, meaning if the quantity of contaminants per rabbit is probably fairly low already (or else they'd have died at or near the site they were contaminated at).
Plus, any really nasty isotopes they've absorbed will also have a shorter half-life. So this isn't a long term problem, provided that whatever circumstances resulted in the rabbits getting contaminated in the first place have been rectified.
But it didn't feel like it belonged in the other list either. It wasn't good biology, it wasn't awful biology, it was mildly bad biology.
And it's the only example of biology coming up as a plot device in Firefly, and then only in the movie. Medicine comes up a couple of times with Simon and River, but that's actually handled a lot less badly than medicine normally is in sci-fi. So all Firefly has to show for itself is one mildly bad example of biology, used to explain inexplicable bad guys (who I thought were a lot scarier when we never saw them up close, but maybe that's just me).
The problem with allowing gravity control is that the same technology required for artificial gravity also gives a reactionless drive. If you can manipulate gravity, then you can trivially build a ship that can accelerate in any direction without any kind of obvious thrust.
Ehhhhhhhh, kinda.
Okay, backing up, if the artificial gravity generator behaves like if often does in soft sci-fi, then you're absolutely right.
But if you want to make a gravity generator that obeys the laws of motion, there is literally nothing stopping you, and it would be much more realistic than the alternative.
You make the attraction between generator and crew mutual. If the deck plating is pulling you down at a comfortable 1G of pull then it is also being pulled toward your feet at the same force. The balance of force is neutral.
This allows cabin gravity and inertial compensation, and for that matter some other cliches like tractor beams, without allowing reactionless drives. You could still build a gravity based reaction drive, which would probably resemble an ion drive in terms of thrust output, using generated gravity to expel reaction mass.
Note that for stuff like inertial compensation, you'd want the generators to been firmly moored to the ships structure.
Okay, where do they say the ships in B5 and Farscape are carbon based? In BSG the ships are perfectly mechanical aside from the pilot. In Farscape and B5 the ships are made of horribly alien materials and it's generally noted many times how absurdly alien their biology is.
Actually, I'll need to double check the B5 one, since I'm less sure than I was before googling it, but I do remember Farscape's Leviathans being stated/shown to be carbon based.
You are once again limiting your definition of life to things which are like life on Earth. A 100% mechanical spaceship with an AI and a repair facility that can make copies of itself is alive. Electricity transfer energy and metal is the building block.
Agreed.
And now that I've shocked you by agreeing with you, reread about three of my posts in this thread where I address that very issue.
"Living ships" that use AI, robotics and self-repairing materials are perfectly fine by me. Saberhagen Berserkers, which Cylons owe a lot of their inspiration to, are alive by this definition, and I would champion them as an excellent example of hard sci-fi. I don't have a problem with the type of living ship you bring up in this paragraph.
I have a problem with ships that are made of meat. Space whales, bio-ships, call em what you want. And no, making the ship partly mechanical doesn't excuse it from this.
Want to know what sort of biological components I will accept as starship parts? The life system. Make the biological elements part of air and water reclamation, or food synthesis, and I'll call it realistic. Make the pilot a brain-in-a-jar and I'll reserve judgment until I see what the writer used to justify it (which BSG did poorly). Those are where I see the use of organic parts as sensible.
We're talking about fucking science fiction series, every bloody ship breaks fifty laws of physics by just existing. Do you comprehend how large the heat sinks would need to be for even the most trivial of spaceships to not melt into slag inside of a single episode? The laws of physics the show operates under are explicitly different from our own or they have found ways to break them.
The need for heat sinks would be proportional to the heat generated, and thus variable depending on ship type and solar proximity. Technically, what you really want are radiators and circulating coolant. And you're quite correct that most series get this one badly wrong (showing a ship freezing instead of frying), but I'm mostly only bothered by this when the mistake becomes a plot point. Like a character who should know better talking about it being cold in space, or referring to the need to keep a ship heated (Firefly did this once, Star Trek several times).
Actually, this perfectly illustrates my point. I am fine with a ship involving many, many pieces of "black box" technology. I don't need to see how every damn piece of equipment operates, because that wouldn't make for good viewing.
Where I get into sci-fi curmudgeon mode is where the technobabble become a plot device and is either poorly explained, or contradict real life elemental science (like inventing new elements on the periodic table, or mangling the theory of evolution). In BSG, the Cylon biotech in their ships was a plot device, whereas the cooling systems were left alone, hence why I single out the former and overlook the later.
The BGS team really should have contacted you, as you apparently have knowledge of every single molecule that not only does exist, but also all molecules and compounds that could ever exist!
I realize I'm replying to sarcasm, but what the hell.
Tylium actually does have it's energy capacity and other properties given in the episode where they have to blow up a Cylon refinery. To wit:
1. It's much too energy dense to be any sort of chemical compound. We're talking an order of magnitude here. And yes, this is established science, not speculation on my part.
So from point 1 we can establish that Tylium is a nuclear fuel, like Uranium or Deuterium, though whether it fissions or fusions is not specified.
2. It's shown as being highly sensitive to ionizing radiation. A material that breaks down suddenly when nuked would break down gradually when exposed to background radiation. And no, this isn't a question of the fuel being contaminated, Baltar specifies that Tylium is rendered inert if you set off a nuke anywhere remotely near it. But that's only half the problem.
If it becomes inert when exposed to "nuclear radiation" (words taken from the episode), then how is it synthesized? Every element above hydrogen in the universe is produced via nuclear reactions, either in the form of stellar fusion or nuclear decay of heavier elements. Tylium cannot be an element and have the property of radiation sensitivity shown. Even if the nuke were somehow transmuting elements in quantity (which it cannot), if the Tylium were that sensitive, it could never have been formed in quantity in the first place.
So point 2 means it should be a chemical compound. There exist compounds that react to ionizing radiation by breaking down into their constituent elements.
Point 1 makes Tylium a nuclear fuel, and not a chemical one, based on energy density. Point 2 makes it a chemical fuel, not a nuclear one, based on its reaction to ionizing radiation. This cannot be reconciled without making it unobtainium. Ergo, the writers failed to do their research properly.
Per your comments about living ships, I've done that to death elsewhere in this thread, and won't bother repeating my points here. Suffice it to say, if you're like me and know biology, the whole "ship with self-repairing goo" and "ship with a fleshy brain at the helm" cliches get very old after a while.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you, someone else who gets it.
Crime is not about how hard it was for the perpetrator to commit it. Crime is about intent, or sometimes criminal negligence. "But the door was unlocked" is not, has never been, and should not be a legal defence.
Now, "intent" itself can sometimes be vague or fuzzy enough to leave room for doubt. You cannot be tried with trespassing on land that a reasonable person would not have known was off limits. And the balance of the law, the concept of innocence until guilt is proven, should favour the accused; if there is reasonable doubt, acquittal should be the outcome.
But that was not the case here. There was no doubt as to the accused's guilt, both in the crime itself and the attempted cover-up. Political angles aside, this would have been criminal no matter who the victim was, or what the perp's motive.
Depends on the battery, but yes, that's most often true.
I'd foresee using battery/cable operated suits for logistics and fuelled ones for combat, just because of the endurance issues with batteries.
Damn, I think slashdot ate my previous post.
You're comment on ethanol got me thinking.
I can see another advantage to ethanol, and that's field production. You could set up stills at a forward base for refuelling. Granted, you'd still need biological material to ferment, but that might be available locally. And the alcohol produced doesn't need to be palatable, it just needs to combust. Methanol would also be a possibility, and a fuel cell that could use either would open up a wider range of materials used in fermentation.
Now, I don't know if this makes sense from a cost perspective, but if it could be done, it would eliminate a major logistical burden that powered infantry would otherwise add to the supply chain.
I don't think anyone would seriously consider exosuited infantry necessary for anti-terrorism, for much the same reason tanks aren't needed.
However, I doubt we've seen the last of wars fought where both sides have access to technology more sophisticated than AKs, RPGs and IEDs. An exosuit makes far more sense if you assume the infantry wearing it are going to be up against superior numbers, or foes with air and armour support, or opposing forces with the equipment and training to pose a serious threat.
In point of fact, exploding fuel isn't exactly a huge risk.
This is one of those areas where Hollywood is to blame for the popular perception. Every time a car goes off a cliff, every time a tanker truck catches a stray bullet, every time hydrogen is even mentioned, what follows is an impressive pyrotechnics display.
Doesn't work that way in real life. Mythbusters, who never avoid a myth involving kaboomery, have tested most of the fuel explosion myths and found them wanting. Fuel (gasoline, propane, hydrogen, diesel, etc) can catch fire certainly, but this rarely involves the instant towering inferno seen in film and on TV.
As far as that goes, it's not like the military doesn't use plenty of fuelled combat vehicles already. They know how to make them not blow up every time somebody with an AK cuts loose. Self sealing tanks and armour plating in particular mitigate the risk.
So I wouldn't worry about it. And if fire or explosion is a concern, I'd suggest diesel fuel for powered suits, as it doesn't ignite easily, and pretty much can't explode on its own.
That was implied to be a fusion reactor. I was actually impressed in the second movie where they made oblique references to neutron embrittlement, which is much more sophisticated physics than comic book movies usually get. Mind you, the rest of the movie's physics were still awful, but I'll cut it some slack given the source material and the desire to be faithful to it.
Presuming it was a fusion reactor, you can pretty much forget about seeing them that small anything soon. Fusion power plants scale up better than they scale down, partly as a result of the square-cube law, and partly as a result of components being hard to miniaturize. We don't even have building sized fusion plants that can produce more energy than it takes to achieve and maintain the reaction in the first place. We'll probably have working fusion power in this century, assuming we keep at the R&D and don't blast ourselves back to the stone age in the meantime, but I doubt we'll have it miniaturized to Iron Man levels anytime in the next couple hundred years.
Either fuel cells or a portable generator might make more sense than a battery. Both have a much higher energy density per mass and energy density per volume, plus they are much easier to refuel than a battery is to recharge.
Technically, the fuel cells needn't be hydrogen powered, since you can make a fuel cell that runs on hydrocarbons (which are easier to store and transport). A generator adds more exhaust and moving parts, but is at least proven technology. Either could work.
And for military applications, you don't need to augment arm strength, you can focus on the legs and torso. After all, if the intent is to add plate armour for battlefield use, then carry capacity is what you're after, not super-strength. Now, augmented arms would still be desirable, if only because it would allow for heavier infantry weapons (which you'll need once the other side starts fielding powered exosuits), but for the first-gen version you can skip the arms and just use existing rifles.
Regardless of what the numbers are for the cut Steam takes, they're going to undercut Gamestop in the long haul. They don't have the attendant costs of a brick-and-mortar.
Really, Steam may not be perfect (I really wish more online stores were DRM free), but compared to Gamestop and company, they're practically saints. I know which side I'm rooting for.
And as a final thought: How many games actually need to have Steam if they're being sold as physical copies? Wouldn't it be preferable for the gamers if the game disc just installed single player mode without requiring the user has Steam, with the understanding that they can register their key/install Steam for multiplayer?
Well, I think the orbital solar approach is likely to become practical before floating cities do. Since TFA makes it clear this is more pie-in-the-sky futurism than actual practical planning, it may stand to reason the designers assume that we'll be using orbital solar regularly by the time these become practical (if ever).
Yeah, this comment is offtopic too, but WTH. (Oh, and I have no points today, and thus made none of the moderations in this discussion).
When I get mod points, I usually drop one or two on comments along the lines of "oh sure, mod me down because you disagree with me", or words to that effect. I do this irrespective of whether I was the person to mod down the original comment, whether I agree with the moderation, or whether I think the original comment has merit. I will occasionally mod the original comment up even as I moderate the complaint about the original comment's prior moderation down, contradictory as that may sound.
Why do I do this? Because bitching about being downmodded is noise instead of signal. It's that simple. Better to remove it from the thread by putting it below most thresholds.
I rarely otherwise downmod comments, unless they're really obviously noise, offtopic soapboxing, or part of a flamewar. Hell, I've even held off on downmodding posts that demonstrated massive ignorance on a subject, in favour of upmodding the people correcting said ignorance.
You might want to rethink that "isn't being used for anything" bit. A hell of a lot of photosynthesis goes on in the topmost layer of the world's oceans. Not to mention the hydrological cycle and the oceans role in thermo-regulation. We don't want to halt or significantly alter any of the above.
Now, floating cities will not interfere with those processes, for the same reason building cities on land didn't interfere with land based photosynthesis - the amount of space we need to build something large from our point of view is small when viewed from a global scale. A huge city is still a small blotch seen from orbit.
The Earth has some five hundred million square kilometres of surface. We don't need all of it to be occupied. "Wasted" space is not a problem.
I think the point is that this idea comes from Japan, where land is not cheap.
Technically, Tsunamis only rise to their maximum height as they get closer to land. Out at sea, they're mostly beneath the surface. It takes a decrease in depth to force them up into the walls of water we associate them with.
Bearing that in mind, and further considering that we can and do have ships at sea when Tsunamis happen, I assume the problem is manageable, and was probably considered for the Green Float design sometime prior to this point.
Slightly off topic, but did anyone else notice in the overhead pics that these things look fractal derived?
The article is from the AP. It did make the news.
Yeah, I coulda made that clearer. Since I made the sarcastic "news at 11" remark at the beginning, I thought it would be more obvious that I meant "make the major network news" at the end.
Seriously. "Promiscuity linked to sociability among teenagers, news at 11!"
The only thing different about this and the circumstances that were true when I went through high school is the tech angle. Predictably, this will appeal to the Luddite crowd, which means depressingly it probably will make the news.
Does it really surprise anyone that you can link sociability to promiscuity? Especially in teenagers? Pretty much the only difference between this and the circumstances that were true when I went through high school is the tech angle. Which will, of course, result in much hand-wringing among Luddites.
Damn, I need to start refreshing the page before I post, the post immediately above mine confirms what I thought.
Going by the .za TLD his homepage links to, he's either South African or uses a service provider located there. And SA is considered a developing nation by the HDI last I checked.
A distinction that's lost on many people is that "freedom of speech" in the US legal system applies to the government, not private entities. Put another way, North Korea is a bad point of comparison when talking about corporate policy.
Now, should the protection of freedom of speech apply to corporate policy? I would say yes. In my ideal world, basic human rights would be encoded into the law in such a way that they cannot be circumvented by private entities in any way. But the law in reality does not say that this is the case.
The problem would be if a hunter caught the rabbit and ate it. Then he/she would ingest both the rabbit and the radioactive materials, putting him/her at higher risk for certain diseases (most notably cancer). However, he/she would not be radioactive either.
I agree with your post, but wanted to add something.
Aside from the scenario you set up in the passage I quoted, there are a couple of other ways a contaminated rabbit could cause problems. To wit, the animal could die to some cause other than a human hunter and spread the contamination through other parts of the food chain, via scavengers and decomposition . Or the rabbit could get adopted or otherwise come into contact with human beings and cause health problems via contaminated droppings. Or, if the animal remained wild, its contaminated droppings could find their way into agricultural soil (this last one is a long shot).
The good news is, the total quantity of radioactive material is finite, and will become more diluted over time. And rabbits are not especially radiation resistant, meaning if the quantity of contaminants per rabbit is probably fairly low already (or else they'd have died at or near the site they were contaminated at).
Plus, any really nasty isotopes they've absorbed will also have a shorter half-life. So this isn't a long term problem, provided that whatever circumstances resulted in the rabbits getting contaminated in the first place have been rectified.
Yeah, I thought of that.
But it didn't feel like it belonged in the other list either. It wasn't good biology, it wasn't awful biology, it was mildly bad biology.
And it's the only example of biology coming up as a plot device in Firefly, and then only in the movie. Medicine comes up a couple of times with Simon and River, but that's actually handled a lot less badly than medicine normally is in sci-fi. So all Firefly has to show for itself is one mildly bad example of biology, used to explain inexplicable bad guys (who I thought were a lot scarier when we never saw them up close, but maybe that's just me).
I did RTFA. And that sounds very much like a man trying to ditch his critics to me.
The problem with allowing gravity control is that the same technology required for artificial gravity also gives a reactionless drive. If you can manipulate gravity, then you can trivially build a ship that can accelerate in any direction without any kind of obvious thrust.
Ehhhhhhhh, kinda.
Okay, backing up, if the artificial gravity generator behaves like if often does in soft sci-fi, then you're absolutely right.
But if you want to make a gravity generator that obeys the laws of motion, there is literally nothing stopping you, and it would be much more realistic than the alternative.
You make the attraction between generator and crew mutual. If the deck plating is pulling you down at a comfortable 1G of pull then it is also being pulled toward your feet at the same force. The balance of force is neutral.
This allows cabin gravity and inertial compensation, and for that matter some other cliches like tractor beams, without allowing reactionless drives. You could still build a gravity based reaction drive, which would probably resemble an ion drive in terms of thrust output, using generated gravity to expel reaction mass.
Note that for stuff like inertial compensation, you'd want the generators to been firmly moored to the ships structure.
Okay, where do they say the ships in B5 and Farscape are carbon based? In BSG the ships are perfectly mechanical aside from the pilot. In Farscape and B5 the ships are made of horribly alien materials and it's generally noted many times how absurdly alien their biology is.
Actually, I'll need to double check the B5 one, since I'm less sure than I was before googling it, but I do remember Farscape's Leviathans being stated/shown to be carbon based.
You are once again limiting your definition of life to things which are like life on Earth. A 100% mechanical spaceship with an AI and a repair facility that can make copies of itself is alive. Electricity transfer energy and metal is the building block.
Agreed.
And now that I've shocked you by agreeing with you, reread about three of my posts in this thread where I address that very issue.
"Living ships" that use AI, robotics and self-repairing materials are perfectly fine by me. Saberhagen Berserkers, which Cylons owe a lot of their inspiration to, are alive by this definition, and I would champion them as an excellent example of hard sci-fi. I don't have a problem with the type of living ship you bring up in this paragraph.
I have a problem with ships that are made of meat. Space whales, bio-ships, call em what you want. And no, making the ship partly mechanical doesn't excuse it from this.
Want to know what sort of biological components I will accept as starship parts? The life system. Make the biological elements part of air and water reclamation, or food synthesis, and I'll call it realistic. Make the pilot a brain-in-a-jar and I'll reserve judgment until I see what the writer used to justify it (which BSG did poorly). Those are where I see the use of organic parts as sensible.
We're talking about fucking science fiction series, every bloody ship breaks fifty laws of physics by just existing. Do you comprehend how large the heat sinks would need to be for even the most trivial of spaceships to not melt into slag inside of a single episode? The laws of physics the show operates under are explicitly different from our own or they have found ways to break them.
The need for heat sinks would be proportional to the heat generated, and thus variable depending on ship type and solar proximity. Technically, what you really want are radiators and circulating coolant. And you're quite correct that most series get this one badly wrong (showing a ship freezing instead of frying), but I'm mostly only bothered by this when the mistake becomes a plot point. Like a character who should know better talking about it being cold in space, or referring to the need to keep a ship heated (Firefly did this once, Star Trek several times).
Actually, this perfectly illustrates my point. I am fine with a ship involving many, many pieces of "black box" technology. I don't need to see how every damn piece of equipment operates, because that wouldn't make for good viewing.
Where I get into sci-fi curmudgeon mode is where the technobabble become a plot device and is either poorly explained, or contradict real life elemental science (like inventing new elements on the periodic table, or mangling the theory of evolution). In BSG, the Cylon biotech in their ships was a plot device, whereas the cooling systems were left alone, hence why I single out the former and overlook the later.
The BGS team really should have contacted you, as you apparently have knowledge of every single molecule that not only does exist, but also all molecules and compounds that could ever exist!
I realize I'm replying to sarcasm, but what the hell.
Tylium actually does have it's energy capacity and other properties given in the episode where they have to blow up a Cylon refinery. To wit:
1. It's much too energy dense to be any sort of chemical compound. We're talking an order of magnitude here. And yes, this is established science, not speculation on my part.
So from point 1 we can establish that Tylium is a nuclear fuel, like Uranium or Deuterium, though whether it fissions or fusions is not specified.
2. It's shown as being highly sensitive to ionizing radiation. A material that breaks down suddenly when nuked would break down gradually when exposed to background radiation. And no, this isn't a question of the fuel being contaminated, Baltar specifies that Tylium is rendered inert if you set off a nuke anywhere remotely near it. But that's only half the problem.
If it becomes inert when exposed to "nuclear radiation" (words taken from the episode), then how is it synthesized? Every element above hydrogen in the universe is produced via nuclear reactions, either in the form of stellar fusion or nuclear decay of heavier elements. Tylium cannot be an element and have the property of radiation sensitivity shown. Even if the nuke were somehow transmuting elements in quantity (which it cannot), if the Tylium were that sensitive, it could never have been formed in quantity in the first place.
So point 2 means it should be a chemical compound. There exist compounds that react to ionizing radiation by breaking down into their constituent elements.
Point 1 makes Tylium a nuclear fuel, and not a chemical one, based on energy density. Point 2 makes it a chemical fuel, not a nuclear one, based on its reaction to ionizing radiation. This cannot be reconciled without making it unobtainium. Ergo, the writers failed to do their research properly.
Per your comments about living ships, I've done that to death elsewhere in this thread, and won't bother repeating my points here. Suffice it to say, if you're like me and know biology, the whole "ship with self-repairing goo" and "ship with a fleshy brain at the helm" cliches get very old after a while.