Recent content by striogi

It also seems to me that just microwaves would take too long to heat it up enough to kill it without exploding it. If the creature is charging, you'll only have a couple seconds to cook it to death. oo, I kind of like this... Right - to respond 1. Aliens can be fairly advanced, so conceivable...

Hm. okay, so it sounds like the idea of a heat ray just isn't what I'm looking for, unless I add a lot of hand wavy woo-woo stuff. So let's look at a way to kill a human-sized creature down to the cellular level in a second or less. If I have a strong enough, focused burst of radiation, would...

Hm. interesting, but my thought is how to destroy a human-sized creature in an extremely fast manner so that its extremely infectious flesh can no longer infect others. Just setting the thing on fire isn't going to be enough - think the Blob whose size and shape is about that of an adult human...

I'm putting together an idea about a weapon (insert hand-wavy science here) that fires extremely high temperatures a very short range (100 feet or so). A Heat Shotgun, if you will. The idea is that this weapon, with a single blast, could turn the majority of a human sized creature to literal...

Fair enough. I never read the short story. May have to go dig it up. The full novel is pretty good. I read it when it came out, and then again a few years ago, just to be sure I still liked it. The novel also has a preface that touches on how "human" the aliens are. I doubt the short story does...

IMO, one of the things that Asimov did well was write allegorical stories - probably why he's considered one of the best sci fi authors of all time. Nightfall, while it is a story of a society dealing first with Chicken Little and then later with the Sky Falling, it's a story about how we...

...I think that's what I said/implied.

Sure - if you're listening for your own civilization's transmissions. What if you're listening for another civilization's transmissions? My thought is that you might hear a transmission, figure its direction (would you know it's exact point of origin?I suppose so because of how empty space is...

Yes, that. But from what Dave above said, it sounds like leaking em band communications would be difficult to find at the 1000 light year mark - no? SETI was going to be a question I was going to bring up a little later - if signal strength and degradation causes the signal to die so...

Interesting. Sooo... what I'm hearing is it's exceedingly unlikely to hear (by way of comparison) WWII transmissions 1000LY from earth. Yeah, but I should have realized. Thinking about it further, it makes enough sense that I feel a bit like a moron. :sorry: Sound: Well, yes. Haha, you funny...

Try this: http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/articles/snowflake-method/

As I understand it, any axial tilt compared to the orbital plane is possible. The moons can also be on different orbital planes than the equator of the planet or the orbital plane of the planet. This should be considered. You should make a diagram to figure how how much of the planet gets 100%...

Not sure if this is the right section or if this might be better off over at Cosmology... or...? So this is actually around a story concept I had, and while I would like to get the science as right as possible, I expect a certain amount of hand-waving to get past some of the difficult and...