Maybe even having them cook a meal for their instructor, in armor? That would arguably be harder, even with instructions. Definitely if the kitchen utensils are sized for unarmored hands.
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Remember that line in Starship Troopers about being able to catch an egg while suited…
Which is even more impressive given the atrociously primitive negative feedback control mechanism RAH was using!
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I remember first reading it as a young impressionable kid and going “Wow that’s really neat, I wonder why no one has implemented it yet?”
Older me can only laugh at how much of a PITA that would have been.
I once read a story that had a super-powered woman teaching her child control via an exercise she called “soap and steel”: squeeze a steel ingot with one hand until it turns into Play-Doh and starts oozing out from between your fingers, while not popping the soap bubble you’re holding in the other hand.
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- The widespread use of ravens for communication in the early days of the Empire has led not only to minor cultural marks such as the secure communications facility at Ravenstone, but also to the now-standard use of raven iconography (often, indeed, moe corvomorphism) in communications systems.
(There is literally no living citizen-shareholder who would not instantly recognize Metaconnectix’s Karasu-chan¹ with its distinctive croak of “A message has arrived!”)
- Cultural translation rule in effect.
…okay, I am not looking at artists for a Karasu/Hugun/Munin artwork…
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- Inspired by other thread, it may be worth mentioning that a thing that will get a lot of Imperial action (or action-containing) movies a high rating from the MPAA etal. is that audiences there know how guns work, or at least have a sufficient grasp of physics to call bullshit as appropriate.
Namely, when someone shoots you with, say, an APSC or APPT falconet (12mm) round - or, hell, APEX - the result is not a muffled chuff and a nice clean red-rimmed hole, it’s a supersonic crack and an industrial accident at the chunky salsa factory.
tl;dr You don’t have to go all the way to kaeth war movies (universally rated PTSD) to get “gory as fuck,” because that’s the reality being faithfully represented on film.
On one hand true; on the other hand there are some cases where we already have abundance but still have scarcity because it’s not allocated fairly enough.
(And IIRC a few cases where we do simply choose to make more of the thing but the existing allocation strategy is so extremely unfair that there’s still active scarcity going on.)
I imagine those situations aren’t exactly going to be common in the Empire (admittedly partly because their typical level of abundance is, for the most part, a few orders of magnitude above ours… but mostly because of, ya know, the whole korasmóníë thing that the Empire doesn’t do), but in a more imperfect setting (…such as Earth) I wouldn’t call it exactly 100% true. 98%, maybe.
- While both the field dress and mess dress uniforms of the Imperial Navy are worn in the service colors of midnight blue and silver, an exception is made for Admiralty Intelligence, whose jackets are patterned according to the strictures of Measure 36 dazzle camouflage (selected, ironically, from the patterns in use by the wet navy during the Third Oceanic Dominance as the most aesthetically pleasing of the disruptive camouflage patterns).
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Imperial at a Quentin Tarantino film: “Finally, a movie with exit wounds!”
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Today, I see this poll:
Should people be punished more or less for impulsive “crimes of passion”, compared to if the same harm had resulted from a deliberate plan long in the making?
With the result:
Almost as many say to punish impulsive the same, as say to punish them less. Almost none say to punish them more.
Well, under Imperial law and culture, the results would be reversed, and crimes of passion will absolutely be punished more harshly, on the grounds that flagrant lack of self-control makes you an unpredictable goddamn menace to anyone in the vicinity.
- Car vending machines.
That is all.
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I hope you don’t have to lift an annoying flap to try and get your car out of the dispense bay
- When you buy electricity on Earth, you sign a contract that does not specify voltage, available amperage, frequency, availability, or other rather crucial parameters of the product you are purchasing. Does that seem right to you?
It doesn’t to them.
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Actually, how does your average Imperial receive power from their local utility corp? Orichalcum cable? Maser? Are these all options on the Powers-R-Us form?
The voltage is specified in other contracts (specifically the ones the power generators sign to hook their stuff up to the grid) and building codes. Non-standard voltages, amperages, and multiple phases can be contracted for, they’re usually covered as “shop power” for 240v 3phase and “heavy shop” for 480v power. I’m not sure about the total amperages available but they’re relatively standardized in building codes.
Home power is set up as 240v 1 phase, but the delivery allows you to easily split that into a pair of 120v supplies for lights and low power appliances. You have the normal power leg, the ground leg, and the “wild” leg. Voltage between Normal and ground or Wild and ground is 120v. But voltage between Normal and Wild is 240v to feed your high power appliances, like oven and heater/AC.
And because the power supplied is covered in other contracts, it’s not mentioned in your regular power contract.
Places like hospitals or cold storage places that require extra reliability in their power can specify such, and IIRC pay extra for the priority in getting power and gas supplied.
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Based on Options | The Associated Worlds, fusion seems to be the base-load-ish power source (but, er, sub-second response times are not typically a trait of base-load power plants (but I could probably postfix that with a “yet”)), and there seems to be a grid like there is hereabouts, and the talk about losses from more complex routings seems to indicate that they aren’t regularly using superconducting cables. I think the mention of a rectenna farm would indicate that masers aren’t great at many-to-many power transmission, so it’s quite possible that they get their power via ordinarily conductive cables.
Of course, the willingness for folks thereabouts to negotiate on their contracts with anyone would indicate that yes, you probably could ring up Orbital Light and Power and ask to get a maser feed direct to your house (but of course, they’d also say something along the lines of “sure, that’ll be Es. 2 per month in service and equipment fees on top of the power, minimum contract duration of 2 years”).
Orichalcium cabling is probably an internal business decision for the grid operator - while the customer pays for power delivered to their hookup, the grid operator pays for power delivered at the power plant’s hookup, and your business niche is making sure the power actually flows from the latter to the former, and any resistivity losses would impact your bottom line both in terms of actual cost as well as externality payments to mitigate global warming. And, while I think the cost has gone down since historic times there, it’s still a synthetic element, so it’s probably still expensive.
Actually, I’m not sure if we’ve ever gotten an authoritative answer on just how expensive orichalcium is thereabouts.
Large customers get the same orichalcium superconducting-fiber cables that make up most of the grid; smaller customers, like most domestic ones, get to make do with carbofil cables (which while not a match for superconducting fiber is still about a thousand times better than copper cable, conductivity-wise; more importantly, it’s substantially cheaper, because it’s almost all carbon). Right at the terminal end, a lot of power is transferred by electrodynamic induction, because who has time for dangling cables, am I right?
Long-distance power transmission can be microwave or straight up laser photons. The non-collimated microwave system is efficient, convenient, and doesn’t kill everyone if the beam oopsies, but requires an annoyingly large rectenna; it’s mostly used with SPS-to-ground links. Laser power-beams (including maser frequencies) are more common in sat/ship-to-hab/ship transmission in space, or, on the ground, long-range transmission through evacuated transcontinental power bores.
Yeah, I know the Earth system (just rewired most of my house).
But, you see, the thing is that those contracts and codes? They’re promises made to other people, which I’m quite sure are very valuable to those other people, but your promises to them aren’t worth a bean to me.
And if you really can deliver 120±5V at 250A peak, 60Hz±2%, and 99.95% uptime, then you shouldn’t mind putting that on paper in a legally binding way that covers potential compensation in the event of non-performance, now should you?
Yeah, they really aren’t. You’ll note in that incident the LGDE is dumping power into resistor banks to cover the time between the transformer failure and the fusion plant spinning down its output.
Bear in mind that the cable loss is only part of it. You get losses that aren’t amenable to “simply swap in a superconductor” every time you pass through a substation or switching center, so even if you only consider the part of the routing that is traveling on pure superconducting fiber, you’ve still got an incentive to minimize hop count.
Anyway, planetside base load is mostly fusion, both big dedicated plants and a lot of cogeneration (office buildings, factories, even large homes). That’s supplemented by a lot of auxiliary technologies, such as geothermal, OTECs, hydroelectric pumped-storage, and solar (most of which is distributed/cogen), which also conveniently come up and go down a lot faster than the big reactors if need be, making them very handy for balancing the grid.
Space solar mostly aims power beams at habs and ships that need the power, rather than supplementing planetary supply, and when it does the latter it’s always using low-density microwaves. Power companies prefer not to have transmission systems that double as death rays pointed at planets, or at least their tort insurers do.
Which is to say: you can get it, but you’re gonna pay one heck of a risk premium for the privilege if you insist on a full-bore power beam. You may also have some issues to discuss with people who have aerospace rights above you.
Inexpensive enough that you can use it when you need to in consumer devices (say, powercells); expensive enough that you don’t use it when you don’t need to.
I’m pretty sure that the folks you signed a contract with to supply power to the grid would take severe exception to someone who wasn’t meeting the standards the grid implies. (While I’m sure the 120V is - a lot more than 5v, the 60hz is a lot closer than ±2% (±1.2Hz? No, more like ±0.1Hz)
What was that line from when Bright Shadow(?) revoked an entire nation’s Security Certs? “No one gets to break our word”?
So, about like Gold today, then? For a rough order of magnitude comparison?