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It was fun for a long time but towards the end it just started to drag

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Total Members Voted: 28

[WillowLuman]

[Why must I write about such things before going to bed? In actuality, though, I've already had the glass nightmare and an atomic war one, and those other ones were just written now, so no way I can have one about killing my friends or betrayal or something right?]

[wierd]

[At least you don't hold encyclopedic knowledge of just about everything that can cause the apocolypse. If eric even *suspected* how deep the rabbit hole went, weird would be in a very special room for the rest of his unnatural life, with a stupid, blissful smile on his face.]

[For instance.... the united states and the former soviet union created weapons grade anthrax by collecting harmless soil anthrax spores, and culturing them in human medical waste, mixed with pig offal, in heated culture tanks.  The human specific food sources used to culture the microbes put selective evolutionary pressures on the microbes to specialize toward that particular food source.  Using live tissue samples, both countries selected the most virulent strains of their creations, and then began refining them further to better withstand the drying and reconstitution process, until they had a library or weaponizable terror germs.  These microbes were mass produced, carefully dried into spores, and loaded into conventional air-burst shells. I fully understand each stage of the process, and might even be able to design a lab protocol and equipment to carry out that very task, given a suitable source sample, such as from a cow with hoof and mouth disease. Knowledge is power. But the power eric has to put geas on people absolutely terrifies weird in ways it wouldn't other people. Weird is terrified of what eric might make him do, if he ever found out.]

[Eric Blank]

[From what I've heard about you before, if I ever wanted to make atomic weapons or biological nightmares, I would have already made you to do it, just assuming that if I had questions about how best to kill something a nutter like you would know. There is absolutely no way I'm going to attempt to use biological warfare, because I'm terrified of all forms of plague, and atomic weapons are neither practical nor would I ever want to attempt it. Now, nuclear reactors I may be interested in. I know only a very little about how a nuclear reactor is constructed, and nothing about extracting enough uranium to make it practical. Nor do we have any use for electricity. Maybe besides powering enormous lasers...]

[Oliolli]

As if the previous dreams hadn't been odd enough, soon they had begun to include new limbs growing all around his body. It had been enough to wake Oliolli up. Hugo had disappeared, and in his place stood a tall man wearing a blue suit and carrying a briefcase.
"Good morning, Mr. Oliolli."
"It's morning?"
Oliolli looked in both directions down the hallway. Very little, if any light was visible. Still night.
"Not really. However, there is something--"
The man suddenly stopped speaking and looked to his left, down the empty hallway.
"I shall tell you later."
And with that, he started walking away quickly. As he disappeared around a corner, Oliolli noticed wierd wandering down the hall from the opposite direction.
"Out for a nighttime walk, then?"
"If you're looking for Hugo, he's probably in the hospital. If Eric, we can't help you. If something else, probably the same as with Eric."
"You know, I also feel like walking a bit. Mind if I join you?"

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

Corai, I was talking about the civil war idea, which I had to scrap due to what Eric had the dragon general do, but oh well.  I prefer a war against Phyrexia.


Hey wierd, how much worse off would we be if Eric got a hold of the forge-bot blueprints and my notes on planeswalkers sparks, planes, and mana?

[wierd]

Ztg:  depends on how well he's learned his lesson that responsibility sucks balls, and that powerful knowledge is powerful responsibility.

Weird treats eric like the bogeyman, because he doesn't know how deep in the rabbit hole he's fallen.  Eric (author) says that his character is not as innately evil as my character thinks he is. However, my character will continue treating him like Joseph Stalin with mind control powers and the ability to raise the dead, until a suitably convincing argument or scenario plays out to convince him otherwise.

[WillowLuman]

[From what I've heard about you before, if I ever wanted to make atomic weapons or biological nightmares, I would have already made you to do it, just assuming that if I had questions about how best to kill something a nutter like you would know. There is absolutely no way I'm going to attempt to use biological warfare, because I'm terrified of all forms of plague, and atomic weapons are neither practical nor would I ever want to attempt it. Now, nuclear reactors I may be interested in. I know only a very little about how a nuclear reactor is constructed, and nothing about extracting enough uranium to make it practical. Nor do we have any use for electricity. Maybe besides powering enormous lasers...]

Uses we would have for electricity:
Motorized mechanisms (For better operation of bridges, traps, etc.)
Heating and air conditioning.
Lights. Seriously, torches are a pain in the ass to maintain.
Power tools
Defibrilators
Electrolysis (we could get a lot of aluminum this way, instead of searching for incredibly rare native aluminum)

We would be considered gods among mortals for providing such a standard of living to our dwarves. Just the electric lights and climate control would vastly improve our lives.

[wierd]

Fun facts:

Anhydrous ammonia was the first ever refrigerant gas used in commercial refrigeration systems.
Aluminum is far more comon in earth's crust than iron.
Electric motors can be significantly more efficient than internal combustion, due to not being a carnot engine.

Long story short:

Electrical power would enable vastly more efficient energy transfer through the fortress, and far less invasively. (No need for hubs and bull belts.) It would save us a fortune on bee's wax for candles, or oil for lamps and torches.  It would enable reasonably easy heating of cold sections of the fortress, and cooling of hot ones. (Important for aboveground constructions.) It would allow us to produce such fantastic metals as bulk aluminum, and titanium. It would allow us to make neutral environment kilns for creating high quality industrial ceramics and glasses. It would allow us to operate freezers, greatly reducing food spoilage, and giving us access to such delights as popcicles and icecream in the summer. It enables many industrial tools for industrial metal fab, such as lathes, mills, brake presses, hydroblocks, and autohammers.

And... it allows us to make some pretty kick ass defensive systems.  Our enemies like to wear iron and steel armor..........what happens if we switch on burried high intensity magnets?

We have the theoretical ability to do some crazy shit in this world, by exploiting the broken second law of thermodynamics, which enables dwarven purpetual motion machines. We could have gluts and gluts of electrical energy to throw around, and that means we could do some serious shit with it.

For instance... do you know what a resonant klystron is?  If you don't know.... look it up! Its a seriously high gain microwave amplification device. (Its used for commercial radar!) A small crystal oscillator reference feed at one end, and instant cooked chickens at the other. And its directional! (I've seriously considered building one and installing it in my car to overload other vehicle's electronic ignition systems, but the risk of killing people with pacemakers has so far kept me civil.)

Co2 based pulse laser turrets with active cooling are another, but more expensive option.

Electricity is the shit.

[WillowLuman]

All we need is to use electrolysis and we will have aluminum out the wazoo. Laser weaponry and other technology that hasn't actually been developed yet (beyond a prototype that is) would obviously take quite some time for us to develop.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

Unless Wierd knows something that those people don't....

[wierd]

The problem with laser weaponry is 3 things:

1) laser energy is extremely inefficient to produce. Less than 1% of the energy input leaves as beam energy. Nearly all of it leaves as heat.  In our world where the second law holds the whole universe by the balls, this is a serious issue. Laser systems need to be large and bulky just to dissipate the produced heat.

2) production of the necessary energy to power a high energy device is nontrivial. A 500MW beam weapon requires gigawatts of electricity just to make the beam, and more energy to dissipate the heat.

3) in atmospheric conditions, there is a maximum beam energy you can release before you develop "bloom". "Bloom" is essentially the result of ionizing the air the beam is traveling over, and inciting it to become plasma. When that happens, it becomes opaque, and scatters the beam. This means your laser weapon suddenly falls off on effective power faster than a man with ED. To resolve that issue, laser weapon systems use "pulse" lasers, which pulse the photon energy in high intensity spikes, with a refraction period for the air to cool off again before the next spike. However, this comes at a cost, as the laser takes time to reach full intensity. This is called the avalanche period. Not all mediums are good choices for laser weapons as a consequence, and the effective beam conversion drops even lower than it already is.

This is why laser weaponry systems are not considered viable for warfare, except for very specific, specialist applications. No phasers on roast. Sorry.


A klystron, on the other hand, is something radically different.

It is more like what you get when you rub a wet finger on a fine crystal goblet. A light energy input resonates the goblet, and it rings loudly and profoundly, for as long as you keep rubbing the rim.

A klystron is essentally a long, metal tube that is hollow, and evacuated.
Inside this tube, an electron beam gets fired. Such as is found in old glass TV sets.
At the near end of the tube, a microwave input antenna broadcasts a reference microwave signal. This signal pushes on the electron beam ever so slightly, and causes it to wobble. The wobble of that beam resonates the tube perfectly in harmony with the reference signal, and the whole tube starts to emit microwaves of the same frequency. Those waves further perturb the beam inside, and eventually you have a veritable microwave "scream" coming out the far end. It is very efficient, and produces sufficient microwave emissions at the far end of a long drift tube to kill birds and cook hotdogs, or worse.

Kystrons are the heart inside things like the US navy's ship radar systems, and coastal radar monitoring networks. They are more than 60% efficient at converting electrical energy into highly focused microwave beams.

Given the very short distances involved, a tower mounted, high energy klystron would make very short work of an invading army. Very literally, it would be like popping them in the microwave on high. They would die in minutes, and feel the effects in seconds.

Metal suits of armor would weld together at the joints, and bodies would cook from the radio excitations, exactly as if they were placed inside a microwave oven.

The kystron is easier to build, easier to maintain, more efficient, invisible, and devistatingly deadly if built powerfully enough. It is also quickly on/offable with just a simple switch.

It also makes a nice radar detection signal source.

[Reudh]

The US have a prototype of that on a much lower scale; the 'active discouragement system' or something like that... It fires microwaves that make people in the ray feel uncomfortably warm, and hence try to flee.

[wierd]

A considerable research budget was used to determine exactly what the proper energy and frequency were needed for a *NON*lethal version.

Standing on the radar tower when they turn it on *will* kill you.

The proposal is for a death ray you sweep across the invading army like a flash light, and watch as they drop their weapons and scream in agony as their fingers, toes, and first few inches of skin gets instantly cooked.

Sustained exposure to the beam is garanteed lethal.

I think we should build one.

[WillowLuman]

But klystron weaponry is not developed yet either. It's likely that there is some major design flaw that has to be overcome in order to weaponize klystrons on that scale, or else they would have been already. Any technology that hasn't been developed effectively yet in the real world would probably take us a long time to develop ourselves. We aren't exactly leading experts in any fields; long years of !!SCIENCE!! would be required for us to build any directed energy weapons on our own.

[wierd]

The issue is the short effective range with the klystron, not the technical difficulty.

Microwave energy falls off in intensity in an inverse cube rule. Compare to inverse square for gravity.

This means that it falls off exponentially with distance.  This was the problem with all early radio sources. We didn't invent better transmitters exactly... we invented better ears.

Given that at most, the klystron has to cover a few hundred yards of terrirtory, the fact that it has limited range is beneficial.  It means our radio emissions aren't going to cook our pals in the microcline tower down the road, for instance, being over a mile away.

This is for the goblins with the battering ram at the door, and who have pitched a siege on our front lawn.

We don't normally deploy weapons like this, for the same reasons we don't use fortress warfare. It is impractical with modern adversaries against modern tactics and modern ordinance.

We would be employing it against dark age tactics, and dark age ordinance.  Out klystron shotgun would have a greater range than a crosbow would, with greater effective contact. It can be remote operated, meaning goblin sharpshooters have no targets to hit through the fortification slits.

It would be devistating against most of our worlds adversaries, until they upgraded to long range artillery, like cannon and mortars.

Should they successfully acquire our deadly projectile technologies of that type, fortress warfare would become obsolete for the same reasons it was abandoned in our world, in favor of rapid troop deployment, mobile artillery, and aerial bombardment.

For a fixed position fortification, against poorly armed, and poorly armored (by our standards) adversary, the tower mounted klystron would be like shining a magnifying glass on an anthill. They would smoke, and burn, and die, and not have a single shred of protection from it.


As for the resiquite technologies...a dark-age craftsman could construct one with proper direction. Its just physics.

The electron beam can be provided using a high voltage source (such as a transformer and a regulator), and a simple crooke's tube design.

relevent wikipedia page on a crooke's tube

The initial microwave source is more touchy, requiring a crystal oscillator that operates at the apropriate gigahertz freq. Not impossible, but touchy. We only need one though, and there are other ways to get a suitable reference signal, such as with a magnetron.

wikipedia article.

Calculating the size and shape of the cavity required is a bit on the voodoo side of things, but easily understood and implemented with some education. Essentially, its the same physics involved in making a sounding board for a string instrument. The cavity has to be a derivative of the wavelength of the frequency desired. Magnetrons are a fixed frequency microwave source, of fixed output power. The klystron, if powered by a quality crystal signal source, is fully configurable.  Our klystron would be fixed freq, due to the magnetron input source, but would be radically more powerful on the output, and coherent.

It might take a few months of experimentation, but I am confident we could build both devices.