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Doom Lobster

Joined: Mon Mar 22, 2004 10:41 pm
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I would like to point out that a brown dwarf a) has no illumination and b) only a bit more gravity than jupiter.

So you might want to ammend that to a Red Dwarf, not a Brown one.

Also, I advise you to look at "Destiny's Road" it's kinda similar to what you're talking about. sci-fi. No war or galactic empires. Though it really doesn't deal with Relativity to the point that yours does. FTL isn't a big part, I don't even know if it's dealt with. But it is Sci-fi.

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Sat Oct 02, 2004 11:28 pm
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Chibi-Czar
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Cam S. wrote:
I would like to point out that a brown dwarf a) has no illumination and b) only a bit more gravity than jupiter.

So you might want to ammend that to a Red Dwarf, not a Brown one.

Also, I advise you to look at "Destiny's Road" it's kinda similar to what you're talking about. sci-fi. No war or galactic empires. Though it really doesn't deal with Relativity to the point that yours does. FTL isn't a big part, I don't even know if it's dealt with. But it is Sci-fi.


A) A brown dwarf does have illumination and most of that is outside the visible spectrum. It just has little illumination so your planet has to be reasonably close to the star or it will be cold on the planet.

B) A brown dwarf has about the mass of our sun compacted into an area the size of Jupiter. Due to the inverse square rule this means a brown dwarf actually has more intense gravity than our sun. Go ahead, do the math.

C) Of course there would be no galactic war or empire if it tried to be hard scifi as it requires difficult things of a culture that make it entirely too alien to our own. I however wanted to explore that aspect of it so here I am.

D) I chose a brown dwarf carefully as i needed a decent longevity to the star, plus the system needed to have large quantities of specific elements that are in abundance in brown dwarf systems. I also needed the planet to be close to the star. I had a whole range of stars to choose from. If I wanted to go for the most pleasant and habitable I would have chosen an orange giant and been done with it. But that would not have fit my criteria.

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"Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step to true panic."
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A file that big?
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But now it is gone.
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Sat Oct 02, 2004 11:40 pm
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Chibi-Czar
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Close but no bananas... (MMMMmmm Bananas.)

A brown dwarf is a 'not quite' star. It is not quite big enough mass wise to produce nuclear fusion... but is still too large to be considered a planet.

It's mass is usually several jupiters, but always below one solar mass. They do not shine on their own power (Not for long anyway), but do however, produce quite a bit of heat and the pressure in its core is strong enough to cause some decent internal heating and in turn, convection. It is not however "the mass of our sun compacted into an area the size of Jupiter" ... that is RUBBISH.

http://www.bahnhof.se/~davidgr/browndwf/bd_def.html
hhttp://chandra.harvard.edu/xray_source ... rf_fg.html
http://astron.berkeley.edu/~basri/bdwarfs/

Would you like more links? I hope astonomy isn't something you're studying...

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Sun Oct 03, 2004 12:46 am
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Chibi-Czar
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ATC's Second Link wrote:
When brown dwarfs are very young, they generate some energy from the fusion of heavy hydrogen, or deuterium, into helium nuclei, but this supply is used up in a few tens of millions of years.

This is a young system. Like I wanted it. It allows the planet they're on to be ready for life to take hold but have no native life beyond the prokaryotic stage. The star is still firing, the planets are still very geologically active, and everything is very proto. Again, there is a reason for this, I chose the system with care.

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"Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step to true panic."
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A file that big?
It might be very useful.
But now it is gone.
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Sun Oct 03, 2004 1:23 am
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Chibi-Czar
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I like the story so far. It is an interesting change from the standard. Somehow I think deaths are inevitable as a cast of 50 is going to be a little hard to manage effectively. That and what's exploration without death and danger. And damn these kids have been set up to root like rabbits. The lemon/lime potential is virtually limitless.

On FTL travel. Relativity is a bitch, but one that can be worked around. But I can understand your wish to keep things within current limitations where we are forced to respect relativity.

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Sun Oct 03, 2004 10:46 pm
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Chibi-Czar
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Julzz wrote:
I like the story so far. It is an interesting change from the standard. Somehow I think deaths are inevitable as a cast of 50 is going to be a little hard to manage effectively. That and what's exploration without death and danger. And damn these kids have been set up to root like rabbits. The lemon/lime potential is virtually limitless.

There are going to be deaths because they are living in a very hostile enviroment.

Yes, they were set up to breed. That's because they have to go from a population of fifty to a population of five hundred in under fourty years or else they're chances of survival will be slightly higher than impossible.

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"Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step to true panic."
--Freefall

A file that big?
It might be very useful.
But now it is gone.
-- David J. Liszewski


Mon Oct 04, 2004 11:22 pm
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Post 10/27/69
I woke up this morning to the joy of a hangover. I have got to find a better way to self medicate.

I took a quick shower that morning. I didn't use any warm water so I didn't expend any of my hot water rations for the day. The icy water helped wake me up anyway.

I groggily made my way to the study. I ran into Samantha along the way and she started walking with me.

?Hangover?? she asked me.

I nodded in response.

?Drink this,? she said, handing me a bottle of something. I opened the top and sniffed it cautiously. It didn't smell too pleasant.

?It's herbal tea. It'll help with your headache.?

I trusted Samantha. She was great with plants and growing things. Plus she had put her tongue in my mouth last night. Not that it has anything to do with trusting her, I just really liked it.

I downed the tea in two gulps.

?How do you feel?? Samantha asked me.

?Like my tongue is growing hair,? I said, making a sour face.

Without any warning, Samantha pushed me up against the wall. With us being twelve she was about as big as me. She pressed against me and kissed me deeply.

The kiss didn't last long. As Samantha let me go she screwed her face up in a grimace.

?You're right,? she said, ?It does taste bad.?

I was struck speechless. That's not to say things weren't coming out my mouth, it just wasn't speech. I believe it was something along the line of, ?mgrulgurle-feht.?

Samantha walked away without another word. This seems to be becoming a habit. Not that I mind.


This afternoon there was a seismic event. At seventeen fourty-seven an earthquake shook the complex. The epicenter was about seven kilometers from here. It's actually not uncommon. This planet is still relatively young compared to Earth. It is far more geologically active.

I was in the study at the time, more maps had to be drawn. Although these ?nodquakes? are common, they can still be dangerous. We all follow the standard safety drill. We're all rather blas? about the whole thing but in the back of your mind you're always worrying that a seal will break or something load-bearing will give and someone will die.

The quake had damaged something in the manufacturing bay. We're trying to build up a surplus in our production so we can expand. We can't afford to lose in production so nine of us had to do damage control.

A local load-bearing beam had given way during the quake. The wall it had supported crumbled under the weight of the machinery attached to it. We set about removing the rubble from the area, making sure to label and categorize everything for later analysis. During the clearing we found that the beam had a flaw in it similar to the one on the North wall that we had to fix last month. This was troubling as it meant we would have to do soundings of the entire structure to make sure we all didn't die because of another flaw. We'd also have to track down the particular drone or drones that did this construction and analyze them to see why they missed these flaws; we'd also have to make sure anything else they worked on was sound.

Once we got all the rubble cleared out, which took three hours with all of us and our mechanical hordes to clear, we began the actual repairs. It took another two hours just to get the temporary supports into place so we could bring in a replacement beam.

I suppose I should describe the basic construction of the complex. The complex is made primarily of Silicon-based composites and ceramics. That's a fancy way of saying glass and concrete. Not to say it isn't very high tech concrete and glass, it's very strong and all. The materials needed are usually readily available. The exterior walls are six trapezoids in a regular hexagon shape sloping upwards. The roof is a geodesic dome made of hexagonal composite panels that merge at the bottom with the main walls. The center of the complex is the colony lander. It used it's main engines to burn itself over six hundred meters into the planet. It was originally just over seven hundred meters high so it comes up to near the top of the dome. The lander isn't kept pressurized or oxygenated and is mostly for storage and emergency escape to orbit. Internally beams run in regular triangles and trapezoids providing internal support for the structure, though most of the load bearing is done by the outer walls, which is why the flaw we found last month was so dangerous.

After getting the replacement beam in place, we checked the surrounding structure for flaws. We didn't find any so we started in on the wall. We started with the basic sections of the wall that were prefabbed in another section of the manufacturing bay. Although a good portion of the work could be prefabbed, some actual construction had to be done on site. After Ananda finished with the power systems, we placed the molds and poured the inner wall. We used a quick-set composite polymer to keep build time down. We finished with the main wall in only four hours. Not a bad time considering we put in two tons of materials.

By time we had started actually attaching the scaffolding for the equipment, it was already approaching the start of our sleep cycle. There was a tacit agreement among the repair crew to continue working through the night if we had to. We were all aware that keeping ourselves at peak production was vital to our survival.

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"Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step to true panic."
--Freefall

A file that big?
It might be very useful.
But now it is gone.
-- David J. Liszewski


Tue Oct 05, 2004 10:40 pm
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Chibi-Czar
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I just realized I've been writing the dates backwards. It's supposed to be '96 as this is taking place in 2296. That's an interesting Freudian slip on my part. And not that much time has past for the colonist. Relativity means that their journey took 160+ years

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"Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step to true panic."
--Freefall

A file that big?
It might be very useful.
But now it is gone.
-- David J. Liszewski


Mon Oct 11, 2004 3:00 pm
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This is SUCH a good story, Silent. I hope you post more soon! ^_^

Lady Senie

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Sun Oct 17, 2004 8:06 am
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