Conworld random thread

[Raphael]

Although i do think you could call up architechts and city planners to make your vision just to make a city no one lives in.

A lot of people already live in cities where they aren't happy about various aspects of the local city planning. A lot of people aren't happy about square- or rectangle-based layouts, either, but still live in places that use them.

[foxcatdog]

Frankly i could see a hexagonal grid system working but not a triangular one. People would feel to claustrophobised in their houses.

[jal]

I once designed, for a conculture, a city that was kinda hexagonally oriented, but with towers in the middle of each hexagon, and a circular road around it, with walls and gates in between.

[Emily]

i do like hexagons a lot too. i was watching star wars when i had the idea, i think it would work best in a setting like that, where the flavor is more important than the nitty gritty reasoning behind it

[malloc]

Hexagonal streets seem like an interesting idea. If nothing else, I suspect they would make cars and other powered vehicles less practical and thus encourage walking.

@Torco: Thanks for the input. Part of the issue, I will admit, is that wood just doesn't evoke strength and stability to me, at least not compared with stone or concrete or something. Plenty of stone buildings have stood the test of time, but it seems hard to picture a wooden building with the same longevity. The sheer flammability of wood seems hard to ignore as well.

[Travis B.]

Hexagonal streets seem like an interesting idea. If nothing else, I suspect they would make cars and other powered vehicles less practical and thus encourage walking.

@Torco: Thanks for the input. Part of the issue, I will admit, is that wood just doesn't evoke strength and stability to me, at least not compared with stone or concrete or something. Plenty of stone buildings have stood the test of time, but it seems hard to picture a wooden building with the same longevity. The sheer flammability of wood seems hard to ignore as well.

One thing to note, though, is that modern concrete does not actually last that long (but Roman concrete is another story, with Roman buildings standing the test of time far better than modern concrete constructions).

[Man in Space]

I stumbled upon this on Wikipedia the other day and now I know what I want the tactical spacesuits in Twin Aster to look like. (Though maybe without so many viewports…)

[Torco]

Travis is right. modern concrete is pretty much shit, but it *could* be made to last forever: as I understand it, it's just a matter of it not being that profitable to do so. This is not necessarily an irrationality of capitalism, I'm also pretty chill with it lasting the a couple of lifetimes... let the far future people build their own damned houses.

Flammability also has solutions: you can, with modern technology, make wood so hard to burn it's ridiculous. But yes, wood isn't that long-lasting material to build works for the ages with.

Of course, a lot of the reason why is that you *can* build thin, light and relatively fragile structures with wood: and so people do, because all building material is relatively expensive: unless you intend to bake your own bricks from your own soil (and even then, you gotta pay for the fuel) you're gonna be paying through the nose to build anything. concrete, on the other hand, does not lend itself to frail, lightweight construction: oddly enough, the even superior material to cement, steel, does! (in Chile, for example, we have a lot of metalcón, which is lightweight galvanized steel modifiable structural members you stick together with bolts). and those light, shabby, barely-stable-enough-to-live-inside structures, well, they're built! If one *wanted* to build a massive, thick-walled, thick-beamed, overengineered behemoth of a building out of hardwood, maybe with a thick coat of mineral oil every decade or so, I bet it could last a millenium.

I guess the ultimate material in a nonseismic area would be... glass? A solid, thick, massive dome of glass in a nonseismic country could last... I suppose essentially forever?

[Moose-tache]

As everyone has hinted at already, the most durable building is the building people are interested in maintaining. A building made of wood shavings and lit candles can last forever if people are interested in maintaining it. Meanwhile most of that long-lasting Roman concrete is gone because somebody would rather have a gelato stand.

So if you want a buildig to last forever, build it out of whatever-the-fuck, and then use the rest of your construction budget on bribes to get it registered as a national historic landmark.

[Moose-tache]

We've all heard the old chestnut that "tin and copper ores don't occur in the same place, hence the need for long distance trade." I've always wondered why that is, with a sneeking suspicion that it doesn't make a lot of sense. Well, recently I went down a metallurgical rabbit hole, so now you can all benefit from my obstinance.

There are a few different types of copper ore. You may have heard of malachite, which is a carbonate form of copper created by solutions trickling down onto shallow copper deposits. What are those copper deposits? Mostly sulfides. Nearly all the major ores other than malachite are sulfides, such as pyrite, chalcopyrite, etc. This is what most of the copper ore was on the island of Cyprus, the biggest source of copper during the bronze age. Under certain conditions, sulfides don't mix well with other kinds of magma, separating out and creating layers. These layers are sometimes rich in copper sulfides, which are easy to find if you know what to look for.

At this point, you might be thinking "Is there a tin-rich sulfide that would separate out this way?" Yes there is. It's called stannite, and it is formed under very similar conditions to copper-rich sulfides. Stannite and pyrite are often found in the same area. But there's a problem. Tin is about 35 times less abundant than copper. We only need a little of it, but random molecules of stannite scattered around a sulfide deposit do not a commercially viable tin lode make. To make tin mining viable, we need some mechanism of concentrating it, which stannite doesn't have.

There is a tin ore that fits our need. It's called cassiterite. It's also not super common, but it accumulates in river beds and alluvial deposits. So in an area with diffuse bits of cassiterite, you can drill into the streams and lakes and possibly hit a commercially viable source of tin. But cassiterite is not a sulfide. It's not formed alongside minerals like pyrite or stannite. Nearly all the cassiterite in Eurasia is associated with granite from the Variscan orogeny of the late Palaeozoic. The copper deposits of Cyprus, by contrast, are the result of a seafloor spreading event in the Cretaceous.

So when people say "tin doesn't appear in the same places as copper," they're wrong. Tin, in its usual wimpy quantities, can be found near copper. It's just that the only tin ore that concentrates itself sufficiently well is found in very geologically different contexts than most of the copper ore deposits available to near eastern civilizations.

The consequence of this for conworlding is that someone who lives in a place where Palaeozoic and Mesozoic orogeny abut one another, like Britain or Spain, would have no such problem, as copper ores and viable tin ores can be found close together. If the bronze age had kicked off in Winchester, Lyon, or Seville, short-distance trade routes could easily connect massive sources of both metals.

[bradrn]

We've all heard the old chestnut that "tin and copper ores don't occur in the same place, hence the need for long distance trade."

I hadn’t! Thanks for enlightening me.

[keenir]

very cool info; many thanks for showing and explaining how it would work and what it would require.

(also, i hope it wasn't a hungry rabbit)

[Raphael]

We've all heard the old chestnut that "tin and copper ores don't occur in the same place, hence the need for long distance trade."

I hadn’t! Thanks for enlightening me.

Same!

[Raphael]

OK....

Granting the general principle that fictional psychic abilities are generally not "plausible" by the standards of the real world - how much, or how little, sense does the following scenario make to you?

SCENE: A starship somewhere in space. The CAPTAIN introduces a NEW ARRIVAL - let's call him TOMMY - to the higher-ranking members of the crew. TOMMY is either a time traveler, or a visitor from a fairly different culture or subculture; at any rate, he's unfamiliar with many things that are regular parts of everyday life for the crew of the starship.

CAPTAIN: And here is Katja, our telepath, and this is Maria, our telepathy expert.
TOMMY: Hello! So - your telepath and your telepathy expert are two different people? Do I have to understand that?
KATJA: Look, all the details of how telepathy works and how to make the most of it are really complicated, and just because I've got telepathic abilities that few other people have, it doesn't mean that I know all about that stuff, ok? Besides, I'm more interested in collecting rare old sound files, anyway.
MARIA: It's the same basic concept as when you hire a physiotherapist to work with an athlete.

[WeepingElf]

This makes perfect sense to me. There are musicians and musocologists; there are athletes and anatomists, etc. So why shouldn't telepaths and telepathy experts be different people?

[jal]

I think Katja is pretty darn rude...


JAL

[keenir]

CAPTAIN: And here is Katja, our telepath, and this is Maria, our telepathy expert.
TOMMY: Hello! So - your telepath and your telepathy expert are two different people? Do I have to understand that?

what do you mean? you don't have to understand it if you don't want to.

KATJA: Look, all the details of how telepathy works and how to make the most of it are really complicated, and just because I've got telepathic abilities that few other people have, it doesn't mean that I know all about that stuff, ok? Besides, I'm more interested in collecting rare old sound files, anyway.
MARIA: It's the same basic concept as when you hire a physiotherapist to work with an athlete.

*nods* I'd add to what everyone else has said, that while its entirely likely a telepath and a telepathy expert can be different people, I suspect that most of the experts about telepathy will themselves be telepaths -- that would make it more likely to fully understand/grasp the subtleties of some aspects of telesciences.


i like this.

[Torco]

I'm not sure I buy it outright... or, rather, it seems suprising! Like... in general, coaches are ex-practitioners, because there's a lot that books just can't teach. *but* maybe she's not a coach, maybe she's more of a traffic controller? like, she directs her, more like a conductor of an orchestra: the conductor is one of the examples of non-practitioner managers, but that's because he's doing something very different from the musicians: he's not playing an instrument, he's playing the entire orchestra. Maybe Maria doesn't coach her like an athlete, but rather, supports her in, yeah, "how to make the most of it", huh? Right! so telepathy is a complicated thing: Katya isn't just exerting her will onto things, she doesn't feel like she has a lot of her ego invested in this role, it's more of thing she just can do, and the complicated thing is to play whatever 4D chess telepaths need to play in order for it to have useful military applications, kind of like hackers, and Katya's just the keyboard Maria plies her trade at.

So I like it, it's very... show don't tell about your magic system, very evocative. or, telepathy system? oh, let's be honest, psionics is just cooler magic.

[foxcatdog]

Immaterial is in fact an appropriate name for a psychic realm which underlies physical reality

[Moose-tache]

If telepathic abilities are rare and randomly dispersed through the population, and they are crucial to the operation of the ship, we would expect a huge network of support personnel. Look at how many people a modern military employs to support a 19 year old with a rifle. At the very least, there would be a "department" of non-telepaths working to ensure the health and efficiency of the telepath.

The larger question is, what effect would this have on the culture of the starship and its society? This is, basically, a society in which genetic superiority is real beyond the wildest dreams of any Nazi. Would they be treated as an aggressively exploited underclass? Mamluks who have taken over the apparatus of state? The least likely scenario, to me, is the one in which they are just ordinary technicians.