Catalog of the Weird Parallels

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by PTTG

1: Populated by a near-human species of giants (About 10' tall). The world (inevitably named Brobdingnag has a history unlike OTL. No magical or superscience phenomenon is needed to keep the giants alive and healthy on Homeline, and the TL-2 civilization of the planet has no global organization to speak of, making recruitment headache-free.
...

What would be the reason for a TL8-9 civilization to recruit large but hard sconce humanoids? They'd be maybe ST18 and pretty slow moving.

[Flyndaran]

Bipedal dinosaurs weren't always slow. They were certainly faster than humans, so hypothetical species could be at least as quick as us.
10' humanoids would be superhumanly strong and tough. I don't think everyone here considers St 18 to be superhuman.

What they require in food is more realistically adjustable than one may think. A 225 lb female lazy zoo tigress eats a whopping 5k Calories, while only an exceedingly active man of that mass needs that much food. So assuming vaguely human proportions, they may need only around three times as much food as a normal person.

[PTTG]

It doesn't matter how high-tech you are, a bodyguard that big is a status symbol, not to mention a credible threat to even an armed attacker.

[Flyndaran]

Not realistically a major threat past TL 4 or so. Bullets kill cattle about as easily as humans. If the setting people accept him as non-supernatural of course.
Though they may go all out trying to kill him regardless of consequences if they did believe he was supernatural.
Not that realistically is at all the only way to play.

[AlexanderHowl]

It is also not a practical bodyguard because the majority of buildings do not have 14' ceilings (meaning that the 10' human would feel quite constrained).

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Bipedal dinosaurs weren't always slow. They were certainly faster than humans, so hypothetical species could be at least as quick as us.
.

Bipedal dinosaurs have radically different anatomy than humanoids. Medium-sized ones among them were still faster than the really big ones.

ST 18 is what you get from Bio-tech with a Sapiens compatible giant race (more like 9' than 10). Genus Homo was specified. The farther you put them from Sapiens the higher the possible ST is but even TL12 genetic engineering wouldn't get you above a 30 ST.

So they aren't really very strong compared to tractors or fork-lifts and on a per pound basis they might not be any stronger than regular humans. Just harder to pack into conveyors

If I struggled for a killer app I might find one at "Gladiator" but competing with TL9 video games even that might not be all that attractive.

[fchase8]

I don't think Homeline would be interested in recruiting giants - in addition to not being that useful or special, it has too much of a whiff of slavery.

Centrum wouldn't have that issue, but its society is less open to 'others' like giants.

The Cabal, however, might like giant servants. A Cabal magician could have giant bodyguards & laborers. And these giants would be relatively 'cheap', in that 'recruiting' them doesn't require a lot of magic (they're not magical giants from a magic land).

[PTTG]

Originally Posted by fchase8

I don't think Homeline would be interested in recruiting giants - in addition to not being that useful or special, it has too much of a whiff of slavery.

Centrum wouldn't have that issue, but its society is less open to 'others' like giants.

The Cabal, however, might like giant servants. A Cabal magician could have giant bodyguards & laborers. And these giants would be relatively 'cheap', in that 'recruiting' them doesn't require a lot of magic (they're not magical giants from a magic land).

Homeline, at least, isn't monolithic. A crime lord would be happy to have a couple of serious toughs.

[David Johnston2]

Marvin-1 is a parallel where inexplicably, nothing can explode. There's a set speed to how quickly gases can expand. As a result there are no guns (not even air guns), no bombs, no internal combustion engines. Rockets exist but aren't very efficient due to the ceiling on thrust, so no satellites either. They do however have steam and electric engines. And nerve gas.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Marvin-1 is a parallel where inexplicably, nothing can explode. There's a set speed to how quickly gases can expand. As a result there are no guns (not even air guns), no bombs, no internal combustion engines. Rockets exist but aren't very efficient due to the ceiling on thrust, so no satellites either.

So basically the speed of sound in gases is lower. And there is a maximum temperature it is possible for a gas to reach.

Other reasonable consequences include everything sounds different, vacuums are easier to achieve (though since their collapse won't produce thunder or whip-cracks either, they aren't particularly damaging), stuff that depends on the behavior of air at sharp edges may not work - I'm not confident they have flutes, or (air) propellers or wings, and I don't think they can get temperatures that will allow them to melt glass or smelt iron.

And of course something happens to the stars. My first thought was they supernova with the shutdown of heat transfer, but that's an explosion, so I think they all collapse into black holes instead.

This sort of thing is the problem with altering physics faced by all alternate worlds that do it. It's all strongly interconnected. Apply some sweeping change to rule out explosions or electric currents and you either need intelligent divine intervention that limits the effect to just the particular things you wanted to disable, or the universe becomes uninhabitable. It can work fine in a game - Infinite Worlds does it a lot and just ignores the side effects - but you need everybody to agree not to think about or try to exploit them, so it's usually better not to say anything about the mechanism - i.e. you stop at "nothing can explode" and don't continue with reasoning about gas expansion. You *want* gases to behave according to ordinary physics whenever there isn't an (obvious, artificial) explosion involved.