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Old 10-07-2016, 06:11 PM   #61
robkelk
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

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Originally Posted by TGLS View Post
...
Magic Smoke
Works, except there is no such thing as a 2012 echo because Homeline diverged in 1997, and a double of Homeline would get confusing.
...
Divergence Point
1995; Parachronic technology is not invented.

(quoting from http://www.fenspace.net/index.php5?title=Gernsback-2 )
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Old 10-07-2016, 10:33 PM   #62
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

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But it's not like cave or ocean bottom animals are brightly colored. I imagine lots of dirty browns and greys as they would all still need melanin or equivalent pigments for solar protection.
Troglobites lose pigment in part because they don't need solar protection. Pigment does more than just sight related things. Here's a silly example: it's cold at the north pole, so animals should be as dark as possible to absorb as much sunlight as possible to warm up, so you have black polar bears.
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Originally Posted by Flyndaran View Post
Most predators attack from behind
How do the blind predators know what side is behind?

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Originally Posted by robkelk View Post
Divergence Point
1995; Parachronic technology is not invented.
A divergence point hardly brings "echo" to mind. Even if as an echo of OTL history, add in everything that happened in the past 20ish years, Homeliners wouldn't be thinking "Weird, this timeline is just like home, but these guys have been using magic since Newton!" it would be more like "The Mideast is in flames, security is way up, and the US invaded two countries. When did this timeline diverge?"
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Old 10-07-2016, 10:43 PM   #63
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

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Originally Posted by TGLS View Post
Troglobites lose pigment in part because they don't need solar protection. Pigment does more than just sight related things. Here's a silly example: it's cold at the north pole, so animals should be as dark as possible to absorb as much sunlight as possible to warm up, so you have black polar bears.

How do the blind predators know what side is behind?
From the direction the prey is walking.
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Old 10-08-2016, 12:26 AM   #64
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

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Originally Posted by TGLS View Post
Troglobites lose pigment in part because they don't need solar protection. Pigment does more than just sight related things. Here's a silly example: it's cold at the north pole, so animals should be as dark as possible to absorb as much sunlight as possible to warm up, so you have black polar bears.
...
I didn't mean the lack of pigment. I meant the uniformity of appearance as why they wouldn't have unnecessary pigments like pink or bright blue.

And your example fits my words of muted browns and greys. They wouldn't have perfect camouflage, but they also wouldn't stand out like like clowns in a forest.
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Old 10-08-2016, 12:28 AM   #65
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

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From the direction the prey is walking.
Blind does not mean dumb or senseless. If even I can often tell which direction someone is facing by sound, then I'm darn sure highly evolved blind predators could.
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Old 10-08-2016, 08:03 AM   #66
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

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it's cold at the north pole, so animals should be as dark as possible to absorb as much sunlight as possible to warm up, so you have black polar bears.
And that is why polar bears are black in real life. Their skin is black and their fur is clear. They're like natural greenhouses. They look white, but they're really black!
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Old 10-08-2016, 12:11 PM   #67
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

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A divergence point hardly brings "echo" to mind. Even if as an echo of OTL history, add in everything that happened in the past 20ish years, Homeliners wouldn't be thinking "Weird, this timeline is just like home, but these guys have been using magic since Newton!" it would be more like "The Mideast is in flames, security is way up, and the US invaded two countries. When did this timeline diverge?"
Fair enough. I was more using the term for shorthand. What I really meant was that it was a duplicate of OTL in a given time.
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Old 10-08-2016, 07:58 PM   #68
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And that is why polar bears are black in real life. Their skin is black and their fur is clear. They're like natural greenhouses. They look white, but they're really black!
On visible and infrared they are hard to spot, on UV they show up well because the fur acts as a lightpipe to UV to get the extra bit of energy from it.
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Old 10-14-2016, 12:26 PM   #69
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

Manamechanic:

The current astronomical date is 5340 BCE. The surface of Earth is different; in this case, pangaeaic, with the world-ocean dotted with islands. Earth's moon is slightly larger, and it, too, is different, with geometric-seeming scars covering its face. The worldline has normal mana.

Plants and bacteria are the only "life," but animals of a sort do exist: robotic living things that consume a variety of energy sources. This includes a sapient, hominoid robot. Even more bewildering, the "species" possesses Magery.

All of the animal-robots on the planet use a kind of fuel-cell-array as a primary energy source. They can intake most hydrocarbons and use a number of chemical processes to produce electricity, with CO2 and water as output. They do not suffer hunger the way that living things do; they are either fully functional, or below operating voltage and therefore dead.

They do not have FP, but they do have ER, which represents long-term energy reserves. I'll figure out some rules based on starvation, eventually.

The robots also consume mineral "nutrients" such as catalysts and metals, and they use some rugged plastics in their casings as well. A poorly-understood refinery system allows the robots to internally produce replacement components for themselves. "Carnivorous" behavior provides highly refined resources, making it a key method for growth. Replacing a damaged module is as natural to them as living things find scratching an itch, but nonetheless it does not happen automatically. In GURPS terms, they have Unhealing, but they have a ready supply of replacement parts and high innate Repair(Manamechinoid) skill, as well as the perk Accessory:Self-repair tools.

They reproduce by producing excess modules and assembling a small new robot with the parts -- this usually done with at least two robots (the robots do not have sexes). The computer modules are among the last ones produced, as they are very difficult to manufacture. The collaborating robots then provide an initial supply of energy, and the child robot boots up. Unlike in living things, reproduction is normally highly accurate, but an individual accumulates inheritable mutation as it ages, meaning that evolution here is surprisingly Lamarkian. An adult robot cannot be "restarted" if it runs out of power, although sometimes they are scavenged for parts.

The brains of the robots seem to be optical computers, and the consist of only a few modules; the most common number of modules is four, from tiny insect-sized robots to the humanoids themselves. Unlike other modules, the number does not change as the robot ages. If there is a portion of the robot anatomy that allows them to use mana, it's integrated into the brains. Functionally, the brains seem to share a networked, node-based design with living brains, but beyond that they are, if anything, even more mysterious than living brains. They are not outwardly coded like a general-purpose computer, although on a very, very low level they are essentially binary.

As one might imagine, these beings are not totally explicable under scientific rules. They rely on mana to function normally, and without it, they have several issues:
- The food catalyzer is too inefficient to provide net energy (they need artificial supplies of carbon and hydrogen, or external power).
- They cannot internally produce new modules at all.
- Specific creatures might find that their abilities do not work, or work less well. In particular, a kind of crablike robot with an integrated flamethrower is only able to produce a much smaller flame in no-mana environments.

The hominoids have humanlike intelligence. They are able to directly access some level of their computational capacity, allowing them to calculate like a general-purpose computer if need be, but they have emotions, heuristics, and quirks. They are the only beings on the planet with leveled magery, but pretty much everything has Magery 0, representing some sense of magic. They have average 10IQ, 14ST, 9DX, 12HT and immunity to disease. Their Magery uses their ER, which can be dangerous, as that reserve of power also keeps the robot "alive." Physically, the adults are between six and eight feet tall, with the children being assembled at around three or four feet. In a full robe, they can be mistaken for tall humans, but normally they have rough, matte surfaces, usually covered in plant matter or soil as a camouflage. Their faces are similar to a human's, though they lack noses (all robots on the planet are anosmic, although they have a taste for copper).

The sapient robots live in something like a TL0+3 society. Even for a 0+3, though, it's a strange path indeed. Magic is used frequently, and that helps support the idea of robots existing in primitive conditions. Outside of the settlements, the world is primal and hostile. While the robots do not have sexes, pair-bonding is important to them, and couples raise children much like human families. They mature over a period of 5-20 years (depending on mineral supplies), but generally aren't considered adults until they're 40 years old. They do die from old age, in a sense; their brain modules cannot be replaced as can their other modules, and so when one of those fails, the whole robot generally "dies." They usually see their 120th birthday, but fortunate ones can easily live to 160 or more. Their funeral rites call for storing and revering the brain-modules of the deceased.

----

Hypothetically, if you were to find an interesting individual, it might be possible to replace their power sources with a high-energy alternative; that would allow them to function in a no-mana worldline long-term. Other difficulties are left as an exercise for the reader.

Last edited by PTTG; 10-14-2016 at 12:51 PM.
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Old 10-21-2016, 12:11 AM   #70
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

All Warp worlds feature a device that allows "local" (not crosstime) teleportation. It is not known if all devices work in all Warp worlds, but it is known that they don't work on homeline.

Generally, these gateways consume electricity or energy in proportion to mass and distance. I'm picking a random number now, but it's about 100 KWHs per metric ton per light-second in theory, with potentially very high inefficiency rates.

Warp-1:

A close parallel, currently 1964. A commercial research laboratory in Kansas developed a teleporter portal only a few months ago. Homeline doesn't know the details of the device and is concerned it might be a threat to the secret. The problem is, local USA officials love the device and see commercializing it as the fastest way to develop the technology. PCs have to play g-men well enough to bluff the real g-men and quietly kill the project -- or at least prove it isn't a threat.

Warp-2:

Actual name "歪曲," literally meaning "distortion." An alternate that diverged at some unknown point in the past. Around the 1600s, China had established North American colonies and was the premiere naval force in the pacific. Late in 1890, a Chinese inventor discovered a simple electric means to produce a portal linking two places. The technology only further anchored the rising ascendancy of China, with frequent service from the most far-flung parts of the mainland to the imperial city and then on to the "Beautiful Land" to the east.

The explorers (via a conveyor leased to the PRC) arrived in 1991, the centennial celebration of the end of North American war, and coincidentally, the 50-year anniversary of the opening of the first lunar colony. Global culture was overwhelmingly Chinese -- even mainland China was more "Chinese" in that soviet-inspired cultural adoptions were never in force.

That was ten years ago. Computer networking exploded in growth over that time, and that includes the use of computerized multi-portals. Though war is rare (except in parts of Europe), the bureaucratic conflict between regions proceeds at a fever pitch, and illicit access to multi-portals exasperates things. A diplomat or spy might visit ten cities on four continents and two planets in a single day.
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