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#21 | |
Hero of Democracy
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: far from the ocean
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Misjudging the human reaction to tree of life is a different matter, and a little harder to explain. Certainly, Pthsspok was working with a very alien mind, and that inflicted a heavy familiarity penalty. It would have been nice to study human society first, but I suspect his purpose got the better of him there. Protectors are depicted with very high intelligence but some very crippling self-control issues.
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#22 | |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Saskatoon, SK, Canada
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I'm reasonably certain that the Kzinti must have had some other form of STL propulsion besides the gravity polarizer. Niven never exactly made it super-clear how it worked, but its description in Protector implied that it was only useful when it was going "downhill" - i.e., towards a gravity source. I'd assume it works by somehow negating the effect of all other sources of gravity on your ship besides the one taking you in the direction you wanted to go. That works fine if you're in the outer solar system and want to get inwards fast, but for getting back out, it's a lot worse - you'd have to turn off the local star's gravity and rely on other sources to pull you back out, but that would be slow in almost all circumstances - the pull of gravity from Alpha Centauri, say, when you're at Sol, is so slight that even if you discount all other sources, it would still probably take years, if not decades or centuries, to get to anywhere you'd want to engage your hyperdrive.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure that Kzinti must have had other propulsion devices besides the gravity polarizer on their ships. Those could have been reactionless as well, of course. But I think that the Kzinti don't necessarily need to not have reaction drives at all in order to learn the Kzinti Lesson. I think simple ignorance and hidebound-ness is probably sufficient - they had never used reaction drives that way, and so never thought of their potential. And their survey of human space wouldn't have tipped them off, because humans didn't use reaction drives that way either, at that point, and didn't think of them as weapons. It's just, humans were much better at adapting and innovating once we needed to study war once more. Quote:
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#23 | ||
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Saskatoon, SK, Canada
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"They had not come here. The natives... would have offered little resistance to colonists, judging by this one sample." And then, later on, after finding Brennan in the roots, Pthsspok thinks: "With a kind of bewildered fury, Pthsspok thought: 'How can I get anything done if they keep changing the rules?'". I think it's pretty clear from those quoted bits that Pthsspok had concluded that Brennan was not a breeder, and was surprised when he ate the root and began the transformation. Quote:
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#24 |
Join Date: Dec 2017
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Not quite sure I buy your logic here. The plot of the story just wouldn't work if Pthssspok "made those rolls". There's a quote out there: "Once again, Probability proves itself willing to sneak into a back alley and service Drama as would a copper-piece harlot." ...
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#25 | |
Computer Scientist
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Dallas, Texas
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IIRC, "The Survivor" in Man-Kzin Wars IV reveals that the Kzinti got their tech by serving and then overthrowing the Jotoks; Kdatlynos were a later conquest. What the Kzinti use is also referred to as an induced gravity drive and a gravity planer. |
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#26 | ||||||
Join Date: Nov 2004
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#27 | ||
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Saskatoon, SK, Canada
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Also, I'd argue that if we're following typical dramatic laws, it's actually more consistent for Pthssspok's failures to be in skills they don't know, rather than random dice failures on skills they do have a very good level in. In general, dramatic stories tend to over-emphasize the competence of characters who are supposed to be highly talented/skilled/etc. Take action heroes, for example. Can you remember a time when someone like that flubbed a task they were supposed to be good at? Dropped a gun in the process of fast drawing it, for instance? Or tripped while they were running down a street pursuing a foe? Similarly, "smart" or "genius"-type characters almost never seem to make gross errors of fact or have brain farts where they just can't remember some little obvious thing. For competent people, failures like this are usually supposed to tell us something about them - if a smart character makes an obvious mistake, it's to show us that this is an area of weakness for them in some way. And I feel, in Protector's case, that the best reason for the failure to identify Brennan as descended from Pak is that Pthssspok lacks biological training. Or, of course, we could assume that Larry Niven is, and always has been, rather garbage at biological stuff. That's honestly the most likely explanation, to my mind. :-) But that pretty much kills any possibility of using anything in his writing to do a conversion, so I think we can discount it for now. |
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#28 | |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Supposedly, theyu took a piece of asteroidal rock, 2 miles long and a mile in diameter, IIRC, hollowed out a few chambers to hold themselves and a few thousand Pak breeders, mounted a fission-powered ion drive on it, and came to Sol. They supposedly (IIRC) got the thing up to about .16c. OK, at .16c you get from Pak to Earth in about 180,000 years, give or take, it's not close enough to c for relativistic effects to matter much. But I have my doubts about getting to .16c by ion drive, and then there's the issue of energy. Assuming a density of about 3 tons per cubic meter, a rock 2 miles long and 1 mile in diameter masses pretty close to 20 billion tons. If we're generous and assume it was half-hollow, that cuts us down to 10 billion tons. So, ten billion tons as .16c is a kinetic energy of 1.7* 10^17 kilowatt-hours, actually more because I didn't bother to allow for the minor relativistic effects. So, 1.7 * 10^17 kW-h is the equivalent of millions of tons of U-235. Plus they have to decelerate again when they arrive. Plus I'm assuming perfect efficiency and neglecting what relativistic effects there are at .16c. Maybe it's theoretically possible, but I don't think it would work.
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#29 | |||
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Canada
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#30 |
Join Date: Jan 2014
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How in the world did the kzinti have a drive that could push 200 G's and yet several hundred years later humans were still putzing around on 20-30 G's at best?
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aliens, conversion |
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