Annoying Game Questions You Want Answered

[OgreBattle]

They mention magnetic fields won't stop a neutral particle beam... so can electricity stop or redirect it? Like if there's a thunder storm would the neutral particle beam weapon be affected by that

Nope. No electric charge means no effect by electric fields.
Only thing you can do is put something in the way and hope it deflects/absorbs enough of the ray.

Thanks.

That site says Neutral charges are good for space vacuums 'cause a Neutral charge in atmosphere will get degraded rapidly by air molecules. Is that plausible sounding? Or would a weapons grade neutral beam still blast through a km of air?

Charged particle beams can be called Ion beams right?


On types of radiation...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/r ... iation.php

There are two kinds of radiation: [1] rays and [2] particles.


Science geeks call rays "Electromagnetic Radiation" (a fancy word for exotic light), but you just have to know that the deadly ones are X-Rays and Gamma Rays. Combat them with a radiation shield made out of dense stuff, such as lead or tungsten. Otherwise the far wall will have a splendid x-ray picture of your skeleton writhing in its death agonies. This is why your dentist puts a lead vest on you for teeth x-rays.

Particle radiation is protons ("proton storm"), neutrons ("neutron radiation"), electrons ("beta particles"), alpha particles ("alpha particles") and heavy primary nuclei ("HZE ions"). Combat them with a radiation shield made out of low density stuff: water, liquid hydrogen, lithium hydride, paraffin, hydrogenated polyethylene composite, or something else stuffed with hydrogen. Otherwise read the radiation chart for the hideous details of your fate, which will convince you that euthanasia might not be such a bad idea after all.

-Protons come from planetary radiation belts ("Van Allen belt"), solar flares ("proton storms"), and cosmic rays. And particle beam weapons.
-Neutrons come from fission & fusion reactors, fission & fusion rockets engines, nuclear & thermonuclear bombs, some radioactive elements and by cosmic rays slamming into the hull. That is, mostly man-made.
-Electrons come from planetary radiation belts and inside auroral borealis and australis. Also some radioactive elements and particle beam weapons.
-Alpha particles come from cosmic rays and solar flares. And some radioative elements.
-HZE particles come from cosmic rays
-X-rays come from high speed electrons crashing into metal. You'll find x-rays screaming out of fission explosions and where electron particle beam weapons rake the metal spacecraft hull. That is, mostly man-made.
-Gamma-rays come from tortured atomic nuclei. You'll also find gamma-rays screaming out of fission explosions and from nuclear fission reactors. That is, mostly man-made.

Put yer radiations shields so it hits the anti-particle shields first then the anti-ray shield second! Otherwise the particles hitting the anti-ray shield will act like a huge dentist x-ray machine and generate a lethal storm of x-rays past the anti-ray shield. The shield will kill the crew!

Really dense stuff like lead blocking ionizing radiation makes sense, like going to the dentist. But I'm not clear on why the particles need less dense or hydrogen rich materials

[Username17]

Neutron radiation in particular is deadly because the moment it strikes something it turns it into a high energy isotope. If it hits a heavy metal (or even a Carbon atom), that isotope is likely to be itself radioactive. Hydrogen, on the other hand, has a fair amount of "space" to turn into Deuterium without being radioactive and deadly.

The preferred shielding for neutron radiation is actually just concrete. It's solid, and the water embedded in the matric gives it enough Hydrogen content to soak a lot of Neutrons. Which is while nuclear power plants are entombed in concrete.

-Username17

[Prak]

Ok, so here's a weird one-

How would you make mechanics for "self-care" and coping with trauma in a game? I want healing from past trauma to be a major theme in the Demon game I'm working on, so I want a mechanic for lowering torment that isn't "Go do selfless good deeds!" or "Spend 10 XP to lower your permanent Torment by 1!" or, my first thought, "make a Wits+Expression roll to introspect."

I mean, honestly, it should be something like "roll Wits+Expression" at the end, but for something like that, I don't want the same mechanic as regaining Rage at will in Werewolf ("I go meditate" "Ok, roll Enigmas, you get Successes#Rage")

[Orca]

Maybe get each player to come up with a different method, so one person's rolling Manipulation + Leadership to run their online support group, another's using Wits + Expression to write poetry, etc., then come up with some minor obstacle to be overcome when they've accumulated enough successes to reduce their permanent torment.

[Prak]

I like that, and it sorta jives with how I want to have players define the way their torment manifests (ie, is their character depressed, anxious, do they have actual PTSD, etc)

Edit: hell, it could maybe even be an extended roll? But then I also have to look up how ST handles extended rolls, and I predict needing to rewrite those...

Which brings up another question- I'm doing away with variant Difficulty. I'm using hits and threshold. When I'm translating something on the fly, what is a good rule of thumb for converting ST difficulty to a threshold? I basically figure anything with "Standard Difficulty 6" has a threshold of, like, 1. Maybe a bit higher to have room for, say, point blank shots, which... my memory from how it worked when I played Werewolf says was diff 4. Is "Diff 7=Threshold 2, Diff 8=Threshold 3, etc" a good rule of thumb, or should it be more like +2 threshold per difficulty raise of 1?

[angelfromanotherpin]

It depends how many dice you're calibrating for. At 6d, 1-for-1 is a pretty good translation.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I'm running into a stumbling block while writing a series of adventures for my game. Said adventure is based roughly from Lovecraft's Dream Cycle so I'm going for a kind of dreamlike, almost faerie-tale like atmosphere.

Long story short, I need some sort of creepy passphrase to give to a dangerous forest entity, who will then laugh and show them the secret ways through the forest to the player's goal. I have trouble being creepy on purpose.

[Username17]

I'm running into a stumbling block while writing a series of adventures for my game. Said adventure is based roughly from Lovecraft's Dream Cycle so I'm going for a kind of dreamlike, almost faerie-tale like atmosphere.

Long story short, I need some sort of creepy passphrase to give to a dangerous forest entity, who will then laugh and show them the secret ways through the forest to the player's goal. I have trouble being creepy on purpose.

Phrases are mostly creepy if they are a double entendre where one of the meanings is aggressive. So "Cut out a man's liver" is not a creepy catchphrase because it doesn't mean anything more violent when mulled over and thought about from multiple perspectives. But "Assistance to stop aging" is something that is creepy, because if you think about it long enough it might not mean something helpful in the traditional sense.

So if you have a dream theme going, you could label something like "The end of the nightmare. The end of all nightmares." And if you think about it for a bit, you might have a nagging doubt that that might just mean death. And that's creepy in a way that "The blood soaked pile of bodies" really isn't.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

Is the Redneck Tree creepy enough?

[OgreBattle]

So geckos, some spiders, and climbing things use electrostatic something something to allow for climbing on smooth vertical surfaces:

https://www.livescience.com/48845-gecko ... walls.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_electricity

The gecko becomes positively charged, the surface is negatively charged

Would this be disrupted if the gecko or surface was charged by another source of electricity?

I'm not clear on why something becomes + or - charged, like rubbing a balloon on your head. Why do electrons go from one's head to the balloon and not the other way around?

[angelfromanotherpin]

Long story short, I need some sort of creepy passphrase to give to a dangerous forest entity, who will then laugh and show them the secret ways through the forest to the player's goal.

My gold standards for creepy passphrases are from The Crying of Lot 49. 'We await silent Trystero's empire' is somewhat spooky on its own, but that's mulitiplied by being almost a pledge of support for the thing-that-you-don't-know-what-it-is, which is exactly the sort of thing that makes players nervous to have to say. 'Don't ever antagonize The Horn' is almost a one-sentence horror story.

Both get extra points for being backronyms, for WASTE and DEATH respectively.

[deaddmwalking]

I'm not clear on why something becomes + or - charged, like rubbing a balloon on your head. Why do electrons go from one's head to the balloon and not the other way around?

The Earth always has a slight negative charge and the atmosphere a slightly positive charge.

Electrons, like electricity, flow through conductive materials well, but they don't flow through non-conductive materials very well. This is why a balloon HOLDS the electrons that you transfer to it when you rub it on your hair. Keep in mind that your hair stands up away from each other because each strand of hair is positively charged and positive charges repel each other.

There is something called 'electron affinity' which essentially means that some atoms are misers and hold on to their electrons very tightly, and other materials will give an electron away any time some atom pretending to be homeless holds out a cup asking for spare electrons.

The measurement of how easily a substance obtains a positive or negative charge is called the triboelectric series. The further apart two substances are the more readily you can move electrons from one to the other. In my analogy, the 'generous' atoms will keep donating back and forth to each other, so a lot of rubbing only gets you a small net transfer to the original beggar. Human hands are even more generous than human hair, which is why you tend to get shocked when touching a door handle in dry weather.

While electrostatic charges may play a role, geckos also have ridges in your toes that work a little like suction cups on virtually smooth surfaces and can find imperfections on 'rough' surfaces (at a near microscopic level). I'm skeptical of the paper from 2014 that claims that electrostatic cling is the primary method of a gecko climbing, but I don't think further research has been done to determine how significant each factor is.

Full disclosure: I am not a herpetologist or actively researching static electricity. I have been a Gecko in a parade and a Christmas party, but I didn't climb any walls.

[Trill]

So geckos, some spiders, and climbing things use electrostatic something something to allow for climbing on smooth vertical surfaces:

https://www.livescience.com/48845-gecko ... walls.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_electricity

The gecko becomes positively charged, the surface is negatively charged

Would this be disrupted if the gecko or surface was charged by another source of electricity?

I'm not clear on why something becomes + or - charged, like rubbing a balloon on your head. Why do electrons go from one's head to the balloon and not the other way around?

I'm not sure where you read that (the first link leads to a 404 page for me), but Geckos etc. can climb not because of static charges but more because of Wan-Der-Waals-Forces, which are forces due to sudden dipole creation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_der_Waals_force.
What happens is that geckos have billions of tiny hairs on their feet, which each are attracted by the wall. Each individual attraction is weak, but together they are big enough to hold them to it.
And here is an article that explains it: https://www.popularmechanics.com/techno ... -17448448/

[deaddmwalking]

This article announces the publication of a paper on the topic. Like most scientific reporting, they assume that the results will stand without regard to peer review.

[OgreBattle]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/SEQ-3_ ... pon_System

So that US Navy Laser Weapon System from a few years back uses six different lasers to shoot stuff. Is there a particular reason for six smaller lasers vs one big laser.

[Foxwarrior]

Larger lasers are actually more accurate, so I bet they use six smaller lasers with gaps between them for heat dissipation reasons.

[deaddmwalking]

Is there a particular reason for six smaller lasers vs one big laser.

I imagine it's also a matter of load - having components that can handle the full 100 kilowatts in a single beam is probably more of a challenge than having that divided into six.

If you try to plug six dryers into a single outlet (with a powerstrip of course!) you're going to trip your fuse every time you try to turn them all on. Connecting them to six different fuses helps avoid that problem. I would think this is similar.

[Trill]

for heat dissipation reasons.

Very likely. Modern lasers are usually either small enough that the power isn't making it that hot or big enough that the resulting apparatus is 10% laser, 90% cooling.
Efficiencies vary from 60% (small diode lasers) to 0.1% (e.g. Ion-Argon).
Those 100kW in photons might need up to 100MW in electrical Power. At that point if your cooling isn't sufficient it will simply start burning and/or melt down

I imagine it's also a matter of load

I'm not so sure about that. The other components usually have lower waste heat or can just be multiplied (e.g. cables). The main cooling is for the laser itself.

[Blade]

Because the next update will have rotating tubes so that they can call it a laser gatling.

[Orca]

The Chinese equivalent seems to have 3 beams. No idea if that's a better or worse design, but they're using multiple lasers too so the general principle looks to be the same.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

'We await silent Trystero's empire'

That actually works. I might change it a bit so it's not a direct quote from a novel but that's perfect.

[OgreBattle]

So I'd like to get some vague consistency on what stuff blocks what level of light spectrum stuff of increasing wavelenght:

Radio
Micro
Infrared
Visible light

Ionizing Radiation...
- X Ray
- Gamma ray

What I'm not clear on is why a plaster wall that blocks visible light still lets radiowaves pass through. It's not as simple as "wider wavelength vs denser molecule stuff"

When it comes to Ionizing radiation, it's just so high energy that it crashes like a runaway train through dense stuff like lead yeah?

Does... lightning bolts and magnets fit in the EM spectrum somehow?

So this chart gives approximate scale of wavelengths...

https://earthsky.org/space/what-is-the- ... c-spectrum

It's neat to have that information, but what exactly is the practical stuff I can glean from a radiowave being the length of a human vs a microwave being the length of a butterfly?

[Grek]

I'm going to answer out of order, because that last question is really important to understanding what's going on in the first question.

What exactly is the practical stuff I can glean from a radiowave being the length of a human vs a microwave being the length of a butterfly?

Realistically, nothing. The human intuitive measurement is actually amplitude - how many photons are passing through a given point at a given time. Which is the same thing as asking how bright the light is. While the picture makes it look like the light is rising and falling like an ocean wave as it moves through space, it isn't actually doing that. The 'wave' here is the change in amplitude (aka brightness) according to a pattern of cyclical brightening and dimming. The wavelength is the distance between two 'pulses' of equal brightness, and the frequency is the time between two 'pulses' of equal brightness. (They're not actually pulses, it's a quantum thing, but if you imagine them as pulses that is a thousand times more accurate than imagining the light cresting like a tsunami.) There is math you can do that uses wavelength (or frequency), but even then knowing whether the distance-between-peaks-in-amplitude is longer or shorter than a human's height is basically trivia.

What I'm not clear on is why a plaster wall that blocks visible light still lets radiowaves pass through. It's not as simple as "wider wavelength vs denser molecule stuff"

There's quantum stuff involved here. Basically, every electron has a certain level of energy, but for quantum physics reasons, a given electron can only exist within certain ranges of energy level called 'bands'. Electrons cannot be energized into an energy level outside of it's allowed band - the quantum stuff that I'm not going to try to explain prevents that from happening. Different materials, having different atoms in them, differ in what energy bands their electrons can occupy. When a photon hits an electron, it can either energize it into an allowed band and get absorbed* in the process, or it can't energize it into an allowed band, in which case it passes through as if the electron weren't even there.

When photons have a high wavelength, that means that there are (relatively) long stretches of high intensity followed by long stretches of low intensity. During the high intensity periods, the ability of the material's electrons to absorb photons gets overwhelmed (each electron can only absorbs photons so fast), while in periods of low intensity the electrons are left idle and doing nothing. Denser materials have more electrons per volume, meaning higher 'absorption capacity' the ability to handle peak amplitude for more time. Materials that are less dense lave less electrons and can handle peak amplitude for less time. And of course having higher amplitude all the time (from having a brighter radiation source) means that more radiation gets through all the time - exactly what you'd expect given that amplitude is brightness and brighter lights can be seen through thicker layers of semi-opaque material.

That said, certain materials are unusually good at blocking particular wavelengths, simply because their electrons just happen to have the right allowed energy levels to absorb photons of a given wavelength. This is why microwave radiation gets absorbed by air despite being having a shorter wavelength than radio waves (which ignore air) and a longer wavelength than infrared light (which also ignores air). Air just so happens to have lots of electrons in the right configurations to be good at absorbing microwaves in particular, giving it a higher absorption capacity for photons of that wavelength than for photons of slightly higher or lower wavelengths.

[Orca]

Metals block a lot of electromagnetic radiation. They have electrons which are free to move around and can pick up a wide range of wavelengths. At long wavelengths a Faraday cage can block radiation with wavelengths longer than the gaps in the cage, without necessarily needing a solid covering. At short wavelengths - X-ray and gamma - the photons tend to be deflected rather than blocked though, and you need either specific shapes aligned with the source, or a lot of material to block them.

Generally if you're going to do damage with radiation then whatever would be damaged will serve as a barrier. Microwaves that heat up water are also blocked by water, even if that water is a vapour.

[Trill]

To add to what grek said: Not only electrons can absorb light. Molecules can too, which convert light of a certain wavelength into vibrational energy. These also only take a certain wavelength and ignore the rest, allowing you to do stuff like check a gas' composition using light (you shine it through and see what wavelengths are absorbed. Then you just look up what molecules this corresponds to).
That's also the reason you can have stuff like one chemical changing color. You send it a pulse, it changes configuration, and suddenly absorbs different wavelengths.