Quote:I'm not gonna lie. The original purpose of the 'wavetech weapons ban was to throw a wrench into arms-racing. I didn't want to see contributors trying to out-twink each other with an endless stream of death ray dick measuring, so I suggested that handwavium can't be used to create death rays.
I still don't like this idea of not being able to make weapons on purpose. Sure, you shouldn't be able to just spontaneously build things like what Fnord listed. They should have to be something really *weird*. But if you can't even try to do things *on purpose*, there won't be any justification for most people to have any effective weaponry at all... except for the Boskonians. And it's hard to make a story containing any kind of conflict work with that kind of force imbalance. (The only exception to this I'm aware of is "invulnerability comedy", which isn't exactly suitable for this setting.)
ETA: Actually, there were two reasons. The first was the one I said above. The other is rooted back in the original proposal where the Mundanes would make just as much use of handwavium as Fandom, only in dull and uninteresting ways. I wanted the 'wave to be something that could only be used for peaceful purposes, in order to keep the 'danelaw from sparking World War Three by weaponizing the shit. It was a desperate handwave in it's own right, but dammit I didn't want to write a depressing story about how the mundanes blew themselves to hell and left the fen squabbling over the wreckage of Earth. ---
Mr. Fnord
http://fnord.sandwich.net/
http://www.jihad.net/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery
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