Quote:yeah we need some agreement on that. Particularly since if the limit is 80 AU and 10 hours out you need to be going about lightspeed to reach it.
First: an easy one: we need a consensus on how long it takes to go from orbit to the surface and back. "grumble grumble seven hours each way" and "I spent a lot of money on this really interesting thing, and now I'm one of the few who can make it in under a day" just don't mesh.
Quote:I like this idea.
My thought would be to have default speeds of handwavium vehicles in a pretty clear inverse curve with size. You can get more space, but it'll take longer to get there. If you happen to get a special drive along with the rest of your devices, it can bend that to a degree, but should have its own disadvantages. This has the avantage that "big ships go slow, small ships go fast" is a genre trope already.
Quote:Yeah, I'm definitly guilty of that one as well, though in my case it's more because I haven't thought of good quirks yet, nor would the viewpoint of people who have been living with it emphazise it too much. Still I would welcome suggestions for quirks, I can think of a few but I need more for something the size of the Sol Bianca. Though I think the androids are quirky enough.
Incidentally, we've been writing some stuff (the basics, really: hull-sealing, getting to orbit, tooling around the solar system, and a degree of environmental) as if it's not just totally reliable, but almost totally quirk-free. Part of the point of handwavium to me was the stage after you get your vehicle of choice, after you breed up your appropriately-sized block of the stuff, after you apply thing B to thing A, but before you actually can use it, where you figure out what bizarre little details there are that you're just going to have to live with/compensate for. That's one of the major things that keeps space in the hands of the Fen, rather than the wage-slaves.
One potential thing to fix this is that Handwavium is illegal groundside, due to possible health risks/whatever which puts transport in a dificult position.
Another is that somke of the quirks appear in the owners/operators, not just the vehicle. You are afterall breathing Handwavium dust, drinking water processed and possibly contaminated by the stuff, etc ect.
Combine the two and make Handwavium illegal groundside except for at specific spaceports (not that this will stop the fen, and the damn stuff is spreading all the time, luckily most use it to go into space so the problem is self-solving), and definitly make it illegal for corperations to own/use it for any purpose but research, but allow them to hire fen to do whatever they want done in space.
Then the problem will be mostly self-solving.
E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?"
B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."