Just posted some new flash fiction: At the Office. Still haven’t managed to write something that isn’t morbid, but I’m trying! I’ll get it one of these days.
- E.D. Lindquist
At least, they may be next to useless as weapons. If we apply some actual science to them, Coldhand’s Steelskin-slaying Talon-9 would be way less effective than Tiberius’ clunky old NI-gun. In a recent Lightspeed article, Jeff Hecht points out that bullets are still the way to go for tearing holes in human (or alien) bodies:
Blame this one on the laws of physics.
Lasers don’t generate energy; they convert energy from other sources into light, and in the process, much of the input energy is lost as heat, hampering the amount of damage it can inflict. And what about a power source? Batteries wouldn’t work. A laser gun drawing the 5000 watts of power needed to produce a kilowatt of laser light would need more than a 30-ampere, 120-volt line could deliver, and again, that sort of beam wouldn’t do much damage.
Now, what makes old-fashioned bullets deadly is their momentum. The explosion of gunpowder in a .45-caliber pistol propels the bullet out of the barrel with only 500 joules of energy and the bullet’s momentum keeps it going when it hits a soft target, so it rips through flesh, often with deadly consequences.
Laser light, however, can cause damage only by delivering energy that heats the target. So, say, zapping a mosquito would be no problem—if you could get it to stay still. People, however, are much bigger, and usually try to get out of the way if they feel parts of themselves burning. So in order to kill a human (or an alien) as convincingly as a bullet does, the laser would have to burn a hole through their body by vaporizing tissue, and at the cellular level, that means evaporating water.
As you might recall from 7th grade science, our bodies are mostly made up of water, and evaporating enough of it to make the kind of through-the-body hole we’re talking about would take about 50,000 joules. Now, that’s only about 100-times more energy than the bullet carries. But because the evaporating water would block the beam and dissipate its energy, it would actually take many times more energy than that to truly finish the job.
Lasers may not be able to kill, but they can cause blindness by burning the eye’s light-sensitive retina. However, staring at the sun can do the same, and, sorry folks, the Geneva Convention has been modified to ban blinding lasers. Staring at the sun like an idiot, however? Still allowed. (And, sadly, wouldn’t even get you a Darwin Award these days.)
- Jeff Hecht, Future Weapons (Lightspeed Magazine, 9/2010)
Just posted a new piece of flash fiction! As usual, it’s exactly 200 words. Keeping the flash pieces that short has been every inch as difficult as I expected it to be. This one was base on some passing comment from Lacey a few nights back. Enjoy!
-E.D. Lindquist
The other night, some of us were talking about a project I linked to a few days ago: The Mongoliad, a novel by Greg Bear and Neal Stephenson to be delivered online. Quite frankly, I don’t think it’s going to work. Not because I don’t like or believe in novels online, obviously, but because they’re going to charge a subscription fee for it.
So why does that worry me? Yes, I believe good fiction is well worth paying for. That’s not my problem with their plan. But even if it’s worth the money, I don’t think most people will pay for it. Merited or not, there’s a strong culture of free on the Internet. We don’t expect or want to pay for our digital goods. I doubt this book is going to change that expectation.
Well, our Star Wars game is going well. Erica and I have taken our players deep behind enemy lines, sent them on a mission into Hutt space and even down the throat of a space slug. Most recently, the characters have snuck back into Sith territory to break into a Sith Lord’s fortress on the world Vjun. The Sith Lord is a member of a fabulously wealthy family, so of course breaking into his stronghold happened during a grand ball!
It’s a real James Bond mission, but before all the sneaking in windows and silently taking down guards, there was intrigue, Sith plots, and dancing. Our games feature a lot of role-playing scenes and my biggest tool for creating excitement, humor, drama, and propelling the story are my cast; Non-Player Characters – the NPCs.
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