The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Eighty One Up

[rdfox2]

Stuart, thanks for the note that it was a "clean" W83 in the strike--while I have only open-source information on them, I've got this odd fascination with nukes, and knowing enough to be able to pick out at least one of the deliberate omissions in the initiation (which I won't mention here, despite being open-source), I did find myself wondering, "Hey, where's the tamper fast-fission?" Now I know--Spoiler

it was a tungsten tamper, like the Tsar Bomba or the old W53 Y2.

Though it does raise a question from me--according to Carey Sublette's Nuclear Weapon Archive, the GLCM warhead weighed 388 pounds, while the W83 weighed "1700-1900" pounds. Even with the GLCM's fuel load reduced to a bare minimum, given the missile's stated launch weight of 2600 pounds, could it actually carry one? (If not, the W87, at 500-600 pounds might be a viable alternative. Granted, it's only a third the yield, but there's no question as to whether the Glickem could carry it.)

And yes, you're right, while the results of an initiation in anger are hideous, the fireball and cloud formation and development *are* strangely beautiful--anyone wanting to get a better chance to see what the visual effects are would be well-served to track down a DVD of "Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie." (Heck, do it anyway--every copy sold helps Peter Kuran justify doing more of his deliberately-neutral documentaries on nuclear testing, which allows him to restore more nuclear test documentation films for preservation. It's important, because apparently the Air Force didn't do a very good job of storing them, and the films are rapidly deteriorating.)

[Andras]

To be fair to Mike, he didn't expect us to use nuclear weapons.

The humans already tried to nuke him once, only he sent it back to the city who's name I can't remember.

That was when Uxhalar stopped in his tracks, backwinging so he could absorb the immensity of what he saw. For, in front of him, the landscape had changed and become something he couldn't have imagined. For at least three miles in front of him, the ground had been completely flattened and turned into glass. Soil, trees, grass, animals, people, Angels, all had gone leaving nothing behind but the sheet of glass. He tried to imagine what could have done this, what great power could fuse soil unto glass. He flew over it, looking down, realizing that this glass plain was the only memorial to the Army that had been once marching through the valley. Through the valley, that was not true any more for even the valley itself had been changed. The hills had been distorted, their pleasing symmetry destroyed, looking as if a giant hand had pushed them away.

Stuart, I though the glass plain only formed when the fireball touched the ground, but it's been mentioned that this is a high airburst.

[Stuart]

Stuart, I though the glass plain only formed when the fireball touched the ground, but it's been mentioned that this is a high airburst.

It's a function of the heat pulse from the initiation. Glass will form if that heat pulse is intense enough. At 1.2 megatons we will get glass formation from even a high airburst. This is especially the case in Heaven where the nice clear air is ideal for energy transmission.

Though it does raise a question from me--according to Carey Sublette's Nuclear Weapon Archive, the GLCM warhead weighed 388 pounds, while the W83 weighed "1700-1900" pounds. Even with the GLCM's fuel load reduced to a bare minimum, given the missile's stated launch weight of 2600 pounds, could it actually carry one?

It can; it was an option examined when Gryphon was a real strategic system. It does require airframe and engine changes and a severe reduction in fuel load plus some changes to the device but it can be done. Remember, the missiles here aren't the ones that were deployed in Europe. They were all scrapped years ago. These are a new version of the missile built around the larger warhead.

By the way, if people do spot the bits I left out of the description of the physics package, it's probably better not to post them. We don't want to give people ideas.

[Gil Hamilton]

After that level of a dose of radiation? The strongest and oldest of the angels who can control their own bodies' processes to a limited extent will be able to survive and even fully heal.... By ripping out cancerous after cancerous attempt at re-growth until they by luck get one which holds true. The ones who aren't so strong will be more apt to be overtaken by horrifying cancerous tumors caused by the severe radiation exposure essentially making their quick-healing mechanisms go crazy. The results of nuclear weapons on Second Lifers, Angels, and Demons will be more horrifying than anyone could imagine on a living normal human because of the fact that they regenerate. They will die because their auto-healing mechanisms in their bodies will be massively irradiated, and twisted, fast-growing cancers will consume every single wound healing effort they have.

It will be sort of like this time I tried to develop a sci-fantasy internally consistent method of "scientific" vampires--they could regenerate limbs but it would take decades because they would frequently regenerate in twisted tumors, so the old, wise ones, to preserve their human appearance, cut the tumors off over and over again, like someone trimming and pruning and shaping a tree, until their lost limb would slowly grow back into the rough shape and function of the limb they'd originally had. Now imagine that happening much much faster because Angels and Second Lifers heal much faster than those vampires I created. And it would happen whever the body was trying to heal damage. Since damage took place at the cellular level, it means they're going to essentially turn into giant living lumps of cancer tissue and then die from overwhelming systemic shock. The ones close enough to the blast to get their basic metabolic processes completely disrupted will be by far the luckiest. The strong ones at the edge of what would be the lethal zone for humans will live, and have the lifespans ahead of them to spend the next few decades in a constant state of chronic disablement endlessly battling the tumors, and everyone between them in the effects zones will die the most grusome deaths imaginable.

I don't know about this. Second-Lifers, Angels, and Demons may be uniquely suited to TAKING this sort of damage. Remember that second-lifers were pulled out of rivers of boiling pitch which continuously burned their flesh off and made a recovery. Ori and Aeneas, after all, took their first demons shortly after being burning corpses.

Radiation, leaving out thermal, damages a human being three ways:
1: The first is just from high energy particles chemical bashing apart bonds in your body, causing structural damage. Depending on the radiation, this may affect surface tissue to your bones themselves. This is brute physical damage and is cumulative over time. Here are your burns and other effects.
2: The second is related to the first and is possibly more dangerous. The radiation will collide with something, most of the time water, excite it, and cause the equivalent of photochemistry to happen. This is why neutron radiation has such a high quality factor, by the way. Water absorbs radiation fairly well, but what may happen is that it will dissociate into free radicals, which are extremely reactive. These guys go on to react with other things in the body, doing the free radical chemistry thing, causing damage and defects. This is not less severe than brute damage.
3: The third is replication errors in cells, causing something to break in the machinery. The most common event here is that the cell just dies, but its possible that the replication error may cause the cell to go apeshit, causing cancer. Oddly enough, given how rapidly cells must form in angels, this point may be the most insidious for the supernatural (the rest is just physical damage in the end) though angels, demons, and second-lifers almost certainly have cellular machinery that makes alot less replication errors than humans by several orders of magnitude.

I'll post more on this topic when I get into work. Placeholder.

[Simon_Jester]

So he thought it would be okay to do it since his boss did it. I'm still surprised by how widely spread that logic is.

Well, if it's something like throwing up due to motion sickness, you really want to be able to relax whatever control you exercise to keep yourself from throw up. Wishful thinking is going to be par for the course. For that matter, just thinking that someone else is going to puke can trigger someone else who's on the verge of it.

Hold on, let's step back for a moment.

I'm not at all sure that the human janissaries are actually going to die from the radiation. Remember the damage mechanism - broken DNA or, in extreme cases, broken proteins. Mostly broken DNA.

They don't have DNA...

They're still made out of atoms. Radiation damages anything made out of atoms. Big solid inert blocks of matter (like rocks and metal) don't suffer much structural damage, because having one random atom in a million or billion transmuted into something else doesn't really hurt them. But anything organic made out of complex molecules is in much more trouble, because you cannot survive having one random carbon atom out of every million in your body transformed into an unstable boron isotope by electron capture, or inhaling a bunch of alpha emitters.

Whatever system second lifers use for regeneration of damaged tissue on the cellular/biochemical level is still going to be vulnerable to radiation damage. How vulnerable, exactly, is an open question, because it's mostly a question of whether...

The ones who aren't so strong will be more apt to be overtaken by horrifying cancerous tumors caused by the severe radiation exposure essentially making their quick-healing mechanisms go crazy.

And that depends on exactly how the mechanism in question works. If it includes built in error-checking of DNA (which seems likely, since otherwise angels and demons would die of cancer anyway over millenia-long lifespans), this might not happen. After all, there's still a background mutation rate, and you'd still see cancer as a perversion of the cell growth process occuring in angels and demons as it does in humans.

The fact that they don't get cancer (or at least that it's not an accepted and common cause of death) suggests that either:

-It's been engineered out of them by genetic modification, or
-There's a self-repair mechanism in their DNA, along with the gross self-repair mechanisms in the body as a whole.

In the former case, they're screwed, because exposure to mutagens can easily trigger cancers where no genes that coded for cells to become cancerous existed. In the latter case, they'll have exceptional resistance to radiation-induced cancer, because of the error checking. I'm not sure which.

[TimothyC]

Maybe it is just me after closely following all of the TBOverse books and stories but the presence of the targeteer is comforting - a true expert is in control. The comment about running countries is so Parmenio.

After a quick recollection, I think (and stand only a 30% chance of remembering correctly here) that Don Brennan was one of the basis for Parmenio's Character in TBO'verse

[Gil Hamilton]

They're still made out of atoms. Radiation damages anything made out of atoms. Big solid inert blocks of matter (like rocks and metal) don't suffer much structural damage, because having one random atom in a million or billion transmuted into something else doesn't really hurt them. But anything organic made out of complex molecules is in much more trouble, because you cannot survive having one random carbon atom out of every million in your body transformed into an unstable boron isotope by electron capture, or inhaling a bunch of alpha emitters.

Elemental transmutation shouldn't be the problem, unless I'm wrong. We were taught in Radiation Producing Machines training that radiation damages humans in the above three ways. I'm sure you could get some nuclear zaniness, but I think its a relatively rare event as compared to the three above I listed. Usually radiation (X-Rays, beta particles, et cetera) are going to cause bond breaks and chemical changes by bashing out out a core electron of an element and causing a reactive species or severing a bond, rather than transmuting carbon. I would think any being that is exposed to that much radiation as to cause elemental transmutation is going be made the size, shape, and texture of a Big Mac patty anyway.

Whatever system second lifers use for regeneration of damaged tissue on the cellular/biochemical level is still going to be vulnerable to radiation damage. How vulnerable, exactly, is an open question, because it's mostly a question of whether...

Coupled with my post above, it really depends on how their biology works.

The first two causes of radiation damage; radiation burns from brute damage and unwanted chemistry SHOULD be repairable. Like I said, we've seen humans pulls out of burning pitch to live to fight another day (though central nervous system damage might be rough).

The third is the one, where radiation where radiation smacks the guts of their cellular machinery and causes replication errors, I suspect THAT might be the chief bugbear, which will compound the other two.

Imagine our "logs" in the previous story, if you have the stomache. The one is clearly alive and alive enough to be able to scream (indicating he's got working vocal cords and lungs). Let's throw him on a gurney and let him heal. From the effects described, at least half of him got the business end of the thermal effects of the nuclear weapon, but he probably also got a fair dose of hard ionizing radiation. Right now, we recall from our kinetics class, he was probably just far away the suddenly application of intense heat flesh well and truly burnt his outside but probably only lightly seared his insides. This should make sense; diffusion rates of heat through flesh favor long, low temperatures for the insides to cook while a quick, intense blast of heat will burnt the outside while leaving the inside cool. Not to be gross, but those human levies were cooked like rare steaks rather than well done ones.

So his insides survived well enough, including his central nervous system, so as a second-lifer, he'll start regenerating. If there are medics, they'd be wise to scrape off the carbonized crust allowing the patient to heal, but now what ever cellular process second-lifers undergo must be going into overdrive to replace soft tissue and muscle, mass produce fresh blood (he'll likely need an IV to keep him hydrated and alot of food), and grow new nerves and blood vessels. That is alot of replications and this is happening FAST; second-lifers regrow tissue incredibly rapidly.

Here's where the ionizing radiation may be horrific. Presumably, second-lifers/demons/angels however they grow new tissue have remarkably replication error free processes; better than Earthly life which itself is INCREDIBLY good. Now you've got radiation banging kinks in their genetic material, smacking transcription proteins, and generally damaging the cellular machinery. Replication errors are going to go up. It's no big deal if the cell is DOA, a second-lifer can deal with that. However, the event of cancer is the concern. Suppose a cell is made, but due to a replication error (keeping in mind replications are happening very rapidly!), the cell now doesn't give a crap about limited growth and growing in sheets like a good cell. Now you've got a cell that is making new guys like it which don't care and you get a tumor. This is something that happens in humans but now... it's happening at Second-Lifer cell replication rates. How quickly do you expect that bastard is going to become malignant and metastasize? Once it metastasizes, how quickly is it going to invade the rest of the body?

That's an ugly thought.

[Baughn]

If it comes to cancer (which, as previously mentioned, I doubt), here's an uglier thought:

There's nothing to stop them growing, not even the effective death of the human in question. They're not dependent on food to replicate, or apparently (given the pitch-bathers) even mass.

They could very well go on duplicating forever, forming something of a world-eating blob. A rather bizarre end for heaven, but there's nothing obviously preventing it.

[westrim]

If it comes to cancer (which, as previously mentioned, I doubt), here's an uglier thought:

There's nothing to stop them growing, not even the effective death of the human in question. They're not dependent on food to replicate, or apparently (given the pitch-bathers) even mass.

They could very well go on duplicating forever, forming something of a world-eating blob. A rather bizarre end for heaven, but there's nothing obviously preventing it.

Y'know, aside from the square-cube law.

[Simon_Jester]

Elemental transmutation shouldn't be the problem, unless I'm wrong. We were taught in Radiation Producing Machines training that radiation damages humans in the above three ways. I'm sure you could get some nuclear zaniness, but I think its a relatively rare event as compared to the three above I listed. Usually radiation (X-Rays, beta particles, et cetera) are going to cause bond breaks and chemical changes by bashing out out a core electron of an element and causing a reactive species or severing a bond, rather than transmuting carbon. I would think any being that is exposed to that much radiation as to cause elemental transmutation is going be made the size, shape, and texture of a Big Mac patty anyway.

OK, granted, sorry. Was thinking in terms of a different context, more like cosmic rays and less like nuclear warfare. Was also thinking about the primary impact between high-energy particles and the target, not about secondary and tertiary effects (which are what causes the chemical changes and bond breaks).

That said, bond breaking and free radicals are still a threat to anything made out of atoms too; it's still going to attack the cell replication machinery.

Here's where the ionizing radiation may be horrific. Presumably, second-lifers/demons/angels however they grow new tissue have remarkably replication error free processes; better than Earthly life which itself is INCREDIBLY good. Now you've got radiation banging kinks in their genetic material, smacking transcription proteins, and generally damaging the cellular machinery. Replication errors are going to go up. It's no big deal if the cell is DOA, a second-lifer can deal with that. However, the event of cancer is the concern...

Which is where the Duchess's comments come in. Essentially the only way to prevent this is either by repeated cutting and regeneration of the tissue until you get something that comes in right, or by Second Lifers having built in error-checkers in their replication process that prevent stuff from growing back wrong.

Since they don't die from cancer after thousands of years of cumulative mutations sabotaging whatever code controls their regeneration, they must have some degree of error-checking. The question is how much.

If it comes to cancer (which, as previously mentioned, I doubt), here's an uglier thought:

There's nothing to stop them growing, not even the effective death of the human in question. They're not dependent on food to replicate, or apparently (given the pitch-bathers) even mass.

They could very well go on duplicating forever, forming something of a world-eating blob. A rather bizarre end for heaven, but there's nothing obviously preventing it.

Y'know, aside from the square-cube law.

That just keeps the blob of tumor from growing infinitely tall, because the cells on top crush the ones on the bottom. It could still spread out across an arbitrarily large amount of land, in theory.

However, there are still two problems with Baughn's idea:

1) Second Life humans are not like starfish: while Hell-Pit Denizen #8745019832 may be able to regrow a severed hand, the severed hand will not regrow a new Hell-Pit Denizen. Clearly, there is some part of the body, or some structural configuration, that a Second Life body needs in order to grow back. Therefore, an isolated cancer cell from a Hell-Pit denizen probably won't keep reproducing in a petri dish... or in open country. Probably.

2) This problem, a consequence of the application of nuclear weapons, can be solved by the application of more nuclear weapons!

[usagihunter101]

Another horrifying question: Can cancer kill second-lifers, or will it merely cause them to eventually become horrific sacks of tumorous growth? (Assuming the cancerous tissue isn't cut out...)

[Simon_Jester]

If it could, they'd all be dead of cancer, or wishing they were. The background rate of cancer in demons, angels, and second lifers is practically zero, or they wouldn't be nigh-immortal. I'm pretty sure they have some built in anti-cancer defense, something that shuts down corrupted cell replication before it can get out of control.

[Baughn]

Given intelligent design, it's relatively simple to reduce the rate of cancer (or, in general, corrupted cells) to as close to zero as makes no difference. A bit of ECC, a bit of encryption (to make any broken DNA-equivalents turn into the equivalent of random noise), and you end up with several trillion years between expected single-bit errors.

That's not an exaggeration, either. If anything.. if you're doing that, you could just as well apply the kind of single-bit error expected waits that are best described with Knuth up-arrow notation.

[Simon_Jester]

Yes, but if you've done that kind of engineering on the genetic code of an organism, such that the expected time to single-bit error is on the order of trillions of years... you've made them functionally immune to mutagens. At which point they won't dissolve into massive blobs of tumors when exposed to a radiation pulse, because all that does is increase the probability of a single-bit error by a factor of, say, a million.

[Baughn]

Right, which was pretty much my point, back a few posts.

[GrayAnderson]

Alright,
I know that it is often an after-effect of a nuclear explosion, but I did want to ask (since I think it's likely y'all will know): What causes that strange black post-nuke rain? I can understand it being discolored (lots of garbage in the atmosphere condensing out), but why does it stain like that, etc.?

A second question on the morbid topic of the day, but the "burned shadows": How, exactly, does that work? The people/body in the way just block the wave of radiation and, while getting annihilated, cause that spot to appear? The reason I ask is...I'd expect them to form an un-burned spot, so to speak (i.e. they absorb the direct radiation shot, preventing the spot behind them from getting burned).

Third up for the day is a bit of conjecture: Satan is dead and annihilated. Yahweh's son also bit the dust here...in a manner that in fact made him into dust. I'm guessing Yahweh is not long for, well, anywhere. Stuart, would I be right in guessing that you'd rather not deal with the physiology of the deity-race in the story?

Finally...magnificently done depiction. Good balance of the horror without overkilling it. Well done.

[Stuart]

I know that it is often an after-effect of a nuclear explosion, but I did want to ask (since I think it's likely y'all will know): What causes that strange black post-nuke rain? I can understand it being discolored (lots of garbage in the atmosphere condensing out), but why does it stain like that, etc.?

It's a combination of two things. One is the generation of soot and other particles from the initiation. Remember, there's a lot of serious fires going on - up to around five or six miles from ground zero, most things either burn or explode. People, other animals, vegetation, fabrics, asphalt road surfaces, paint, stuff like that, all combust instantaneously. Other things, mostly those that contain water in some form or another but are not flammable, explode. Concrete structures, for example, explode violently as the water boud up in their structure vaporizes. So, there are masses of nucleii in the air, in a variety of forms. Now, as everything cools down and becomes only a few times hotter than the sun, the water vapor in the air recondenses on those nucleii to give "black rain". There's a lot of complex reactions going on in there but the general effect is to produce a sort of carbon-pigmented ink that's radioactive (although not as much as one might think - one might live for quite a few hours after being contaminated by it. Might.) The nasty problem is that one can't get it off; try and wipe it away and it just smears and spreads. At Hiroshima and Nagasaki, some people tried to lick it off - that was not a good idea. So, the stain is just carbon pigmentation. The sticky effect is peculiar and not fully understood. The most likely hypothesis is that there are long-chain hydrocarbons in there that formed by the interaction of carbon particles with hydrogen

A second question on the morbid topic of the day, but the "burned shadows": How, exactly, does that work? The people/body in the way just block the wave of radiation and, while getting annihilated, cause that spot to appear? The reason I ask is...I'd expect them to form an un-burned spot, so to speak (i.e. they absorb the direct radiation shot, preventing the spot behind them from getting burned).

The effect of the flash is to bleach objects. Therefore, where a human is present, they shade the background from the flash and the background remains unbleached in the area they cover. The result is a remarkably detailed shadow. Another aspect of the same thing is that women had the patterns of their clothes branded on to their skins. The light parts of the cloth reflected more of the flash than the dark part so the dark patterns were branded on to them.

There's a lot of weird things happening around nuclear initiations. The energy levels are so high that things that are otherwise impossible just happen.

[Gil Hamilton]

If it comes to cancer (which, as previously mentioned, I doubt), here's an uglier thought:

There's nothing to stop them growing, not even the effective death of the human in question. They're not dependent on food to replicate, or apparently (given the pitch-bathers) even mass.

They could very well go on duplicating forever, forming something of a world-eating blob. A rather bizarre end for heaven, but there's nothing obviously preventing it.

Even if they pull mass out of the aether, I doubt its going to become a world-eating cancer blob. The cancer will halt with the death of the victim and a good cancer will kill a patient long before then.

OK, granted, sorry. Was thinking in terms of a different context, more like cosmic rays and less like nuclear warfare. Was also thinking about the primary impact between high-energy particles and the target, not about secondary and tertiary effects (which are what causes the chemical changes and bond breaks).

That said, bond breaking and free radicals are still a threat to anything made out of atoms too; it's still going to attack the cell replication machinery.

Absolutely, but its physical damage that an angel/demon/second-lifer might be able to deal with.

Which is where the Duchess's comments come in. Essentially the only way to prevent this is either by repeated cutting and regeneration of the tissue until you get something that comes in right, or by Second Lifers having built in error-checkers in their replication process that prevent stuff from growing back wrong.

Since they don't die from cancer after thousands of years of cumulative mutations sabotaging whatever code controls their regeneration, they must have some degree of error-checking. The question is how much.

Their ability to resist replication error is obviously excellent in normally working cells. What I'm thinking though is a large dose of ionizing radiation damaging the cell such that it is no longer normal and no longer transcribing correctly.

[thegreatpl]

wow. just wow. Or is wow the correct word for what i am feeling. That is the most horrifying description of nuclear weapons i have ever seen. When you use WMDs, you really like to describe their effects dont you.

and i am soooo in wait of seeing what the reaction to it will be from the holy city.

[Baughn]

If it comes to cancer (which, as previously mentioned, I doubt), here's an uglier thought:

There's nothing to stop them growing, not even the effective death of the human in question. They're not dependent on food to replicate, or apparently (given the pitch-bathers) even mass.

They could very well go on duplicating forever, forming something of a world-eating blob. A rather bizarre end for heaven, but there's nothing obviously preventing it.

Even if they pull mass out of the aether, I doubt its going to become a world-eating cancer blob. The cancer will halt with the death of the victim and a good cancer will kill a patient long before then.

Why does the death of the victim kill this cancer?

Think about it. If the individual cells don't actually need nutrition.. which they don't seem to do...

[Simon_Jester]

See above. You can kill a second-lifer; chop off their head and the head will not grow a new body, nor will the body grow a new head. Apparently, once the second-lifer "dies" in some significant but not well defined sense, their regeneration just stops.

For your proposed "Second Life tumor expands to fill all available space" idea to happen, you'd need second-life bodies to be able to regenerate from a single cell. Otherwise when brain activity ceases or whatever, the regeneration process stops.

[xthetenth]

If it comes to cancer (which, as previously mentioned, I doubt), here's an uglier thought:

There's nothing to stop them growing, not even the effective death of the human in question. They're not dependent on food to replicate, or apparently (given the pitch-bathers) even mass.

They could very well go on duplicating forever, forming something of a world-eating blob. A rather bizarre end for heaven, but there's nothing obviously preventing it.

Even if they pull mass out of the aether, I doubt its going to become a world-eating cancer blob. The cancer will halt with the death of the victim and a good cancer will kill a patient long before then.

Why does the death of the victim kill this cancer?

Think about it. If the individual cells don't actually need nutrition.. which they don't seem to do...

A lack of an obvious source of energy is not evidence of a lack of a source. They could be getting their energy from all sorts of things that aren't food. There's probably some dimensional deep wizardry going on that'll take a long while to puzzle out, but it is very unlikely that there is no source whatsoever, considering what horrible things that'd do to the second law of thermodynamics. I long to see what happens when a bunch of good biochemists take a good look at the cells of second-lifers. My guess, considering second-life bodies absolutely reek of design but are still following human patterns, is that instead of mitochondria, there's something plugged in that fits the same interface as mitochondria, but takes energy from some sort of ambient energy field, but the obvious limiting bit is not energy but raw material.

That is the very odd bit, and for everyday use I'd guess that the kidneys and other organs that deal with waste instead recycle the waste molecules (since if what I'm postulating is true, energy is cheap). For the rest of it, there's only really a few possibilities. The first and by far most likely and stable for the second-lifer is a process for fixing atmospheric gases (and taking the stuff in from whatever surroundings there are, like hot but organic material rich hydrocarbons). This would get most of the requirements, but some of them are still not likely to get filled, which would be a problem before we get into how the setup requires some functioning organs for it to work (an intact second-lifer could probably regenerate them by basically bootstrapping them with the nutrients that are in good forms), and a cancerblob wouldn't have them so it'd peter out as it burned through the non-waste molecules. The only real way that second lifers' setup will work for a cancerblob is if their setup is on a per-cell basis, but it's got enough properties that require complexity that it's very unlikely that any cell can work individually enough to cause problems. Plus, a second-lifer's energy is likely limited so a cancer could probably burn through it anyway.

EDIT: damn, ninja'd, but the point still stands.

[CaptainChewbacca]

It can; it was an option examined when Gryphon was a real strategic system. It does require airframe and engine changes and a severe reduction in fuel load plus some changes to the device but it can be done. Remember, the missiles here aren't the ones that were deployed in Europe. They were all scrapped years ago. These are a new version of the missile built around the larger warhead.

By the way, if people do spot the bits I left out of the description of the physics package, it's probably better not to post them. We don't want to give people ideas.

Yeah, I was halfway through such a post when it occurred to me you had left too much detail IN to make accidental omissions, so they had to be intentional. I deleted the post and gave myself strict instructions to not think about it too loudly.

[old Infantryman]

snip
Well look at his fucking salad bar!

NZ army joke is that US service personnel get a medal for flying over northern Ireland.

Yup, they do indeed seem to award a great many decorations. It's interesting to compare with General Sir Mike 'Darth Vader' Jackson, who is serving as his CoS, in the HEA.





They both have broadly similar careers, though, interestingly for his current position, Jackson has a longer period of service than Petraeus. It just looks like the British Army doesn't give out decorations with the sort of generosity that the US Army does.

...and to provide the 'Observer's Guide' , his orders, decorations and medals are as follows:

The neck badge and breast star of a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath (GCB)
The neck badge of a Companion of The Order of The British Empire (I can't see it in the photo,but it's there somewhere...)
The Distinguished Service Order (DSO)
The General Service Medal (For Campaign Service) with one bar (for his three tours in N. Ireland)
NATO - Bosnia
NATO -Kosovo
The Queen's Golden Jubilee Medal
The Accumulated Campaign Service Medal
Some foreign Order

Although he served in a Staff position in both the Falklands and Kuwait wars, he was not issued those campaign medals as in the Commonwealth, issue of campaign medals is limited to those who serve 'in-Theatre' for the required period.

Unlike SOME forces of my acquaintance, in our lot if we're given bits of ribbon to wear there is invariably a bit of metal hanging on the end of it....

oh, and the distinctive badge of which I'll bet he's most proud: the maroon beret of a member of the Parachute Regiment.

[rdfox2]

A second question on the morbid topic of the day, but the "burned shadows": How, exactly, does that work? The people/body in the way just block the wave of radiation and, while getting annihilated, cause that spot to appear? The reason I ask is...I'd expect them to form an un-burned spot, so to speak (i.e. they absorb the direct radiation shot, preventing the spot behind them from getting burned).

The effect of the flash is to bleach objects. Therefore, where a human is present, they shade the background from the flash and the background remains unbleached in the area they cover. The result is a remarkably detailed shadow. Another aspect of the same thing is that women had the patterns of their clothes branded on to their skins. The light parts of the cloth reflected more of the flash than the dark part so the dark patterns were branded on to them.

There's a lot of weird things happening around nuclear initiations. The energy levels are so high that things that are otherwise impossible just happen.

A fine example--in some places, you get *reverse* "burned shadows," in locations where the heat pulse scorches the background more than the flash bleaches it, leaving an area of unaffected *lighter* image in the shadow. Never been too sure if anyone knows how to predict which you'll get...