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Buritot wrote:I just can't wrap my head around the obvious organic requirements to both stand such an arsenal of attack as well as the limits to sustain its own weight on the scale we see here.

We already know that the Great Beasts are extremely rare and powerful creatures, and that other powerful creatures in Hell or Heaven can use telekinesis. Putting two and two together, I'd assume that they use telekinesis to protect themselves from attack, and perhaps also to support their own weight.

Darth Wong wrote:

Lonestar wrote:I know who you're trying to base this person off of, and you're trying to make her look "Tough", but really it's came across as a insecure person just trying to show that "she's the boss" right out of the gate.

Is that such a bad thing in this context? In these smaller countries where the military and politics are so intermingled, it only makes sense that you'd have a lot of posturing.

I think I have a quote from HBO's Rome might be appropriate:

ANTONY: "Look at you. About to march on Rome as a bloodstained conqueror and yet you look as calm as a cup of water.
CAESAR: "I'm glad I appear so."

Making people see what you want them to see and think what you want them to think is very important in warfare.
Sure, General Asanee might not have done the best thing, but she shook people up and got them moving.
She gave the image of someone who was in charge, knew the situation, would dismiss anyone she saw as useless, and had the political backing to much such a dismissal stick. She got people out of their peacetime malaise as quickly as she knew how, and showed them she was actively involved in leading her troops.
Yes, it may have been foolish to immediately dismiss the people in charge before she heard the whole story, but they are being fucking invaded and time isn't exactly abundant.

Gil Hamilton wrote:I like that the portals have an activation energy in order to make a transition. It seems to me that the obvious source of it is on of potential energy, with altitude being the symptom. They can confirm that by sending something through Hell Portal Alpha with instruments on its drive, then turn around, and head back through. If transitioning from one side to the other is "uphill" in terms of potential energy, then going the opposite direction should turn the higher potential energy into kinetic and the vehicle should experience an unaccounted for boost of speed.

This actually strikes me as an interesting way to make a weapon. If you can put someone in orbit who can open a portal, say, for a large rock. Then you find a way to have someone center a portal over something you don't like. Push the rock through the portal and the difference in PE between orbit and the ground should make your rock into an instant orbital strike.

You could do it with a hydraulic cylinder anchored to the ground. It can apply great force to push a heavy object through the portal against resistance (thus making up the gravitational potential energy difference) until it's all the way through, at which point it falls like a stone. If they can open portals at will with pinpoint accuracy, this could potentially eliminate the need for bombers. You could run the equivalent of bomber sorties by simply lining up racks of ordnance on a portal-based delivery station and using hydraulics or some kind of sled launcher system to force the bombs through the portals.

Hydraulics might be safer than the high-speed sled launcher. It could be messy if the sudden sharp force gradient at the portal from a large potential energy increase triggers the bomb somehow. Subjectively, it would feel like hitting a wall.

CaptainChewbacca wrote:

Revelation 13
1And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. 2And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority. 3And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast. 4And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him? 5And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months. 6And he opened his mouth in blasphemy against God, to blaspheme his name, and his tabernacle, and them that dwell in heaven. 7And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them: and power was given him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations.

Not... a very pleasant guy. The beasts get progressively worse from here.

What I'm wondering is why were beasts that were described as opposing God being used by Heaven? Am I just reading too much into mythology, or does it mean something?

I take it this means the idea of refueling relativistic rockets through portals won't work?

Setzer wrote:

CaptainChewbacca wrote:

Revelation 13
1And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. 2And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority. 3And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast. 4And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him? 5And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months. 6And he opened his mouth in blasphemy against God, to blaspheme his name, and his tabernacle, and them that dwell in heaven. 7And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them: and power was given him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations.

Not... a very pleasant guy. The beasts get progressively worse from here.

What I'm wondering is why were beasts that were described as opposing God being used by Heaven? Am I just reading too much into mythology, or does it mean something?

It occurs to me that these leopard-beasts could be extremely deadly weapons once Heaven figures out how to utilize them better. 2 or 3 of them attacking at once might have overran and destroyed the entire base. Or even one of them could portal into a major city, destroy the entire downtown area, and then portal away before the local military forces can really react.

Just the threat of them is going to tie down a huge amount of human manpower and equipment. Heaven has a huge huge advantage logistically in this war right now.

Interestingly. If Michael just took advantage of some drug-fuelled rantings, this means he made that Great Beast in the last two thousand years, rather than it being natural.

Junghalli wrote:I take it this means the idea of refueling relativistic rockets through portals won't work?

The potential energy difference between portal ends exists in "real" physics as well, for wormhole ends with drastically different rates of time. Well, at least, you have to compete with that as well; this pure potential energy problem wouldn't happen in real life, as it'd instead affect the mass/charge of the wormhole ends. (Push a 1kg ball through a wormhole, the end it enters gets 1kg heavier, the other end gets 1kg lighter; thus, there is no net change on either end, just restructuring of mass-energy. This is why hard-SF books will often require a balance in mass transfer through wormholes.)

Anyhow.. the bottom line is, pushing fuel up against a potential energy difference makes refueling a travelling spaceship more expensive, but it's still nowhere near as expensive as carrying the fuel with you all along.

Basically, you get a multiplier on the fuel cost - at (very) extreme velocities, when using a matter-antimatter mixture for fuel, it might take as much energy to push the fuel through the wormhole as you get from burning it. However, this does not mean you can't do it, because you can pay the cost on either side; the energy needed to push your fuel through the portal does not itself need to pass through the portal, unlike with carrying fuel to carry the fuel to carry the fuel.. etc., like you'd have to do without portals.

Of course, when using simple chemical fuels, even pushing through the potential difference of earth's gravity well is costly. But it should still be easier to push it through a portal on the ground, than to make rockets to carry it out of earth's gravity-well *without* portals.

So, overall, they're better off than before. It just isn't magic, and it's more useful for interplanetary voyages than for getting off earth; by manufacturing your fuel off earth (eg. in the asteroid belts), there'd be little in the way of a potential energy difference to cause trouble in the first place, and intrastellar velocities are not large enough for temporal differences to start adding to the cost.

On the subject of what humanity can and can not kill...

"And with strange aeons even death may die."

Are the stars right yet?

Baughn wrote:<snip>

Wouldn't the potential energy difference between a portal in our solar system and a relativistic rocket be huge? If so, I'd think you'd need one hell of a pushing mechanism to get the fuel through the portal. It'd probably still be better than carrying the fuel though, if for no other reason you avoid the exponentially increasing mass ratio problem.

I think you could still use portals to resupply the ISS. If I'm understanding how this energy potential deal works you'd basically need a mass driver capable of accelerating a pellet to the ISS's orbital velocity with a portal at the end. It'd be much more efficient than getting things into orbit with chemical rockets and easier than a conventional mass driver as well since you wouldn't have to worry about getting the pellet through the atmosphere or circularizing the orbit so it doesn't crash back into the ground at the end of the first orbit.

Darth Wong wrote:

dragon wrote:Ahh but rember nukes made that one creature grow by providing it energy.

Don't go introducing bullshit from other fiction franchises here. In any realistic or even pseudo-realistic setting, nukes vapourize organic material. They do not invigorate it.

Stas bush's story is considered Armageddon-verse canon.

Setzer wrote: What I'm wondering is why were beasts that were described as opposing God being used by Heaven? Am I just reading too much into mythology, or does it mean something?

If I'm a good, devout, first-century apostle and I'm seeing visions of the final battle of the end of the world, am I going to want to CONSIDER that my loving, kind, merciful creator is the one fielding ten-headed beasts of teeth and flame?

No. So I blame it on the devil.

JointStrikeFighter wrote: Stas bush's story is considered Armageddon-verse canon.

The basic story is; some of the details need significant changes. The nuclear burst is one of them. No offense meant to Stas, he did a damned fine job (sorry about the pun).

Wow, that was impressive. Never saw that Leopard Beast comming.

Stuart wrote:

JointStrikeFighter wrote: Stas bush's story is considered Armageddon-verse canon.

The basic story is; some of the details need significant changes. The nuclear burst is one of them. No offense meant to Stas, he did a damned fine job (sorry about the pun).

...what pun?

Darth Wong wrote:

dragon wrote:Ahh but rember nukes made that one creature grow by providing it energy.

Don't go introducing bullshit from other fiction franchises here. In any realistic or even pseudo-realistic setting, nukes vapourize organic material. They do not invigorate it.

That was from Stas Bush's Russocentric spinoff in the same setting, titled "Don't Wake Me While I'm Quiet" or something like that. The monster in question was Leviathan, in the oceans of Hell, it being a communal organism on the order of a hundred miles across. If nothing else, nuking it to death would have been a real pain, though I'm sure it would have been possible given enough megatonnage.

Apparently, Leviathan's nuke-resistance isn't all that canonical, though the sheer size of the thing would require a lot of strikes in any case.

CaptainChewbacca wrote:4And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?

The National Guard, apparently.

Buritot wrote:A great beast, a battle, and portals. A nice chapter.

Albeit I have to very much doubt the biological feasibility of an organism 200 feet (60 metre) high. Even if we take dinosaurs into account, there is no way any bone structure would be able to hold the weight of such a mass. If the beast would have been able to fly it would have weighed magnitudes less but it wasn't if its resilience (=presumed thick hide) was any indication.
I am of course assuming something organic to withstand such a barrage to be very dense (in matter-volume-ratio).

Chalk it up to bioengineering, based off genes found in some freakish otherworld accessible only via portal. Weirder things are probably out there if you go explore the multiverse thoroughly enough.

Enhanced tissue and bone structure would help to explain its sheer resistance to firepower, too.

Darth Wong wrote:We already know that the Great Beasts are extremely rare and powerful creatures, and that other powerful creatures in Hell or Heaven can use telekinesis. Putting two and two together, I'd assume that they use telekinesis to protect themselves from attack, and perhaps also to support their own weight.

Hmm. Good one.

It occurs to me that these leopard-beasts could be extremely deadly weapons once Heaven figures out how to utilize them better. 2 or 3 of them attacking at once might have overran and destroyed the entire base. Or even one of them could portal into a major city, destroy the entire downtown area, and then portal away before the local military forces can really react.

Just the threat of them is going to tie down a huge amount of human manpower and equipment. Heaven has a huge huge advantage logistically in this war right now.

You given Heaven too much credit, remember the relevant passage of the book of Revelations has already been quoted, there are four particular evil beasts that we're going to be dealing with (though I'm surprised the beasts are showing up before all the bowls of wrath our poured out, I guess to give Micheal time to figure out how to rain fire from the sky) but they're "bosses" to use some video game terminology, not mooks. Heaven doesn't has an infinite supply of them.

At least that's what I'd be betting on, that there are these four beasts, and after we've killed them all we're done with them Heaven is going to have to go back to using angles, and natural disasters to make war with us...

Guy found by ErikT....fixed

Simon_Jester wrote:

Darth Wong wrote:Don't go introducing bullshit from other fiction franchises here. In any realistic or even pseudo-realistic setting, nukes vapourize organic material. They do not invigorate it.

That was from Stas Bush's Russocentric spinoff in the same setting, titled "Don't Wake Me While I'm Quiet" or something like that.

Ah, I see. I thought he was talking about Godzilla movies or something.

The monster in question was Leviathan, in the oceans of Hell, it being a communal organism on the order of a hundred miles across. If nothing else, nuking it to death would have been a real pain, though I'm sure it would have been possible given enough megatonnage.

The nuke would have created a huge shockwave that would liquefy much of such a large creature's internal tissues, over and above the region of its body which is directly vapourized by direct energy transfer from the detonation.

In a nuclear blast, the first microsecond is an enormous burst of ionizing radiation which heats up the surrounding gases (or liquids, in water) to a plasma which is much hotter than the Sun. This ball of plasma has enormous pressure and also radiates at an enormous rate, which causes material outside this ball to rapidly heat up from both radiative energy transfer and the shockwave pushing outward (a shockwave is, if you may recall, a near-vertical pressure waveform).

In a creature's body, the effect would not be much different than it is in water: part of its body would become hotter than the Sun. The part of its body outside that fireball would be rapidly heated up by this miniature Sun in its midst, which would also be expanding rapidly outward: so rapidly that it would be pushing outward at many kilometres per second. This would be the mother of all gut punches, the shockwave liquefying everything in its path until its propagation velocity drops below the critical value and it "only" causes massive disruption in the tissue.

There's just no way any kind of organic material absorbs anything from this other than death. Even outside the vapourization and liquefaction zones, the tissues would be severely burned and crushed: the effect would be not dissimilar to being struck with a red-hot hammer.

Stuart,
Thanks for the clearing up on military culture and the points over that phraseology. Those simply do not come to mind (I'm a civilian and not terribly familiar with the military mindset at work there), and your points are all good. I think the debate was good to have, even if most of us got turned around by the situation and our own mindsets.

Your points on the nature of the Thai military also make sense (and thanks, btw, for the update on what party the Thaksinites are in these days; I've been having trouble following the labels), and I'm glad for the information. Out of curiosity, how'd you build up such a pile of info on them?

bcoolger,
I don't see the need for a separate thread. I have to suspect that some variation on this discussion may recur...and do consider that we'll probably be at 3000-4000 posts before the story is done no matter what.

Perhaps Michael influenced the prophet's hallucinations? Is it possible to talk someone into seeing something specific while high?

Shep, that's an awesome pic.

And as an update (yay posts sitting in the queue), I think air pressure might be the "wild card" with the portals. Something about the portal wants to keep gas exchange to a minimum, which means you've got a bit of a "film" to punch through on your way from side A to side B. The amount that you have to punch through depends on the air pressure difference.

The way to test this, if I could offer one, would be to open a portal in either Death Valley or by the Dead Sea and see what happens (and/or one that's higher up as well). If it's simply air pressure, the gradient would be lower or reverse (you'd need more energy again) as you got lower and then exceeded the air pressure in Hell. Another way to check would be to open one "higher up" in Hell (either on a mountain or in the air) with the other end near sea level on Earth. That'd give you a good way of checking.

Still, like I said, I think the key here is that the portals want to avoid random gas exchange as much as possible for whatever reason.

MKSheppard wrote: Guy found by ErikT....fixed
(snip images)

I have to say it... COKE TRUCK FROM HELL.

Darth Wong wrote:The nuke would have created a huge shockwave that would liquefy much of such a large creature's internal tissues, over and above the region of its body which is directly vapourized by direct energy transfer from the detonation.

A hydrozoan organism the size of several hundred kilometers could, in my view, survive a single nuclear hit even if part of it's body would be vapourized. A below-100 kiloton airburst would not generate enough overpressure to really destroy anything outside of a several kilometer wide gap. The hydrozoa would simply have it's body broken but as it has no vital organs or anything, it would survive.

Darth Wong wrote:until its propagation velocity drops below the critical value and it "only" causes massive disruption in the tissue.

Which would be several kilometers from the epicenter.

Darth Wong wrote:There's just no way any kind of organic material absorbs anything from this other than death. Even outside the vapourization and liquefaction zones, the tissues would be severely burned and crushed: the effect would be not dissimilar to being struck with a red-hot hammer.

Of course, for the material which is in the zone of heating, burning and sufficient overpressure this means death. For the organic material 100 km away? I doubt it. The blast wave is the farthest-reaching strike factor, and the high overpressure zone even for the largest of nuclear devices ever detonated by mankind does not extend further than 25 km as far as I know.

Though I don't object to it being edited out, I thought colonial organism of such size could feasibly do it based on the scale limits of nuclear explosions and teh common yields of nuclear devices of the human arsenal.

Darth Yoshi wrote:Perhaps Michael influenced the prophet's hallucinations? Is it possible to talk someone into seeing something specific while high?

Shep, that's an awesome pic.

I think the angels have some telepathic (if you want to call it that) power to influence mental thoughts, though actually guiding around someone who's high as a weather satellite to something that specific is going to take a lot of doing.

It would be simpler just to alter the prophecies after the fact.