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Stuart Mackey wrote:How is it that a US CinC is issuing orders to a Thai general on how dispose her forces in the defence of her own country?

She did not withdraw her forces from the HEA to defend her homeland. Instead, the HEA identified Thailand as a new combat area in the war against Heaven, and re-deployed her forces (with support) to the region.

bcoogler wrote:That is my thought as well.

We assume you cannot create a recursive portal, where the begin and end points are both in the same world. That would eliminate tapping into one of Earth's own volcanoes. But I do wonder if a recursive portal is not completely out of the picture, just that no one has ever tried before. Neither Baldricks nor Angels had a reason to create a recursive portal (so far).

I disagree. The advantage of having instant transport from one place to another within a given plane would be obvious even to premodern cultures. Look at how Belial grouses about having to spend days flying back and forth from his palace to the capital in Armageddon.

It might be that if we understood the physics really well we could create recursive portals, but that's not guaranteed.

Jamesfirecat wrote:Why would said plain involve a step that could only be easily pulled off (fire from the sky) if they had the help of their archnemisis (Hell's volcanoes)?

Because Yahweh is a dick and forgot that Heaven had no volcanos.

Darth Wong wrote:

Stuart Mackey wrote:How is it that a US CinC is issuing orders to a Thai general on how dispose her forces in the defence of her own country?

She did not withdraw her forces from the HEA to defend her homeland. Instead, the HEA identified Thailand as a new combat area in the war against Heaven, and re-deployed her forces (with support) to the region.

Which is fantastic from an operational perspective because it allows direct support from other nations within the HEA and requires none of the red tape. I think.

tim31 wrote:

Darth Wong wrote:

Stuart Mackey wrote:How is it that a US CinC is issuing orders to a Thai general on how dispose her forces in the defence of her own country?

She did not withdraw her forces from the HEA to defend her homeland. Instead, the HEA identified Thailand as a new combat area in the war against Heaven, and re-deployed her forces (with support) to the region.

Which is fantastic from an operational perspective because it allows direct support from other nations within the HEA and requires none of the red tape. I think.

Oh, I know for sure at least the Bundestag (German Federal Parliament) would have a field trip with that. Just thinking on the various current "missions" with conflicting mandates already in place makes my head swirl.

Furthermore: It is easier by magnitudes to launch an attack on faceless monsters instead of essentially a Third World country(s military). The civil unrest and moral ambiguity would be enormous and I hope that will be shown somewhat.

Stuart will inevitably touch on the human consequence aspect(it's half the reason he writes fiction), but a lot of that meat will be cooked in book three.

Simon_Jester wrote:I disagree. The advantage of having instant transport from one place to another within a given plane would be obvious even to premodern cultures. Look at how Belial grouses about having to spend days flying back and forth from his palace to the capital in Armageddon.

It might be that if we understood the physics really well we could create recursive portals, but that's not guaranteed.

Good point. I was thinking in terms of who might war on whom, not in terms of day to day transportation needs. "Welcome to Pan Hell Portalways. Passengers are reminded to please refrain from eating PHP employees and fellow passengers in the portal walkway. Thank you, and have a pleasant day."

D'oh! When I put a bit of thought into it, a recursive portal really shouldn't work under "normal" conditions. Like a dead battery, both ends of the portal are at (nearly) the same energy potential. This was talked about earlier with Heaven/Hell being on one level, and Earth on another. The easy portals are the ones between worlds of different potential, whereas a Heaven <--> Hell portal is difficult because both are at the same potential.

What is needed, at a guess, is an "external" power source to drive a Heaven <--> Hell portal, and by extension any Heaven <--> Heaven, Hell <--> Hell, or Earth <--> Earth recursive portals (or Intraworld portal if you like). This was accomplished (perhaps purely by chance?) at least once between Heaven <--> Hell.

For our part, we have the technology, and I hope the power generation capacity, so that when fully artificial portals become possible, we can do things no one in Heaven or Hell ever imagined, like creating stable microportals (Buritot's spy portal idea), or recursive portals to revolutionize Earth transportation.

There was more than one occasion in the first story where Belial or some other demon was complaining about how far in hell they would have to travel. They wouldn't have had reason to if they could portal within a dimenson.

I believe it was described as being impossible to create a portal to a different location in the same dimension. kitten, I think, described it as being like trying to have a door without a wall. A portal could only be formed through the barriers between realities.

Well, dragging that analogy a bit further, you can have a door without a wall if you use wiring or some-such to keep it standing. :3

More reasonably, I'd interpret that analogy as stating that something between the dimensions gives structure to the portals, and without it there they won't be stable. That doesn't mean we can't make them, it just means they wouldn't be doable without computer support.

Baughn wrote:I'd interpret that analogy as stating that something between the dimensions gives structure to the portals, and without it there they won't be stable. That doesn't mean we can't make them, it just means they wouldn't be doable without computer support.

Exactly. We can do computer support. Any artificial portal generator is going to have dedicated computer equipment. Think of modern avionics and fly-by-wire systems.

I had made a earlier comment about how a computer program could monitor a portal and make corrections a thousand times or so per second -- a dynamic stabilization system. Under those conditions, it hardly matters if a portal would otherwise be unstable. Hence my reasoning we should be able to do far more with portals than ever dreamed of in Heaven or Hell.

Oh yes, and the 1000 corrections per second is a conservative estimate. As coding algorithms improve and you begin to manufacture dedicated chips (ASIC - Application-specific integrated circuit) you both drive down the cost as well as improve on computational speed.

Edit: Driving downs costs assumes enough of a commercial market to drive economies of scale. If portal equipment remains the classified purview of the military, then there's no particular reason to worry about costs.

Peptuck wrote:I believe it was described as being impossible to create a portal to a different location in the same dimension. kitten, I think, described it as being like trying to have a door without a wall. A portal could only be formed through the barriers between realities.

You mean like this?

The problem comes when we define "unstable." If "unstable" means "unstable on a time scale of milliseconds," we can keep the portal open with a computer. If it means "unstable on a time scale of nanoseconds," we can't.

You'd be surprised, but it certainly wouldn't be easy.

If we can predict the instabilities, though, at least well enough to push that timescale out to some microseconds.. well, I'm trying to say that even if it looks completely impossible right away, we could very well figure out ways around even apparently insurmountable problems later on.

bcoogler wrote:

Baughn wrote:I'd interpret that analogy as stating that something between the dimensions gives structure to the portals, and without it there they won't be stable. That doesn't mean we can't make them, it just means they wouldn't be doable without computer support.

Exactly. We can do computer support. Any artificial portal generator is going to have dedicated computer equipment. Think of modern avionics and fly-by-wire systems.

There is no reason to assume that the problem is a lack of computer support. If the portal is something that is intrinsically tied to the barrier between dimensions, than it is impossible to make it between two points on Earth, with or without computers. You are getting way ahead of yourself here.

Darth Wong wrote:

Stuart Mackey wrote:How is it that a US CinC is issuing orders to a Thai general on how dispose her forces in the defence of her own country?

She did not withdraw her forces from the HEA to defend her homeland. Instead, the HEA identified Thailand as a new combat area in the war against Heaven, and re-deployed her forces (with support) to the region.

Oh yeah, that's right.. one forgets the finer details in a long story.

Why must we choose one or the other? Isn't it entirely possible that John made up a bunch of shit while tripping balls, but also incorporated a lot of other things that Michael talked about?

Let's say both John and Michael were high on shrooms. Michael starts telling stories about the Great Celestial War and then starts boasting about the Giant Can of Whoop-Ass that he'll open up on humanity if they get uppity. He starts incoherently ranting about LeopardBeast and Leviathan and other great creatures that he has at his disposal. John hears this and adds it to a delusional story brewing in his addled brain, and the result is the Book of Revelation. Two thousand years later, Michael only remembers John being high on shrooms; he does not recall himself being fucked up or blabbing all kinds of secrets about Heaven.

I'll admit, I like this explination best, I can has canon plez?

I have a question about portals.

I do not know if the author plans this or not, but a thought I had if I wanted to use one was maybe instead of a weapon being sent through a portal, could a portal be 'imploded' in effect releasing an enormous amount of energy on the other side? Maybe having the devestaing effect like using a nuke?

Or is that too impossible?

Feel free to beat me if I'm being stupid?

ZGundam wrote:I have a question about portals.

I do not know if the author plans this or not, but a thought I had if I wanted to use one was maybe instead of a weapon being sent through a portal, could a portal be 'imploded' in effect releasing an enormous amount of energy on the other side? Maybe having the devestaing effect like using a nuke?

Or is that too impossible?

Feel free to beat me if I'm being stupid?

Why would that release energy? Closing a portal normally doesn't do that and portals are made using relatively low amounts of energy given it can be done by mind alone.

Samuel wrote:

ZGundam wrote:I have a question about portals.

I do not know if the author plans this or not, but a thought I had if I wanted to use one was maybe instead of a weapon being sent through a portal, could a portal be 'imploded' in effect releasing an enormous amount of energy on the other side? Maybe having the devestaing effect like using a nuke?

Or is that too impossible?

Feel free to beat me if I'm being stupid?

Why would that release energy? Closing a portal normally doesn't do that and portals are made using relatively low amounts of energy given it can be done by mind alone.

I guess I was thinking along the lines of say, a ship going to warp or hyperspace too close to a planet, sun, or another ship. Feel free to ignore my question then.

How about sending a nuke through with some sort of 'link' to the detonator where idf the portal was closed, it would go off?

ZGundam wrote:I have a question about portals.

I do not know if the author plans this or not, but a thought I had if I wanted to use one was maybe instead of a weapon being sent through a portal, could a portal be 'imploded' in effect releasing an enormous amount of energy on the other side? Maybe having the devestaing effect like using a nuke?

Or is that too impossible?

Feel free to beat me if I'm being stupid?

You've been watching too much sci-fi. That kind of thing is very common in sci-fi because, quite frankly, most sci-fi authors don't know a goddamned thing about science. To your average sci-fi author, it is completely reasonable that you can create a phenomenon out of nothing but a small amount of energy and then destroy it to create a huge amount of energy, as long as it is sufficiently exotic.

How about sending a nuke through with some sort of 'link' to the detonator where idf the portal was closed, it would go off?

We have those now, but generally we use a signal to set it of instead of the absence of a signal because we don't want it easy to go off accidentally.

Darth Wong wrote:You've been watching too much sci-fi. That kind of thing is very common in sci-fi because, quite frankly, most sci-fi authors don't know a goddamned thing about science. To your average sci-fi author, it is completely reasonable that you can create a phenomenon out of nothing but a small amount of energy and then destroy it to create a huge amount of energy, as long as it is sufficiently exotic.

Well, actually, the idea is workable, with some modification. Consider, Heaven and Hell are both shrinking, all the while releasing energy. Presumably, the matter in the bubble dimensions is somehow being converted into free energy. It is entirely possible that someone might figure out how this works, and devise a mechanism to exploit the process for destructive purpose. E.x. perhaps you could somehow use the collapse of a portal to cause objects trapped inside to be rapidly converted into energy. Even just converting a few grams of matter would trigger a multiple kiloton release of energy. The trick, of course, would be getting it to come out of the right side.

You've been watching too much sci-fi. That kind of thing is very common in sci-fi because, quite frankly, most sci-fi authors don't know a goddamned thing about science. To your average sci-fi author, it is completely reasonable that you can create a phenomenon out of nothing but a small amount of energy and then destroy it to create a huge amount of energy, as long as it is sufficiently exotic.[/quote]

That's why I said it might be a stupid question. I've been a regular reader of this site for years but finally decided to sign up and start posting.

Of course, it may keep me from asking more questions or posting if the great Darth Wong thinks I'm reading too much Sci-Fi.

The problem isn't the absolute quantity of sci-fi that you watch, but rather, the ratio of sci-fi you're absorbing compared to the amount of real science that you're absorbing.