David Harris

Comment Threads

• Dirk Bruere commented on A message from our sponsors
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• Max™ commented on A message from our sponsors
  A basilisk gun is kinda like a claymore mine which displaces the explosion a bit further away from your hand, sometimes things just cook, sometimes you get chunks of hot concrete flying around. There's no undo button on one, you can decide you shouldn't have shot someone and as long as you didn't put the round in their brain there it just might be that you can patch em up and dig the round out, no way to patch up having most of your carbon molecules swapped for silicon. The device has to "observe" the target, so it generally has...
• Charlie Stross commented on A message from our sponsors
  Watch my lips: "Equoid" introduces some really important background that is going to come front-and-centre in "The Nightmare Stacks". So, not a side-trip at all, really....
• Charlie Stross commented on A message from our sponsors
  Q: Basilisk gun v. Old George. A: Remember George's coat? A basilisk gun would probably prove rather ineffective against him -- at least until after he's run into (and dealt with) an Auditor. Wrt the sarcophagus: nobody has dared to try that because they're not entirely certain it would work, and if it doesn't work the outcome will be very sub-optimal indeed, for world-ending values of sub-optimal. (Trying to murder a god and failing is not terribly safe.) Wrt why everybody doesn't have one: much the same reason why cops -- at least in the UK -- don't all carry...
• MSB commented on A message from our sponsors
  Remember George's coat? A basilisk gun would probably prove rather ineffective against him -- at least until after he's run into (and dealt with) an Auditor. That's exactly what I'm having so much difficulty with. As far as I remember, we haven't yet seen a case where a basilisk gun is deflected by magic, so I don't suppose that any spells on George's coat would counter its effects. The coat is mainly protecting him by a translocative compulsion field, in other words, it deflects anything thrown at it, which makes it immune to bullets. But from my understanding a basilisk...