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• Dirk Bruere commented on Towards a taxonomy of cliches in Space Opera
  Just ticking over, slowly... More next week......
• Flugendorf commented on Towards a taxonomy of cliches in Space Opera
  Charlie, I tripped over this part of the "Space and Cosmology" section: "Gas giants are good for mining volatiles ... Because dealing with Mach 6 wind shear, 10,000 Bar pressure, and a lethally deep gravity well is trivial ... Because we need volatiles such as 3He, to fuel our aneutronic fusion reactors (hint: Boron is cheaper and much less scarce)" Yes, we do have boron. But the hydrogen-boron reaction requires much, much higher energies/temperatures to make work at useful rates than the deuterium-3He reaction, which is the next one down from D-T, the very easiest. Given that it can be...
• Keybounce commented on Towards a taxonomy of cliches in Space Opera
  Oh wow. 1100 comments??? I can start scanning them. But my first thoughts: A lot of these comments about star ships and communications reminds me of cross-ocean naval travel in our relatively recent past. Take a several month long cross ocean journey, or a year-long round trip, and scale that up to inter-stellar distances. Not much changes. I was reading Niven's last few books in the puppeteer/known space series recently (somehow I never saw them when they were new), and really started to think about the speed, or lack thereof, of a hyperdrive that had a speed of 3 LY/day....
• Keybounce commented on Towards a taxonomy of cliches in Space Opera
  Replying to #11: Planets rotate east-to-west Maybe the trope should be "There is a universal Aristotelian set of directions. And a universal calendar valid for everyone, even those traveling at FTL." Thing is, without that universal frame of reference, how do you determine "east"? Easy and most useful method is "Where the sun rises." (Yes, it's planet-specific. So is "up".) The "subversion" of this is a giant space station, a long cylinder "can". If you have sufficiently large scale, you run into directions like these: http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2013-05-19 and the next day http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2013-05-20 Replying to #12: --The Squad of Marines Rule is...
• Keybounce commented on Towards a taxonomy of cliches in Space Opera
  Replying to #51: A few biology ones: This reply may show my limit of understanding of biology. Things that have only evolved one or a few times on Earth will always be present in alien biospheres (feathers, lactation, powered flight, flowers). Given the very large number of times that something can happen, and that it only takes one success, the likelyhood of a successful, even if rare, thing not happening given a long enough time is low. In other words, an ecosystem that is large enough, and long enough, will have some form of "parent supplies nutrients to child through...