Free Shipping Sale Ends Thursday
Posted December 30th, 2008 by Howard TaylerJust a quick note — the free shipping sale (spend $100 with us, get your stuff shipped free anywhere on the planet) ends January 1st at midnight.
I now return you to your end-of-year partying. Happy New Year!
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December 30th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
I think that trebuchet is aimed in the wrong direction maybe.
December 30th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
I personally don’t wish to see the results of having a thermobaric warhead (even in a barrel) scraped along the ground prior to launch _>
December 30th, 2008 at 10:15 pm
I just love the fact that it’s a trebuchet with fiddly bits.
December 30th, 2008 at 11:30 pm
If the mob wants to lob the thermobarrel at the Toughs then yes, the trebuchet is pointing the wrong way.
The mob didn’t know the Toughs were there until about thirty seconds ago. It can be assumed that the mob has a different target.
December 31st, 2008 at 2:08 am
Howard: I don’t know. Depending on the tensile strength of that cable, and how well it grips that barrel, it’s entirely possible for the barrel to go flying in an unintended direction, such as along the floor through the crowd, or straight up and down again… (which with the rotating frame of reference that is credomar… you know, that’d be pretty nasty for artillery, lob it straight up with a certain amount of inertia and let it come back down where you WERE…
December 31st, 2008 at 4:21 am
That would likely work better than trying to aim the trebuchet in the rotating reference frame, but only works one way.
The other way, at just the wrong firing angle you can launch it forwards only to have it come back and smack you. (I can’t see calling it just the right one in that circumstance.)
December 31st, 2008 at 7:07 am
If there’s one thing Credomarans have figured out it’s rotating reference frames. When you grow up in one you learn to play “catch.”
January 1st, 2009 at 4:35 am
Booom! Well, that’s not going to be healthy for the reactor.
January 1st, 2009 at 10:49 am
I want to echo Sam. I like the trebuchet with fiddly bits, and the fact that it’s launching a “thermobaric warhead” made from a barrel filled with high-test kerosene. Thermobaric warhead sounds so high-tech, when about the only way to be more low tech is to throw rocks.
January 1st, 2009 at 9:47 pm
My understanding is that the high-tech part is building a shaped charge that can blow the kerosene into a fine mist, along with a second, carefully-timed incendiary device that ignites the cloud of mist at the proper time. By the 31st century, it’s probably pretty easy to get access to fabber plans to make such low-tech devices. I mean, you can get the formula and ingredients for anfo pretty easily. Making plasitc explosive and nitro is harder, and more dangerous, but not impossible. Making a nuke is really hard to do undetected just because of the tech involved.
January 2nd, 2009 at 7:23 am
I bet there are a few millers or coalminers or grain elevator operators who only wished air-fuel explosives were that difficult to make. ^_^
(According to Wikipedia the earliest recorded flour dust explosion was in the 18th C CE in Italy, but I suspect that mills and coalmines went boom before then. Just no one knew why.)
January 2nd, 2009 at 8:35 am
Grain elevator and silo explosions are simple because you have lots of infrastructure providing the dispersion, and then you sit around waiting for a spark to set the whole mess off.
FAEs or thermobaric weapons are tricky because you’re trying to weaponize the effect — you want it to go off in an exact place at an exact time, and you want to maximize the yield.
As may be apparent to the student of weaponized vapor clouds, the Credomaran thermobarrel deployed in Southport had a fairly long delay between dispersion and detonation. This is indicative of a primitive design, and the weapon is lower-yield than those we see deployed today by non-science-fiction militaries.
January 2nd, 2009 at 12:56 pm
And then they don’t always work… *mumbles about ctholoid entities and cruel GMs*
January 2nd, 2009 at 7:49 pm
I think “We don’t run from the end of the world. We CHARGE!” should be the new blog subtitle thing. By the way, have you got a list of the old ones somewhere?
January 3rd, 2009 at 9:10 am
I don’t have a list, no.