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Post by dans on Oct 29, 2023 16:02:25 GMT
So, suppose you were an asteroid belt prospector? You have spent years flying your singleton crew prospecting ship through empty space and the most crowded regions of the belt, avoiding or navigating safely around all the speeding 'obstacles' in space, donning your space suit and landing on various tumbling mountains, analyzing them, planting markers, filing claims, returning to secret discoveries with a mix of intuition and ai navigational assistance, sometimes with charts (some of which you created) and sometimes without, doing emergency maintenance on your vessel, playing video games in your spare time, occasionally protecting your claims from claim jumpers, writing a novel in your spare time, and dreaming of what you will do after your big score! (While in the back of your mind, remembering that some of your fellows returned fairly quickly to being prospectors after they had 'struck it rich'! as they preferred the life - or, had spent their riches almost instantly)
So, suddenly you are given super powers - nice, huh? And then just as suddenly, you are thrust into your first super powered combat, with a criminal who also has super powers, probably superior to your own. But you are both novices, both to using super powers and fighting (who is there to fight in a one person spaceship?).
Are there any skills that you learned during your years of Belt prospecting that you can immediately apply to your current fight?
Note - you probably have skills I didn't cover above, since YOU were the prospector and I'm just writing about it. So if there is some plausible skill I over looked, please make use of it if applicable!!!
Thanks!
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Post by DocQuantum on Oct 29, 2023 21:48:43 GMT
My guess is that the asteroid belt prospecting world is a bit of a rough trade, much like gold prospecting on the frontier. You'd have to be fairly proficient in conventional handheld weapons, as well as more powerful weapons equipped in your spacecraft. Besides that, you'd probably be fairly experienced in barroom brawls and pretty versatile in fighting (while intoxicated) with whatever is at hand.
And then there's wild animals to deal with. If sci-fi is any indication, there are creatures that live in space and can attack you that you would have to know how to fend off. I imagine that would take some particular skill based on years of experience.
For example, let's say there is a group of floxtra (I just made it up) attracted to the ores you're mining. You can't just kill one of them, because if you kill one, it emits a particular type of radiation that acts like pheromones and alerts other floxtra to come to its aid, and they all attack you at once. You have to either use a nonlethal method to discourage the particular floxtra from going after your ore, or you have to use another method to "shock" all the floxtra at once, forcing them as a group to find better pickings elsewhere.
I'm not sure if this applies much to your questions, though. Just spitballing here.
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Post by redsycorax on Oct 29, 2023 22:12:01 GMT
Actually, if we're talking about our own asteroid belt, Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud, there's a lot of empty space between asteroids, cometoids, dwarf planets et al in those three areas. So approach navigation wouldn't be a problem, unless you were dealing with a situation where an asteroid had one or more satellites in orbit (which is sometimes the case).
The Jovian and other planetary trojan asteroid clusters are still some distance apart. However, given the possibility that if they formed alongside the planets they're in synchrony with, there might be more useful raw materials present there, I suspect one relevant skill might be proficiency in dealing with high-radiation environments, particularly if we're talking about Jupiter or Saturn Trojans.
Orbital navigation around a small celestial object might be a useful attribute of asteroid mining, as might knowing how to read spectrographic analysis and other instrumentation to ascertain the concentration of whatever trace elements you're looking for, so geological proficiency would be a relevant skill.
So might knowledge of chemistry and engineering in low gravity environments as well as mining operation experience offworld.
Things might be easier on the larger planetary satellites, asteroids or dwarf planets from this perspective, given their greater mass and density. I suspect that they would probably be the first extractive colonies ventured for that reason.
Most asteroid mining SF takes place in the intermediate range asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, given we know less about the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud due to their distance and preliminary exploration stages as yet. If the NASA New Horizons mission can locate new mission targets out beyond Neptune, we might have a better idea.
Incidentally, there'd probably be robot mining operations established out there before humans travelled out there. I can foresee a period of risk assessment before regulatory agencies allowed human access to asteroid mining. So robotics competency might also be a useful skill to have.
If we're talking alien asteroids, it's possible some dwarf planet sized asteroids might have some primitive life, possibly parasitic and/or microbial, so we're talking the size of Ceres, Vesta, Juno and Pallas here.
As for weaponising the above skills, much would depend on how skilled your opponent might be in corresponding areas.
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Post by DocQuantum on Oct 29, 2023 22:33:09 GMT
Red, have you ever thought about breaking up your wall of text with a few paragraph breaks to make it easier for us to read? Just a suggestion.
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Post by redsycorax on Oct 29, 2023 23:32:19 GMT
Sorry, Doc, I was in a hurry this morning. I suspect you remember what coffee break times are like!
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Post by DocQuantum on Oct 30, 2023 0:01:31 GMT
No worries, thanks!
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Post by dans on Oct 30, 2023 0:31:39 GMT
This takes place in the Rao system, in the orbital belt filled with the rubble of the destroyed planet Krypton. As in practically any system of captured asteroids, the volume is mostly empty space - even in the 'thickest' parts of the belt. Unlike our own asteroid belt, this one has existed less than 100 years and while it is slowly spreading out to be less dense, in certain areas of the belt the density is higher. And because a lot of momentum-absorbing collisions between the various chunks have not yet occurred there is probably a wider range of velocity distribution than in a more long-term asteroid belt. There are chunks in this belt that are probably as large as some of the smaller moons in our own system, a lot of 'mountain-sized' chunks, down to a LOT of dust that hasn't yet been swept up by the larger stuff. I see the profession of prospector as more of a 'full time solitary pilot' with only rare social interactions rather than the more rugged, bar-fighting-every-time-he-roars-into_town on his barely broken wild stallion kind of person. It is a LOT more difficult to set up saloons and cat houses in space with airlocks and the constant need to bring EVERYTHING in, including air and water, than it was in the wild west. So I don't think brawling is necessarily a prospector skill set. Being proficient in hand weapons that work in vacuum seems like a probable skill (lasers or hand-held missile launchers to destroy small, unexpected meteors just about to smash your helmet to smithereens, for example) and using ship mounted weapons too - both to protect the ship from collisions and pirates. And estimating trajectories, both from the control seat and when in a spacesuit outside. And yes, chemistry and some construction techniques, perhaps handling explosives, general rocket repair skills and familiarity with tools, cooking and housekeeping. Some prospectors might set up a still in the spare cargo compartment, or even brew their own drugs. Probably many of them are good programmers. None of that, other than the trajectory estimation and the familiarity with hand weapons, seems to me to be useful in fighting. I'm looking for some awesome secret weapon that nobody (other than us!! ) will ever expect. Thanks all so far!
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Post by dans on Oct 30, 2023 0:43:00 GMT
I also agree that robot asteroid prospecting is way more likely in our own solar system and our own civilizations, than humans in single crew rockets, but in this story, mid-80s, Earth humans don't have robots or AI yet, and while Thoron technology might have advanced that far, for the last 50 years ago they have had to struggle to retain what is still left of their technology while being bombarded from space. Cheaper to build a spaceship for a human pilot, probably...
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Post by redsycorax on Oct 30, 2023 1:22:14 GMT
Unfortunately, our own solar system has no known super-terrestroid planets, so we can't see for ourselves what happens when a super-earth like Krypton explodes. We know that some of its ejecta fell into Rao, much as Wegthor's fragments did when Jax-Ur's carelessness destroyed that satellite, and probably advanced the imminent destruction of Krypton due to the ensuing electromagnetic or gravitational effects.
Some of the fragments might have hit Thoron, although it seems as an advanced civilisation, it might have had spectrographic early warning that Krypton's core was volatile or unstable, and had orbital particle beam or laser installations either in thoronostationary orbit or on its satellites ready to zap any incoming debris. I'm assuming that as an advanced civilisation, Thoron would have also been able to protect itself against the electromagnetic pulse that would have resulted from the nuclear chain reaction that obliterated Krypton.
We know that some of the kryptonite was scattered into interstellar space, possibly by the space warp Kal-L's rocket made when it escaped from Rao's solar system. As for its planetary debris, it seems that the Jewel Mountains and Gold Volcano were volatilised and transformed into gold and jewel kryptonite rather than green kryptonite, and magno-kryptonite seems to be a sub-variety of green kryptonite caused when the Magnetic Mountains were destroyed. However, for some reason, Krypton's Fire Falls were wholly preserved almost intact- Supergirl bathed in them at one point with no ill effects, so it cannot be composed of green kryptonite. The above suggests that the explosion of Krypton produced fragments that had differential effects given their pre-detonation kryptological chemical and elemental composition in some cases. Most of it became green kryptonite, but clearly not all of it.
Therefore, I may have an inferred motive for an asteroid miner prospecting Krypton's ruins. Let's say that there are useful post-detonation kryptonite variants that resulted from the explosion and our prospector is trying to get her or his hands on those. As for competing prospectors, perhaps they were both in the Thoronian interplanetary armed forces and acquired useful space-based combat skills, whether suit to suit or within small, mobile exploratory spacecraft.
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Post by dans on Oct 30, 2023 1:36:03 GMT
I have been positing that there are small amounts of kryptonite other than Green K in the rubble of the Krypton-2 explosion. While most other colors than green of Kryptonite are rare, so far at least 3 types have been discovered in the K-Belt - green, white, and jewel (also called 'endurite' on Thoron).
That's a good point about the super emp - but Thoron would have been almost fully shielded, I think, given that I established it as the 'counter-Krypton' - exactly 180 degrees away following the same orbit.
There are probably some Thoronan military or police vets now working as prospectors. I suppose I could give Fion Drim pretty much any background I choose, but she has virtually no brawling, fighting, or combat experience. Which is why I'm hoping that we can figure out some kind of likely skill she can use by surprise in a fight with a superhuman.
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Post by redsycorax on Oct 30, 2023 2:22:17 GMT
Ah. If white and jewel kryptonite-two have analogous effects to their kryptonite-one counterparts, then there could be good reason for asteroid prospecting in the K Belt. Jewel kryptonite-two might have applications in telepathic receptivity and psionic criminal apprehension, if Thoron has any criminal telepaths. If white K-two operates analogously to its K-one counterpart, then it could be useful as defoliant if Thoron has problems with predatory vegetation (say, something like John Wyndham's Triffids or Anne MacCaffrey's Pern "threads"). One advantage of having a scantily detailed world is that you can embellish and detail at will.
You could make your protagonist a xenobiologist, which could be useful in deducing possible vulnerabilities when it came to alien protagonists. Particularly if Thoron has comparative expertise in the life sciences to Daxam in Universe-One, which was said to be highly advanced.
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Post by dans on Oct 30, 2023 13:09:35 GMT
white k kills plant life in the E2 universe. I don't know what other qualities jewel K has in the E2 universe, but on Thoron they use it as the crystal in their super powerful x-ray lasers.
I'd like to put a surprise but plausible twist to the final confrontation between 2 characters with similar power sets, one of whom (the bad guy) is considerably more powerful than the other.
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Post by redsycorax on Oct 30, 2023 21:12:57 GMT
Say that the apparently powerful character has an achilles heel of their own that's commonplace. Lead vulnerability's already been done, but why not have them vulnerable to inert atmospheric elements like xenon, argon, krypton or neon? Which are commonplace on Earth, but may not exist on the assailant's homeworld and may indeed be toxic to them? Or anasality- they lack a sense of smell altogether?
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