The Pub Discussion Board

Dame mt wife came woundeing why I was crying, good but sad chapter keep up the work

(posted from the Item Information Page)

damn awesome chapter.. serious impact there... :'(

also to put a final lid on the stuff in space fantasy. you guys are all forgetting orbital mechanics.  a LEO is between 7800m/s and 6900m/s GEO 3100m/s  so aside form getting something the required height (you guys seem to be going "magically"(somewhat logical assumption but hey) straight up. you would need to accelerate your object in space to the required orbital velocity else it will just fall down back to earth again.  so i kinda dont see that happening.

Okay im gonna put an idea out their Eric

David convinces the king to let broken wands have a shot at earnning citizenship back ala Suicide Squad

(posted from Chapter 12: May)

Better question:  Why would David, who would just as soon see those people rot in jail as be free in Earth, attempt to convince the king to bring them back?

Eric Storm

Terrific!  I can say enough about how much I've enjoyed this story from the beginning.  I know fawning isn't terribly helpful to your writing. I just wanted to let you know how much I appreciate the fact that you write well and that you follow through with your stories to the end. Your characters have depth and breadth that make them seem real.  Please keep up the great work.

(posted from Chapter 6: November)

There is one honking-big problem with putting criminals on the lines : what if they turn traitor?
They could do one HELL of a lot of damage by turning their wands on their leaders.

(posted from the Item Information Page)

Which is exactly what I was going to say, darthel.  Those that don't defect are likely to desert, thus creating a much BIGGER problem for the Rimohrs.  Oh, sure, the Rimohrs will eventually catch up with them, but how long is that going to take, given the number of people they'd have to look for?

The other thing I was going to say is:  Neitherspace, SLOW DOWN and check your damned typing. I got a headache from trying to interpret your typo-riddled message.  I'm quite sure you know the word "the" doesn't have a "g" in it, thus they're not spelling errors, so don't try using that as an excuse.

Eric Storm

New GPS. Nice touch.

But wouldn't you need at least one more point?
If i remember correctly, the tool measures a distance perfectly and a directional arrow very well, but until you are close there could be some variation.
That would give you the radius and a direction twards a point on a sphere, not a fixed location.
This would imply to me the further you get away from David's locker the wider the line on a map would be of potential "i was here."

Now i know that David is using more then just the tool to figure out where he was, but if the devices are about to be created for more then just David, being able to grab measurements from 3 or more locations would give you that fixed position.

This of course is all assuming i remember correctly.

What an awesome book! Sure there ups and downs but thats life. But the imagination to create a story like this and by the number of fans there are on this site is credit to this man's skill in storytelling.
Is there a place in the forums for story ideas for us to give feedback to you Eric or private messages?
BTW: 2 points make a line, as the crow flies (or a jay) in map-making. Measuring up this hill, around that boulder and right at the three trees is useless. His device for the Black Academy was accurate and didn't have to configure the planes to fly at the same altitude.

(posted from the Item Information Page)

Not sure exactly how you consider that "cheating".  The device measures along the ground, that is, around the surface of the sphere, as opposed to measuring in free space.  The only way this is "cheating" is that you can't really do it directly with technology: technology requires calculations to do this same task... which we do regularly, by the way, because Earth-surface distances are really the only important distances we use for positioning things on the planet...

So, yes, I guess if you want to call it "cheating", it is... really, it's just the inherent benefit to using magic over technology in the Dugerra universe.  Divination is more intuitive than a GPS beam: it can tell what it is you want to know, and tell you that.  The GPS beam just tells you "The satellite is over there...." even if I didn't care where the satellite was... and usually, I don't.

private: If you have an idea you wish to share, either just put it into the Eric Storm general discussion thread, or if you want to discuss it in... ahem... private...  (Sorry, could not resist that one...) then you can email me.  If you're viewing this in the full forum, you can click the "E-mail" link under my name at the left of this message.  If you're viewing this on a story page, just open a chapter and scroll to its bottom.  You can use the feedback form to send an email, just change the option in the radio boxes to send email instead of post to the forum.

If the idea is specific to a story already in progress, you can also put the idea in that story thread, again, if you don't mind it being talked about in public.

One final way to get a hold of me is to use the Contact Us form on the main part of the website.  Not really what it's there for, but I won't yell at you for using it that way...

Eric Storm

Crusader wrote:

ah cheating.
not sure how I forgot about magic...

fixed... of course magic is cheating it always has and will be.

My problem is that I spent two hours starting to brainstorm a program where you know how far away and what direction 2 robots are, and have to get them into the same "mile" to get them to high five.

That is why I was trying to use logic to determine how the MAGIC told David where he was. I just immediately went to how would I program that.

I don't think it would be a 180 degree arc. more likely you wouldn't get much higher then about 10, but unless I finish off the program I wouldn't know for sure, because I would make the program do the math for me.

I wasn't even trying to figure in curvature or height at first.

Crusader:  I was just speaking geometrically.  Two-dimensional direction, plus distance, will give you a 180-degree arc, minus a miniscule, infinitesimally small section at each end where the points on the circle are directly above or below where you're currently standing.

The easiest way for your robots to "connect", given that they do not need to know absolute position, but only relative position to each other, is for each to have a transmitter and two receivers.  The receivers should be offset in such a way as to be able to use the timing difference of reception to indicate three-dimensional direction to the other robot.

Eric Storm

I don't like it when people delete their messages.  Stand by what you say.  So here is the message I was replying to, which has been "edited out":

Malkav666 wrote:

I have to point out that most major empires loved conscripting untrustworthy cannonfodder.   
          The British empire , one of the greatest ever, extensively used criminals in times of major conflicts, including rapists and murderers,  and basicly anyone able bodied . Or drunks who wanted the 1/3 pint of rum a day. Napoleons army  was basicly every male of fighting age that was forced into the army and sent to die.
     
       The Roman and mongol empires extensively used people in their armys they had recently conquered via butchering a large percentage of the population (lots of complete hatred)
I haven't studied other empires in such detail but thoes types of things seemed to be used by every great empire before very recent times.
They kept order by brutally punishing or killing anyone who acted up.



PS from what I understand your ideas from a long while ago on this thread about the danger of giving poorly trained troops military rifles being more a danger to their side has been studied a lot and the prevailing conclusion for WW2 and earlier is the side that shoots the most bullets usually wins.
Meaning everyone they can force through basic weapons training should get military grade weapons.

There's one huge, whopping, mountain-dragon sized flaw in your logic:

Callamandia is not an empire.

Callamandia is a single nation with no expansionist ambitions.  They are fighting to defend themselves, not to conquer someone else.  When empires conscript the unscrupulous the key is they send them AWAY to fight and die.  Callamandia would be stuck with these criminals on their own soil.  In the age of empires, if a few (or a lot) of criminals deserted, it made no never-mind to the emperor: those people were thousands of miles away and no trouble to him.  In fact, the carnage and chaos they might cause as simple criminals would be beneficial to the invading force.  If the Callamandian king tried this, he'd be unleashing those bastards on his own people.

As to your point about "he who shoots the most bullets, wins"... you'll note that the concept isn't valid once you get into the era of the highly trained soldier with a highly accurate weapon.  Every single person fighting in the Third Were War has a minimum of four years of training with his "weapon" (his magic), and the accuracy of his weapon is that of a guided missile launcher.  It's an environment where skill is a tad more important than mere numbers.  I will say it one more time:  You cannot apply the concepts of Earth warfare to magical battle.  The two don't even resemble the same activity.

Eric Storm

PS: Confused about why you're saying hi to yourself.  Has your account been compromised?