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Proof-reading EG
#11
By all means - if you're in a mood to do artwork to help flesh out the setting we're happy to consider anything you'd like to show usSmile

Todd
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#12
In the article for GEvidian, there's a passage referencing the hip-located neural mass once believed to be possessed by certain dinosaur species:

"Early on, e had developed a technique of augmenting the dinosaurian hip ganglion into a genuine brain through generous wetware and symbiotic neurobionanotech..."


According to the most recent findings, although stegosaurs and sauropods did have a skeletal cavity in their hip region, it apparently did not house a neural ganglion or "second brain", but instead is believed to have contained an organ analogous to the glycogen body in birds (here is an article from Smithsonian.com on this subject).
"We are not simply in the universe, we are part of it. We are born from it. One might even say we have been empowered by the universe to figure itself out — and we have only just begun." -Neill deGrasse Tyson
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#13
Biology/paleontology is not my area of expertise, but this seems simple enough to correct and make more robust in the process. Perhaps change the sentence to read:

"Early on, e had developed a technique of augmenting the modest dinosaurian brain into an organ capable of supporting a fully sophont mind through the use of generous wetware and symbiotic neurobionanotech..."

OR, if we wanted to change it up a bit more...

"Early on, e had developed a technique using generous wetware and symbiotic neurobionanotech to augment the modest dinosaurian brain into an organ capable of supporting a fully sophont mind..."

Or something like that.

Will give this some time for others to weigh in and then update the EG accordingly.

Thanks for catching this!

ToddSmile
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#14
The Cygexpa article refers to "multi decade stable agrav cloth", which appears to be a reference to a magical ultratech product in one of Vinge's works (a fire on the deep maybe?) but has no other mentions in OA. Perhaps the name could be changed to something more in keeping with the scenario?
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#15
Yes. This is obviously some form of clarketech, but I can't imagine any way that even clarketech could allow antigravity cloth. Since we removed Ylem from the scenario, we should remove or modify this as well. Perhaps one of the mooted (slightly less fantastic) replacements for Ylem might be used instead; a cloth that absorbs a wide range of wavelengths and converts them to useable power, perhaps?
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#16
The context of the agrav quote is key:

Quote:The early Age of Crisis period saw a further crucial undermining of the Cygexba empire. The so-called Tonebtor Transcend flooded the market with agrav cloth of multi-decade stability and saw some fortunes made and others broken. A number of Zoeific Biopolity struck it rich at the same time that at least a dozen Cygexba wormhole-control AIs decided to defect to the Biopolity. The Biopolity corps were suddenly in a position to invest in and buy off memetically entire strategic star systems and polities

So what we need is a replacement product that could conceivably have the same effect.
OA Wish list:
  1. DNI
  2. Internal medical system
  3. A dormbot, because domestic chores suck!
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#17
I knew I heard that term before. Ylem.
There are a few articles that I've run across that haven't been retconned.

Conversations and Jokes
Hermes ISO
Interstellar Singleship
Oracle War, The

This seems to be analogous to the modern-day OA's magmatter in some respects. How would one create ylem and maintain it? (One of the reasons it was removed, I guess...)
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#18
Yelm wasn't like magmatter, essentially it was a "femtotech" material that could take in any form of energy and convert it into itself. So one could shine a light on it and it would grow just on the basis of that.

It was removed before I joined OA but I'd periodically read OA for the year preceding. Yelm and other mentions of pico/femtotech put me off for a while but then the project decided to use less exotic/soft-SF things. Part of why that's a big challenge is that the project is so old and has had literally hundreds of people contribute to it over various times. Big overhauls are difficult.
OA Wish list:
  1. DNI
  2. Internal medical system
  3. A dormbot, because domestic chores suck!
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#19
I think we do intend to re-introduce Ylem in some form, so those articles can stay as they are. We just need to tweak it from its original, almost certainly unphysical description to a (slightly) more realistic one. Note, however. that clarketech is suppose to be mysterious, so we shouldn't eliminate it altogether IMO.
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#20
Oh. That's what this ylem was. My bad~

The retconning of femo- and picotech devices is still noticeable in some areas of the site.
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