On 20 Dec 2003, at 12:25 am, David Hobby wrote:
"If shields are even possible"? Don't tell me that you want to only allow starships that use what is accepted as real physics! If so, you might even have to give up your ramships... I can certainly design a good warship under those constraints, but I can't recall any stories that have such ships. (Help?) My guess is that the fairest thing is to get a good sample of stories, and allow any physics that occurs in more than half of them. (With obvious translations, so ansible = subspace radio = backchannel communicator, and so on.)
Given the progression in E E 'Doc' Smith's _Skylark_ series something around Skylark X would be a multiverse smasher :)
And that series started in 1915 :)
{And then he wrote the Lensman series...}
-- William T Goodall Mail : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web : http://www.wtgab.demon.co.uk Blog : http://radio.weblogs.com/0111221/
"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." - Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949
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