03-29-2016, 11:13 PM
(03-27-2016, 03:47 PM)Lost Rinoah Wrote: They'd be cold to the touch (Although not freezing just slightly uncomfortable like wet clothing cold, although they'd feel even colder the warmer it is.) and probably have a set of "netting" laced through their fur for the temperature regulation. It's more efficient to have it collect to a single point where the heat is rapidly expelled like a radiator. Thing is it would constantly be hot enough to start fires at such a point, which would allow them to use that thermal energy to increase the battery life/reduce strain on the avali. Thus likely on the back with what would amount to a basic HEV computer and regulation systems about as small as a fannypack. They'd also probably have an in mouth breathing regulator that would be VERY uncomfortable without long periods of training beforehand. Connected to the cooling net-work.I don't know if a mesh would have sufficient coverage--you'd end up with a patchwork of hot and cold spots that would be at best uncomfortable for the avali. I don't think it would be hot enough to start fires, since it's just taking the ambient heat it absorbs from the environment and re-radiating it. Think of it like a mirror that reflects heat instead of light. I'm thinking some sort of nanotechnology that evenly covers the exposed surfaces would be necessary, including internal organs that could be exposed to air like the lungs or stomach.
But again, a whole lot of handwaving here if I want avali to be able to work in environments the rest of us find comfortable without big, clunky environmental suits that obscure their faces (usually a bad thing in cinematography). Sigh. This it probably one of those things I should just kind of ignore.
I did figure out how Rhaomi's able to breathe without a hydrogen tank--internal apparatus that strips hydrogen from water vapor. So he'd need to carry a supply of hydrogen to operate in low-humidity areas such as deserts or, ironically, cold regions
(03-27-2016, 03:47 PM)Lost Rinoah Wrote: On icy worlds and in icy zones what rocks actually visibly show up are mineral rich, meaning metals are easily obtained. But limited in use to hand pounding in most cases. Meaning basic hooks, wire, and snares. How are they mineral rich? Volcanoes originally formed the island and all of the softer stone has been worn off over metal deposits by ice flows.Yeah, but now we're back to the problem of an oxidizer, which will be rare, otherwise a) it would use up all the hydrogen and b) the whole atmosphere would probably explode. And even if you can shape the metal, it's not going to work as well in the extreme cold experienced on Avalon. At our temperatures, iron weapons and armor are quiet useful, but on Avalon it's like making armor out of glass. Some metals perform better than others, of course. Copper seems to still bend well, but there are limitations on what you can do with copper.
Wait wait WAIT! On a world with a hydrogen atmosphere. Fires would burn WAY hotter and produce pure water although hard to start. That's how hydrogen reactors work(partly). Our environment rapidly reacts with hydrogen which is why we don't have enough to have produced hydrogen tech as early as we could have otherwise.
I HAVE FOUND THE MISSING LINK!
Hydrogen reactors produced as early as the stone age by accident. that would have been a tech catalyst right in front of them that could have slingshotted them like metalwork did for us along a very different set of discoveries.
I don't think you could make a hydrogen reactor* in the stone age, as that requires not only hydrogen to burn but also machinery to channel that energy in a useful way. Early avali would basically have fires just like we did, but hotter.
*"Hydrogen reactor" seems to refer to several different things. My first thought was hydrogen fusion, which we still haven't mastered. Commercial hydrogen reactors that you can purchase today work by stripping the electrons from hydrogen and pumping it through membranes, just like cells do in aerobic respiration. You seem to be talking about hydrogen internal combustion engines, which actually burn hydrogen.
(03-27-2016, 03:47 PM)Lost Rinoah Wrote: I actually have a point to make on the prior point about, cannibalism stuff. I'll leave a spoiler here this time.That's an artifact of a) unusual desperate circumstances and b) modern society where most people don't know how to hunt. It's also a really lousy survival mechanism, because how much sustenance are you going to get from someone who died starving?
Actions in such specific and desperate circumstances cannot be generalized to a whole way of life. Further, for early humans and human ancestors, not knowing how to hunt was not an option. Everybody hunted and foraged.
(03-27-2016, 03:47 PM)Lost Rinoah Wrote: As I said, we are lucky we have vast amounts of edible plants. We WERE and ARE hunters in the absence of easily edible plants. Look at the Western and Northernmost Inuit culture(I hesitantly call them by the insult Eskimo to make sure people know of what I speak...) Entirely based around hunting culture and survival all. They're just lucky enough to have others trade them some other things now and eventually found some roots that they then took into use.I think you have it kind of backwards. When we're talking about human ancestors and how our species started out, what the Inuits do doesn't matter any more than what British and Americans do. None of those groups existed then--we were all near-human apes living in Africa, where we had both plants and animals to eat. That was the environment that shaped us, and it shaped us to be omnivores. Only later when we used our extreme adaptability to expand into areas where foraging was not viable did some of us (like the Inuits) switch to more purely hunter lifestyle.
So the Inuits went from omnivores to near carnivores, rather than from carnivores to omnivores. It's not so much that we were and are hunters, it's that we were and are adaptable.
And of course, we can tell from the fossil record that both human ancestors and our evolutionary cousins were built for eating plants as well as meat. Homo habilis, for instance, ate both meat and plant material, possibly including things we would find quite unappetizing like leaves and woody stems.
It's not really meaningful to speculate that humans would have evolved to be hunters in the absence of edible plants, any more than it is to speculate that elephants would. Humans and elephants were both shaped by the availability of edible plants--without that, they would have evolved in very different directions and wouldn't be humans and elephants, but something else.
This is not to say that humans can't be fearsome hunters. One school of thought on the question of why Africa has so many fearsome animals (everything from big cats to super-aggressive honeybees) is that they evolved to be fearsome to survive in the face of an even more fearsome predator: us.