Recent content by PeterDebney

Don’t forget that Shepherd Book in Firefly was essentially a Believer before mustering out (plus other, mysterious careers - where are they revealed?) with the intent to become a missionary. Of course, it didn’t quite work out that way…

Speech recognition is AI. It works by artificial neural networks trained on speech. But crucially it is not generative AI. Dragon and its kin try to reproduce what you say and not make up words for you (except by accident). This is key. Generative AI is trained on the works of creative humans...

Rather than fuel, I would use one of these options (usually #2) if time was important.

Option 2 is my favourite as well.

Easy interplanetary distances When not jumping between star systems, travellers sometimes need to fly between planets, but what is the distance between them? The referee can keep careful track of exactly where all the planets are or take the easy approach (as long as their ship has an M Drive)...

The theory goes that Roman stone trackways, aligned grooves in stone paving for carts, led to the modern railways. This includes the gag about the railway gauge being based on the width of the Roman horses’ ass (or similar spelling…) The jury is out whether these grooves were manufactured or...

… They became free and called themselves K’Kree

Can you imagine how dangerous cows would be if they gained high intelligence and access to weapons…?

Agriculture is the second most dangerous career in the UK and ninth in the US (or second if you treat fishing as part of agriculture), due to all that exposed heavy machinery waiting to rip your arm off, or heavy animals. Cows kill a lot of people, whether by taking an active dislike to you...

There are also the Esseray, the Non-playable Non-Terran Alien species from The Fall of Tinath adventure.

So, like a cat's claw attached to the base of the thumb. Like a cat's dewclaw it will help with holding on to prey and soft objects, but in combat I would think that their digit claws would be more dangerous. I can also see why Aslan have lower dexterity, as manipulating objects will be harder...

I don't have that one. Please can you share the image?

That looks like Claw option #1, and the hands do look very strange.

One aspect of the Aslan that has long bothered me is the illustrations of their dew claw. I have not yet seen one that makes anatomical sense: none of them allow for the claw to be inside the “hand” or limb and leave the whole still functional. As far as I know there are 4 possible solutions...

I would agree that you should not increase the mass, but rather increase the size. But to what? I note that the sun (G2V) is predicted to become a red giant, but if size TBC. I don’t have the book to hand but I would say that, in principle, if your main sequence star is too old to remain in the...