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Dune
Ghostmaker:
--- Quote from: Premier on May 03, 2022, 01:08:05 PM ---
--- Quote from: David Johansen on April 29, 2022, 12:31:21 AM ---I keep thinking there's no way they'd have thrown lasgun fire around so indiscriminately in the books. Not a chance, shields are ubiquitous and you're gonna hit one and every house in the landsrad is going to shriek "NUKE" and hit the button.
--- End quote ---
I'm not sure the second sentence there is correct. I mean, yes, the Great Convention prohibits the use of atomics, and everyone will gang up on you if you break it... but my understanding is that the proscription only extends to proper, actual nukes, and shield-lasgun reactions don't fall under the convention. In no small part because they can happen too easily by accident, and there's also the very ambiguous question of which side should be held responsible.
Or did Frank Herbert explicitly state that reaction explosions are also forbidden?
--- End quote ---
They're not. As far as I can recall, it's only actual nuclear devices, and ONLY used against humans (Paul makes a point of this late in the original novel, when he nukes part of the Shield Wall ridge so his forces can reach Arrakeen).
I admit I'm surprised that weapons which utilize the lasgun-shield reaction didn't exist. I'd have wired up those fuckers in a heartbeat and started lobbing them at people who annoyed me.
BoxCrayonTales:
Frank's books suffer from what TVtropes calls "misapplied phlebotinum" a lot because he wrote it to be a philosophical tract first rather than a technology exploration like other scifi authors of the time did. Other scifi authors were physicists and scientists who wrote what they knew, often neglecting things like character. Frank was a journalist who could write characters, politics, religion, etc but didn't do so well when it came to the actual science. He thankfully leaves most of the science unexplained, but what little he does explain any significant detail is about as nonsensical as typical technobabble is.
hedgehobbit:
--- Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on July 19, 2022, 11:58:38 AM ---Frank was a journalist who could write characters, politics, religion, etc but didn't do so well when it came to the actual science.
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That explains so much. The lack of scientific accuracy doesn't bother me nearly as much as Dune's lack of business accuracy. While some might read the book and think "OMG, the ecology makes no sense", I'm reading and thinking "OMG why isn't the Duke leveraging his future earnings to pay his startup costs?!?!"
Manic Modron:
I wonder if Sandworms can digest non-organic things. If so, ever since the Imperium started in on Arrakis one thing that might supplement their diet would be harvesters.
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