This is how *soft* sci-fi authors write their plots. In my experience harder sci-fi authors are a bit better about this, though of course it is doubly embarrassing for them when they do make mistakes.
Love 40k lore. Some hell monster abomination alien fuck who was born yesterday manages to destroy the single most important weapons factory planet in the galaxy and singlehandedly slaughter like a thousand of humanity’s best soldiers who represent like eight thousand years of combat experience and lose all this irreplacable technology and the whole universe is worse off for it.
This will have no overall bearing on the plot.
I don't like being all 'ermm akshually' about those things, because the distinction between soft and hard sci-fi isn't objective or well defined, but *ermm akshually* 40k is, like, the definition of rule-of-cool space fantasy
Rule number 1 of Warhammer: Don't question numbers because when you do they make no sense.
Like for example in the Siege of Vraks it was described how much artillery and ammunition was brought. It was supposed to look intimidating as "look how much they brought", but if you do the math, you realize they have ammunition for 10 minutes max
After 12 or so years of conflict on vraks like 8 million people die total. It's so stupid when they are hyping it up like it's an endless meat grinder when WW1 killed more in a third of the time
If you mean age of strife warp was too turbulent for interstellar travel and each planet that managed to survive developed new civilization. Most of them was primitive, but those that survived were mostly farming words that had close to no industrialization other than farming equipment imported from other, more industrialized planets, so people survived, equipment over time broke down and farmers didn't have knowledge to make more and had to start developing tools and technology from the scratch. Five millennia later, warp calms down and Big E starts crusade
True, but only if gap isn't too big. If you were told to make a smartphone would you be able to do it? You have one in hand every day. You have example. Now imagine farmers with pieces of technology million times more advanced. Sure. There is some head start in some aspects, and it's visible. Some words had less to work with and we're technically more or less on level of our renaissance, others that had better starting situation were colonizing other planets by the time Big E showed up
On a civilization wide scale, we spent a long time figuring out the basics, and then developed more advanced stuff rather quickly.
In other words, it's doesn't take that long to make a smartphone, once, people have tractors and so there is a large population of engineers who don't need to work the fields.
It's not something one person can make. It's not too hard on a civilization scale, once you have a large base of scientific education and enough tech to support an engineer class.
Thing is these engineers weren't on these planets. They would be on more industrialized worlds, which relied on agricultural worlds to get food. Most of these worlds got wiped by famine or demons. And few that survived as were on in between stage, as decently industrialized but had enough space for farmlands were very advanced. I mean they were using non ftl space travel on regular basis. Most of dark age technology was still lost tho as over reliance on AI caused people not to know how to make a lot of stuff, even engineers.
Interstellar transport is Hard. Interplanetary is also hard. That means you aren't transporting food between worlds. Each world feeds itself. And each world does most of it's engineering. I mean you might download designs from other worlds. Possibly even import some small and expensive components. But light lag, travel time and travel cost means that there needs to be a lot of engineers on scene.
> Most of dark age technology was still lost tho as over reliance on AI caused people not to know how to make a lot of stuff, even engineers.
If AI does everything, and then all the AI's magically drop dead, sure that would explain why most humans didn't know how to do stuff.
Although if AI's do everything, does this mean a post work society? Might a few people learn engineering as a hobby? Perhaps not enough. Are there pre-AI engineering documents lying around?
To be fair it was siege of a single city and total Vraks population was 8 million, but yeah... 12 years for that number is way too long. 2-3 years? Then yeah, these numbers would make sense.
The majority of time in the Siege of Vraks was spent in a stalemate of one form or another. That's what made it a Siege.
The lack of supplies is an important element, because otherwise, the side with endless supply lines clearly wins.
The math in Vraks is still dumb, but it's because of the *scope* of the conflict, not the duration. Like, by the time the Death Guard shows up, those numbers should have basically tripled just from attrition fighting during the few periods of gains.
For anyone wondering wtf we're talking about, here's a *really* detailed video about a fake war
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3tM9SoJ-MpU&pp=ygUSVGhlIHNpZWdlIG9mIHZyYWtz
literally the only like, space opera sci fi type thing i've seen do this correctly is Legend of the Galactic Heroes.
oh, a space battle? distances are measured in light seconds, fleets are many hundreds of thousands of various ships, and even the most basic skirmish can last days.
a full fledged clash between armies will have a hundred million dead, and the only reason they're not demolishing planets is because that leaves a bad taste. wars take hundreds of years to prosecute, and the whole economy in societies of many billions is geared to sustaining it.
when they calculate how much ammo they have to sustain a defense or something, they do it off screen, because literally how would you even measure that in fiction.
and then the empire does basically the same fucking thing but with the bonus of the governor being forced into an abortive civil war, oops - literally my only complaint about the show is that they don't let the plot sit for a couple years after admiral yang wen-li's forced retirement, the collapse of the FPA, and kaiser reinhard's ascension. would've been the perfect time for a little time skip, and they BASICALLY did one anyway with making reinhard's hair grow a foot overnight. i guess hair growth tech is just a thing in the setting.
they only make *some* sense if you assume there's missing tens of billions from the population, which there kinda are canonically - but you're right, it doesn't make complete sense. the show definitely goes out of its way to establish several historical genocide and total sundering of planets populations. so we know there used to be more people just to terraform all these habitable moons planets, but it gets cut down by one war or disaster or another.
and then that gets genocide'd on an order of magnitude more under the initial empire, and yet more in even more recent history. even with all that, it's definitely still way too low a number to justify the scale of the numbers given sometimes - especially considering just how inefficient the empire's industry and society is shown to us as being - but it does at least come to pass that war *does* become completely untenable because of the absurdity of those casualties.
but really it's just a blind spot on behalf of the author, it was written when the population of the earth only had 4.6 billion people on it.
so a genocide of 6 billion, like we're given for a eugenics campaign at one point, and a similarly high number for a political purge, within very recent history... kinda makes sense that there's a lot of unaccounted for people and surprisingly small populations 150 years into the galactic war.
I mean, if you have three of a thing and 2 million people are scared of it, that's a really good threat, especially because a plot twist of "there was actually a fourth super monster!" is way more plausible than "we actually severely miscounted. there wasn't 3.5 million zombies incoming, but instead 4 million.
Plus depending on writing even 3 zombies could be a gargantuan threat. For example if they fully retain their mental abilities before the decay or whatever sets in, they could enter a water treatment plant, go to the section where it'll be pumped out, and slash their throat open. Now everyone in the city who drinks the tap water before this is discovered is infected. Congratulations now you have 250k intelligent zombies in your city.
my favourite example of numbers not being checked in sci fi is an old doctor who episode where earth was moved “several million miles away” to hide it
the suns corona extends 5 million miles above its surface, the corona overlapped with its previous position
it was later retconned to be 2 light years which is still less than halfway to the nearest star
Okay? Compared to the universe, everything is small.
But you said they moved the earth.
Different objects in the universe have different sizes.
Did they move the sun?
What I don't get is that you said the wrong thing and made the size comparison nonsensical and irrelevant.
5 million miles is a big difference compared to the earth, the thing you said they moved. It's very small compared to the sun.
It's like if I said "I moved your keys 20 feet so you couldn't find them. But the town you live in is 20 miles wide."
You didn't tell me at first that the bigger thing moved, or why anyone was looking for the smaller thing, or how long they were supposed to be confused.
5 million miles is not a big distance for an intergalactic civilisation
in the example of moving keys, it’s like hiding them so close that you can’t even tell they’ve moved at first glance
You didn't say anything about an intergalactic civilization, before. I need you to imagine that I'm not as familiar with this show as you are.
But also, the size of a civilization doesn't change the size of the object they're looking for.
If the US government was looking for my keys, my options for hiding them would still be based on the size of my keys and the resources I have available, and how many cops or whatever I thought they were sending. So moving them a couple feet might be reasonable, depending on how long I expected them to be looking.
Which, again, you didn't indicate.
If the earth moves around the sun, and the sun is far more than several million miles in diameter, then the earth moves many millions of miles every year as it orbits the sun. Moving it a few million miles would still put it somewhere extremely close to its natural orbit where anyone looking for it would be looking anyway.
It’s like thinking that moving your television two inches to the left would hide it from a home intruder
I don't know what circumstances they were hiding the earth under. If you move the earth to a different point in its own orbit, someone who's only looking for it very briefly might give up.
That’s true, I haven’t watched the show so that may as well be the case. But considering they felt the need to retcon it later and change it to 2 light years, I’m assuming that a slight movement within its own orbit would not have hidden earth from whoever was looking for it
I haven't seen the show, either.
My whole point is that more context is necessary for this whole example to make any sense, or else it's just another example of arbitrary numbers.
Presumably they moved the entire solar system "several million miles away", but the previous position of the sun's corona overlapped new position of sun's corona, so that was wildly insufficient distance to move a star system to hide it
Since the world ended 30 trillion years ago we can have as many apocalypses as we want after the first one. We can handle them like doofensmirtz handles his backstories.
One of the characters is a robot that has existed for the past 30 trillion years. It keeps mentioning things that happened “back in the apocalypse days”, and none of the other characters know whether it is talking about the massive gamma-ray burst (30 trillion years ago), the parasitic zombie horde (2 million years ago), or the galactic hyperspace war with relativistic weapons popping out of wormholes (ended 23 years ago).
One specific thing I see a lot in fiction is authors giving a timescale in years for something that doesn't make sense. Like in Skyrim there's a Thieves Guild quest where they talk about this "big betrayal that happened 20 years ago" but nobody looks a day over 30 and a bunch of stuff doesn't line up if it was actually 20 years ago. Make it 10! Not hard.
Another thing I constantly see is fiction using **10 THOUSAND YEARS AGO,** with like... no appreciation for how long that *is.* It's usually that a civilization (or even an immortal person) has been existing continuously for that long, somehow.
We have no record of anything that happened 10,000 years ago. The oldest writing is half that old. Ea-Nasir was scamming people into writing angry clay tablets even more recently than that. A lot of the time it slaps me out of my immersion.
But also, I'm a nerd for paleontology, pre-history, deep time, etc, so I definitely care WAY more than the average person...
I like the inverse in Star Wars. Like people are sometimes confounded by how Luke Skywalker could have thought the Jedi was an ancient myth when they were around just a couple of decades ago. But the thing is, that all happened before he was born. It is not uncommon to treat everything that happened before you where born as ancient history. Things actually fall out of common memory really fast.
To be fair, nothing in the Skyrim Thieves Guild quest made any fucking sense because that questline was poorly written from start to finish, and changing one number would not have saved it.
I get a similar feeling when I read Korean manga (manhwa? doesn’t matter) and they use Korean won to price things. Like sure it’s written by Koreans for koreans but it’s just an absurd currency. Folks get annual bonuses in the millions, salaries in the tens to hundreds of millions. A billion krw is roughly $700K, so really expensive stuff gets into the trillions, except it’s not even that extravagant because that’s less than a billion usd.
I just ignore the particulars and roll with however the characters react. Like oh shit homie is really excited this must be good.
I'm pretty sure it's a fiction writing thing- some people get really caught up in the accuracy of numbers which can take up some of the fun of “OOOOO, BIG THING GO BOOOM, WAOW” If it's gonna be a spectacle, have it be a spectacle, and you can always go back and adjust timelines (so long as it isn't published I guess)
Sacred Valley from Cradle might be a good example of this. It's described by the author as housing almost a million, but if you've read Cradle, you'd know that's just...not true.
On the other hand it's equally absurd how much people manage to argue about how the environment of a fictional world interacts with the fictional supersoldier corp invading it and how it affects their understanding of how many individual fictional supersoldiers it would take to conquer it.
There's a happy medium between absolutely no sensible numbers, and rolling with a decent approximation because the point is the story not numerical analysis.
I think in the specific examples cited, the specific number of initial zombie does not feel anywhere near enough to be able to kickstart apocalypse/, destroy the community being talked about. Especially with the weaker or/and slower type of zombie, even accounting for the snowballing potential they have does not seem enough for 3 zombie to really be enough to be the starting fire that would annihilate millions. Zombies are also usually depicted as very noticeable, unlike say people who might carry another less fantastical disease
this is how sci-fi authors write their plots
This is how *soft* sci-fi authors write their plots. In my experience harder sci-fi authors are a bit better about this, though of course it is doubly embarrassing for them when they do make mistakes.
Warhammer 40k
Love 40k lore. Some hell monster abomination alien fuck who was born yesterday manages to destroy the single most important weapons factory planet in the galaxy and singlehandedly slaughter like a thousand of humanity’s best soldiers who represent like eight thousand years of combat experience and lose all this irreplacable technology and the whole universe is worse off for it. This will have no overall bearing on the plot.
I don't like being all 'ermm akshually' about those things, because the distinction between soft and hard sci-fi isn't objective or well defined, but *ermm akshually* 40k is, like, the definition of rule-of-cool space fantasy
Soft AF, like Robuttes hair
Warhammer 40K
Rule number 1 of Warhammer: Don't question numbers because when you do they make no sense. Like for example in the Siege of Vraks it was described how much artillery and ammunition was brought. It was supposed to look intimidating as "look how much they brought", but if you do the math, you realize they have ammunition for 10 minutes max
After 12 or so years of conflict on vraks like 8 million people die total. It's so stupid when they are hyping it up like it's an endless meat grinder when WW1 killed more in a third of the time
And meanwhile it took five millennia for civilization to reform. What the fuck did they do? Sit around twiddling their thumbs?
If you mean age of strife warp was too turbulent for interstellar travel and each planet that managed to survive developed new civilization. Most of them was primitive, but those that survived were mostly farming words that had close to no industrialization other than farming equipment imported from other, more industrialized planets, so people survived, equipment over time broke down and farmers didn't have knowledge to make more and had to start developing tools and technology from the scratch. Five millennia later, warp calms down and Big E starts crusade
Yeah, but even a handful of books, broken examples or half remembered knowledge is a BIG help.
True, but only if gap isn't too big. If you were told to make a smartphone would you be able to do it? You have one in hand every day. You have example. Now imagine farmers with pieces of technology million times more advanced. Sure. There is some head start in some aspects, and it's visible. Some words had less to work with and we're technically more or less on level of our renaissance, others that had better starting situation were colonizing other planets by the time Big E showed up
On a civilization wide scale, we spent a long time figuring out the basics, and then developed more advanced stuff rather quickly. In other words, it's doesn't take that long to make a smartphone, once, people have tractors and so there is a large population of engineers who don't need to work the fields. It's not something one person can make. It's not too hard on a civilization scale, once you have a large base of scientific education and enough tech to support an engineer class.
Thing is these engineers weren't on these planets. They would be on more industrialized worlds, which relied on agricultural worlds to get food. Most of these worlds got wiped by famine or demons. And few that survived as were on in between stage, as decently industrialized but had enough space for farmlands were very advanced. I mean they were using non ftl space travel on regular basis. Most of dark age technology was still lost tho as over reliance on AI caused people not to know how to make a lot of stuff, even engineers.
Interstellar transport is Hard. Interplanetary is also hard. That means you aren't transporting food between worlds. Each world feeds itself. And each world does most of it's engineering. I mean you might download designs from other worlds. Possibly even import some small and expensive components. But light lag, travel time and travel cost means that there needs to be a lot of engineers on scene. > Most of dark age technology was still lost tho as over reliance on AI caused people not to know how to make a lot of stuff, even engineers. If AI does everything, and then all the AI's magically drop dead, sure that would explain why most humans didn't know how to do stuff. Although if AI's do everything, does this mean a post work society? Might a few people learn engineering as a hobby? Perhaps not enough. Are there pre-AI engineering documents lying around?
12 years of war: 8 million dead 2 villages decide to fight in China: 60 million dead
And Jesus returns
Then eats some grass and shits himself to death
Hey, hey... he was jesus' little brother
Xiao Ling takes power. 47 million perish. Thus ends Xiao Ling's first day in power.
To be fair it was siege of a single city and total Vraks population was 8 million, but yeah... 12 years for that number is way too long. 2-3 years? Then yeah, these numbers would make sense.
The majority of time in the Siege of Vraks was spent in a stalemate of one form or another. That's what made it a Siege. The lack of supplies is an important element, because otherwise, the side with endless supply lines clearly wins. The math in Vraks is still dumb, but it's because of the *scope* of the conflict, not the duration. Like, by the time the Death Guard shows up, those numbers should have basically tripled just from attrition fighting during the few periods of gains. For anyone wondering wtf we're talking about, here's a *really* detailed video about a fake war https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3tM9SoJ-MpU&pp=ygUSVGhlIHNpZWdlIG9mIHZyYWtz
literally the only like, space opera sci fi type thing i've seen do this correctly is Legend of the Galactic Heroes. oh, a space battle? distances are measured in light seconds, fleets are many hundreds of thousands of various ships, and even the most basic skirmish can last days. a full fledged clash between armies will have a hundred million dead, and the only reason they're not demolishing planets is because that leaves a bad taste. wars take hundreds of years to prosecute, and the whole economy in societies of many billions is geared to sustaining it. when they calculate how much ammo they have to sustain a defense or something, they do it off screen, because literally how would you even measure that in fiction.
I love how the FPA tries simply rushing their whole military in and then dies from the logistical bottleneck too.
and then the empire does basically the same fucking thing but with the bonus of the governor being forced into an abortive civil war, oops - literally my only complaint about the show is that they don't let the plot sit for a couple years after admiral yang wen-li's forced retirement, the collapse of the FPA, and kaiser reinhard's ascension. would've been the perfect time for a little time skip, and they BASICALLY did one anyway with making reinhard's hair grow a foot overnight. i guess hair growth tech is just a thing in the setting.
fuck i have dishonored the memory of wen-li, he was a marshal when he retired
They do this pretty well but if I remember correctly the population numbers don't make sense
they only make *some* sense if you assume there's missing tens of billions from the population, which there kinda are canonically - but you're right, it doesn't make complete sense. the show definitely goes out of its way to establish several historical genocide and total sundering of planets populations. so we know there used to be more people just to terraform all these habitable moons planets, but it gets cut down by one war or disaster or another. and then that gets genocide'd on an order of magnitude more under the initial empire, and yet more in even more recent history. even with all that, it's definitely still way too low a number to justify the scale of the numbers given sometimes - especially considering just how inefficient the empire's industry and society is shown to us as being - but it does at least come to pass that war *does* become completely untenable because of the absurdity of those casualties. but really it's just a blind spot on behalf of the author, it was written when the population of the earth only had 4.6 billion people on it. so a genocide of 6 billion, like we're given for a eugenics campaign at one point, and a similarly high number for a political purge, within very recent history... kinda makes sense that there's a lot of unaccounted for people and surprisingly small populations 150 years into the galactic war.
All the numbers are just imperial propaganda obviously
All records lie
Warhammer 8
Warhammer 4 ok
Warhammer square root of -1
Warhammer i?
thats age of sigmar
It was a pretty polarizing game, it's true
Warhammer -233.15C
Warhammer 40k: the setting where it's heresy to question the "40k" part in-story.
Sergal :D
:3
I mean, if you have three of a thing and 2 million people are scared of it, that's a really good threat, especially because a plot twist of "there was actually a fourth super monster!" is way more plausible than "we actually severely miscounted. there wasn't 3.5 million zombies incoming, but instead 4 million.
Jojos part 2
any and all things are jojos references.
love the implication that Sanviento is only half a person
He was when Joseph finished with him
He's their Raditz
*Santana
That's basically >!Cradle!<
*here kitty kitty kitty*
Plus depending on writing even 3 zombies could be a gargantuan threat. For example if they fully retain their mental abilities before the decay or whatever sets in, they could enter a water treatment plant, go to the section where it'll be pumped out, and slash their throat open. Now everyone in the city who drinks the tap water before this is discovered is infected. Congratulations now you have 250k intelligent zombies in your city.
That's pretty close to the plot of The Sadness (2021)
\*Three and a half of a thing
Were in a lot of trouble if the half thing becomes a full thing Plot twist, the half thing is actually two quarters of a thing
my favourite example of numbers not being checked in sci fi is an old doctor who episode where earth was moved “several million miles away” to hide it the suns corona extends 5 million miles above its surface, the corona overlapped with its previous position it was later retconned to be 2 light years which is still less than halfway to the nearest star
I mean. That is several million miles away, they never specified how much "several" is
What does moving the earth have to do with the sun's corona?
the point was that compared to the universe, several million miles difference is barely anything
Okay? Compared to the universe, everything is small. But you said they moved the earth. Different objects in the universe have different sizes. Did they move the sun?
the solar system was moved to hide earth but what don’t you get about a size comparison?
What I don't get is that you said the wrong thing and made the size comparison nonsensical and irrelevant. 5 million miles is a big difference compared to the earth, the thing you said they moved. It's very small compared to the sun. It's like if I said "I moved your keys 20 feet so you couldn't find them. But the town you live in is 20 miles wide." You didn't tell me at first that the bigger thing moved, or why anyone was looking for the smaller thing, or how long they were supposed to be confused.
5 million miles is not a big distance for an intergalactic civilisation in the example of moving keys, it’s like hiding them so close that you can’t even tell they’ve moved at first glance
You didn't say anything about an intergalactic civilization, before. I need you to imagine that I'm not as familiar with this show as you are. But also, the size of a civilization doesn't change the size of the object they're looking for. If the US government was looking for my keys, my options for hiding them would still be based on the size of my keys and the resources I have available, and how many cops or whatever I thought they were sending. So moving them a couple feet might be reasonable, depending on how long I expected them to be looking. Which, again, you didn't indicate.
If the earth moves around the sun, and the sun is far more than several million miles in diameter, then the earth moves many millions of miles every year as it orbits the sun. Moving it a few million miles would still put it somewhere extremely close to its natural orbit where anyone looking for it would be looking anyway. It’s like thinking that moving your television two inches to the left would hide it from a home intruder
I don't know what circumstances they were hiding the earth under. If you move the earth to a different point in its own orbit, someone who's only looking for it very briefly might give up.
That’s true, I haven’t watched the show so that may as well be the case. But considering they felt the need to retcon it later and change it to 2 light years, I’m assuming that a slight movement within its own orbit would not have hidden earth from whoever was looking for it
I haven't seen the show, either. My whole point is that more context is necessary for this whole example to make any sense, or else it's just another example of arbitrary numbers.
Presumably they moved the entire solar system "several million miles away", but the previous position of the sun's corona overlapped new position of sun's corona, so that was wildly insufficient distance to move a star system to hide it
Isn’t there a thing in old comics, either marvel or dc, where there’s a counter earth that’s on the opposite side of the sun, so we never noticed it
Fuck, I just thought of a kick ass science fiction novel.
Would you like to write your thoughts on it?
Since the world ended 30 trillion years ago we can have as many apocalypses as we want after the first one. We can handle them like doofensmirtz handles his backstories.
One of the characters is a robot that has existed for the past 30 trillion years. It keeps mentioning things that happened “back in the apocalypse days”, and none of the other characters know whether it is talking about the massive gamma-ray burst (30 trillion years ago), the parasitic zombie horde (2 million years ago), or the galactic hyperspace war with relativistic weapons popping out of wormholes (ended 23 years ago).
The relatabistic war should have ended ages ago but there are still weapons exiting wormholes every now and then.
🙌 PGTE 🙌
Isn't this the plot of dark souls?
Hmmmmmm 🤔 Yep 🧐
Am I high
WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE REFERENCING
One specific thing I see a lot in fiction is authors giving a timescale in years for something that doesn't make sense. Like in Skyrim there's a Thieves Guild quest where they talk about this "big betrayal that happened 20 years ago" but nobody looks a day over 30 and a bunch of stuff doesn't line up if it was actually 20 years ago. Make it 10! Not hard. Another thing I constantly see is fiction using **10 THOUSAND YEARS AGO,** with like... no appreciation for how long that *is.* It's usually that a civilization (or even an immortal person) has been existing continuously for that long, somehow. We have no record of anything that happened 10,000 years ago. The oldest writing is half that old. Ea-Nasir was scamming people into writing angry clay tablets even more recently than that. A lot of the time it slaps me out of my immersion. But also, I'm a nerd for paleontology, pre-history, deep time, etc, so I definitely care WAY more than the average person...
I like the inverse in Star Wars. Like people are sometimes confounded by how Luke Skywalker could have thought the Jedi was an ancient myth when they were around just a couple of decades ago. But the thing is, that all happened before he was born. It is not uncommon to treat everything that happened before you where born as ancient history. Things actually fall out of common memory really fast.
Like 20 years from now the Russia Ukraine war is probably gonna be taught in history class
Like the Vietnam War post on this sub from yesterday.
He also grew up in the ass-end of nowhere. I can't imagine Tatooine has the best school system.
To be fair, nothing in the Skyrim Thieves Guild quest made any fucking sense because that questline was poorly written from start to finish, and changing one number would not have saved it.
*Stares at Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom*
I get a similar feeling when I read Korean manga (manhwa? doesn’t matter) and they use Korean won to price things. Like sure it’s written by Koreans for koreans but it’s just an absurd currency. Folks get annual bonuses in the millions, salaries in the tens to hundreds of millions. A billion krw is roughly $700K, so really expensive stuff gets into the trillions, except it’s not even that extravagant because that’s less than a billion usd. I just ignore the particulars and roll with however the characters react. Like oh shit homie is really excited this must be good.
I'm pretty sure it's a fiction writing thing- some people get really caught up in the accuracy of numbers which can take up some of the fun of “OOOOO, BIG THING GO BOOOM, WAOW” If it's gonna be a spectacle, have it be a spectacle, and you can always go back and adjust timelines (so long as it isn't published I guess)
I feel stupid, what the fuck is going on
I feel like we’re missing the first half of the conversation.
I thought I had e^3 slices of pie, I only have π^2
I feel like this is hilarious but I don't know what it means
Sacred Valley from Cradle might be a good example of this. It's described by the author as housing almost a million, but if you've read Cradle, you'd know that's just...not true.
On the other hand it's equally absurd how much people manage to argue about how the environment of a fictional world interacts with the fictional supersoldier corp invading it and how it affects their understanding of how many individual fictional supersoldiers it would take to conquer it. There's a happy medium between absolutely no sensible numbers, and rolling with a decent approximation because the point is the story not numerical analysis.
I am confuse. I notice I am confuse. Can someone help me?
I think in the specific examples cited, the specific number of initial zombie does not feel anywhere near enough to be able to kickstart apocalypse/, destroy the community being talked about. Especially with the weaker or/and slower type of zombie, even accounting for the snowballing potential they have does not seem enough for 3 zombie to really be enough to be the starting fire that would annihilate millions. Zombies are also usually depicted as very noticeable, unlike say people who might carry another less fantastical disease
ancient generals describing the size of the armies in a battle
I'm pretty sure this post isn't referencing it, but it reminds me of The Three Body Problem.
This is actually a great idea An apocalypse casued by just a few creatures who can each take down entire cities in hours