Bill/Larsen--
Hey, by the way, can someone give me a pointer on how to correctly use this "Quote" utility. Is there a "best practices" convention on this board on the nested indents, and use of bold/not bold, and how to cite who did it? I think this particularly became a problem for me last night and I did not have the patience or brainpower to figure out what at first had seemed so simple.
Swennyway, Bill/Larsen axed:
Q: What is it about the Empress Wave that allowed it to 'sneak up' on the Consulate? Was there a Zhodani psionic blindspot of some sort at work here? Or was the Wave both a FTL and lightspeed phenonmena? Just how does the Wave's timing work?
A: It's funny how much stuff can still be lodged in my brain after all I wrote, and which can still be dislodged by further questions.
To be brief, the idea was that the arrival of the wave and the implementation of the phenomenon "carried" by the wave don't have to have the same timing. Here are a couple of examples. You can wire your house for electricity and plug in all your appliances, but until the power company turns on the power from the street, nothing happens. So you can think of the Empress Wave as, in my first posting, the line behind which there is a slight change in the membrane between N-Space and J/Psi-space, but the "traffic" passing through that membrane is not a constant, but can change. So you can get your house wired, and the power can come on intermittently.
Another example is that you can broadcast radio waves of silence ("dead air") and also radio waves of information (music, talk, etc.). The energy of the waves is the same, but the way they are decoded by the receiver is different.
That's what I was getting at with the Empress frozen in time, like the moment when the birds stop singing, waiting for something to happen.
So the phenomenon that the EW is carrying/transmitting/enabling/wiring the universe for is not always behaving the same way. Likewise, just as psionic effects have a range, the various madness effects are amplified by the presence of a bunch of psis who may have been adversely affected by the wave. So the more psionic energy encompassed locally by the wave, the worse it is capable of getting.
So while Zhodani core expeditions have been inside the wave before, sometimes it wasn't carrying damaging energy, sometimes there wasn't sufficient critical mass to amplify it, sometimes a single crewman went nuts, sometimes a ship blew up, but it wasn't until entire Zhodani worlds got involved that it was capable of really going bad. And even then, sometimes the "empress was frozen in time" for long periods.
Those were some of the concepts that I remember, but the heavy lifting of working out exactly how each person would react to wave/membrane energy, how often the wave would be energized in a damaging way (and there would have also been energies of a non-damaging nature), how much that energy would be amplified by local conditions, density of psionically-permeable minds, etc., was going to have to wait until there was a product that would focus more closely on it. The Empress Wave was not going to have one single monolithic effect in all cases first of all, because it's not interesting, and second of all, because we know that some known polities (Zhodani and Vargr) have already been through it, and if it were that simple and predictable, then better countermeasures would have been evolved.
That is all off the top of my head and can probably be improved on after one or two good night's sleep and a couple more long car rides when my brain can say, "oh here's another piece you were looking for." But I had that much to share now, and felt like dumping it while I was thinking about it.
Outta here,
Dave
