Well, they can firebend through their clothing without too much trouble (they don't have to be barefoot to do fire kicks, for instance), but it's kind of a moot question, since "making an existing fire bigger" is not really something firebenders find themselves doing all that often. They don't work like Pyro in the old X-Men comics (unless we're talking about the Last Airbender movie, which we're, um, not :). Firebenders make fire, and with the Comet overhead, they make a lot of it, but it still needs a clear line-of-sight from them to wherever they want it to end up.

Bending while wearing a spacesuit is really hard in general, not because spacesuits are significant barriers to the outside world, but simply because they're so difficult to move in. Bending is largely about moving in very particular, sometimes very subtle ways, and pressure suits don't handle so well in town.

>Another idea (which doesn't solve any problems, but increases mass
>allowances) would be to employ airbenders to improve a mother-ship's
>lifting capacity.

Useful, but doesn't like you say, it doesn't solve any actual problem that they have.

>Sudden off-the-wall thought: advanced firebending can generate
>high-voltage electricity. Perhaps the craft can be accelerated to (or
>near) escape velocity by firebender-powered linear induction? Would
>Sozin's Comet enhance lightningbending?

I'm not sure, but again, somewhat academic. The acceleration-induced G-load involved in acquiring all the velocity needed to reach and escape orbit in Planck time (as with, for instance, Jules Verne's "humongous cannon" approach in From the Earth to the Moon, and presumably with a giant lightningbender-powered railgun as well) would reduce the crew to gazpacho inside the ship, which tends to have a deleterious effect on their ability to perform routine tasks such as still being alive when they get to the moon. That would be tricky to counter. Despite certain daft metaphysicists' claims in the decades since Dìqiú got Science, there's no such thing as gravitybending.*

Also, though for purposes of developing things in Dìqiú I'm generally playing along with the show and pretending that it is, I'm 80% sure that the energy discharge you see in lightningbending isn't really electricity, any more than Force lightning is; they both just play it on TV. It doesn't act like an electrical discharge really would, and besides, electricity has sod-all to do with fire, physically speaking. That's like saying sufficiently advanced eartbenders should be able to bend plastic, because plastic is made from petroleum (literally "rock oil", does come from the ground, doesn't actually come from rocks).

("But lightningbenders can charge batteries! We saw that!" I hear someone** cry. Well, yes, but keep in mind that this is the same show where the South Pole is a few hours' walk from the Antarctic coast - which would have saved Robert Falcon Scott some trouble! - there's morning there on the day after the Winter Solstice, and people think metalbending works because there are little bits of dirt in processed metals. The people making it know a lot about kung fu and, evidently, not much of anything about science.)

Anyway, Keep in mind that this is an excerpt from a much longer work in which the characters already went on to solve these problems. I appreciate the thoughts, but you don't actually have to repeat the work. :)

--G.
* This is, I expect, the Dìqiú scientific community's equivalent of perpetual motion machines or cold fusion.
** Probably Merc. :)
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I have actually had long, barely-civil arguments about this very topic. :)

My personal take on the matter has always been that the lightning produced by lightningbending is indeed lightning, but that it is allowed to ignore all the regular rules for how lightning ought to behave because, well, bending. Bending is basically magic already. I don't really question the underlying cause any more than I question how Magneto is able to produce enough energy out of his noggin to create the breathtakingly powerful magnetic fields he's capable of putting out.

I just sort of assume that bent lightning can do everything normal electricity can do in addition to whatever insane craziness the kung-fu action wizards producing it can force it to do as well.

-Merc
Keep Rat

You don't have to yell at me, I agree completely.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Hmm. That's a good point, and I will definitely do that in a little while, but the way you've phrased it makes me wonder if I've properly conveyed the scale of the project. As such, I should probably clarify what's going on here a bit; I've never been a fan of those coy promotional strategies where they don't actually tell you what the hell they're promoting. (Looking at you, "alternate reality games". Just tell me what the frigging product is, at least.)

What you see above (and the one from last week, too) is really what the surrounding copy says it is: an excerpt from Challenging the Cold Silence, Asami Sato's in-universe book about the Phoenix Flight (as seen in S5DS01 Honeymoon by the Sea and mentioned several times since), itself presented in an in-universe style (in this case, as a promotional article published in a popular Republic City magazine).

It is not, however, a fake excerpt in the sense that the disembodied chapter from Gryphon's 2092 memoir, Get the Girl, Kill the Baddies (And Save the Entire Planet), was a few years ago. That was the whole project, just pretending to be part of a larger whole. Our intent this time is to produce the entire book, and I'm pleased to be able to tell you that we are well along with it. It isn't just a "hey, we should do this" idea, it's something we are elbows-deep in making as we speak.

And not just the text, which is the really exciting part for me. We're doing CTCS as what the marketroids would probably call a "multimedia product". By that I don't mean that it's going to be a book with a soundtrack album or anything similarly weird (like that inexplicable Star Wars novel from ages back), but that it's going to be more than the usual "words in a certain order" experience you get around here. In-story, Challenging the Cold Silence is the kind of book that would have a number of illustrations and be presented in a certain way, and as a sort of creative experiment, we're seeing how close we can get to reproducing that sort of effect with the real-world version. We've had illustrations before, of course, but usually they come along after the fact and are more of an enhancement to the text than a key part of the reading experience. CTCS will be much more tightly integrated - not a picture book, by any means, but the kind of book that wouldn't really work without the pictures.

Mind you, there is a downside to that. Phil's an artist, but I'm not in any way, and there's a lot more work here than one person could realistically be expected to do anyway. So, while we work on the text that's at the core of it, we've enlisted the help of some other talented individuals to help us flesh it out and make the project really pop. The downside I mentioned is that the more people are involved in a project, the more chances there are for people's mojo to get hung up and slow the whole process down a bit - and even without delays, that many pictures takes a while. "It's done when it's done" is even more true of a sprawlingly cooperative project like this one.

I'm excited about the result, though, and I think it'll be worth it. When it's ready, Challenging the Cold Silence will be presented not as a text file or even an HTML webpage, like previous EPU experiments in enhanced text (such as Weapon of Choice or Night of the Kissogram!) - it'll be a PDF file, just like an online version of a real illustrated book.

In the meantime, to keep everybody hungry, there may be additional promotional stuff, if we can come up with some more that doesn't give away too much of the store. Can't let the book come out with no surprises left in it!

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

May I just be the first to say "Ho-lee crap! Wow!" at this?

-- Bob
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

If you aren't, it's only because I said it when it started to become obvious we were actually going to do it. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

This will be -epic-. Which, based on my opinion of UF as a whole, is really saying something :)

-Droken

Gryphon, my hat is off to you and I will now worship at your feet, for you, and those helping you, are truly the gods of fanfic. And I'm not being sarcastic.

I appreciate the thought, but, protip: maybe hold off on the worship until we deliver. I don't like the thought of being one of those vaporware gods. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.