It's actually not doing either; that's Sozin's CometComet Zuko, it's passing through the outer stratosphere many miles above the camera.

(Yes, I know comets don't do that. I have to work with what the show gives me. :)

--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, it being on fire all the time does complicate my plan to land on it, but I'm pretty sure something can be worked out.)

Well, it's not that the moon is a spirit so much as it has one. The same is probably also true of Comet Zuko. It's definitely a paranormal phenomenon of some kind - not only is that totally not how comets work, it's totally not how anything else works either. :)

(They have a pretty weak grasp of astronomy in general over at the Avatar home office. The most headsmacking example of this is in The Legend of Korra 202, "The Southern Lights", in which Korra and company walk back to the Southern Water Tribe's canonically unnamed capital from the South Pole on the day after the Winter Solstice, and as they stand on the outskirts of town, they watch the Northern Water Tribe's navy invade the city in the cold light of dawn.

Let me just repeat that. The antarctic coastal capital city is within overnight walking/camel-riding distance of the South Pole (itself a pretty unlikely scenario), and there is dawn there on the day after the Winter Solstice.

You can tell that DiMartino and Konietzko went to the Rhode Island School of Design and not a proper university, is all I'm saying. :)

--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 led me into wondering about the astronomical knowledge of the people of Dìqiú in general. The BPGD entry says that Dìqiú and Yue "exist in a limited parallel reality". What would happen to anyone trying to go out beyond Yue? Would it even be possible to get modern spaceflight technology through a nexus point, or would it all have to be built right there on Dìqiú?

(Cue the mental image of Corwin having a go at hovering One-Hit Wonder sideways through the same crossing point used by the railway line. I'm not sure if it would fit.)

--
Unable to save the day: File is read-only.

Leading to a trip to Corellia to dig through CEC's and Incom's back catalogues for something that will fit, and thence to 03F8 or someplace else to find one of the <single-digit-number> of spaceframes still in existence?

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

Polychrome

To paraphrase Jeremy Clarkson when he discovered that the Caterham Super 7 they built on one episode of Top Gear had had its resale value destroyed by being nameplated as such, "Would you drive a starship I built?"

--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.

There is a great deal of that, as one might expect in a world where one of the biggest countries is basically imperial China, but it's all slanted toward astrology. That is to say, the sages of Dìqiú know a hell of a lot about the way their night sky works, in terms of what moves where and when. They can predict eclipses and such with great accuracy and know exactly when things like the Comet are coming back.

What they have until very recently been almost completely lacking is a field like astrophysics, which looks at why astronomical phenomena happen. It's probably only within the last century or so that their civilization has realized obvious things like "the stars are other suns that are very far away".

To be fair to them, this is less of an oversight in a world where astrology is actually not a load of hooey. For example, in Dìqiú in 171 ASC, there was a major planetary alignment in the Zipang system - the kind of thing that crystal gazers and horoscope readers expected would cause all hell to break loose on real-life Earth in 1987, and of course absolutely nothing happened - and all hell did break loose on Dìqiú because it's that kind of world.

Waterbenders' powers wax and wane with the phases of the moon, even though the moon is STILL THERE when it's new, it's just that the side of it being illuminated by the sun is facing away from the planet, and bending ability has no correlation to actual exposure to moonlight, or it wouldn't work indoors or during the daytime. Similarly, firebenders' powers stop working entirely during totality of a solar eclipse (I would assume the same happens to waterbenders during totality of a lunar eclipse), even though nothing whatsoever actually HAPPENS to the sun during a solar eclipse, and again, it's got nothing to do with sunlight, or firebenders would be powerless indoors (which is entirely not the case).

(As an aside, bending really annoys physicists, firebending most of all. The other forms of bending can just barely be explained as a kind of super-specialized telekinesis (even though it isn't really), but firebending violates conservation of energy and mass. Fire is a combustion byproduct, and firebenders aren't burning anything; they're just making superheated, ionized gas plasma come out of nowhere. That personally offends a certain breed of scientist.)

>The BPGD entry says that Dìqiú and Yue
>"exist in a limited parallel reality". What would happen to anyone
>trying to go out beyond Yue?

I have not chosen to examine the matter this closely. Probably they would come back onto the other side of the screen, like in Pac-Man or Asteroids.

>Would it even be possible to get modern
>spaceflight technology through a nexus point, or would it all have to
>be built right there on Dìqiú?

I doubt there is a natural nexus that is physically large enough to get an entire starship, even a small one, through in one piece. As far as anyone has ever been able to determine, there's no actual limit to what you can bring through one as long as it fits through the door, but then no one has ever tried dragging along, e.g., a hyperspace motivator. Those have a tesseract inside them. That might not get along & play well with the dimensional threshold. Might be able to do it with a powered-down Cochrane drive, but again, it's entirely possible that there's nowhere to go at faster-than-light speeds anyway. It hasn't been investigated.

--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.

Right, so get one of those photon torpedoes that is actually a probe, fire it straight up and see how far it gets before going "clunk!" on the ceiling, *then* worry about how to cram a functional starship through the interdimensonal mail slot.

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

Personally, I like the photon torpedo/probe idea better. At least make sure that whatever you send isn't going to go smash like a hard-boiled egg thrown at a brick wall before you risk someone's neck.

Or worse yet, if that's the 'Kori' I think it is, she smashes *through* the dimensional barrier, and wouldn't that be a fun exercise in debugging the Yggdrasil?

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

Which rather suggests that the whole thing may or may not be psychosomatic, in a fashion similar to some versions of Martian pyrophobia. Not saying this is true in UF, of course.

>(As an aside, bending really annoys physicists, firebending most of
>all. The other forms of bending can just barely be explained as a
>kind of super-specialized telekinesis (even though it isn't really),
>but firebending violates conservation of energy and mass. Fire
>is a combustion byproduct, and firebenders aren't burning
>anything; they're just making superheated, ionized gas plasma come
>out of nowhere. That personally offends a certain breed of
>scientist.)

Aren't there already pyrokinetics out in the UF cosmos? I don't recall if Hammond or Storm have shown up, but I'm sure there've been mutants with that ability out there somewhere....

Some do, some don't. "Pyrokinesis" is a pretty broad label, with a lot of (if you'll pardon the pun) degrees inside it. Like most of the names for different psionic abilities in the DSM-14, come to that - hence the P-scale for telepathic puissance, and so on.

--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.

No, I'm reasonably sure it's an actual thing that happens; it's just that the setting is one in which sympathetic magic - things that are intuitive, but scientifically nonsensical - really work. (See the previous remarks about astrology not entirely being bunk there.)

>>(As an aside, bending really annoys physicists, firebending most of
>>all, (etc.))
>
>Aren't there already pyrokinetics out in the UF cosmos?

Yes, but I should've been clearer: I'm not talking about "big universe" scientists above, I'm talking about the local species that have appeared in Dìqiú over the past century or so. Quantitative, analytical science had an uphill climb getting established in Dìqiú because of the long-established and empirically indisputable existence of phenomena which defy conventional scientific explanation. In the "big universe", the metasciences (Spengler and Stantz's equations, that sort of thing) had to come after the "hard" sciences and explain the very infrequent gaps in them.

In Dìqiú those gaps are a lot wider, and the metascience disciplines came first, which led for a while to a period in which people who insisted on the reality of things like the laws of thermodynamics were widely regarded with much the same sort of "dude be buggin', yo" attitude that pyramid power gurus and homeopaths get in real life.

By the time we visit Dìqiú in UF, the hard scientists and metascientists have largely achieved an uneasy peace, but there are still a few holdouts on each side. Amusingly, they are equally wrong to take the stances they do, because anyone can see that a) thermodynamics does work b) except for bending. The fact that internal combustion engines work there is proof enough of a), and, well, anyone can see b) for him- or herself. :)

--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.

I considered this for a moment, and I realized that this makes the motivations of noted shit-crock the Equalist movement actually make sense from a comedic perspective. Like, instead of a bunch of complete wankers, they're coffee-propelled STEM students who've gone so completely round the twist that they create the kind of mad, science-destroying battle machines they think benders are. It had a kind of Genius: The Transgression vibe in my head, but with more mecha and better slapstick.

Also, yes, Korra needs to kick the handeggfootball in canon. I've given up on the show itself, so I won't know unless someone tells me, but I still want Korra to win. Admittedly, I also just want Korra, because damn, but that would deprive Asami of her and they will ride off into the sunset on a unicorn made of diamonds because I said so that's why.

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

This also gives me the image of the more analytic forumites being the scientists you mentioned. Merc heads the research team. I make the tea.

Oh, trust me. If she does, I'll be sure to mention it. Probably in rather large type, at least within the body of the post itself.

--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.