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Hybrid Hive: Eat Shard? (Worm/MGLN) (Complete)

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Crazael said:
This sort of political hostage exchange was common in much of the world for a very long time for basically the exact reasons described in the chapter and worked quite well in a wide variety of cultures.
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Yes, and those were societies where war was a game between nobles struggling for power. Like it has been for much of human history.

I can guarantee you that trading children between the US and Nazi Germany would have worked poorly, let alone between Poland and Nazi Germany.
 
arromdee said:
Yes, and those were societies where war was a game between nobles struggling for power. Like it has been for much of human history.

I can guarantee you that trading children between the US and Nazi Germany would have worked poorly, let alone between Poland and Nazi Germany.
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This sort of system only works if you have a common culture, or at least a common cultural trend of some sort that can allow the trick to have any meaning at all. Really it also needs a hereditary or lifelong leadership too, in the US, there's no way we'd get any useful benefit from this sort of system, the only people who have long enough time in government are the bureaucrats or corrupt politicians, and any group that could be considered enemy enough to justify this sort of trick are ideologically opposed to the point that it couldn't work anyway.

Now a bunch of noble houses, with a common style or ancient treaties/tradition encouraging this sort of thing? A good way to make alliances.
 
arromdee said:
Yes, and those were societies where war was a game between nobles struggling for power. Like it has been for much of human history.

I can guarantee you that trading children between the US and Nazi Germany would have worked poorly, let alone between Poland and Nazi Germany.
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The Romans keeping exchanging political hostages with the Huns was not "nobles treating war as a game". It was, in fact, serious business between two great powers looking to ensure peace between them.
 
It sort of was. Otherwise they wouldn't need such an elaborate scheme; they could capture a few dozen civilians and use them as hostages. They didn't because in those times, nobody cared about civilians, just about aristocrats.
 
Crazael said:
The Romans keeping exchanging political hostages with the Huns was not "nobles treating war as a game". It was, in fact, serious business between two great powers looking to ensure peace between them.
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Gonna need some more specifics on that one. The Battle of Catalaunian Plains (451 CE) was the last battle between Attila (the Hun) and the combined forces of the Romans and the Visigoths and I don't remember there being any children exchanged before or after. Granted, I am not an historian specializing in that time period, but I vaguely recall reading Prosper (a contemporary of that battle) in my Latin class ages ago and I don't recall that ever being mentioned. So... Cite your source, please.
 
kaosisreality said:
Gonna need some more specifics on that one. The Battle of Catalaunian Plains (451 CE) was the last battle between Attila (the Hun) and the combined forces of the Romans and the Visigoths and I don't remember there being any children exchanged before or after. Granted, I am not an historian specializing in that time period, but I vaguely recall reading Prosper (a contemporary of that battle) in my Latin class ages ago and I don't recall that ever being mentioned. So... Cite your source, please.
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It was before that. When Attila was a child/teen. Attila waa friends with the Roman hostage. They later fought against each other as adults i dont have time to dig up the specifics.
arromdee said:
It sort of was. Otherwise they wouldn't need such an elaborate scheme; they could capture a few dozen civilians and use them as hostages. They didn't because in those times, nobody cared about civilians, just about aristocrats.
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The point was that this was two cultures doing a thing and not two groups within a aingle aociety doing it.
Yes, the individuals being exhanged were of noble birth, but that was never something i was arguing against.
 
arromdee said:
It sort of was. Otherwise they wouldn't need such an elaborate scheme; they could capture a few dozen civilians and use them as hostages. They didn't because in those times, nobody cared about civilians, just about aristocrats.
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That's not treating war as a game, it's closer to describe it (anachronistically) as treating war as a business.
 
Crazael said:
I said that the time period you were assuming was wrong and that I didn't have the time to go digging for citations.
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Which continues to be unhelpful for the discussion at hand. You've made a bold claim about the veracity of hostages using a specific example and then not cited your claim. If you, for example, could say "It appears in Epitome Chronicon" then I could then check that book for it to verify. But no: you have left me with "I can't be bothered to cite anything and you are wrong." Well... I'm pretty close to writing this conversation off.
 
kaosisreality said:
Which continues to be unhelpful for the discussion at hand. You've made a bold claim about the veracity of hostages using a specific example and then not cited your claim. If you, for example, could say "It appears in Epitome Chronicon" then I could then check that book for it to verify. But no: you have left me with "I can't be bothered to cite anything and you are wrong." Well... I'm pretty close to writing this conversation off.
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To be fair, they didn't say they wouldn't provide citation, merely that they didn't currently have time.

Apparently my sister's boss has a saying, "What's clear to you is clear to you."
Effectively, that's all you can be sure of in what you say, that it makes sense to you. At least without verifying that you're coming across as you intend to. I think that goes double for situations where things like tone of voice and body language are not available, such as in a forum, and is a major reason why I don't try to use things like sarcasm in text based conversations. Can either of us say that they aren't meaning to get back to you on a later point?

It's not from Crazael, but there is this:
Isiri Pudireach said:
Wikipedia makes mention of an exchange of hostages, and lables a French book as a source: Rouche, Michel (3 July 2009). Attila: la violence nomade [Attila: the Nomadic Violence] (Paperback) (in French). [Paris]
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which certainly looks like a citation.

Incidentally, my sister and her coworkers apparently find the saying irritating, because it seems like it should be obvious and because it's not and likely because the boss says it often enough to get eye rolls.
 
The saying could also mean 'find a different way to phrase it'. I've had times when I could not get a point across until I found a different way to say the same thing. Same meaning, but now the point is clear to the other person due to a different set of words.
 
It would seem to me that using noble family child hostages would not work if their families stopped caring about or wrote off the hostage. One example below is fictional and one historical.

Theron Greyjoy in Game of Thrones was 'fostered' (held as a hostage) by the Stark family in the North after the Iron Islands revolt, and would be presumably executed if his birth family was disloyal and/or revolted again. The problem was that most Northerns did not trust Theron due to his birth family and the Iron Men did not trust him due to him being raised by the Starks. Theron's arrogant personality did not help. His birth father essentially wrote him off for dead, making him useless as a hostage. Theron turned coat a couple of times as a result and wound up badly for it.

Ieyasu Tokugawa in medieval Japan was a real life example. He was given over as a hostage as a child, and when his father went to war again and they threatened to execute Ieyasu, the father sent a letter that essentially said 'go ahead and kill my son, this will prove my loyalty to my side'. Ieyasu was not executed since his captors still though he would be of value in the future, and the father was assassinated thereafter. Ieyasu later wound up winning the Warring States War and founded the Tokugawa shogunate that lasted about 200 years, until the West forced Japan to open to trade and modernized the country.
 
Sandy River DL said:
Funny in a 'hesitant and slightly manic laughter, safe in the knowledge that the 4th Wall is between you and the multigigaton N Molecule' sense.
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Funny in the fact that the universe was trying to avoid thinking about the massive lump of presumably singly and doubly bonded nitrogen just sitting there until a cosmic whatever or piece of space debris hit it then it deciding that it may well just get it over with. Violently. Because big explosions from safe distances are always fun.
 
Steakthedog said:
Funny in the fact that the universe was trying to avoid thinking about the massive lump of presumably singly and doubly bonded nitrogen just sitting there until a cosmic whatever or piece of space debris hit it then it deciding that it may well just get it over with. Violently. Because big explosions from safe distances are always fun.
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That many nitrogen atoms linked together in unstable bonds, the 'safe distance' would be much too close for my comfort. I don't blame the ships for turning tail and running upon realizing what they were looking at.
 
AurielReaver said:
Especialy since they don't know if there are any particularly exotic effects caused by that many bonded together at once after a technical runaway conversion reaction
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Not only will they be unsure of exotic effects, they'll be horrifyingly aware of the plain old boring effects (which themselves would cause exotic effects due to how hard they will happen.)

Even in the optimal case, where every two nitrogen atoms lets go of it's neighbours, and immediately and stably bonds with only a single other nitrogen atom, there will be two effects on the local scale that don't seem all that big until you consider scale.

First of course, is the release of a bit of heat. Just a tiny bit, after all, it's only two atoms releasing and forming bonds. Then multiply that by a few [insert number too big to fit in a post here] and of course, it becomes worryingly warm.

And even without that, there's the other problem. Atoms in a single molecule like to get up close and friendly with each other. Atoms in separate molecules want to have some space. Not a lot more space, only a few orders of magnitude, after all very warm N2 molecules like to be a gas. That means they will ALL want to be further apart, by a few orders of magnitude. And we've got a whole asteroid that wants to spontaneously convert from dense solid to spread out warm gas instantly. The kind of pressure likely built up in the centre of this worryingly warm wants to be cloud of nitrogen, combined with it's worrying warmth, and many of the nitrogen atoms in the middle are going to stop being nitrogen, and instead be something else as they get smushed together in ways that atoms find uncomfortable. And then the exotic effects start, because fusion with heavy (ie: not hydrogen) elements can be fun for the whole solar system!

Also, remember not to anthropomorphise your giant nitrogen molecules, they hate that, and it might make them explode.
 
I'm thinking part of the issue was less so the nitrogen itself, and possibly moreso the "Huh, that's interesting. I didn't expect that." response from Kingdom observers.

If you're a TSAB vessel watching a demonstration of total conversion weapons that are noted to become more dangerous in the presence of mana, and you're sitting at what is thought to be a safe distance, and then hear the demonstrator mention anything about something unexpected happening with the weapon system, how likely are you to stick around with your mana-based defenses for clarification?
 
Logos said:
how likely are you to stick around with your mana-based defenses for clarification?
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That's how you get a the spaceship running at top speed like Officer Earl, but using the Joestar Family Secret Technique. I'd ask to be no less than 13 Parsecs away, effective yesterday.
 
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