There are more than 200 viruses that can cause a common cold with 20-30% caused by "unknown" bugs. See a list of the most common virus types that cause colds.
As a tangent, vīrus in classical Latin is a mass noun that does not pluralise (singulare tantum) understandably, since at the time a virus was not some small, discrete biological thing you could have more than one of. In Neo-Latin, it is declined in the plural as vīra, but there's no real etymological reason the English plural form should be either, except as a hypercorrection.
As a tangent, vīrus in classical Latin is a mass noun that does not pluralise (singulare tantum) understandably, since at the time a virus was not some small, discrete biological thing you could have more than one of. In Neo-Latin, it is declined in the plural as vīra, but there's no real etymological reason the English plural form should be either, except as a hypercorrection.
Eh, it's not quite that bad. I mean, sure, 20M x worse than antimatter is pretty awful, but it'd be closer to, oh, a few thousand ruptured cells at most? Atoms are really freaking tiny, after all. Going with ~20x the weight of an iron atom gives you roughly 2 joules.
Just found this gem of a story. Hovever, I was wondering how the human ships look. All I know is that they are quite small but but I'm unsure if the shape have been described?
Just found this gem of a story. Hovever, I was wondering how the human ships look. All I know is that they are quite small but but I'm unsure if the shape have been described?
Given that they don't have any engineering constraints on how they need to look, I would seriously doubt there is a standard "look" for human ships. You'd have everything from flying saucers, Borg Cubes and other fictional ships to hotdog in a bun, a piece of broccoli, and anything else anyone can imagine.
The simple and practical ships probably bear some resemblance to Startrek shuttles.
Given that they don't have any engineering constraints on how they need to look, I would seriously doubt there is a standard "look" for human ships. You'd have everything from flying saucers, Borg Cubes and other fictional ships to hotdog in a bun, a piece of broccoli, and anything else anyone can imagine.
The simple and practical ships probably bear some resemblance to Startrek shuttles.
How many sexual organs both of real and fictional species do you think there are? Like, does Bad Dragon have a line of starships now? Worse, is someonw running a 'scan your own' service for personally customised rides? I mean, come on, this is humanity here. And while I'd like to think we'd be better than that, I am all too aware of how organ-focused most of the allosexual community is.
The classic Thranx posigravity ships are basically in the form of a wide shallow parabolic dish at the front, which is the singularity projector, with the bulk of the ship behind it as an elongated oval. Overall dimensions range from small craft perhaps fifty meters long to ones the size of the Rylix which are around 400 meters or so.
Something like this, except this is a human-designed version from the source books using the KK drive which was the human variant of the same drive system, designed independently of the thranx. I envisage the thranx ships as being rather more streamlined and considerably larger.
Note that the size of them is limited more by practical requirements than anything else; the drives can be scaled up to easily move small moons around and on paper at least you could turn a planet into a ship
The human ships don't have the requirement for the singularity projector, so can be pretty much anything you like. There certainly are influences from fictional ships all over the place because it's cool and why not? Some fictional spacecraft designs are actually fairly sensible if you have the right materials and drive systems. However, that said, the bulk of the 'standard' craft like the Interstellar Survey scouts are much more practical over cool. I've sort of got a mental picture of something roughly sixty meters long, as a top to bottom flattened cylinder perhaps ten meters wide at the widest point. They're not huge as they're designed for a fairly small crew, and both the power systems and drives are quite compact.
One of the larger patrol ships would be a similar design, but around twice the size. Still only half the size of a common thranx freighter though. The largest human ship at the moment would probably be one or other of the science and research vessels and even those wouldn't exceed perhaps 220 meters or thereabouts. They can easily build larger ones of course, almost trivially easily in fact, but so far it hasn't been necessary. When your drive can go from anywhere to anywhere in the galaxy in at most half an hour, near enough all of which time is at the destination if you're landing on a planet, you don't really need to make the things enormous. You just send more of them.
Obviously in the longer term the humans and thranx are likely to combine designs and end up with something that has a posigravity drive and a blink drive, which would tend to make it look much more like the first ship as the design is heavily influenced by the hardware requirements needed to project the gravitational field. And there will be specific designs for specific purposes, like mining, asteroid moving, bulk cargo, and so on, all of which will change the appearance of the ship.
But if they want to make the Andromeda Ascendant, they'll damn well make it
Note that the size of them is limited more by practical requirements than anything else; the drives can be scaled up to easily move small moons around and on paper at least you could turn a planet into a ship
Note that the size of them is limited more by practical requirements than anything else; the drives can be scaled up to easily move small moons around and on paper at least you could turn a planet into a ship
And now I want to see the humans show up at the Citadel... flying Earth as their "ambassadorial ship". Just to see the look of utter shock and disbelief on... well, pretty much everybody's faces.
The Tar-Aiym were in the original books the masters of gravitic control. Moving an entire solar system around was certainly something they'd have had no real problems with...
And of course the Krang was the ultimate weapon using those principles. It could project an instant black hole anywhere in range, where 'range' was from memory at least light-hours distant. Anything they wanted gone went pop into a singularity
Question - are human ships set-up to use thrust gravity in the event of artificial gravity failure? Ie., are they internally laid out more like a skyscraper than an ocean liner?
I imagine the Thranx ships are, just because that seems the most sensible way of doing it - that way, if the artificial gravity fails while you're walking around, the controls aren't suddenly on the ceiling.
Question - are human ships set-up to use thrust gravity in the event of artificial gravity failure? Ie., are they internally laid out more like a skyscraper than an ocean liner?
I imagine the Thranx ships are, just because that seems the most sensible way of doing it - that way, if the artificial gravity fails while you're walking around, the controls aren't suddenly on the ceiling.
Since human ships use gravity manipulation as their sublight drive and blinking involves almost zero thrust, I suspect that if the cabin gravity dies, the drive is probably dead too. You're also probably in microgravity which means there's no such thing as a ceiling, just six walls.
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