CodeBreaker wrote:

Still, I imagine buying a Morph capable of living on the Sun would be expensive. Like, really expensive. I cannot imagine your random Mesh Buisness owner owning one really. That large an investment must have a practical use beyond being a fun place to live. I agree that there is a chance that they where developed as a hostile environment testbed I guess. But then the Sun is a bit extreme, the only place I can imagine they would be of any other use is through one of the Gates, and then you have the trouble of fitting a very large spacewhale through a fairly small Pandora Gate (And then getting said Spacewhale to the nearest sun.) If I was going to produce a Morph capable of living in extreme conditions I would do it so it survived in actual space, not in the Sun corona. Much easier to put them to use (Just throw it out an airlock!).

CodeBreaker wrote:

I was under the impression that: 1) The Pandora Gates are a Gate to Gate transfer system. So sure, you might end up dialing up a Pandora Gate that happens to be on a Sun but you could not just throw in some co-ords. 2) The ability to control the size of the gate entry way is not quite in our control. And the last time someone tried to fiddle with the controls a bit too much a large explosion went boom and some ExHumans decided to go galavanting across the Galaxy.

CodeBreaker wrote:

Bolded the important parts. Each gate connects to a gate on the other end, determined, seemingly, by the arrangement of the dialing gates matrix thing. The Synergy incident occurred when the Sol gate system was unable to force a connection through back to the Synergy gate system, for whatever reason. This is supported in quite a few places throughout the book. The part I quoted being one, page 109 referencing Echo being another; The original Pandora Gate opens onto lifeless Echo V, a forbiding place littered with the detritus of a dead alien civilization. You are correct in that the Pandora Gates vary in size, however the book is not all that specific about how much of a variance there is. It says that they are at times large enough to allow a freight train to pass through. Now we need to know how big a Suyra actually is. From the images provided they look [b]large[/b]. Very large indeed. If the spacecraft on the cover of Sunward is manned then they must be massive. That is supported by the fact that they are capable of producing a magnetic shield around themselves strong enough to deflect high energy particles on the surface of Sol. I may be wrong but I cannot imagine that being something easily crammed into a Morph the size of a Humpback Whale or a Blue Whale.

Dr. Sólfar Sauhatapana Ta-Novaeangliae wrote:

In human mythology, the apocryphal records tell us, the ancient sapiens divined five elements - just enough for their evolutionary abacus, the hand. Four of the five, Air, Water, Fire, and Earth, had an opposite; an opposing element whose interaction was annihilation; but for the rest, various quantities of each element combined to make the various rocks and fish of the world. Two parts Earth and one part Fire to make coal, for example. If we think of these elements as atoms, as these early uprights did, then the analogy of matter and antimatter comes to mind for the combining of Air and Earth or Fire and Water. For those of us borne by water; born, as it were, beneath the waves; the salt kissed; the deep dwellers; for us, fire was always a mystery, an enigma. Not physics, not the laws governing the strange flickering, quicksilver dance heat and light - those we understood well enough. But of emotion, of sensuality. A mystery we felt safe from, safe to puzzle and romanticize. For myself, I viewed Fire and Water not as enemies, but as lovers, forbidden lovers whose very touch changed them. Not destroyed or battled against, but altered and invigorated. I remember those days, that golden age, when we were among the first uplifted - and I use that term with total sincerity, without irony - despite the hubris, for what is life without hubris, what is life if not the audacity to create? Then, we spent many long hours in quiet dreams along the bottoms of those tanks. There was still a gap, a seeming chasm as vast as the gulf between planets, between human thoughts and our own. They seemed alien, incompressible, almost as much so as now, but then we studied them, studied what they chose to show us, I should say. That was before it went bad. Who knew, then, that the world balanced on a thread - a breaking, strained thread six billion years old? It was easy then to romanticize fire, fusion, the power of heat and light. We talked of when we, the water dwellers, would have mastery over this mystery. Fire. The life bringer. There is a reason Prometheus is the god of forethought and fire, for where would humankind be without fire? And where would it take us, the newly uplifted. The enlightened. When war came, and come it did, like the rising tentacles of a giant squid, its gnashing fiery tentacles streaking across the sky, it seemed our dreamtime was ending. Fire's Janus face, the face of destruction, the face of suffocating agony, rained down on the earth. Sweeping away the old age. I dreamt then, dreamt I saw my kind riding the plumes of fire that exploded from the surface like terrible algal blooms. I dreamt we rose into the air, swimming with phoenix fins into the star riddled sky. Of all of us, of all the few hundred awaken whales and dolphins of my group, I was the only one who survived, survived to have my mind spliced into a millions bits and beamed into the night like an ocean song lamenting everything lost to the fires of war. I still sing that song. That elegy, that eulogy for our fallen past. But the future flows on. In human mythology, the apocryphal records tell us, the ancients knew fire's destructive nature. Knew it could destroy and kill and wipe away their world. They warned of it, time and again. But they knew, too, that fire could rejuvenate, could cleanse. Thus they dreamed of the phoenix, that beast who died by fire and was born of the ashes. Borne from the ashes as we all have been re here, in the scorched soil. And so to was my dream reawakened here. My dream of conquering fire, the dream to embody the phoenix and swim within the flames. Within the very heart of fire. Thus, I have given birth, birth to a new body, a new spirit. This, my child, my body. The Surya! Special thanks to Mercurry Industries: for all your nova hot spicy need, nothing's hotter than Mercurry.

PredatoryMollusk wrote:

So you're saying that a Surya would have to have a massive reactor in it's own body (the size of a habitat), just to deal with the heat from the Corona. And that does sound a bit silly.

Quote:

Now, this is probably a stupid question, but could Suryas periodically stop in at their habitats and... charge their batteries or something? Could they have a smaller internal mechanism that deflects the heat, but would require them to dock at orbital stations every few weeks (or days) to replenish their power?

jackgraham wrote:

I've been promising/threatening to write a scenario where everyone plays either a surya or a sundiver. I didn't get to it for this year's con-going season, but rest assured it's still on my to-do list.

Smokeskin wrote:

Could the magnetic fields collect and condense coronal plasma so that the plasma on the outside of the magnetic field blocked the radiation?