kengr

Ok, I'm trying to solve a few problems with a hypothetical communications device. It's undetectable, nothing but the paired device (they are made in pairs cannot made hooked up other than as pairs). Think of the paired part as a small chips, like a SIM card.

There is no way to determine the distance or direction of one unit from another. Not even a time lag.

So, given this, is there any way you can think of to determine where you are with such a device. I mean, you could use some *external signal like GPs, but that's essentially cheating. I'm trying to figure out something that dooesn't rely on other devices. Closest I can come is using it as a reliable clock and doing celestial navigation tricks. Which is both cumbersome and kinda noticable.

Just as a side note, while uyou can use paired chips for a completely secure link, and like build comm units to have slots for multiple chips, more common units just have a chip paired with one at a switching facility that hooks you up different users.

It all started a few weeks back when a friend gave me a couple of "surplus" laptops They were part of a bunch that had been retired by a company he does tech support for.

Anyway, one had a virgin (re)install of Win 10 on it, and I played around a bit. It was designed to hook up to a docking station which had some nice extra. And they were cheap on e-bay. So I bought one. And when it arrived, I hooked it up to the monitors and keyboard/mouse on the kitchen table I use as a workbench.

This meant fayanora and I could resume our long lapsed weekly TV nights. We are way behand (watching shows from 2021 now) but we are making a dent in the backlog. Good thing because space was getting aa bit tight on the server.

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This was sparked by watching a remastered copy of and old BBS civil defense videos. Basically about what to do before and after a nuclear attack.

It got me thinking about the stuff I read back in the 70s and 80s about building fallout shelters, and other "how to survive getting nuked" stuff.

So I considered survivors of an attack, and what they might maintain in the generations after (assuming moderate collapse of civilization here).

Now, deliberately built fallout shelters are useful for other things as well. Storm shelters, "panic room" type refuges, etc. And the food and water stockpiles are a good idea for pretty much any sort of disaster. So, those could survive thru generations.

Other things, like improvised air filtering and air circulation are a bit harder to maintain, but far from impossible. and they are again useful for other situations (bad or long lasting dust storms, or persistent smoke from wildfires for example.

It's even possible to build radiation detectors with some pretty low tec. And radios are harder, but given some knowledge & resources, they could persist for a long time. Crystal sets are very simple, and you can use chips or transistors from "dead" electronics as the crystal. Transmitters are harder, but still a lot more doable than you might think.

So you could have a "primitive" looking society with lots of hidden and fairly sturdy shelters, bigger stockpiles than you might expect and some unexpected emergency communications. Won't that set the cat among the canaries for "more advanced" raiders.

This also reminded me of a bit that used to come up on the Traveller SFRPG mailing list.

Sure, the planet is primitive, but it does have a spaceport (even if it's just a cleared hunk of land and somebody with a radio).

If it gets many visitors, odds are somebody will have put up some sort of satellite network. In Traveller, you can literally toss some cheap stock satellites out an airlock and they'll self position and organize into a network.

This means comms. Even if only for the convenience of off-worlders visiting and prospecting. Not that much harder to have the satellites do weather monitoring and the like.

Receivers are common, and cheap (think android cell phone). So natives *will* manage to get them. Maybe at first, just so they can get weather info and contact other villages in an emergency.

Some bright boy (either an off-worlder or perhaps an "enlightened" native in government) will bring in receivers for "school by satellite) like India and other places have. This too will help.

But even at this point to your typical off-worlder, the place will look the same on the surface.

*Under* the surface, things are different.

Picture Bwana and his friends who've hired a "native guide for a safari. Or to help them explore for minerals.

They'll be impressed by how well the guide knows the country and what keen eye for the weather he has. He'll be snickering to himself when he checks the weather photos and GPS, as well as aerial shots of the terrain ahead. No need to worry the off worlders with details they don't need to know.

:ikewise imported weapons (in small numbers at first) and imported vehicles. In some ways like the third world here, in other ways different because the tech level was higher when things started getting introduced.

This sort of thing can make for fun stories or fun gaming sessions.

Since it's going to be cool today, I turned off the AC. I also decided to clean the filters since it's been a while.

Ok, washed the filters, waited for them to dry. Went to put them back. All okay so far.

Put the top cover back on. Note, the covers are different sizes and gave these helpful arrows on one side to tell you which way is up.

Top cover went one fine. Bottom cover just wouldn't go. It was getting painful crouching next to the AC (It's a portable).

So I dragged over a milk crate to sit on. Cue many more minutes of trying to make it go into place.

Finally, I decided to try something stupid. I turned the cover upside down (so the arrow was pointing down).

It slid right in.

I am *very* annoyed with whoever designed this....

OK, I've been thinking about the subject recently. I decided to start by defining some terms/types.

Hide: outdoors, provides concealment, but not cover. Think of a hunting blind, but designed to fool humans too.

????: like a hide, but also provides cover (ie stops weapons and other attacks to at least some extent. Foxholes, dugouts and improvised bunkers are good examples

Priest's hole: a "room" that provides concealment for one or two people. Intended to hide them from a non-destructive search. Think "hidden closet". Very much a temporary thing (hours, not days)

Panic room: Often concealed, but mainly intended to protect from a destructive search and from attacks of various sorts until help arrives.

Bolt holes are similar to panic rooms, but usually have a concealed entrance to something that takes you to a room(s) elsewhere.

Then we start getting into tornado cellars, bomb shelters, fallout shelters, bunkers and lairs.

In these you've got increasing levels of protection from various threats (sometimes specific threats only, other times from a variety of threats). You also have increasing occupancy times, and the need to accomadate multiple people.

Anybody see anything wrong here? Maybe a different way to break things down? Or categories I've overlooked?

Once we've refined this, thewn I can start to work on what things ae needed for the various types.

All of these are based on Vantablack like materials.

Best would be if we could make "cloth" that acted like vantablack. Zentai suit would effectively be "living shadows". Flowing robe type stuff would give "cloud of darkness"

Less ambitious would be a full face "mask" (say something like a fencing mask) worn with a hooded robe. Tiony holes would let enough light in so you could see well enough to move around. But anybody looking into the hood's opening would just see utter blackness.

That last is probably doable.

Finally, ig we could come up with a coating that'd work (and be safe) on scleral lenses (like contacts, but they cover the entire front of the eyball) you'd have the effect of utter blackness instead of eyes. It'd look like there was just a hole in space where your eyballs should be.

Be *really* spooky if you could do it.

The Storage company I deal with has a website you can make payments thru. Or rather, it has one you *used* to be able to make them thru. It hasn't worked for several months at this point.

I made a payment over the phone last month. Did it by talking to the manager.

This month I got hit with a phone menu. A horrible one.

I had to enter my credit card number using the phone keypad. Yeah, 16 digits with no possibility of erasing if you mistype. You doi get prompted for confirmation that you entered it right. Except the audio keeps fading in and out, so I had to reenter it because I missed a prompt. Then you enter the card expiration date. Then the zip code pof the address the card is associated with. then the security code.

All this on a tiny keypad on the phone.

yerg...

In the various Polychrome Heroics threads, They've had a number of stories dealing with the aftereffects of "The Big One" (a megaquake hitting the west coast of the Us in the alternate world of Terramagne)

Recent posts by dialecticdreamer triggered an odder than usual train of thought. I thought it be of interest to many folks, not just the ones writing in that universe.

First thought was having a building on some sort of ball bearings or something on top of a sturdy foundation. That the ground shimmy all it wants and the building mostly sits there as the ground moves under it.

Fun idea and *wonderful* image but has just a *few* practical problems. :-)

So ok, we need to damp the movement a bit. Magnets in the foundation and the bottom of the building? Likely have problems.

But that got me thinking about the anti-sway dampers they put in tall buildings. Those involve massive springs and weights. Also they way they mount stuff inside Cheyenne Mountain. Ok, that may be workable.

Probably need to have a "basement" and flexible pipes and cables for water, sewer, gas, electric and other connections to the building. You need a space to goive the flexible pipes/cable *room* to flex so they don't kink up.

Probably put the springs and weights down there in in areas where they don't interfer with the connections.

Not a *detailed* solution, but something that may be doable with a little testing and research.

Added bonus, worst case after the quake, you can disconnect the building from the base and rig some sort of cradle and *move* it to a new location, because it'd have to be built to be "self supporting" in ways current buildings aren't

I stuck a couple of spare drives in the Dell Precision T3500. Took a while to get it to boot (the monitor on the workbench does not like the video signal that the vid card puts out when you are in BIOS settings.)

Once I got it to boot, it took a fair bit of time updating windows (the drive hard Win 7 Pro on it, but fort very different hardware). Fortunately the case had a product key sticker on it, so after an initial complaint of a non-verified install, I managed to make Ms happy.

it performs scarily well. Of course, with a 6-core Xeon and 24 gig of RAM it *should*.

After checking prices, I decided to order new drives for it. A new BD-rw drive, a pair of 500 gig drives and a 2 TB drive.

They should all be here within a week. Of course, the 500 gig drives are going to be the last to arrive.

I can install the BD drive and the 2TB drive before then and get a head start on moving stuff over from the old system.

I'll do a fresh install of Win7 on the 500 TB (drive C:) and set one form of backup to use the other 500 gig drive (d:) to back that up.

The I get to set other sorts of backup to the NAS servers.

Oh yeah, I didn't realize one set of SATA cables went uner the motherboard to the other side, so it "only" has 6 SATA channels. One of which is the eSATA connector on the back of the motherboard. That still leaves 5, of which there's only room for 4 in the case (unless I want to put an SSD in the 3.5 "floppy" bay) Eventually I'll dig up another SATA to eSATA adapter. And put that in. Or not.

Struggling along on the old box while doing various things on the new one to clean up various things that the old one couldn't really handle.