[CanRay]

Libya - Worked like a charm

Of course that one worked!  Doc Brown was involved! 

[Operator]

Libya - Worked like a charm

Of course that one worked!  Doc Brown was involved! 

So Libya fired off a bomb casing full of used pinball machine parts? They must have felt pretty dumb.

[CanRay]

So Libya fired off a bomb casing full of used pinball machine parts? They must have felt pretty dumb.

That's what they get for trusting a Mad Scientist. 

[Mirikon]

Actually, I was talking about when the Israelis finally got tired of Libya's drek, and nuked the hell out of them.

As for the bit about nukes being unreliable, I would say that they aren't any more or less reliable than they are today. You know why you don't have a lot of dud ammunition? Because people fire off a lot of them, so you get the kinks worked out. Except you don't have people shooting off a bunch of nukes to perfect the design. You have a bunch of weapons that, on paper, should work, but because you haven't test fired any of them in over a hundred years (Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was in 1963), you don't know if they will work. Weapons are reliable because they have been tested. An untested weapon is inherently unreliable.

[CanRay]

Actually, I was talking about when the Israelis finally got tired of Libya's drek, and nuked the hell out of them.

Yeah, and Libya's response was a bunch of pinball machine parts. 

[Sichr]

@Mirikon: IDN what are you trying to defend. Ive just posted what is RAW and continuig discussion on reliability of nukes seems to be waste of time. For me, it is simple...every single one out of two nukes used to kill people succeeded. 100%.

[Wolfboy]

Sichr, what i think he's getting at is that since we have effectively stopped all nuclear testing, we have designs that are untested and while the paperwork says they should work better than those that have been used in the past, we havent seen any of the designs tested in the feild where in all actuallity nukes are hard enough to get to go off in the first place. Theoretically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, but tell it that. theoretically the current crop of nuclear warheads should work fine so long as their tritium detonators havent degraded due to radiation or have been recently replaced, but we wont know for certain, (because believe me they have changed designs since the last UNDERGROUND test in the early 60's ) and wont know until some are set off.

in short what he's saying is that the reason they dont work as designed in SR is that their designs might just be flawed.

[Mirikon]

Exactly. Weapons design is a process of trial and error. And even if the design is sound, there are always going to be errors in the manufacturing process. Large production runs weed out these errors by product testing. They make enough Ares Alphas and test fire them enough that they catch things like the firing pin being missing most of time. The smaller the production run, and the less the product is used/tested, the greater the observed effect of those errors when they crop up. To take an example, if you look at statistics, the Apollo program had a 13% chance of catastrophic failure (2/15).

[Glorthoron]

I know I'm coming into this thread quite late, and the question may have already been addressed, but what has happened to the Universal Brotherhood.  Do they still exist?  I know all the stories about them up until sometime after the cermac (spelling?) blast, when they were starting to be shut down/wiped out.

[Mirikon]

The Universal Brotherhood was shut down before Chicago became Bug City, Glor. About a year before, IIRC. Ares and the UCAS (among others) were trying to quietly deal with the hives without causing a panic, after they'd been given evidence of the UB being a front for the bugs. The excuse given depended on the jurisdiction, but tax evasion was the most common one. Yeah, that's right. They brought the UB down allegedly for tax evasion. Hey, it worked for Capone, right? Anyways, with the UB officially shut down, Ares and others began moving against the hives, eliminating them where they could. When Ares raided an old warehouse that had belonged to the UB, searching for bugs, they uncovered the Chicago hive, and all hell broke loose. Not long after, Ares forces trapped inside the CZ used Damocles (AKA a small tactical nuke) inside the building the bugs had relocated to, resulting in the Cermak blast.

Since Bug City, the Universal Brotherhood doesn't exist. Period. There are some old abandoned chapterhouses, of course. And in one of the Missions (Brothers United, IIRC) you have a few old bug shamans trying to bring over a new queen. Oh, and then there's some of the insect shamans and queens that Ares has been experimenting on. More on that in Conspiracy Theories, a short story in Street Legends, and the upcoming Sacrificial Limb adventure.

[TheNarrator]

Theoretically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, but tell it that.

This commonly perpetuated statement is utterly false. Bumblebees aren't capable of fixed wing flight, true. However, bumblebees do not have fixed wings. They flap their wings. Also, the guy who first came to the conclusion that bee flight shouldn't be possible was blind stinking drunk at the time, and immediately realized his mistake when he sobered up. Unfortunately, by then the myth had already spread to every humanities major on campus. Scientists have fully understood the aerodynamics behind bumblebee flight for more than 80 years.

Similarly, we understand the principles behind nuclear fission quite well. There have been over 2000 nuclear test detonations worldwide since 1945.


Additionally, the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963 only banned the test detonation of nuclear devices in the atmosphere, underwater or in outer space, to prevent the spread of radiation and release of electromagnetic pulses. Nuclear testing continued to occur underground in the United States until 1992. The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty wasn't signed until 1996 (and probably never existed in the SR universe) and has still not yet been ratified or implemented, and may never be.

[Glorthoron]

Bumble Bee 1.0 couldn't fly. 

Version 1.5 could only glide.

Version 2.0 could fly.

Apparently they are working on a version 3.0 that can reach close to light speed.

The link you gave is, unfortunately, no better than the myth itself.  No one really knows the origins of the bumble bee myth, and this story is just one of many.  Using it as "the" reason is no better than perpetuating the myth itself. http://forums.shadowrun4.com/index.php?action=post;topic=7158.150;last_msg=138719, on the other hand, is a much better story.

P.S.  How do you insert a link under different text?

[Wakshaani]

I'm not too worried about bees; they've been airborn for a long, long time. It's when Scorpions learn how to fly that you can consider me checked out.

[TheNarrator]

P.S.  How do you insert a link under different text?

Code: [Select]

[url=http://domain.com/webpage]The text.[/url]


[Glorthoron]

P.S.  How do you insert a link under different text?

Code: [Select]

[url=http://domain.com/webpage]The text.[/url]


Thanks Narrator