Yes it is.
This is not negotiable.
We are not talking about nature, we are talking about technology.
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Based on your other responses to counter arguments, I’m going to go with “I’m pretty sure you haven’t.”
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heaters? what are these heaters? also, why did they fill the shell with air? and how did they figure out that they need to do that in the first place?
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fire drills. burgeon weirdly thinks those would work underwater to like melt wax or something. i dont get why he’d think that either.
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Use boning/preservatives
Why?
What about the use of technology by nonhumans? Where is the fire there?
With experimentation
Why wouldn’t they?
Just one point I’ve wanted to make for a long time: Even if it could give an underwater civ to create a suit that allows him to go to the surface, his vision (assuming he has eyes) would still be adapted to the water, so it’s possible when he goes a surface, he can’t see anything (Think about getting into a pool without swimming goggles) It would possibly take centuries of adaptation to be able to see on the surface (Also why would they spend their time on that?), OR wear lenses, which would need glass and fire, which they cannot access.
I think everyone assumed (me included) that part of the challenge of building the land suit is solving the any potential problems with not being able to see on land.
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that’s actually an awesome idea. but why stop at crabs? what about fish or slugs. maybe even worms? honestly the possibilities are endless as long as it has the magnet organs
" If a process is started at room temperature, say 72°F, and the application process temperature is 500°F, then ΔT is 500°F - 72°F, or 428°F. Below are some good guidelines for heating different materials in different situations. Example: To heat 50 lbs of steel by 250°F in 1 hour; . 05 x 50 x 250 / 1 = 625 Watts." - How Much Wattage do I Need? | Tutco-Farnam
and lets say 6000 electrocytes are able to produce 500 watts, then to make up the difference we use 60000 electrolytes, since the pacific sea floor averages a temperature of 38.3 °F (3.5 °C). Then It is possible to do it theoretically, this is without tweaking the structure of the planet.
and for those who say that it won’t have the same over time affect-
Most of the time, electric eels produce lower voltage shocks just strong enough to stun prey or deter a threatening animal. When threatened, electric eels can produce intermittent electric shocks for at least an hour without showing any signs of getting tired.
so what if you hook them up in series, you can get huge amounts of energy flowing through something almost iron like, and if you do hook them up is series, you get a sort of tesla coil approach to it.
--------now that its possible lets check out the practicality
To make this easier lets say this is a sort of jellyfish, which can hook up to other jellyfish to create circuits of defense, this would allow them to keep at bay while their food falls beneath their feet, but in order to become a sapient species you need brainpower, so lets make them crabs, nice shell and powerful ligaments, perfect for a sapient species, now lets expand the body of this crab to the size of an adult human, since each adult human has around 37 trillion cells it would be more than enough to fit this electric organ in, and to make it simpler, we will make the current flow from one claw to another.
Now you might ask how would one get that many resources to sustain such a body, and that is where electricity comes in, they can use their powerful jaws to break apart bones, not only that they can make tools out of them too. now comes their sight, they can use electric pulses to navigate, as well as use them for prospecting! as the different resistances are from different materials.
Theoretically, this species is not only able to survive the stone age but thrive past it. (
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Please refrain from using non-scientific units in calculations.
You almost get a pass here…
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Another thing to think about is how these ideas are going to apply in a game context. While having the right elemental magic will certainly give you a fast-track to higher technology, and perhaps by cold harsh realism it might even be near-necessary, that isn’t going to be a useful outlook when thinking in terms of designing game progression
I’ve ran a small poll, and of the 64 respondents only 4 of them (or just 6%) believed that they’d need such adaptations to get to the higher stages. What sense does it make to strand over 90% of players at the halfway mark of the game just for the sake of realism? It wouldn’t even take that much of a leap to help this great majority, all we’d need is not to blockade out the tech tree to force metal onto the player: I’ve already argued for how achievable this is earlier in this very thread. And if realism really is that much of a sticking point for you, then the entire game should be scrapped on account of the lack of real alien life
TL:DR is that forcing the player to use metal will make the game effectively unbeatable
I mean you could easily see if your planet is a water world…
and apparently your ‘poll’ is a fluke.
just because something is a popular opinion, doesn’t make it a fact.
it’d be like asking a club of flat earthers if the world was round.
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what do you propose then, riding to space on a bird? also comparing elemental magic (a not-real thing that has never existed) to metal (a very real thing that our only example of a high tech civilization has relied on) is sorta dumb. yes- a lot of things would help, but only a few are necessary, and we want to minimize that number. there is a lot you can do as a landbound species with metal, and if you think having that be a requirement breaks the game’s individuality and playablity than you need a new imagination.
scientific realism doesnt mean “do a, then b, because they have both happened irl” it means “a through x seem plausible, y seems not doable but feel free to prove me wrong and z doesnt follow the laws of thermodynamics.” id love to play a game i was forced to get metal in. a game without that would be not very well paced, wouldnt force the player to do anything, and would be a mess. its like portal where the tests are optional. defeats the whole perpose. i want to be challenged. i can mod the game to have alternate paths if i want, but the base game should be enjoyable, not a mess.
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HOW??? just HOW??? how will it ever become unbeatable by forcing people to use metal?
i can not believe that you’re actually genuine with this, stop trolling
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???
Or perhaps this thread is the fluke, due to all of the obfuscation around the topic
Blocking progress halfway through a playthrough is bad regardless of the factual accuracy of the player
No, I’m proposing what I’ve been proposing throughout this thread
We’ve also had to rely on chimp-like rage, smiling, and sexy feet. Remove any one of those and humans would be just like monkeys and shrikes
There’s also a lot you can do without metal
You’d still have to invent your stuff, and design for adaptations that you actually need and make sense. That’s far from nothing
I have explained the reasoning in the two paragraphs above
@BurgeonBlas this is your final warning to stop trolling, as Tea said, you can’t be serious at this point. I will silence you for a week if you keep this up any more.
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you haven’t at all, all you said was that you made a poll where a group of people voted for whether or not they need special adaptations to reach the society/industrial stage as an underwater species, i think? you never really specified what the poll was about, and from that you took the majority as people that will be trying to become underwater civs, and somehow that makes the game unbeatable?
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I do not usually write here if I have no reason, but I went to do something I could not do before:
Since I was studying at university, I was able to get and ask one professor who specializes in chemistry and I also went to ask Metallurgy about the question of whether any metals can be smelted underwater, and after talking to them, I got the answer from them:
It is possible to do this at high heat source, but there is one problem in this matter: the thermal conductivity of water is very low (4.2 J / K) and it is able to cool the water quickly and damage the stability of the metal, lowering the ability to form metal efficiently under water compared to metal formation In air, whose thermal conductivity is higher, which slows down the cooling of the metal, allowing it to harden more efficiently.
And to put that aside, I also asked about the possibility that an ancient civilization could melt and inflate metals underwater, and both gave me one significant direction:
“In the knowledge we know, it is almost impossible to melt metal underwater without exposing it to air or vacuum, especially with prehistoric knowledge.”
One of them even noted that substances from the alkylene family can produce enough heat on contact with water to melt low metals boiling points such as gallium or lead, but these are really dangerous and ineffective as they have a tendency to explode on contact with water. Especially for underwater civilization, their production is impossible.
Other substances like thermite are also said to be possible, but its production requires air because water is not friendly to form powders at all because of their high solubility.
And after I came out with the answer from them, I went to check the internet and there is an alternative way to produce metallic materials:
Scaly-foot gastropod is able to use iron and mineral it in its body, but it’s just a way, and if in case an intelligent underwater creature is able to obtain a similar creature capable of doing this, then yes it had access to metal (I call it cheating) but process it without what Mentioned above, it is almost impossible.
I am writing this because I quite wanted to examine the subject in depth and ask people who do know about the subject, but in my opinion, it is not enough, but at least I know that this subject does not bear fruit and I wanted to check if it is really possible from expert people.
Sorry to ruin it
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burgeon try being more like doom please. he’s not too great with english but he’s much better than you at getting his ideas across.
me and nigel worked on this for a while, the bottleneck seems to be aluminum refinement, theoretically extractable from bauxite or
trigger warning
hydrothermal vent plumes
prolly wouldnt form into usable shapes, even if the PC species was the scaled critter they’d have to be able to control the shape consciously which i dont think is possible.
you didnt, i liked your perspective.
burgeon… im disapointed
getting metal with extra steps?? seems hypocritical.
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