The Bad Ideas thread

Sir Lee wrote:

Cryptic wrote:

Sir Lee wrote: Glowing red nose too?

I was thinking laser blast nose so yes.

Codename: Rudolph.

I was thinking that was his given name.

Oh and he crash landed on his grandmother while coming in for a landing.

Combat Finals crash pairing - Team Awesome (cira winter 2007) vs the Village Irregulars (Karma et al, cira winter 2016)

Has anyone in the Workshop asked if Moebius could make a real "bottomless" coffee cup?

He probably could -- but then, how would you fill it?

Although that could be an interesting prank... appears to be a regular mug, but there's a small drain to an extradimensional fifty-litre container. Victim fills mug, takes a sip, rests it on the counter, next sip it's already half empty. Third try, it's empty. Victim thinks they must be really thirsty, refills it... rinse and repeat.

But it would be a really dangerous prank too. Devisors do NOT take well people messing with their coffee.

Like the beer glass with the miniaturized transfer module at the bottom in "Flatlander"?

At least I think it was "Flatlander", though it could have been one of the other Beowulf Schaeffer stories such as "Grendel", or even at the very beginning of "Borderland of Sol", It's been years since I've read them.

Probably a lot less salty than Utgard-Loki's mead horn, at least.



Now that I think of it, it was probably "Borderland", which began with Bey on Jinx, drinking away the fact that Sharrol - who had Flatland Phobia and so was stuck on Earth, where population-control laws made it impossible for an albino such as Schaeffer to get a procreation license - was temporarily married with Carlos Wu to get around the eugenics issue.

Of course, when Larry "consistency, what is that?" Niven decided to make a fix-up story (as a framing device for the anthology book Crashlander) to get around the many, many problems with the series, he chose to have them go on the run because the ARM (and specifically Agent Ausfallader) were getting antsy about Bey knowing too many important government secrets. In order to make this work, he had Sharrol, along with their kids Tanya and Louis - yes, that Louis Wu, who was only a toddler and so wouldn't recall any of this later - travel to the newly repopulated Home (the most Earth-like of the colony worlds) in cold sleep, meaning that all of this heartache was sort of pointless since they could now have as many kids together as they liked.

I seem to recall that the cold sleep option had been mentioned in an earlier story, actually, but if memory serves, the problem was finding a place which wasn't so literally unearthly that she would be constantly freaking out - even Wunderland had too many differences for her to cope with, apparently - so there was still some ass-pull in doing it this way.

I had that request for Moebius when i was drinking my first coffee of the day, and complaining that the mug didn't hold enough...

I believe the endless beer glass first appeared in Flatlander, given to BS by Elephant. The story where they end up managing to destroy an indestructible GP hull...

How about Mob team up with Jericho and apply his tech to medical storage of things like blood, saline.

Urine and Feces.

The latter two quickly adopted by workshoppers so that they don't have to stop for bathroom breaks or change after getting so in the zone they loose all awareness of anything other the what they're working on.