data/curated_samples/stackexchange_extract.json

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    {
        "text": "Q:\n\nHow would humanoid creatures with powerful jaws, claws, and a tail efficiently use their anatomy in barehanded combat?\n\nIn the story I am writing, there are several fight scenes between clearly non-human combatants. These combatants have several natural weapons at their disposal that humans do not have, including jaws, claws, weaponized tails, and tusks (though not every individual has the same series of natural weapons), and they use them in combat in addition to more typical jabs, throws, kicks, and grapples. In some cases these natural weapons are more effective than one would expect based on their anatomy (for example, biting is extremely effective if it does manage to connect). However, despite having non-human anatomy they are sentient beings and fight intelligently, in some ways they are compared in-story to martial artists.\nWriting fight scenes has proven to be a challenge due to it being difficult to get a general feel for how a sentient being with non-human features would actually fight. It also poses challenges in showing characterization in showing the character\u2019s emotion and personality through how they fight. For example being upset and going straight for the kill, arrogant and toying with their opponent, or hesitant and fighting on the defense. Or whether they are skilled fighters or just flailing. Martial arts and combat sports like fencing all have moves that can immediately convey some of these things, but I am not sure how to apply that to non-human fighting styles.\nI have tried looking at guides about swordplay, barehanded martial arts, and self-defense in general (under the impression that improvised \u201cgutter-fighting\u201d might provide more insight on how to fight in unorthodox situations\/with unorthodox weapons like claws than formalized sports), as well as tried to piece together some basic logic on how they would use their anatomy from general brainstorming. Obviously no one has written a guide on how to fight with jaws, teeth, and a tail because humans don\u2019t have any of these things. Additionally, many of these guides don't give advice on what to do if you know you are stronger or faster than the opponent, only if you are smaller or slower (and most of that advice is: don't pick that fight\/run).\nI have done a lot of research on how animals with natural weapons fight, but this only goes so far because animals don't have prolonged fights (they usually scuffle and then run if they can) and don't fight with any forethought or strategy. I've also watched a bunch of monster movies but with a few exceptions most of them don't seem to put a lot of thought into how the characters would actually fight (I know that at least a couple of Godzilla movies are exceptions, Godzilla's movements being based on bears). I have also looked at several previously asked questions here.\nI have especially had trouble with finding good sources for getting an idea of \"combat logic\" in general not based around a certain weapon or fighting style that can be applicable to any fight, including fights between non-human combatants with natural weapons. E.g., fighting with a sword is very different from fighting with claws, but in both cases it is a good idea to use them to guard your vitals to keep them from getting cut. I am also interested in avoiding silly things (e.g., unnecessary spinning) especially as the characters are supposed to be good at fighting and not make amateurish mistakes.\nThe overall image I am trying to portray is \u201cmartial arts with teeth and claws\u201d, and the idea that despite being non-human the characters are intelligent enough to think through their actions and have put some thought into how to best use their unusual anatomy.\nAdditional Information\n\nThey do not have access to artificial weapons like spears, swords, or firearms because of plot reasons (the fights are more or less unexpected street fights rather than premeditated or ritualized affairs), though on rare occasions they will make use of improvised weapons (mostly based on availability).\nSome of the fight scenes are nonlethal but most are in a lethal context.\nA \"one size fits all\" fighting style probably wouldn't work because their anatomy varies within the species (e.g., an individual might have claws but not a tail). Going on a case by case basis is clearly beyond the scope of any one question, I am more looking for general combat principles that I can them extrapolate to each individual.\nThe creatures' overall anatomy is semi-humanoid. Not entirely human-like and exactly how much varies between individuals. Martial arts and combat styles designed to exploit human weak points would work some of the time but not always. In general they have four limbs, two eyes, etc., but not always.\nTheir size is variable. Most are larger than a human but would also be less than 12 feet\/4 meters tall if standing fully erect.\n\nThe fact that such variable anatomy would make a codified system of martial arts difficult because everyone cannot learn the same techniques and the same techniques will not work on everyone is a plot point. Think \"stereotypical MMA monster\/kaiju fights with non-standardized anatomy of combatants\". At the same time, one would expect fighters to be able to learn how to use their anatomy on an individual level and at least some techniques could be taught between individuals of similar anatomy.\nMy question is threefold, all of which are related to one another:\n\nHow would a sapient humanoid creature with claws, powerful jaws, and a tail fight if they did so intelligently and in a trained or semi-trained manner rather than lashing out blindly? (If it helps those three features are the most common ones across the species.)\nBarring that, does anyone know of any useful references on combat and fighting logic in general that could be applied to a non-human combatant to get an idea on how an individual would fight with jaws, claws, tail, etc.?\nAre there any real-life weapons whose usage could be analogous to natural weapons seen on a non-human creature in general to get an idea on how these individuals could use their weapons?\n\nEDIT: There have been a lot of good answers thus far, though I noticed a lot of them focus on how animals fight. I thought I would share some of the information I have found on how animals use their natural weapons to give an idea of where the question is coming from and the prior research I have done. This isn't meant to be comprehensive but just what I have found so far. A lot of the issues I am having deal with how a being that uses weapons strategically would fight instead of just lashing out.\n\nJaws - From what I can tell jaws are a very high-risk, high-reward weapon. If your jaws are powerful enough or you have large fangs or teeth they can be devastating, but they require you to get your vital areas (head, throat, abdomen) very close to the opponent\u2019s body where they can strike you easily. Therefore, jaws seem to be terrible openers but devastating closers: break the opponents\u2019 guard in some way and then sink your teeth into them when you know they can\u2019t retaliate.  \nClaws - This one I have had the most trouble with. There are different kinds of claws in the animal kingdom, claws adapted for slashing and cutting and those that are more adapted for grappling and hooking onto prey. How a sapient species would use claws adapted for grappling has been discussed previously on this site, though how bladed claws more suitable for slashing wounds would be used does not appear to. I thought a kama or a falx might be an appropriate analogue among human weaponry.\nVenom - This one is surprisingly straightforward. Either use hit and run attacks by biting and then returning to finish the job like a Komodo dragon, or use them to sap your foe and wait for them to make a mistake due to sluggishness like a shrew. In a straight-up fight venom rarely works by itself.  \nTail - A lot of animals that fight with a tail will arc their body so their head and tail are both facing the enemy at the same time and they can easily lash out with it. The problem with a tail is that because it sticks out behind you one of the easiest ways to get it to strike your opponent is by spinning. Which is apparently a terrible move in combat because it turns your head from the enemy and exposes your back.\nLong Tusks - Usage of tusks is very different depending on length. Animals with long tusks will use them like spears, charging to gain momentum. However using them like lances doesn\u2019t work, lances only work for humans because the rider can be dislodged from their seat to dissipate force, if an animal tried that it would likely break its neck. Animals like elephants will also use their tusks in a sweeping motion to knock smaller enemies off their feet.  \nShort Tusks - Animals with shorts tusks like wild boar use their tusks more like knives, as short-distance slashing weapons to either lacerate their foe or cut at vital regions (femoral artery, groin, viscera). Large razor-edged fangs (like mandrills, chimpanzees, or peccaries) could be used the same way.  \nHorns - Horns are kind of similar to long tusks. Most animals with horns fight by interlocking them, but when using them against a predator they will also charge and use them in a slashing motion.  \nSpines - Spines are primarily defensive weapons. They go to cover areas you don\u2019t want your opponent striking or to punish them if they do. You don\u2019t really use them as offense except as a desperation move.\n\nC:\n\nI don't think this is worthy of being a full answer, but this clip of MMA experts critiquing a bear fight should give you some leads for further research: https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=XwobcJOOF-A\n\nC:\n\nFor weapons you can take a look at the [Kris](https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Kris). It's an Indonesian dagger that's generally used as if it's an extension of the wielder's hand. It's mainly used in [Pencak Silat](https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Pencak_Silat) where a lot of the original movements were inspired by animals.\n\nC:\n\nspeed is the essence of war, it applies to MMA too. My mom can easily sudue any crab unarmed while I must step on it and hold the pincers... Ok actually my mom stepped on it.\n\nC:\n\nHow nimble are the tails?  Are they prehensile?\n\nC:\n\n@Ryan_L It's variable. Some are prehensile, and in one case are used as makeshift garrotes or for strangling. Others have clubs, spines, stingers, or thagomizers. Others don't have natural weapons but are good for maintaining balance while running and fighting. Hence why I am trying to keep suggestions on how to use the tail as general as possible (and keep the question from being too broad) and then extrapolate how to apply them to individual cases (like prehensile tails).\n\nA:\n\nWell a thicker tail can be used to club a foe whereas a prehensile one can be used to trip or grapple. A big enough tail can aid mobility and a weaponized tail will be extremely deadly. However a tail will have a limited degree of movement (assuming it is attached at the base of the spine on their back) and thus depending on length they'll need to turn to hit with it. Making it a more risky maneuver best done from a guard. They'd probably have one side facing forwards to make it easier to hit with their tail. Sort of like with boxers. A tail that is prehensile can strike from overhead,around the waist or between the legs (not recommended) without needing to turn at all if long enough. But a prehensile tail is usually not as strong.\nClaws are fantastic natural weapons as are talons. They can be used to slice open soft tissue and cause extensive bleeding,talons can impale by slamming them straight into an enemy (even piercing bone) and there are many creative ways to utilize them. Grabbing with claws makes it much harder to escape and struggling guarantees further injury. Those with claws on their feet can also kick and if grabbing your or pinning you rake their back leg claws against your abdomen and legs potentially gutting you. (much as large cats do) If you rake at someones eyes with claws you are much more likely to slice open their eyes and even if you miss the eyes the cuts will bleed into their eyes.\nTeeth it depends on how the jaws are formed,neck length,etc. But generally you bite when in a grapple. Like wrenching someones neck aside to sink your jaws into their neck and then tear,biting the hand (especially the fingers),arm,leg or tail of someone grappling you and generally if you end up REAL close in combat. As for tusks or horns they go very well with the rush down and pounce tactics. Except you can just slam into them and impale them. Then you can keep hitting them,gore them again,kick them while they're down,etc.\nSo I'd say it'll involve alot of brutal grapples,strikes to incapacitate and make the enemy bleed,then immobilizing and killing them. Will depend on your build but that is my view of it.\n\nC:\n\nAlmost exactly what I intended to say so I won't add a new answer, but for tails wouldn't prehensile ones tipped with weaponry (say spikes or a slightly thicker tip like a whip) be fairly effective as well? Doesn't need to do lethal damage but when you get slashes coming from all directions while focusing on simultaneous attacks from your opponent it would be pretty hard to defend against, and the wounds and bleeding will add up.\n\nAnd depends on the body layout but for eyes on the side with a large field of vision for example I would think tails could be used for rear attack and defence.\n\nC:\n\nExactly. Thinner tails you'll want to use in a whipping motion. However not all tails will be useful in combat. As they may be too weak to do any real damage. But they are indeed very distracting. Honestly the hardest part of attacking with multiple limbs is being coordinated enough to do it effectively.\n\nC:\n\nTails can be a disadvantage.  They're yet another appendage for your opponent to grab.\n\nC:\n\nIndeed they can be. There is a risk to using them. Kind of like kicking high and being off balance in close quarters.\n\nC:\n\n@SapphireFlame Monitor lizard and iguana tails can be really nasty for that exact reason. They look simple but they hurt when they strike you.\n\nA:\n\nWell, your fighting styles are going to be based around the natural weaponry.  Normally I go on about making the weapon match the style, but you can't tailor your physiology, you are just born with it.\nYou've listed a variety of natural weapons, and each grouping will influence how the guy fights.  Tusks are going to be best used much like a Western style Boxer.  Think a cross between Mike Tyson and TMNT's Bebop.  Western Boxers wade in, head down, and if you notice the heavy punches come from really close in.  Now imagine wading in like that, but instead of a couple of left hooks and uppercuts, a sharp slash with the tusks across the midsection results in someone getting disembowled.  The Presumed thick hide and heavily muscled back and shoulders will offer protection.\nI imagine jaws and claws would follow a fighting style like Wing Chung.  There is a philosophy, I suppose you could call it, with Wing Chung.  Every major strike point is along the opponents centerline.  Solar Plexus, Xyphoid Process, Throat, Chin, Nose, and so on are all along the centerline.  If you can control your centerline, you are in good defensive shape.  If you can control your opponents centerline, they are toast.  That's the short version, there is a little more to it.  Most body movements and blocks in Wing Chung are dedicated to that goal.  Not a lot of hard blocks, mostly just light parries to move the incoming off target.  \nNext in Wing Chung are the punches and kicks.  These favor speed and repetiveness over heavy shots.  You have to get in close to make it work, and make no mistake, it does work.  How I imagine this working with with teeth and claws?  even fairly large claws suited to a Humanoid feline won't be long enough to eviscerate in one shot, at least not easily or reliably.  Hit the same area half a dozen times though.  The damage makes me cringe.  Also, with proper centerline control, going for the throat with the teeth or claws gets a bit easier.\nBear type body plans are going to kind of fight light a bar brawler.  They will rely on being tougher than anything else out there and wade in, relying on extremely powerful blows that can't really be parried, only outright dodged.  anything that gets inside the reach of those powerful arms are going to face a really powerful bite.\nThese are some starting points, but what it comes down to is look at how animals fight each other.\n\nA:\n\nYour main problem is that you make a distinction beetween reason how they fight and what they want to achieve. That's human way of fight. Animals are not cocky \"Oh I'm so big, I have strenght advantage you cannot harm me\".  They either have that advantage and will use it, the opponent will notice this and if they decide to fight they don't need to be reminded about that, thre's no mind play here.\nAnimals go for the kill in the manner of \"I'm just seconds away form killing you\". Look at wolves who will try to attack\/protect their throats. Only then they are somewhat coparable to humans. \"I have a knife on your throat, one move and yo're dead\". The diffrence is that animals, if they back off will know to not try to pick the fight again immediately. They have been defeated and spared (or not which is again human ethic\/morality issue). \nSo the point - no matter what they use they will go for the kill. It's a fight of deadblow and parry. Let's say a small monkey-type animals with claws would try to climb bigger opponets from their back to try to puncture\/cut arteries. How to parry? Imagine cat going on their back with 4 claw equipped limbs up front. Again, cat when attacking a bigger dog will try to go fake going for their mouth while really gaining a leverage to use much stronger back legs on throat. \n\nC:\n\nFor that matter, there's a huge difference between \"fighting\" (e.g. boxing, MMA, movies, etc) and *fighting* (two people trying to *kill* each other). The latter usually starts and ends with a single blow. You only get fighters slugging it out over a long period when they're trying to *not* kill each other. (Yes, I will argue this is true for animals also; the objective of a dominance fight is to walk away unhurt, which is hard to do if both fighters are out for blood.)\n\nC:\n\nThis answer hits exactly on the answer's edit (\"why is everyone talking about animals\").  In the animal world, your world, and the human world, there are tremendous-borderline-insurmountable differences between combatants (size + training + natural abilities).  The outcome is clear: fights to the death are over almost instantly, restricted show matches for dominance can allow for different styles.\n\nA:\n\ni have the same opinion regarding using biting unless in grappling\/wrestling (this depend on the jaw length too, i imagine it probably awkward to be able to bite for long jaw like crocodile for example if they have humanoid body, but i can see a bite use in defensive or counter attack (still risky like from bad timing and the teeth may get knockoff or end up breaking the jaw) and this also depend on the animal teeth, such as if it piranha or shark type teeth it can bite off the muscle chunk and opponent will have movement disadvantage and blood loss, while for crocodile teeth for example it can help to lodge and pull or hook the person and slam him like how crocodile or komodo do their thing outside of spinning to shred the body part.\nfor tail i can see a spinning kick combine\/follow with the tail or to low swipe kick and follow up with the tail if its the crocodile or komodo type of tail by using the spinning momentum to aim at their opponent feet or tail to make them fall down or losing their balance (i dont think a full spin is a problem for unarmed fighting as long it quick enough before enemy can retaliate and counter it, it help increase the force or impact too, compare to weapon martial arts which have length advantage and its a lethal weapon and such move is unnecessary. although some animal here clearly have natural body weapon it dont have much length advantage outside of tail which is already awkward as is, and claw can truly be lethal if it reach the throat or pierce the heart, outside of long tusk or horn though, beside its already a bad idea using spinning kick against horn or tusk opponent anyway.), but this depend on their opponent weight and type of tail though. there also kangaroo for example which also help in delivering more stronger kick for the kangaroo type of tail. while a tail like monkey can be use to hook opponent limb in order to disturb opponent balance or grapple or strangle their opponent.\nfor horn\/tusk (elephant type of tusk) pretty much use during charging or try to keep moving, otherwise if you get caught or grappled or stopped you are screwed, since its a good target to get hooked or locked or grabbed, not so much for boar type of tusk they still can deliver slashing motion during close combat so grappling is bad choice against boar, even more dangerous if they are like the real boar counterpart which like to keep suicidal charging or moving forward despite being pierced or lethally wounded, reason why human develop boar spear and need a lot of dog or human to hunt a boar they definitely the dangerous and hardest to defeat in close combat.\nfor claw martial arts, i am not knowledgable about this martial arts, but try check tiger claw, eagle claw, dragon claw technique in chinese martial arts, outside of claw weapon like bagh nakh to visualize tiger or bear way of clawing and teko kagi which i will recommend or consider as pangolin martial type of slash or claw \nimage for bagh nakh from pinterest \n\nits use as assassination weapon to kill Afzal khan\nimage from:https:\/\/www.rom.on.ca\/en\/blog\/weapon-wednesday-bagh-nakh-making-humans-into-tigers\n\nand this video:Secret Weapon of Indian Kings - Bagh Nakh aka Tiger Claws\nimage from the same video\n \nteko kagi from:https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Tekko-Kagi_Ninja.jpg\n\nand here pangolin claw \nimage from:https:\/\/news.janegoodall.org\/2017\/05\/22\/a-pangolin-bush-walk\/pangolin-claws-and-scales\/\n\nwhile for chinese clawing\/scratching type of martial arts they sometime equip with this duel gauntlet. \n\nor something like this (it have many variant) both from pinterest.\n\nA:\n\nTails\nTails come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, so each fighter is going to need to figure out what kind of utility they can get from it.\nIf you have decent control over the tail and it's long enough, it can be used for whip-like strikes. You don't need to spin all the way to get more reach with a tail, you could potentially use a punch and then twist your body a little further to throw in a follow-up tail strike.\nA lizard-like tail would have high potential as a whip-like weapon. While I can't imagine the impact damage from one strike being high, if aimed up an eye you could cause some serious damage or distraction.\nA prehensile tail would have usage as a grappling tool. Throw a punch, but also send the tail low to grab a foot and potentially pull an opponent off their feet.\nI could also imagine any tail having a little accessory tied to the end of it...something that looks ornamental and cute, but is actually heavy enough to bludgeon or sharp enough to cut.\nAdditionally, any long enough tail is another limb that could make or break a grapple. Even a weak tail could get into the eyes of an opponent and cause them difficulty.\nThe rest\nAlmost all of the rest making various grappling techniques have applications for grappling, both as defense and offense. So any grappler would have to deal with some of their moves being made unsafe based on what they fight. Jaws? Any technique that puts anything near the opponent's mouth is now dangerous. Spines? If you choose badly your opponent could twist in your grip and shred you.\nOn the flip side, certain grapplers would have very dangerous techniques available to them. Being able to bite whoever you grab or claw at them will quickly turn a hold into a kill.\n\n",
        "meta": {
            "source": "worldbuilding.stackexchange"
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        "text": "Q:\n\nRhino cavalry charge! How horrible would it be?\n\nThere have been questions asking if rhino, hippo and other similar kinds of cavalry are feasible.\nNow let's for a moment skip that and assume we have some special means, on the end of which, we get rhinos that behave almost war horse-like.\nI'm asking this question for worldbuilding reasons, as I'm trying to discover standard strategies for my fantasy army.\nHow horribly is medieval or ancient army standing on the other side of field sc***ed by rhino cavalry charging, provided they somehow manage not to disperse in terror and hold a traditional spear or pike defencive formation?\n\nC:\n\nWhat does \"sc***ed\" mean? I am not a native English speakers and learned to recognize these (ridiculous BTW) hiding strategies for  common words but that one is a mystery.\n\nC:\n\nsc**ed is probably \"screwed\"  Not really that rude.\n\nC:\n\nRhinos would be a devastating surprise...once...like any new weapon or tactic. After that, a reasonable enemy will adapt: More triplines, earthworks, fire arrows, stronger pikes, etc.\n\nC:\n\nThere's a great series [here](https:\/\/acoup.blog\/category\/collections\/war-elephants\/) on ancient elephantry, which would be a good analogue.\n\nC:\n\nSimilar question about [bulls](https:\/\/worldbuilding.stackexchange.com\/questions\/164390\/if-you-could-train-them-would-bulls-make-good-cavalry).\n\nC:\n\nwell the corpse probably stuck each time it connect and rhino will need to shake his head to get rid of it (unlike lance) while keep moving so need a good saddle against such rodeo and safe against accident organs rupture to the rider, i dont know their stamina and how maneuverable they are compare to horse but if they suck at it they probably end up get flank by swifter mount or lost its stamina and get surrounded in prolong fight.\n\nC:\n\nIf you have magic in your world, you could counter some of the logistics with teleportation circles that transport the rhinos to the battle field. Maybe the teleportation is expensive in one way or another, so *only* rhinos are teleported.\n\nA:\n\nThe charge itself? Terrifying. The amount of food needed to feed them, the amount of care and training would be too high for any reasonable state to use them for a long time.\nSo if you read actual historical campaigns you will find that rarity of fodder is a huge issue and supporting even horses, big or small, was a huge issue.\nSometimes you will slaughter the horses to eat them because you don't have food.\nSometimes you will feed them and let your own soldiers almost starve to death.\nAnyway war is won by logistics as much as pitched battles.\nIf you need 10x more food to support an animal then the enemy can get 10x more animals to attack you with.\nBut anyway you also need to consider a crap ton of other elements before you start replacing horses as cavalry.\nAre they comfortable to ride for long time?\nMost of any war is basically marching and marching.\nAre they maneuverable enough?\nDo they tire as quickly?\nThis is a big point.\nA Cheetah runs way faster than a camel.\nBut guess who wins in the long term?\nCan you replenish them with any reasonable speed?\nOr are they a one usage wonder.\nCan they serve other function like actual cavalry. Like mounted archers, or can they scout...etc.\nAnd the last thing is that are they cost effective?\nThis point is basically why 99% of technology and super duper equipment is never used for actual military usage.\nI won't get into into many example but I'll just write the following:\nWar elephants. They were awesome and fearsome. But guess what. They tended to be another tool at a general's disposal not an absolute game changer.\nOnce faced with them you can plan and counter them.\nThus they turn out to be no more different than Cataphracts or fully armored medieval knights or chariots or full plated knights or mounted archers or even gunpowder and cannons.\nHaving a bunch of elephants used correctly can win you the battle.\nBut so is having a bunch of cavalry, or starving your foe to death...etc\nActual warfare tend to be boring affairs with planning and marching and fighting like one battle every now and then with a surprising low number of casualties.\nNow don't let that discourage you. Far be it for me to even suggest it.\nAll I'm saying is that the pure idea of strong=good is never a military thing.\nSo with that in mind you can solve most of those problems.\nMaybe they are trained and bred to solve most of those problem.\nThey also got a particular logistics branch of the army that just handles them.\nLike trainers and grooms and transportation and usage.\nHeck. The story can revolve around just that!\nObviously enemy commander can try to exploit your weakness. But that just same old military tactics.\nSo perhaps your Rhinos are a bit different.\nMaybe your state is really into them because it's a tradition and they are useful.\nAnd on that note please understand that most warrior cultures were extremely practical otherwise they don't tend to stick around.\nAnyway solve the underlying reasons why they are not used and use them if you want.\n\nC:\n\n@LiJun: Making the chain of command obvious even the confusion of battle has advantages of its own. It's not like the commander is expected to spend their time in the front lines most of the time, and even when they *are* in front, they'd have bodyguards; a high-level commander's value is rarely in their personal swordplay.\n\nC:\n\nwarrior culture extremely practical......what about gaesatae? japan [samurai commander](https:\/\/i.pinimg.com\/originals\/6e\/51\/a7\/6e51a7ed1f4a23955d813cc19f505570.jpg) with all that elaborate equipment which only burden the wearer and tell everyone you are in charge? not including their flag banner that stuck in the back for their troops, most of the bronze warrior culture also wear horn helmet...... some warrior culture just like the rule of cool too no matter how impractical it is.\n\nC:\n\n@LiJun,\nAfaik the Samurai were practical and used bows+lances to fight most of the time.\nThe little banners at the back I think are just light sticks.\nThey never had access to iron and steel like Europe. So maybe layering was more important, \nThat thing on the head looks silly. But I doubt it's that heavy. Could be made of light material and that looks cool.\nAnd most helmets I saw were rather reasonable with a little piece of decoration and not much crap.\nAnd depending on the commander they might not left a spear. \nThey could be in charge of an army or a normal soldier.\n\nC:\n\n@LiJun,\nThe example of Gauls ended in defeat. \nBow and lance as examples.Not a detailed historical list.\nMy rule still applies. Things that are harmful to your actual army but are cool don't get passed down. like genes.\nDecorations don't have to be heavy. European plate armor is much heavier than that armor. Also muscle armor is a thing. Greeks!\nThe flags I see them as an organizational thing. \nAlso the image shows actual firing units to move away from them.\nThe helmets are absurd. Is it certain they were used by rank and file soldiers?\nIf you are a warlord you won't fight much.\n\nC:\n\n@ShadowRanger well thats why i use honda tadakatsu image there, since he like to goes frontline and wear that armor. iam not even bring out big ship or canon that just for bragging by the nation or kingdom.\n\nC:\n\n@ShadowRanger what i mean is they dont even need such elaborate decoration to the point it burden them, since they even know plume and paint if they want to goes practical but making the chain of command obvious.\n\nC:\n\nKinda related: I recently read a [space-based SF story on Reddit](https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/HFY\/comments\/h9m9iu\/darwins_revenge\/) which basically is this answer but in fictional form, with rhinos replaced by super space aliens.\n\nC:\n\n@LiJun,\nIf you are practical then you get defeated in battle after battle and you lose your own thing. Sparte was awesome but guess what happened?\nRome expanded taking over all of Greece.\nAnyway a point on the Gaesatae.\nActually arming your soldiers with more than a spear and a shield is not easy. Chainmain is expensive, especially given the era.\nSo either they were stupid or could not afford anything better. \nAnd guess what. They historically lost against the Romans.\nSo like I said. If you are not practical you don't survive long.\nI'm really not good on Japan but here is what I know\n\nC:\n\nthats depend on the era though, during muromachi? yes, they use bow and cavalry lance and they use light flag, but during sengoku which is when this elaborate armor is? not really most of them use gun and ashigaru which have huge flag on their back its the same problem with fluttering cape , the rest that still use the previous method is either poor or doesnt have port to trade with nanban and most of the armor is cumbersome though, honda tadakatsu is considered lighter, still such horn is not practical in anyway because it can easily get tangle and snap your neck in the worst case scenario.\n\nC:\n\nhere some image how annoying the [fluttering flag](https:\/\/topwar.ru\/uploads\/posts\/2018-03\/1521089787_1.-bitva-samuraev-1990.jpg) is especially to the person behind you it also make you need some gap for it. and theres even one where it try to [defied wind].  and here several of their helmet, [this](https:\/\/lh6.googleusercontent.com\/proxy\/A8F9n_rwdbadReZSkBukC0kfokZPFQ2odGMIvkvF2m_MYQ306sqx1PP99kl15ALxRUe2ITUD26newkKoE1NUGNADGYrupaV2aTizueSx_N760YwLYTXEkg),[this](https:\/\/i.imgur.com\/KaR8M7h.jpg)\n\nC:\n\n[this](https:\/\/i.pinimg.com\/originals\/72\/76\/a7\/7276a715efda55a3ef74839f48c29994.jpg),[this](https:\/\/d2rormqr1qwzpz.cloudfront.net\/photos\/2014\/10\/02\/68089-1knrha9.jpg) ,with [hideyoshi](https:\/\/i.pinimg.com\/originals\/d3\/b2\/d2\/d3b2d2f51c4fef27f73d4af617dd809a.jpg), one is so heavy and cumbersome, and there also elaborate [muscle cuirass](https:\/\/i.pinimg.com\/originals\/e0\/b2\/a1\/e0b2a1d878e6a083b1bc2c0410c8d610.jpg), theres many more most of them that use big horn too, i have trouble to find it but you get my point they also do it for rule of cool too despite theres better practical alternative.\n\nC:\n\nand here several [bronze helmet with horn](https:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/8\/88\/Horned_helmet.jpg) too, like [this](https:\/\/natmus.dk\/typo3temp\/assets\/images\/csm_Hjelm_fra_Veksoe__f.I_9dc667f0f5_ec498d8031.png) ,[this](https:\/\/www.thevintagenews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/Bronze-Gladiator-Helmets-Breastplate-The-British-Museum-Bloomsbury-London.-640x480.jpg),[this](https:\/\/pbs.twimg.com\/media\/D14VR9NWsAUx3ZN.jpg) even teutonic helmet have horn (which is debatable are they use it for battle or just for parade, but i personally think they did).\n\nC:\n\nyes and thats muscle armor is impractical in deflecting blow and doesnt add anything to stop gun shot either, and here the [defied wind](http:\/\/i87.photobucket.com\/albums\/k145\/evalerio0160\/color%20plates\/HOJOSASHIMONOdarker.jpg) one since look like i fail to copy paste the link. and i say again they have better practical alternative than that but majority of them choose this, they know plume they know coat of arms they know paint. also plate armor has better weight distribution than samurai armor though so upon wearing it samurai armor technically is heavier with all the padding too.\n\nC:\n\nthe helmet is for commander but most of them also join into the frontline, with at best the highest ranking that usually in the rear.\n\nC:\n\ni mean kamakura period there not muromachi, also here [another one](https:\/\/i.pinimg.com\/originals\/89\/f4\/2b\/89f42b891655b4c6ce8f44c50941a930.jpg) and [this](https:\/\/i.pinimg.com\/originals\/94\/74\/32\/9474328d19fec6322ebd4317d974df73.jpg)\n\nC:\n\n@LiJun,\nYou remind me of this. \nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=1j7CdoKqhAI\nIf you approach history with mere \"facts\"then you will have a bad time.\nI have 0 knowledge about Japan so you're arguing with me about something you know more of. So that's that.\nYes. But European armors were heavy. Ceremonial equipment, exist and sometimes we can only guess to which is which.\nExample. Dane axes are cool. But they are light and nimble weapons with a light blade. \nOtherwise they can't be an effective weapon.\nSo imagine WWII Germany fighting with halberds because they are cool!\n\nC:\n\n@LiJun,\nNow I get your point about something being cool.\nBut that can't take away from the actual military efficiency. \nagain Germany in WWII using cool looking halberds. \nThey lose in a day and the tradition is done.\nBut create an elite group of guards in 1300s who use horned helmets and big swords.\nand the image becomes: sure. They are not the most practical things. But there is enough utility in the whole thing to be functional.\nThe Romans simply forgot about the maniple army, they moved from the spear, they ignored the restriction on joining the army...etc.\nGreat success followed.\n\nC:\n\nwell originally ww2 germany also make big tank which is originally impractical though, but i also dont know much about ww2 technology. also during napoleon to ww1 many make big ship and big canon too which is impractical, slow, and costly yet they stubbornly make it anyway. because people especially warrior culture usually not 100% pragmatic\/practical and like to show off too. also maybe you dont know about the japan culture, but i just like to share, at least it help us share knowledge. :)\n\nC:\n\nLet us [continue this discussion in chat](https:\/\/chat.stackexchange.com\/rooms\/110250\/discussion-between-seallussus-and-li-jun).\n\nA:\n\nSo, putting myself in the opposing army's shoes here:\nThe first battle is probably a rout - You've found a new weapon, no-one knows how to deal with them, the Rhino charge wins hands down.\nThe second battle, being a sneaky medieval commander, I show up prepared. Rhinos have soft feet, so I get my smiths making hundreds of caltrops* to scatter. I cut longer pikes, and dig indentations so the shafts can be braced into the ground. I have my bowmen carry sharpened stakes, and knock them into the ground facing forwards. I try and find boggy and marshy ground, and try and persuade you to attack me there. As I'm not the one feeding muti-tonne animals, I can probably afford to wait around there.\nIf we have a tradition of horse archery, I send out horse archers - the Rhinos are slower, with lower stamina. We lure them across the battlefield, and every now and then one of them goes beserk.\nWithout horse archers, I get my cavalry to feint - pretend to charge, and then withdraw. With any luck, the rhinos will chase them, with their riders unable to control them, and I can lure them across the battlefield until they're too tired to stand, and then deal with their riders with lances. This works even better if my cavalry have a few javelins to pelt them with.\nLight siege weapons would work very well here - a ballista has very good range, and just a few crazed rhinos running back through the opponent's lines might make them question using them in future\nThey'd also be hit hard by the standard medieval tactic of retreating, and burning all the crops, forage etc you can find along the way.\nIn short, they're a terrifying weapon, but easy to counter if you base your entire strategy on them.\n*A quote from Vegetius, writer of Epitoma rei militaris:\n\nThe armed chariots used in war by Antiochus and Mithridates at first terrified the Romans, but they afterwards made a jest of them. As a chariot of this sort does not always meet with plain and level ground, the least obstruction stops it. And if one of the horses be either killed or wounded, it falls into the enemy's hands. The Roman soldiers rendered them useless... they strewed the field of battle with caltrops, and the horses that drew the chariots, running full speed on them, were infallibly destroyed. A caltrop is a device composed of four spikes or points arranged so that in whatever manner it is thrown on the ground, it rests on three and presents the fourth upright.\n\nA:\n\nRhinoceroses are about twice as heavy as horses. If the hypothetical rhinoceroses used as cavalry mounts truely \"behave almost war horse-like\" as the question states, then standard tactics developed against horse-riding heavy cavalry will work with minimal adaptations against rhinoceros-riding heavier cavalry. They just need sturdier pikes.\nPike formations work against cavalry charges because horses will not charge a wall of pikes. Hence the importance of deciding how much do those rhinoceroses behave like horses.\nOn the other hand, if the rhinoceroses don't behave like horses and instead keep their typical rhino berserker behavior when charging, then the infantry won't try to use the same tactics. Ancient and medieval armies were not commanded by idiots.\nWhat the infantry would do we can only speculate, and the question doesn't ask it.\n\nC:\n\nAssuming the rhinos _would_ charge into a pike formation but there is no resonable way to armor them, how much damage would a pike do to a rhino? Would they (assuming they are lucky enough to not be hit in the eye) be able to tank it and trample down the infantry or would the pike wall do enough damage to the steeds to make the attackers unwilling to charge in the first place?\n\nC:\n\n@hajef: That depends on the sturdiness of the pikes and the training of the pikemen, doesn't it? But generally speaking, if two ton rhinos are known to go berserk and charge the wall of pikes then nobody will try to use pike formations against them; anti-tank ditches and [Czech hedgehogs](https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Czech_hedgehog) will make an early entry into history. (And why wouldn't there be no reasonable way to to armor rhinos? Heavy cavalry did use armored horses.)\n\nC:\n\n@hajef in my opinion, the pike probably snap upon contact while the rhino momentum help penetrate it deeper, so reverse lance probably and lance puncture plate armor, though the wielder probably get dislocate arms or knock back. but iam not knowledgeable about physic hence just my opinion, besides if the formation tigthly  enough i think the rhino can also lose its momentum after several impact and get surrounded to get stab hence cavalry do flank or charge at enemy gap or try to scare the pikemen rather than keep forcing themselves to charge the front.\n\nC:\n\nmedieval people know about [buried wooden stakes](https:\/\/i.pinimg.com\/236x\/81\/dc\/3f\/81dc3f53ffc5ca51bdc822e184a2135a.jpg) as anti cavalry or something like [this](https:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/thumb\/4\/49\/Cheval_de_frise_petersburg_civil_war_02598.jpg\/597px-Cheval_de_frise_petersburg_civil_war_02598.jpg)  anyway\n\nC:\n\n@LiJun: [Here is a close-up picture](https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Pike_(weapon)#\/media\/File:Pike_square_img_3645.jpg) showing how pikes were used. The first rank of pikemen show the position for defense against a cavalry charge; notice that the pikes are set with their butts into the ground, to absorb the force of the incoming charge. Also notice how thick the pikes are.\n\nC:\n\nyeah i know, hence iam not sure will it dislocate the arms or not upon impact, but regarding the pike thickness, i still think it probably snap upon impact though, if they use halberd thats another story since it have reinforce metal in their shaft, either it can penetrate deep enough to puncture their internal organs while wearing armor or not is another story.\n\nA:\n\nI would start by comparing them to mounted elephants rather than horses. Elephants are extremely big and scary, but not unstoppable. And logistical reasons mean that it's hard to bring a large number of elephants to the battlefield.\nArmies fighting elephants would often pelt them with heavy javelins until the elephants got so scared\/angry they went out of control. A rampaging elephant is a threat to anyone standing near it, so you would hope this happened before they reached your frontlines. Some elephant riders carried a special weapon to kill their own elephant in case it started trampling their own side.\nSome relevant rhino facts:\nRhinos can reach speeds of up to 30mph, faster than any human (28mph for an expert sprinter) or elephant (25mph) but slower than a horse (44mph). If they're travelling at 2\/3rds the speed of a warhorse, then the rider's lance (if he had one) would have significantly less impact.\nFun fact: when moving at top speed, rhinos run on their toes.\nRhinos have a lot less endurance for travelling long distances than horses.\nA rhino has skin two inches thick (thicker at its shoulders and at back, a little soft under its neck), similar to an elephant's, making them somewhat resistant to spears, arrows, etc. A soldier could perhaps be trained to target their weak spots.\nA rhino has a good sense of smell but very poor eyesight. I suspect that unlike horses they would not shy away from infantry with spears - by the time they even noticed the spears were there it might be too late for them to stop. (Although rhinos are surprisingly good at making tight turns mid-charge.)\nRhino poachers are known to catch them in wire snares and then finish them off with a spear or machete. This suggests that a well-prepared army in a good defensive position would have a good chance of holding them off.\n\nA:\n\nMedieval times?\nOne rhino? Terrifying. A whole platoon of rhinos acting together? Complete devastation.\nHave you seen what rhinos can do to sizable animals?\nWARNING Scenes of animal vs animal aggression in the wild https:\/\/youtu.be\/liAdulWOWws?t=17\nOne-on-one, rhinos are only evenly matched by a large hippo. An elephant treats a rhino as a toy. Anything else and watch out.\nThe real unnerving aspect of rhinos as cavalry mounts is that, unlike horses, they have no discernible fear of anything and will attack large moving objects even if unprovoked. They don't know when they are beaten and would probably refuse to lie down even if they were dead.\n\nC:\n\nRhino-zombies? I like the idea.\n\nC:\n\nI like the bit in the video where the lion goes \"Okay, okay! I'm moving.\"\n\nC:\n\nRhinos attack almost anything, because they have the strength and resistance, but they are not suicidal and certainly know when not to charge. They just don't encounter things strong enough to beat them very often.\n\n",
        "meta": {
            "source": "worldbuilding.stackexchange"
        }
    },
    {
        "text": "Q:\n\nCountries with a limit on how much money people can spend in a year\n\nA world similar to ours, but all countries have the following law: Each individual person is allowed to spend no more than a fixed amount of money every year (\"fixed\" in the sense that it is equal for each person, but the amount may change from year to year, e.g because of inflation). There is no limit to how much money each person can save in a year.\nThis law is supposed to maintain a small difference between life standards of the rich and the poor.\nHow would the economy of these countries be like? Would it be stable?   \n\nC:\n\nIs it just me or would this create the largest black market (off books) trade system possible? Would education and gaining higher employment even be a goal for people here?  If i made 100k in a year but only 10k can be spent, im pretty sure id have a 9 year vacation\n\nC:\n\n**First law of currency:** If you impose too much restrictions on currency, it will soon stop being used as money, and something else will take up its place.\n\nC:\n\nComments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been [moved to chat](http:\/\/chat.stackexchange.com\/rooms\/42390\/discussion-on-question-by-lior-countries-with-a-limit-on-how-much-money-people-c).\n\nC:\n\nSo... families could create foundations or family business, and then earn money for it and make it spend money on them? Or you also include legal entities as \"persons\" that will have their spending limited?\n\nC:\n\nHow does this law apply to a Juridical person? In our world, Richguy already has a Richguy Estate company that earns the money instead of him, and manages anything pricey, leaving him pocket change below tax threshold. (have a look at \"Panama Papers\")\n\nA:\n\nMoney is just a fictional thing to keep track of value and time. If money doesn't work, people find other ways around it.\nA real world example you could study is the German Democratic Republic. Money was practically worthless, so high-quality items were traded in secret.\nLet's say you can spend amount X per month. X is the amount an \"average\" job pays. This means for average people, not much would change (on first sight). For people with sub-standard jobs that pay less then X, nothing would change, either.\nFor people in jobs that pay more then X, but only a little, not much would change, either. The surplus would be saved so that they can use it up after retirement.\nThe problem lies with high-quality jobs. Jobs that pay a lot more then X. There would be little incentive to do these jobs anymore. And if you did these jobs, then you would likely only spend a few years doing them, and then retire, using up your saved money. This means that a lot less people would be practicing such jobs, leading to an increase in pay, and even shorter times they actually need to perform that job.\nThat is, if money were to stay. But that's not what will happen. People will simply create another system to keep track of time and value - a black market. Let's say you need to get a doctors appointment. Many people will try that, but there is little incentive for the doctor to see you. So you \"sweeten the deal\" by giving him something that isn't money. You trade your own labor or self-produces goods for his time.\nThis is exactly what happened in the GDR - money was worthless, since you couldn't buy anything -- so if you wanted to get something special, you had to have something of value to trade for it.\nCertain goods were always very rare in the GDR due to the regulated market. if you tried to buy those, the merchant would always tell you \"they are out of stock\". But if you secretly handed him something equally rare, suddenly you ended up with getting exactly what you wanted. Without money, the problem is to define what \"equally rare\" means.\nAll in all, it's a recipe for disaster. Money works well because it has a standardized value and is recognized by all parties. If your population can't use money for their everyday needs anymore, they'll use something else, less standardized, less controlled, and even easier to abuse. People that are poor will be even poorer then before, because the little money they have isn't worth anything anymore and they likely don't have qualified labor to offer or much own ground to produce something.\n\nC:\n\nIf you set the limit to high, you achieve exactly nothing. If you set the limit to something that actually hits some people, the black market *will* emerge - at least for high quality products \/ services. A doctor can easily make more then 100k\/month, especially when not a local town doctor but e.g. plastic surgeon. Think about the sums some sportsmen get (e.g. soccer players). Furthermore, you only shoot yourself in the foot. If you discourage people from doing highly specialized, difficult jobs, then they won't do them for long. See above. If I get $1m\/month, I'll only do the job 5 years.\n\nC:\n\nBut if we set the limit quite high - lets say 100k then 99% of the population wouldn't be affected at all. Only 1% of the population would be interested in the black market\/cheating - for all others money would still be the preferred currency, even more so since super-rich people can't just walz in and throw millions around, money would even be more precious!\n\nC:\n\nYou'd be surpised how many jobs earn more then 100k \/ year. Pilots, doctors, qualified software developers. These might not be the jobs the mass of the people actually are employed in, but those few people have *significant* influence on the society and everyday life. Furthermore: What do you actually achieve if you don't hit a significant portion of the people? Most rich people have their assets in companies anyways, which you can't target with the policy (try running a car manufacturer with only 100k\/year allowed spending).\n\nC:\n\nIf we take the limit of 100k per year - how many people are actually needed by society who make more than this? Most specialists will not spend more than 100k a year - this would equal a net income of maybe 250k (you have to deduct taxes and retirement savings). Pro athletes will still get shitloads of money, because they can do their sports only for a few years (most athletes are only pro for 5-10 years) - so most specialists will still strive to get to 250k, above that you find mostly upper-echelon managers getting obscene bonuses for doing nothing ;-)\n\nC:\n\nYou would still hit personal spending. And hitting the 1% with the highest income, if they share 40% of the nationwide income total will have a significant effect. You will not hit many individuals, but you will hit a significant amount of the total income\n\nC:\n\nHow will you hit personal spending if your assets are all in companies? And yes, you will only hit 1% of the population, but the actions these 1% take will have significant influence. You will loose a lot very qualified labor, which is bad for any society. Besides, these people would still create a black market. Not for everyday products, because they usually get them, but for more expensive goods. This can be *very* subtle (and inviting each other to expensive business trips to avoid spending much on vacation yourself is only the tip of the iceberg).\n\nC:\n\nLet us [continue this discussion in chat](http:\/\/chat.stackexchange.com\/rooms\/42300\/discussion-between-falco-and-polygnome).\n\nC:\n\nThey could also use cryptocurrency.\n\nA:\n\nPeople would do what they did in high tax countries (>90%).  Cheat.  Instead of taking a high salary, they would get benefits from their employer.  Free housing.  Free food.  Free clothes.  Free travel.  Free education benefits are possible but tricky (since you usually get educated before working, not after).  \nCheating actually helps the situation, because without it, people with high incomes would retire early.  Why keep working if you already have more money than you could ever spend?  \nBlack market barter of goods and services directly is also possible.  This is economically inefficient but not as much so as not getting goods and services at all.  \nThis would decrease the velocity of money, causing a drop in the money supply.  That would cause deflation.  Rather than having inflation, prices would fall as no one has enough (spendable) money to afford many things.  \n\nC:\n\n\"prices would fall as no one has enough money to afford many things. \" - oh, no, they'd have plenty of money. They just couldn't use it.\n\nC:\n\n\"prices would fall\" as sellers would be competing for a very limited amount of disposable income.\n\nC:\n\n\"they'd have plenty of money. They just couldn't use it.\". Not being able to use it is the same as not having it, at least from a spending perspective. \"I have to buy a new car this month. Better only buy cheap food so I don't go over my spending limit\". Prices will fall because companies will compete for less money on the market. And their employees won#' be particularly interested in getting a raise they can#t use anyways.\n\nA:\n\nSo several economists just cried a little.\nMoney would deflate in value to approximate its now current value, paychecks would be reduced, and where paychecks couldn't be reduced (due to wage laws) workforce would be reduced and costs would increase.\nSome industries would just simply fold, unable to make a profit. \n\nA:\n\nMoney is simply a fiction used to account for time and value, so the value of work, goods and services would radically inflate or deflate according to circumstances.\nPeople would be effectively \"paid\" the same regardless of what they did or how hard (or little) they worked, so incentives to work or do highly skilled jobs would disappear. Good luck finding either a plumber or a brain surgeon. Since you would be \"paid\" the same regardless of what you did, then any job would be done to the same high standards as the local DMV or the team which set up Hilary Clinton's email server (i.e. not at all). I might not recommend that you go to a restaurant to eat in this economy.\nIndeed, the effective result will be everyone is forced to into subsistence farming in order to survive, since the social and economic underpinnings of society will erode away and infrastructure will collapse without routine maintenance.  Venezuela is rapidly approaching this point despite having the second largest reservoirs of oil in the world, a temperate climate and fertile soil. In Canada, Quebec has the largest land area, a wealth of mineral, agriculture and hydropower resources, not to mention several large cities with modern industry covering a multitude of sectors, but decades of soft socialist governments have reduced what is potentially the richest province in Canada to receiving billions of dollars per year from other provinces just to pay the bills.\nSo TL:DR this plan is a recipe for poverty and social collapse.\n\nC:\n\nYou could still spent the money you earned this year, next year. So it seems like this system would trade time for money. In our world all people work(Almost) the same amount of time each week, but earn widely different amount of money. With this system people with high paying jobs, would simply work less.\n\nA:\n\nMost paths I see for your world involve collapse.  There's many paths it could take, depending on details you'd have to work out yourself.\nThe first and most obvious would be the development of massive loopholes.  A fundamental problem people in your world would have to solve is that any money earned above the limit is basically useless to them.  If the cap is \\$100,000, and I'm earning \\$100,000, there's no incentive for me to take on a job that would earn me \\$1,000,000 every year, because \\$900,000 of that is unspendable useless paper completely devoid of value because I can't spend it.  Or can I?  What if I am permitted to \"donate\" that money to the poor?  What if I can \"donate\" \\$20,000 to a poor person, in exchange for him \"donating\" me a \\$10,000 car I couldn't purchase on my own because I'd hit my limit.  Such loopholes would lead the rich to view the poor as tools, valued by how much of their limit they aren't using and how well they can be manipulated to provide goods and services to the rich.\nSo let's say we plug those loopholes.  We've never been able to plug the loopholes in any major economic system, so I won't say how its done, but let's just handwave it away.  So now any paycheck I get above my \\$100,000 limit is worthless, right?  Well, I did gloss over one use for this extra cash: vacations!  I may earn \\$1,000,000 one year, then retire for the next 9 years bleeding off those reserves!  Now you have income equality, but the \"rich\" have more leisure time.  Most certainly those rich who like their position in life will busy putting that time to lobbying for the jobs they want, locking the poor into a perpetual grind.\nOf course, society could always just rebel against your system.  Bartering would almost certainly become a solution immediately, so you'd have to put your foot down and demand that all barters be documented and counted at \"fair market rates.\"  But what's a fair market rate?  What if nobody buys these things with cash?  What would quickly happen is a massive deflation of your currency.  A car that once cost \\$10,000 might suddenly cost \\$2,000, and wages would drop by 1\/5 to support that.  Now that the prices are devalued, the rich that were making \\$500,000 are now only making \\$100,000, which was the limit, so they can spend all of their money.  All of this because you had to document bartering to prevent it from being a loophole.\nOf course, you can also become a despot and fix the market rates for goods.  In every documented case of price fixing ever, a black market springs up.  You set the price of a coffee cup at \\$10?  No problem, someone begins selling a \"topology teaching device: donuts\" for \\$5.  It's purpose is to teach youngsters about topology.  In topology, a donuts and a coffee cup are treated as the same shape, because they have the same number of holes in them.  But you don't have a fixed price on tools for teaching higher order mathematics to children, do you?\n\nIn the end, things don't go the way you want.  It's very hard to apply gross changes to a system as complicated as economics without massive issues.  Changes have to be smooth and subtle.\n\nC:\n\n`Such loopholes would lead the rich to view the poor as tools, valued by how much of their limit they aren't using and how well they can be manipulated to provide goods and services to the rich.` yeah, that would be soo different from our current society. And to call a 100k job a \"perpetual grind\" is quite an understatement. - And you not only save for vacations, but also retirement. So most people in good jobs could go into early retirement - and even then you can save more: For your kids! Not just now, but also future generations\n\nA:\n\nYour scheme would discourage ownership and encourage lease. No person would be able to buy a new car or a house, so they have to rent it. \nOr they create a company with themselves as owner and employee to assign themselves a company car. This would accelerate the erosion of workers' rights in the new \"gig\" economy.\nIf old property can be inherited, it could stabilize economic differences between owners and non-owners.\nYour scheme would discourage saving because there are fewer ways to spend saved money. On the short term that could bring an economic benefit as the demand goes up, but on the long term the lack of investment capital would be harmful.\n\nAnd I agree with Brythan that loophole abuse would be rife.\n\nC:\n\nMost people don't BUY a new car in cash, they will take up a loan and pay off the car or house over several years, only spending a small amount each year. So no change there for 95% of the population. Point 2 is the same with taxes in our world, many people already do this. - And the main reason for saving: security if you lose your job, get sick, retirement or for future generations stay 100% valid\n\nC:\n\nAhhh, but then how we define \"spending\"? If the spending limit is $10,000, and I buy a car at $ 100,000, can I do it because it is credit, and **I** am going to pay only $ 5,000 twenty times? If so, there is a gross stimulus to getting in debt, to a point that people will be so much in debt that there is going to be an outcry against the spending limit.\n\nA:\n\nIf the amount of expenditure is fixed and there is no meritocracy involved, so there is no way someone can expand that amount, and this amount is similar to the medium wage in a country of the first world, then almost the entire economy will need to be controlled by the state. That\u2019s because producing goods and services needs investments, more than the average person can effort. If there are no rich people to invest money on it, then only the government can, or the economy will eventually collapse to a pre-industrial era.\nOtherwise there should be the possibility to exceed this limit only for some not-individual legal entities, but speculate on this and if it can be exploited needs a lot more assumptions.\nThere are others things a government can realistically do to reduce the social inequality without going so far, like giving a job for every unemployed person with the right amount of working hours and salary (and possibly without competing with the private sector), which is supported today by a lot of post Keynesian academics and is fully compatible with capitalism in a modern industrialized country.\nSomething important to consider about the modern industrialized economies, as opposed to e.g., pre-industrial societies, is that the interest of riches and of the middle class are much closer; having an amount of money distributed over all the citizens is appropriate to ensure that sales are done in the market, it grant goods and services for the consumers and income for the capitalists.\nIf the expenditure amount is quite high, like over the average wage, this shouldn't be a problem, at least not from this side.\nOtherwise, if this amount is too low, this will lower the aggregate demand eventually reaching a deflationary crisis; unsold goods and services lead to low salaries and dismissals for workers and bankruptcy for companies. So the entire productive system will slow down, it will be like economic self-harm.\nWith this in mind, I can\u2019t imagine a good reason for all countries to adopt such a limiting rule, and if only one country abandoned it, it will probably gain economic power from that so that the other countries will need to abolish this rule as well, or they will be economically outclassed.\nSo if the only way of make it possible is to have a communist-like form of state, that means all the countries of the world needs to be ruled by this communism-like ideology or to be under the influence of a much stronger country which is under this ideology.\nThat\u2019s already quite far from what we have in the real world.\nI also assume that the government should make the overnight rate (which affect rates of loans) stay really low or completely at 0% (that can be achieved without the needs of nationalizing the bank system, as we can see in a lot of examples in Japan or Europe), otherwise the bank system could have too much power from the needs for everyone to make loans for acquiring expensive goods like an house; otherwise there should be some exceptions to the expenditure limit rule.\nI guess also that the more expensive services (healthcare and education) should be completely public and accessible for everyone. In addition, eventually other services which can be easily monopolized like water, gas, telecommunication, transport etc should also be nationalized..\n\nC:\n\nThere is a lot of information here, but it is hard to read. You should break it up into more paragraphs.\n\n",
        "meta": {
            "source": "worldbuilding.stackexchange"
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        "text": "Q:\n\nCould a cave-in or avalanche in low gravity be dangerous?\n\nI have a character on the surface of Enceladus, one of the moons of Saturn.  It has an icy surface on top of what is believed to be a liquid ocean.  There is no atmosphere, though near its south polar region there are what appear to be canyons filled with long lines of geysers that eject mostly water vapor into space.\nI need to have a way for this character to be trapped and buried on Enceladus (don't worry about his fate), either as a result of the ground caving in beneath him causing him to fall below the surface, or in something like an avalanche of ice down the side of the one of the canyons.  The trouble is, the surface gravity on Enceladus is only 1.13% of Earth's.  In that case, it seems to me most scenarios would be easily escapable, both because a cave-in or avalanche would occur very slowly and because the character could jump so high he should be able to simply leap away from the danger.  I thought of having him hit by a large piece of ice and knocked out, thus preventing him from escaping; but could a person really be knocked out by a large mass that is slow-moving, or would he just be crushed?\nSo my question is: is there a realistic way for someone to get trapped an buried under these conditions?\n\nC:\n\nIf the ground opens up below you, then there's nothing for you to push of of for a jump.  Thus, you'll fall.\n\nC:\n\nYour astronaut won't be able to hear the avalanche. There is less sunlight at Saturn compared to Earth and you have to ask how far electric lights will illuminate the surroundings. There's probably very little warning before the avalanche hits.\n\nC:\n\nIf a pound of feathers lands on you... does it weigh you down more or less than a pound of rocks...\n\nC:\n\nA couple of comments not worthy of an answer: 1) I think you (the author) can contrive an artificial scenario where the character drops something valuable in a crevasse, has to retrieve it, and then gets trapped by a mini cave-in or similar. 2) I might suggest the New Yorker article on Antarctic expeditioner Henry Worsley for some insight on visible and hidden dangers (crevasses!) in a similarly harsh environment  https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2018\/02\/12\/the-white-darkness\n\nC:\n\nIf he's wearing a spacesuit I'm not sure how he can be \"knocked out\" without suffering decompression\n\nC:\n\n@WernerCD it weighs less but has less momentum because of its slower fall\n\nC:\n\n@MCMastery Erm, no, it does *not* weigh less. A pound of feathers weighs exactly as much as a pound of rocks, per the definition of \"a pound of [substance]\". Also, I haven't been able to find anything definitive regarding the density of Enceladus' atmosphere, but my impression is that it's probably thin enough that feathers and rocks would fall equally slowly, so they would have the same momentum as well.\n\nC:\n\n@DaveSherohman Oh my god, I must have been so tired. I meant to write the exact opposite; it weighs the same. I think I remember seeing a comedy skit about that once ;)\n\nC:\n\na little bit off-topic but from the wikipedia page, Surface gravity =\n0.113 m\/s2 (0.0113 g). However, g = 9.80665, not 10... shouldn't surface gravity be 0.110853m\/s2?\n\nC:\n\n@SilverCookies it depends on how the helmet and pressure collar fit. If the occipital bone or the mastoid process are struck with sufficient force in the fall it will result in a knockout.\n\nC:\n\n@pojo-guy indeed, though that does sound like a poorly designed helmet\n\nC:\n\n@BurnsBA thanks for the article, it was helpful\n\nC:\n\nAnother non-answer, but useful thought. As a backcountry skier *on earth*, I know that one of the biggest threats of an avalanche is not actually being crushed by snow, but being battered by snow, ice, and natural terrain features (trees, rocks) while you're being carried. So, being buried is not the only danger; if there is other \"astronaut equipment\" nearby, or if the avalanche consists of massive chunks of ice, astro-guy could be dead\/injured before he even comes to a rest. Also, remember that **low gravity has no effect on the momentum** of massive chunks of ice...\n\nC:\n\nEven in zero gravity an astronaut can definitely be severely crushed between heavy moving objects.\n\nA:\n\nThe surface gravity of Enceladus is 0.113m\/s2. At such a low gravity, you cannot run, for the force you would use in a step will send you on a very long jump that may last more than a minute (if you don't hit anything along the way before you touch ground again). This may be quite dangerous. If you don't have the means to fly, like a jetpack, you may end up landing on a sharp shard of ice that will rip your spacesuit open. Alternatively, you may accidentally jump from a high place to a lower one. And while lower gravity means smaller acceleration, the fact that you can jump dozens to hundreds of meters upwards, to fall on a hole\/crater\/depression that might be dozens to hundreds of meters lower than your starting point, means that you can land with enough speed on hardened ice to break bones and equipment.\nIf you want to see how walking on such a gravity might look like, I can recommend you a simulator. Like any simulator, this one does not model reality with 100% accuracy, but it is close enough to reality to give you a general idea. Get yourself a copy of Kerbal Space Program and go take a walk on Gilly (surface gravity = 0.049m\/s2) or Pol (surface gravity = 0.373m\/s2), which are the bodies with gravity that is closest to Enceladus.\nThat said, unless your astronaut has a jetpack, even walking may be suicidal. But if he does have a jetpack, he would never be in trouble in the first hand.\nAs for whether the snow can crush him... the density of snow on Earth is 0.1 to 0.8g\/cm3. Let us assume that the density of snow on Enceladus is around the lowest range, 0.1g\/cm3 so as to be nice with your astronaut. Now let's say that he gets 100 meters of snow on him. Let's do some calculations.\nUnder 100 meters of snow, the mass of snow above a section of one square meter is:\n$$ 10^2m \\times 1m^2 \\times 10^{-1}g\/cm^3 = \\frac{10m^3g}{cm^3} = \\frac{10^6 cm^3g}{cm^3} = 10^6 g = 1 \\space metric \\space ton $$\nImpressive, right? But at 1.13% the gravity of the Earth, that metric ton would do for a pressure of 11.3 kilograms per square meter.\nThe average surface of an adult humans is around 2m2. This means that, laying down, your astrounaut is exposing about one square meter to the snow. We can then infer that under ten meters of snow, he would be facing 11.3 kilograms of pressure. That is a laughable fraction of an atmposphere.\nSo is he out of the hook? No.\nDon't forget that the astronaut is considerably denser than the snow around him. If he were naked, he could be ten times as dense as that snow - I figure the equipment in his spacesuit might be denser yet.\nIn other words, he will sink in the snow. The snow will behave like a very viscous liquid, and it should feel like sinking in quicksand for the astrounaut. In the end, he is in for a very slow death in the dark and cold bottom of the avalanche.\n\nC:\n\nWhat goes up must come down. Get in the way of one the geysers and that's going to be a bad day.\n\nC:\n\nReminds me of A Fall Of Moondust by Clarke\n\nC:\n\nFor the KSP surface gravities, I'm assuming you meant 0.049\\0.373 meters per second per second, rather than 0.049\\0.373 square meters?\n\nC:\n\n@Sean thanks, I will fix the metrics in the post.\n\nC:\n\nWhat about some sort of \"gecko tape\" like substance on the boots to help maintain traction? You'd still be able to \"peel\" your boot away from most surfaces just through the normal heel-to-toe roll of a footfall, but if you walk such that your other foot makes contact (and thus adheres) before your first foot's toe departs from the surface, you won't be launching yourself into space in the course of ordinary walking. Incidentally, it would make jumping almost impossible, thus preventing that means of escape!\n\nC:\n\n@DoktorJ I don't think you can outrun an avalanche in any gravity.\n\nA:\n\nYes, though Enceladus is probably much safer than Earth for these sorts of things.\nIt all depends on how high the avalanche starts from and how much material is involved. A ton of rock or ice hitting you at 50 mph is going to hurt regardless of whether it's on Earth or Enceladus -- if anything, Enceladus  would be worse because of the likelihood of damage to your spacesuit.\nIt's certainly true that an avalanche starting from the same height will do less damage on Enceladus, but if it's high enough, it will still kill. (Also, there's the distinct possibility that Enceladus's low gravity may make much greater elevation differences more common.)\nLikewise with getting buried. The same volume avalanche will weigh less on Enceladus, and for that reason will be easier to get out of (pressure suit damage aside). But a big enough avalanche will still bury you under too much overlaying material for you to dig your way out even if you survived.\nNext there's the question of escape. Once more, it's probably easier to escape on Enceladus -- though just how athletic and controlled you can be in a spacesuit is an open question -- but escape is far from guaranteed. Further, in a vacuum, will you always be aware of an oncoming mass of ice?  And if you're in a confined space, will you be able to escape?  Consider a deep valley and an avalanche which starts far above you. By the time you're aware of it, it's moving 30 mph and is quite inexorable, with the same momentum it would have on Earth. Can you escape?  Probably not.\nThe lack of atmosphere had a negligible effect, as air resistance doesn't play a large role in the dynamics. (Its major impact is that the lack of air on Enceladus forces people into space suits and this makes them more vulnerable.)\nSo, assuming your space suit is reasonably rugged, you're most likely safer on Enceladus, but a large avalanche can still trap you and kill you.\n\nC:\n\n@JanDoggen But it has something to do with the weight...\n\nC:\n\nIn H. Beam Piper's *Cosmic Computer*, he has the lines:  \"Yves Jacquemont began posting signs in conspicuous places:\nWEIGHT IS WHAT YOU LIFT, MASS IS WHAT HURTS\nWHEN IT HITS YOU.\nWEIGHT DEPENDS ON GRAVITY; MASS IS ALWAYS CONSTANT.\"\n\nC:\n\n@JanDoggen And that's to do with inertia(l mass) \u2013 momentum \u2013 kinetic energy. None of those have anything to do with weight.\n\nC:\n\n@MarkOlson I'm not convinced by your answer. Lack of air resistance means terminal velocities are higher and things like a cave collapse can happen without needing to push the air out of the way and also less warning. (You won't hear an avalanche coming although you may feel a rumble in the ground). On the other hand though fast-moving events often ride on or mix with air in order to reduce friction so without air the avalanche may behave differently. I don't know the answer to all of this but I doubt the net effect is \"nothing\"..\n\nC:\n\n@Tim B: It's not \"nothing\", it's \"not much, negligible\".  One way to look at it is to consider how much effect air resistance has on Earth -- it will be less on Enceladus. And when you're dealing with materials  like ice and rock, it has very little effect on Earth. (Snow's another matter, of course, but that's not what the OP was asking about.)\n\nC:\n\n@Tim B: Not much.  (But I added that.)\n\nC:\n\n*The same volume avalanche will weigh less on Enceladus*? Are you saying that because it wll be ice instead of rock? Because gravity has nothing to do with the mass itself.\n\nC:\n\n@wizzwizz4 Yes, in the case of being buried under it. But *A ton of rock or ice hitting you at 50 mph* is the same here as there.\n\nC:\n\nThis answer is good but misses an important detail - what effect will the lack of atmosphere have?\n\nC:\n\nJust want to point out that weight is a product of gravity. So less gravity means less weight.\n\nA:\n\nYes, it's definitely feasible for either a cave in or an avalanche to trap this character, and ice is heavy enough that chunks the size of two sedans would be very difficult for the average person to move even under Enceladus' gravity.\n\nMaterial Required To Trap a Person: Since the gravity is ~1% of Earth's (rounded for easier math), 100kg on Earth would be only 1kg on Enceladus. Assuming that the character did get trapped under some amount of ice, let's see how much is needed to prevent the character from just pushing their way out once they've been buried.\nBenchpress world records are around 485kg, so if your character is a world record body builder they could theoretically lift 48,500kg, or about 40 Toyota Corollas. Let's assume a more modest 100kg to make the math easy.\nThis site claims the volume of their truck trailers are 82 cubic meters, and this site claims that 82 cubic meters of ice is about 75,000kg. A Toyota Corolla is about 12 cubic meters, which is about 7,300kg of ice. So, a chunk of ice the size of 1 and a half sedans could trap, but not completely crush, someone on Enceladus, and presumably your disaster would involve much more than that.\nAvoiding a Cave In: This is trivially easy to avoid if the character is next to a stable wall to grab on to since they'd fall slowly, so let's assume the entire area around the character is collapsing. \nThis question covers the idea of climbing up falling debris, however the answer's best case scenario involves large pieces of rubble that you were already about to jump off of. If the character is just standing, then they will fall at the same speed as the ground below them so they would not be able to push off of anything. Therefore, the character could not jump to safety if the ground below them caves in and they had no solid ground to grab onto.\nAvoiding an Avalanche: Although it would be moving slow, it would actually be pretty hard to avoid being buried in an avalanche on Enceladus. I don't have enough physics degrees to understand the math, however I'd imagine that since the avalanche would behave much like a liquid, trying to stay on top of it would be like try to walk through a flood of quicksand or molasses. This, coupled with a cloud of powdery ice blocking attempts to find a safe route, could definitely lead to the character sinking and getting buried. \n\nC:\n\n@Andrey I happen to have pushed vehicles as heavy as a Toyota Landcruiser, and I can verify that it does NOT take minutes worth of output from a human to get meaningful velocities in multi-ton objects. Think accelerations on the order of ~0.1 M\/s^2. Absolutely doable and worthwhile, although one thing that I haven't seen mentioned is that the posture of the person trapped may prevent the same kind of leverage one applies with the proper form. Anyone who has benched can tell you proper form is everything.\n\nC:\n\n@wedstrom that's a good point. Just try pushing at car on a 25 degree incline, and you will have 10% gravity perfectly simulated. See if you can still move it. On a flat surface you are converting 95% of your energy into acceleration, just a little loss to friction, on a lift most of it is being lost to fighting gravity\n\nC:\n\nYou would probably not be able to bench the Toyota. Mass is the same. It would take you minutes of pushing at your full stength to accelerate the mass and get it moving. Once it finally moves it would blast off taking you with them if you made the mistake of holding on.\n\nC:\n\n@Andrey: Unless there's no gravity then you don't lift mass, you lift weight. Lifting 'Thing A' that weighs 100kg on Earth would take the same effort as lifting 'Thing B' that weighs 100kg on Enceladus. However, Thing A would weigh 1kg on Enceladus, and Thing B would weigh 10,000kg on Earth.\n\nC:\n\nnot exactly. V=F\/M So even at 0 gravity, it takes a huge amount of force to put any useful velocity on an object. Heavy object in low G are extremely dangerous. They soak energy like a sponge and then become freight trains slowly moving forward crushing you\n\nC:\n\n@Andrey: Ah, I see what you mean now. I was focusing more on how much material was needed to trap the character after they're buried, so they couldn't just push the ice out of the way and escape. I'll update that part to be more clear.\n\nC:\n\n\"100kg on Earth would be only 1kg on Enceladus.\" It would be *equivalent* to 1kg, but it wouldn't *be* 1kg. \"Unless there's no gravity then you don't lift mass, you lift weight. \" If you had semi on a completely frictionless track, and were pushing horizontally, you would have no weight. Does that mean it wouldn't take any effort to push it?\n\nC:\n\n@Acccumulation: Pushing an object is not the same as lifting an object. If a small car is in neutral, pushing it is pretty easy, whereas lifting it is not even though the only friction when lifting is from air. Also, it *would* be about 1kg on Enceladus. Weight is just mass*gravity, so if Earth gravity is '1' and Enceladus is '1% of 1': 100kg*1=100kg, 100kg*0.01=1kg\n\nC:\n\nLifting an object is, in part, pushing it. And kg is a unit of mass, not weight.\n\nC:\n\n@Acccumulation: Good point, lifting is basically pushing something that is accelerating towards you. And I used kg as weight because most people can think of what a kilogram or pound or whatever 'weighs', but have little reference for a newton or pound-force.\n\nA:\n\nDespite the lower gravity, a cave-in in a sufficiently deep crevasse or cave could still easily happen quickly enough to block the escape.\nAnd once the only entrance is blocked by several tons of ice (and remember, the ice still has the same mass as on earth, so you can't just push it away), your explorer is truly trapped without advanced mining equipment.\nIn fact, the use of such equipment might even pose another hazard, if it melts the ice or causes tremors, which could instabilize the rest of the ice.\nBeing knocked out is also a possibility: Even if the actual collapse is far slower than on earth, the large masses colliding can cause shards and boulders of ice to be ejected at dangerous velocities.\nFinally, ice can be quite sharp, so if your character falls on or is hit by an icycle, they could end up pinned in place, with the ice stuck in their pressure suite being the only thing between them and decompression.\n\nA:\n\nI think the other answers have sufficiently covered how dangerous a cave-in or avalanche might be, but I want to point out that the chance and severity of them will be far higher.\nThe lower gravity will create a far steeper angle of repose as the cohesiveness of snow, rock, etc. will be much greater relative to gravity than we are used to on Earth. That means you can have far more material build up into very steep, even over-hanging and exotic structures. Add to that the lower atmospheric disturbance (no wind) and no critters or humans to disturb this moon's surface and you will probably have large, critically balanced structures that are ready to be knocked over at any moment.\nWhether or not cave-ins or avalanches would be as dangerous as on Earth, you will have them occur far more often in virgin territory, and the mass of the material involved will likely be much greater.\n\nA:\n\nWhat I miss in other answers is that the morphology of mountains and avalanche material will be completely different at 1.13% of gravity.  The amount of material stacking up before surfaces get crushed to the degree of starting a conversion from sticking to moving friction will be quite higher.  So when finally things start getting ugly, the amount of ugliness unleashed will be quite different from that on Earth and the amount of potential energy leading to a chain reaction will be comparable, making the involved masses quite larger.  Avalanches will be quite slower at taking up speed, but they will be just as deadly in their effects and the height colloding material will take on will have similar relations and densities compared to the jumping height of a human as on Earth.  It's not just the human energy and time frame getting better payoff.\n\nC:\n\nYou apparently didn't read my answer because I addressed that.\n\nA:\n\nAbsolutely yes.  Even though the force of gravity is 1.3% of the Earth's, the planetary weight of a landslide or cave-in could still be fatal.\nWeight is the force of gravity on a mass. Newton's second law formula (F = m\u2022a) shows the relationship between mass, acceleration and force.  The following weight formula uses Newton's second law:\nw = m \u2022 g\nwhere:\n\nw is the weight (force of gravity on a mass)\nm is the mass\ng is the acceleration due to gravity.\n\nUsing this weight calculator with a g value of 0.1274 m\/s^2 (1.13% of 9.8 m\/s^2), you can make some simple calculations.  If 1,000 pounds of material would crush you on Earth (453.59 kg), that's a fourth of the weight of a VW Beetle.  On your planet, ~34,800 kg would have the same effect, and that could be 21 cubic meters of stone, i.e. not much. \n\n",
        "meta": {
            "source": "worldbuilding.stackexchange"
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        "text": "Q:\n\nWhat would happen with a supermassive planet?\n\nWhat would happen to a planet if it was really massive, like something around the size of the sun (likely made of asteroid materials)? What kind of environment might it have?  What would happen to an atmosphere (if it actually had one, and it didn't just turn solid from the immense gravity)? Could it turn into something like a star that could burn really heavy materials? etc...\nAlso, I would preferably like to know both how it being rogue and in a solar system might also effect it. The solar system wouldn't really need to be ours.\n\nA:\n\nIt would collapse into a neutron star, possibly a black hole. \nThe volume of the sun is about $1.412\\times 10^{27}\\ \\text{m}^3$. The density of normal rock is about $2.65\\times 10^6\\ \\text{g}\/\\text{m}^{3}$.\nSo something the volume of the sun made of asteroid material would weigh about $3.7418 \u00d7 10^{27}\\ \\text{t}$.\nUnfortunately the Chandrasekhar limit is about $2.765\\times 10^{27}\\ \\text{t}$. Masses under this limit remain stable as white dwarfs, masses above that limit collapse into neutron stars producing an explosion that briefly outshines the galaxy. \nAt this point you either get a neutron star or a black hole and this depends on how big the explosion was. \nThe Tolman\u2013Oppenheimer\u2013Volkoff limit, the limit on the mass of a neutron star is $1.98\\times 10^{27}\\ \\text{t}$, (yes lighter than the limit for turning into a neutron star) so this stage depends on whether enough mass was ejected by the explosion. If not you get a black hole, if enough is ejected you get a neutron star.  \nIf you want a really massive rocky world that's not just a ball of flame or a neutron star I'd suggest staying bellow about $2\\times 10^{24}\\ \\text{t}$ (a bit heavier than Jupiter) and sticking it somewhere short on hydrogen and helium, your planet would have a radius of about $44238\\ \\text{km}$, about $334$ times the mass of the earth and a surface area $42$ times that of the earth. \n\nC:\n\nG x (2\u00d710^27 kg) \/ (1.957\u00d710^15 m^2) = 68.2 m\/s^2 is the gravitational acceleration felt on the surface of your planet. It is almost 8 times Earth's gravitational attraction. It would be impossible for anyone to walk normally with regular muscles.\n\nC:\n\nMurphy - It's not hard, and you can do it yourself. For a given uniform density the surface gravity scales as the radius (or diameter, if you prefer). So if you double the size of the earth but keep the overall composition the same, you double the surface gravity. Well, it's a bit more complicated than that, since the earth has a heavier iron core and a lighter mantle, so simple size changes don't quite scale simply, but if you assume uniform density the relationship holds.\n\nC:\n\n@Ephasme Thanks! I was having trouble getting wolfram alpha to calculate the surface gravity for me.\n\nA:\n\nIf you took a bunch of asteroid materials (say carbonaceous because otherwise boring) and cloned up a sun-scale mass (probably below sun size) of them, they'd turn into a star. Depending on the kind of asteroid and its elemental makeup all sorts of weird stuff might happen. There's a colossal amount of energy produced by putting that much mass nearby. Even if it starts out cold and not moving, gravitational energy released as it compacts into a sphere will make it very hot.\n\nLots of light elements: mass collapses -> ignite fusion -> A regular star, for a little while at least.\n\nDeuterium fusion begins at $13 M_J$ and lighter bodies are normal planets. Hydrogen fusion begins at $75\u221280 M_J$ (bodies that burn deuterium but not hydrogen are brown dwarfs), but I (editor) have heard that with bigger amount of elements heavier than helium even lighter stars could ignite.\n\nMixture of light and heavy elements -> ???? (but probably explosions as you skip straight to the supernova stage very quickly)\nMany heavy elements: Ignition is impossible, so we will end with degenerate matter.\n\nAt 1 sun mas, white dwarfs are probable. According to Wikipedia, helium fusion is possible already above $0.5 M_\\odot$, but fusion of carbon, oxygen, neon and silicon happens only in very heavy stars. Iron is most stable and one cannot get energy from it with nuclear reactions.\nChandrasekhar limit for white dwarf mass is $1.39 M_\\odot$ and than we may end with a neutron star. Tolman\u2013Oppenheimer\u2013Volkoff limit for neutron star mass is $1.5\u22123.0 M_\\odot$, and heavier bodies without fusion become black holes (unless some exotic stars can exist).\nElements heavier then iron would be a case without precedence. They could undergo some strange nuclear reactions between fusion and fission.\nFinally, among others, the last common element, uranium, undergoes well known nuclear fission and explodes above critical mass (mere kilograms). It could shine similarly to typical fusing star even for only planetary mass if only the mass was big enough to prevent shattering.\n\nUnless you have very weird asteroid materials your giant planet is going to burn deuterium for at least a while. It's not the most luminous (but it is magenta) but adding a second solar mass to a solar system like ours is going to wreck some stuff. Expect to lose planets to interstellar space, see others crash into each other or swap orbits or disintegrate. If Jupiter hit this new gas giant\/rocky weird thing at any speed expect, uh, fiery cataclysm. \nIn short: A lot of really weird stuff but you probably can't live on it. Either it'll be too hot or it'll collapse into a white dwarf, a neutron star or a black hole.\n\nC:\n\nGenerally I agree, but I would like to add three details (numbers from Wikipedia): 1) White dwarfs are also possible and probable at 1 sun mas. Chandrasekhar limit for white dwarf mass is $1.39 M_\\odot$ and Tolman\u2013Oppenheimer\u2013Volkoff limit for neutron star mass is $1.5-3.0 M_\\odot$. Heavier bodies without fusion become black holes (unless some exotic stars can exist). 2) Limit for brown dwarfs: Hydrogen fusion begins at $75-80 M_J$ and I have heard that with bigger amount of elements heavier than helium even lighter stars could ignite.\n\nC:\n\n3) According to Wikipedia, fusion of carbon, oxygen, neon and silicon happens only in very heavy stars, and this also suggests that mega-planets made of them should be white dwarfs. Iron is most stable and heavier elements could undergo some nuclear reactions. Uranium undergoes nuclear fission and it could explode or shine similarly to typical fusing star.\n\nC:\n\nWhite dwarves are post-star things, but given their composition (carbon-oxygen) we should look to them and perhaps to [how they explode](https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Type_Ia_supernova) for hints on this. @BartekChom I encourage you to edit in all those details to the answer.\n\n",
        "meta": {
            "source": "worldbuilding.stackexchange"
        }
    },
    {
        "text": "Q:\n\nAre there any 3000 year old Northern European languages that modern humans could communicate with?\n\nFollow up to Could a well versed archaeologist understand and speak languages that are 3000+ years old?\nI have an archaeologist who finds some inscriptions that are at least 3000 years old while excavating some ruins in Northern Europe.  It takes him some time, but he manages to track down one of the world's leading specialists in this language to help him with the translations.  Due to some handwavy mumbo jumbo, these two scientists manage to awaken a supernatural being that has been in a sort of stasis since the inscriptions were first written.\nAt a bare minimum, I would need these scientists to be able to read and write in a common dialogue that the supernatural being would understand, but I would prefer them to be able to have a spoken dialogue. \nWhat would be the best language for the supernatural being to know to allow for this?\n\nC:\n\nJust make sure you have lots of gum when you wake the supernatural being. Remember, Dum Dum want Gum Gum.\n\nC:\n\n@JustinThymetheSecond - Oh, you in trouble, Dum-dum. You better run-run. From Attila the Hun-hun!\n\nC:\n\nHebrew would also be a good contender, having first been spoken around 1000 BCE.\n\nC:\n\n@JustinThymetheSecond In _The Mummy_, when Imhotep is awakened he menacingly approaches Beni. To defend himself, Beni starts reciting chants from a variety of religions. The Christian, Muslim and Buddhist prayers have no effect, until he chances upon a Hebrew psalm, which Imhotep immediately recognises.\n\nC:\n\nDoes the common language have to be European?\n\nC:\n\n@JustinThymetheSecond yes, even if the being could speak other languages, the writing would not make sense to be in a foreign language\n\nC:\n\n@Bob Jarvis - Reinstate Monica  Night at the Museum\n\nC:\n\nChinese is one of the oldest continuous languages in the world, still spoken. First written down about 3,00 years ago.  If both the current and the supernatural speaker were conversant in all variations, and could read the written language, communication would be quickly established.\n\nC:\n\nIf your definition of *Northern* Europe matches mine, then you may be out of luck. In particular with the *inscriptions* part. Spoken variants of Celtic, Scandinavian and Uralic languages might not be too distant from modern versions. But, the oldest known runes are from around AD150 (says WP). Celtic variants don't improve the situation much. Written Finnish is much too new for your purposes, and I don't think other Uralic languages are better here.\n\nC:\n\nI think Ridley Scott already beat you to it.\n\nA:\n\nYou are in luck; we actually do know one three thousand years old European language, maybe one and a half. We also do know another (non-European) language spoken three thousand years ago which is quite conceivable that the ancient supernatural being might know.\n\nHomeric Greek.\nThere are millions of people who can read Homer's and Hesiod's works in the original. We are even pretty certain that we know how pronounce them in a way which is not all that far removed from the original. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days were originally composed in the 9th, most likely 8th or maybe 7th century before the common era, so 2700 to 2900 years ago, most likely around 2800 years ago.\nAt that time the Greeks were busy using their ships to trade all over the Mediterranean, so their language was already beginning to be known internationally. Not so much as option number 3, but still plausible.\n(The major advantage of Homeric Greek is that there are many people in the modern world who know it well enough to communicate. This is how the stranded Natucketers begin to communicate with their Tartessian frenemies in S. M. Stirling's celebrated Nantucket series beginning with Island in the Sea of Time.)\nFor completeness, we should also mention the remote possibility that the ancient supernatural being knows some sort of very archaic Latin. It is not at all likely, but hey, maybe his daughter dated a particulary exotic adventurer from Alba Longa, which, at that time, was the most important Latin city. (Rome did not exist yet.) (Yes, there was a people called Latins.) The main problem is that at that time Latin was a small language, spoken by an insignificant small nation in central Italy, and one would have to explain how come the ancient supernatural being knows it.\nThe great language of trade widely known at that time around the shores of Europe was Phoenician.\n\nThe Phoenicians actually traded as far north as Britain in the right time-frame, and they were the dominant long-distance traders in Europe at that time.\nPhoenician was actually written at that time, so it is plausible to find inscriptions.\nPhoenician is quite similar to the oldest layers of Biblical Hebrew, so that it is quite easily believable that a modern scholar would quickly make sense of it. (There are very many people who study Biblical Hebrew.)\n\nSo basically, that's it: if they are to communicate orally without spending time actually learning each other's language, it would be in Homeric Greek or in Phoenician.\nIf there are inscriptions to be found and quickly deciphered, they would most likely be in Phoenician.\n\nBut! It is perfectly conceivable  (and, it my opinion, it would make a great episode in the story) that the inscriptions are in the parent language of Proto-Germanic written with a local adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet. At that time, that very late Indo-European dialect which gave rise to Proto-Germanic was spoken in southern Scandinavia and maybe the Jutland peninsula; and you are speaking exactly about the time when the Phoenician invention of the alphabet was spreading like wildfire west and east -- it was such a simple idea, it makes writing so easy, why on Earth didn't we think about it! If it spread to the west, and it spread to the east, why not also to the north?\n(We know Proto-Germanic a lot better than Proto-Celtic, mainly because the Germanic languages are much more conservative than Celtic languages and thus the reconstruction is much easier, because Germanic languages are attested at an earlier stage, and because Proto-Germanic has so many more living descendants than Proto-Celtic. Its immediate parent language must have been an Indo-European transitional dialect of Proto-Indo-European already with the distinctive Germanic vocabulary, but without the defining First Germanic Consonant Shift.)\n\nNote about the idea of some sort of Proto-Basque: While we are certain that the ancestors of the Basques spoke a language which is the ancestor of Basque, we unfortunately don't know anything much about that language. Yes, it must have existed. No, we don't know it. Not that very few people study it; no: we simply have very very little data (basically, a handful or names recorded by the Greeks and the Romans) so that, at present, we don't even pretend to have the foggiest idea about it.\n\nC:\n\n1000 BCE is too early for Proto-Germanic, which is believed to have arisen roughly 500 years later. At the time in question you're dealing with Pre-Proto-Germanic, which would have been a dialect of Proto-Indo-European. More importantly, the First Germanic Sound Shift wouldn't have happened yet, which, aside from issues of grammar and vocabulary changes, is going to play hell with understanding, at least as much as a modern English speaker would have trying to understand Old English.\n\nC:\n\nI would not call either Homeric Greek or Proto-Basque *Northern* European languages :-)\n\nC:\n\n@JyrkiLahtonen: That's why we have option 4...\n\nC:\n\nIndeed. Adding my upvote. I'm unsure about the written versions that would be old enough.\n\nC:\n\nIn defence of 2: It would make sense for a supernatural being to have a fairly complete knowledge of all languages spoken around the world at the time. While it would be far-fetched for Latin to be its primary language, I think it's much more reasonable that Latin would be one of the many languages it knows.\n\nC:\n\nIf a supernatural being is fluent in all languages contemporary to his prior incarnation, why wouldn't he\/she\/it be fluent in all current languages? Omnipotence works in many ways.\n\nC:\n\n@KeithMorrison: You are of course technically correct ($\\leftarrow$ the best kind of correct) that around 1000 BCE that would have been the early Germanic parent language. It must have been a sort of very late PIE dialect with Germanic vocabulary. But for the purposes of the question, Pre-Proto-Germanic and Proto-Germanic are just bare names; it doesn't look to me that the OP is interested in such depth. (1) I have edited the question to reflect this. (2) 500 BCE is the *terminus ante quem* for the First Germanic Consonant Shift; it *could* have happened a bit earlier, but not later.\n\nC:\n\n@llywrch I don't think the OP is suggesting it should be fluent in all languages. I think they're saying it's only fluent in one, and for plot purposes it has to be one which the protagonists (or antagonists; we're summoning demons here!) could know.\n\nC:\n\n@Graham, if it needs only be fluent in one language, I vote for R'lyehian. That would solve a lot of problems for the OP.\n\nA:\n\nBasque.\n\nThe Pre-Indo-European languages are any of several ancient languages,\n  not necessarily related to one another, that existed in Prehistoric\n  Europe and South Asia before the arrival of speakers of Indo-European\n  languages. The oldest Indo-European language texts date from the 19th\n  century BC in K\u00fcltepe, now in Turkey, and while estimates vary widely,\n  the spoken Indo-European languages are believed to have developed at\n  the latest by the 3rd millennium BC (see Proto-Indo-European Urheimat\n  hypotheses). Thus, the Pre-Indo-European languages must have developed\n  earlier than or, in some cases alongside, the Indo-European languages\n  that ultimately displaced them.1[2][3]\nA handful of the languages still survive; in Europe, Basque retains a\n  localised strength, with fewer than a million native speakers...\n\nThe Basque language is definitely old enough for your purposes.  Whether an ancient speaker would be intelligible at all is a different matter but you can sort it out in the fiction.  Once your scholar catches on that some nouns and verbs are Basque, if the god is willing to be patient they can sort out accent and sentence structure with a little work.  \nThere is also lots of fun theories about where Basque came from which range from the scientific to Atlantis-type theories; read a little and pick what you like!\n\nA map showing the shrinkage of the Basque language area during historic times.\nhttp:\/\/www.kondaira.net\/irudiak\/euskararengaleraeng.jpg\n\nC:\n\n@Willk: Answered as summoned. (And we *do not know* anything about the ancestor language of Basque that was spoken 3000 years ago. Yes, we know that it must have existed. No, we *do not know* it, we *do not know* anything much about it. Such is the fate of a language isolate attested so very late.)\n\nC:\n\nI'm skeptical.  High school in Ireland required me to learn from a book called [\"Peig\"](https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Peig_Sayers), an autobiography of an Irish speaking woman from the 19th century who died in the 20th.  However you have to practically *translate* it (sentence by sentence) into modern Irish.  Likewise compare Chaucer or something from that period with modern English.  Basque may have survived 3000 years but I very much doubt it would be recognizable by a modern Basque speaker at all.\n\nC:\n\nMaybe I can summon @AlexP who always has interesting insights into European languages.  AlexP AlexP AlexP!\n\nC:\n\nBasque speaker here. While the structure of a phrase, of verbs, grammar or other thins *may* have not change, lot of vocabulary comes from latin, french, spanish, and other languages such as arabic. It's sometimes already hard to speak with someone of a different dialect (called euskalki), even if they are geographicaly close with lot of exchanges. Sure you could exchange words, but don't expect fluent conversation from the beginning.\n\nC:\n\nBigger.  Possibly a lot bigger.  The Basques are the relic population left from the people who lived there before the Indo-Europeans showed up.    It might be knowable how large the original range of Basque was, looking for Basque words that have made it into regional dialects.  If you assert they were speaking Proto-Basque in central France in 1000 BC I do not think anyone will cry foul.   I did find the above map (added to my answer) showing distribution back to Roman times.\n\nC:\n\nThanks, a quick search shows that is is still spoken in a small area near the boarder of France and Spain, but do you know what its geographic area would have been 3000 years ago?\n\nA:\n\nThere are two questions that need to be unpacked from what you've written. One -- the language - has been addressed in the linked question. The other is this: what writing system did these archeologists find this 3000-year-old language written in?\nThere are four known writing systems from 1000 BC we can expect an archeologist to recognize, & perhaps even understand. (Actually five, if we include written Chinese.) They are Egyptian hieroglyphs, Luwian hieroglyphs (used in parts of Anatolia), cuneiform, & the Phoenician alphabet. (The Mycenaean Linear scripts fell out of use by 1000 BC.) I don't know of any examples of the Egyptian or Luwian systems being used beyond their territories, let alone to represent other languages.\nWhile a number of languages have been written using cuneiform, reading cuneiform is a very specialized skill: I took a class in Hittite language years ago, & the instructor simplified matters by omitting teaching cuneiform. (All of our texts were transliterated.) So unless your archeological party happened to have a professor in Semitic languages along, I figure all they could do is say, \"Hey, this is written in cuneiform!\"\nThe Phoenician alphabet makes a little more sense: the Phoenicians spread the use of their writing system thru the Mediterranean, & it was later modified to use with Etruscan & Greek. Even an archeologist with only a superficial knowledge of the topic could at least transliterate the inscription, & make a guess at the language it was written in. (IIRC, any competent archeologist working in European topics would know English & one or more of German, French, Italian & Spanish, as well as have some knowledge of Latin &\/or ancient Greek. So they could guess from a transcription that it was written in either Proto-Celtic or Proto-Germanic.)\nTo say more, one would need to do more in-depth research.\n\nC:\n\nThe problem with this is that even if we have the writing system, we have no idea how it was pronounced.  For languages such as Ancient Egyptian, we do at least have a point of similarity in names of people and places which can be compared; elsewhere we don't even have that. Even then, we also have the Great Vowel Shift in English to prove that pronunciation of the same word can change over time; an English person from 1700 would have had trouble talking to someone from 1400.\n\nC:\n\n... And even in the same language, accents may make a speaker incomprehensible, even within the same country.  I've had to \"translate\" at times for a team member who comes from the same area of northern England as me.  And the accents from Glasgow and Newcastle are famously hard to follow, so much so that when the comedy series *Rab C Nesbitt* (set in Glasgow) was first broadcast, it was actually subtitled because the BBC didn't think that English viewers would be able to understand it!\n\nC:\n\n... It gets worse with English too.  Native Brits are used to a *very* wide range of accents and grammars just within Britain, which is why it's relatively easy for visitors with very little English to make themselves understood, and sub-languages from America\/India\/Africa aren't an issue.  The same is not true elsewhere though - it once took me 10 minutes to get a bottle of water at a cinema in Detroit because none of the staff could understand an English accent.  How sensitive to accent might the OP's demon be?\n\nC:\n\n@Graham, you have a point. But without an understandable writing system, we have no clue what language this entity might be speaking, just some wild guesses: Basque, Aquitainian, Etruscan, Proto-Germanic, or Proto-Finnish. If a known writing system is used, the characters have some chance, slim as it may be, of understanding this entity. Unless it is omnipotent & speaks their modern language instantly.\n\nA:\n\nSo far so good for central and southern Europe!\nBut your guys are going to be working in northern Europe!  At 1000 BC, your best bet is going to be a Uralic language (e.g., such as are spoken in Finland and along the Arctic Ocean coastlands.\nIt's thought that the Uralic languages got their start in relatively close proximity to the Indo-European family, and some have posited that those two families share a common ancestor.\nSadly for your intrepid duo, there are no records of anything written in any Uralic language before the 1200s. So, if what the archaeologist finds is a sample of actual Uralic, this would be a bonanza for philology! That would be like finding Schleicher's Fable in the flesh for the Indoeuropeanists! Assuming the writing itself can be deciphered & read, it should at least sound familiar to a Uralicist. So, yes, eventually they'd be able to talk to this ancient being.\nWe really don't know anything at all about what languages were spoken in the rest of Northern Europe at that time. Clearly, the Celts, Slavs & Teutons moved in on somebody, we just don't know who. Could be related to Uralic, could be related to Basque, could be related to Etruscan. Who knows!\n\n",
        "meta": {
            "source": "worldbuilding.stackexchange"
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    },
    {
        "text": "Q:\n\nWhat is the most efficient way of mining energy from a flare star?\n\nSet in the distant future, human is transitioning to a type 3 advanced civilization on a Kardashev scale in about a hundred years or two. We have nearly exhausted the energy from our Sun and several other neighbouring main sequence stars, the demand for energy soars exponentially with every star system conquered.\nWe are currently facing a energy crisis and my experts are setting their eyes on a binary star system just light years away from Earth, we identified it as a binary star system consisting of a Uv Ceti Star aka flare star and a red dwarf. According to a report the flare star has been ejecting massive charged particles frequently as we believed that the companion star is responsible for stirring up the magnetic field on the surface of the flare star.\nQuestion: I'm looking for a reliable and efficient method to harvest energy from the flare star however my engineers feedback that they could not predict the next mass ejection. How can I get around this problem without putting my crews at risk and still be able to tap the energy from the star?\n\nC:\n\nA Kardashev 3 civilization is powered by all the stars in the galaxy. It would have exploited UV Ceti long ago in its ancient past. The possible engineering challenges would be standard operating procedure. Just harvesting energy from yet another flare star.\n\nC:\n\nYou *really* need to fix your grammar; it is almost impossible to read your question.\n\nC:\n\n\"_My engineers cannot predict when..._\" I'm not sure how you expect to reach K3 level with such simpletons doing engineering for you. Have them upgraded, or replace them with something smarter.\n\nC:\n\n@a4android: they are transcending to type 3 so at least the neighbouring main seq stars are being mined so in order to conquered the galaxies they need to mine flare stars and compact stars too.\n\nA:\n\nYour timescales need some attention. It is not possible for humanity to reach K3 in a couple of hundred years. K3 implies a galactic-level civilisation powered by a significant fraction of the energy output of all the stars in the galaxy. With human reproductive rates, even if we invented instant stellar-range FTL travel tomorrow and found optimum colony conditions at every star we tried, we wouldn't populate the galaxy for over a thousand years.\nAlso, what the heck have you been doing that has exhausted the energy of the Sun in a few hundred years? A K2 civilisation might expect to consume a large fraction of the energy output by a star at its normal burn rate, but not generally to accelerate the burning of a star so that it burns through its multi-billion year fuel supply in a couple of hundred years. If your process is even 0.1% inefficient you will generate waste heat equal to a million times the sun's actual current output and will have laid waste to the solar system.\nIf you're still worried about individual stars near Earth and haven't more-or-less automated the process of stellar harvesting you're only really at K2 scale.\nHow you deal with this particular star is really a plot point and dependent on what technology you decide your characters have access to. Some suggestions below:\n\nIgnore it and harvest an easier star. Given the capabilities of your engineers (I presume they are AIs at this civilisation level?), this may be the best bet.\nBuild a Dyson swarm of energy harvesters and accept that some parts of the swarm will get trashed occasionally.\nBuild more robust harvesters that don't get trashed when a mass ejection hits them and can move back into their correct position afterwards.\nMove the companion star out of the way so it stops destabilising the flare star.\nTurn one of the stars into a black hole and feed the other one to it, then harvest the energy emitted from the accretion disk.\n\nA:\n\nIf you are approaching K3 civilization type, building Dyson sphere should be now no problem for you. \nOn \"flare star\" thing. If there is chance of accidents which would damage given sphere, try using Dyson's made out of individual satellites. You should be able to mass produce at marginal costs, so losing several million of them once a while shouldn't be any problem for manufactures.\n\nC:\n\nYep, it is, I hope at least.\n\nC:\n\nHi I have just made major edit to my question please check if your answer is still applicable.\n\nA:\n\nI'll add to the other answers that discuss the harvester setup, and focus on the protection aspect. \nYou need to take your harvester technology and surround it with a material of high magnetic permeability and redirect the magnetic field lines. The magnetic flux will kill your harvesting technology. \nYou also have to worry about the sudden burst of brightness. Flare stars can get very, very bright, by multiple orders of magnitude. You need to account for this. If your sensors and shields account for a certain level of brightness, the sudden brightness can disorient the systems that you need to remain in place and oriented correctly, destroy the systems with heat, etc. \nIt's also important to note that flare stars emit bursts of light across the entire spectrum, an immense blast of ionizing photons and handling just x-rays will not be sufficient. \nFinally, it's not as simple as the red dwarf causing flares. It goes both ways. Red dwarfs can release their own flares, even superflares, and there's evidence that one flare can cause sympathy flares so you also need protection from all sides instead of whatever's just facing the target star. \nBut you're approaching K3 - none of this should be a problem for you. If your Dyson Sphere and harvester technology can only handle certain wavelengths, types of radiation, levels of heat, amounts of magnetic flux, then you're not ready for K3 for a long time because there's a whole bunch of other things that could wipe out your civilization. \nA K3 civilization is expected to handle black holes, quasars, and gamma ray bursts. If you can't handle this, you will never be able to handle those. Better start working on that technology faster.\n\n",
        "meta": {
            "source": "worldbuilding.stackexchange"
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    },
    {
        "text": "Q:\n\nWhy Choose Less Effective Armour Types?\n\nFull steel plate armour is seen as the most effective type of armour from the Medieval period, viewed by some as the pinnacle of medieval\/early-renaissance armour. It\u2019s rounded surfaces and layers of padding and chain mail underneath the plates reduced the wearer\u2019s chance of injury drastically. It also allows for a high level of mobility and articulation without restricting the wearer too much.\nIn our own history, we have developed armour such as brigandine, lamellar, a coat of plates, segmented plates (like the lorica segmentata), gambeson, chain mail, we\u2019ve even made armour out of wood and bone. However, none of these are quite as protective and mobile as a suit of full steel plate armour. Indeed, of these armours mentioned, some are more effective than others, almost in a hierarchy.\nWith this in mind, in a world where multiple types of armour co-exist in the same place at the same time, why would people actively choose not to wear the most effective armour, such as full steel plate, if it was available?\nFor this question, assume that monetary cost is not a factor. The reason for this is that it is fairly obvious that people would not buy better armour if they could not afford it, so cost of manufacture and sale should not be factored into answers. \nAlso assume that the availability of resources is not a factor. Again, it is fairly obvious that if you lacked the resources to produce more effective armour, you would have to produce something less effective.\nThe best answers should cover why less effective armour would be chosen on both an individual level (such as an adventurer, mercenary or other form of lone traveler) and a militaristic level (such as an army or other large group of organised fighters). \nMagic and monsters may factor into your decisions but this is not required for a good answer.\n\nC:\n\nIf I may suggest a meta-answer which will cover all answers:  No rational individual would *ever* choose a less effective armor over a more effective armor.  However, their definition of \"effective\" may be different than you, as the worldbuilder, first think.\n\nC:\n\ncost often comes in forms other than the initial outlay of funds. You want to go 'adventuring' in your plate armor? You going to ask those brigands to not begin their ambush until you have your armor on? Or do you live in it? If you live it in you're going to need to replace parts of it every week, even without any combat. No asphalt roads bro. Feel like you're walking through a swamp on the best of days, leave Scotland and you're gonna boil to death. Did you remember to bring that mobile forge along with you, btw?\n\nC:\n\n@GiuPiete: DM: The orcs attack. Adventurer: I suit up. DM: That takes seven turns, and keeps your page busy during that time too. The orcs stand idly by while you put your armor on. Adventurer: Really? DM: No, I was just messing with you. The orcs attack, doing double damage because you're not resisting, and...you and your page are officially orc stew-meat. Adventurer: Bummer. What else goes in the stew? DM: Onions, garlic, carrots, celery... Adventurer: BUT I DON'T LIKE CELERY! I DON'T WANT TO BE STEWED WITH CELERY!! DM: Roll d20. Adventurer: I roll...1 DM: Celery, celery, and *more* celery!\n\nC:\n\n@LiamMorris It sounds to me like the higher ranking Roman soldiers found part of the effectiveness of their head-dress was in its interpersonal effects, and they valued those effects more than the lost effects.\n\nC:\n\nEffectiveness depends on context.\n\nC:\n\n@Renan By effectiveness i mean how well it serves it\u2019s intended function, that being protecting the wearer and allowing them mobility. Though what you say is true, full plate would not be as effective in a swamp for example as there would be reduced mobility.\n\nC:\n\n@CortAmmon You may suggest it but you may also be mistaken. Rich Ancient Greeks commisioned muscle cuirasses which were slightly less effective than they could have been without the detailing. Higher-ranked Roman soldiers had decorative head dresses to make themselves look taller but added unnecessary weight. There are likely more examples but those two spring to mind.\n\nC:\n\n@CortAmmon I suppose you could interpret it that way, yes. As you stated, my definition of effectiveness may differ from theirs.\n\nC:\n\nA less effective armor could be more effective in a certain context. Going up against a giant ice breathing dragon, you would wear a weaker armor that has certain properties against that type th as the a stronger armor wouldn't have.\n\nC:\n\nYour underlying problem is that \"best\" is not an absolute judgement. Plate is not the best armor for light infantry or cavalry or scouts - they need to move. Plate does not confer absolute invulnerability. It is excellent for mounted shock troops - heavy cavalry. These guys don't have to hike 20 miles a day and then fight for two hours. They ride into battle and charge. Everybody else has competing needs which argue against plate.\n\nC:\n\nAs far as \"high level of mobility\" goes: as soon as a knight in steel plate armor fell off  his horse, he was effectively dead. Can't find the image right now, but there even exists a medieval image of a knight being killed by a farmer with a pitchfork... . One was mobile in them as far as movement within them goes. Mobile in the sense of being fast or able to move quickly definitely not.\n\nC:\n\n@Paul Yes this is true, historical manuals show knights in full plate wrestling each other to the ground to thrust a dagger through the gaps in the armour, such as the eye slit. Though, in historical combat, anyone who fell to the ground was dead, this was not exclusive to those wearing full plate armour.\n\nC:\n\nFull-plate was not as effective all around as a lot of people might think. East-Europe was devastated by the mongols.One decisive disadvantage Europeans had was using full plated armors making the knights not as nimble as mongols were, making them easy targets. And i think most of us agree being on a horse with full plate armor is pretty much the best case scenario for a full plated warrior. I know mongols were warlords and it's quite unfair to compare anyone to them since they pretty much conquered the  entire old world. And \"russians\" were DEFENDING, not hiking or walking around for days.\n\nA:\n\nComfort, individually\nPlate mail is heavy and hot, which is why you don't want to wear it all the time. Instead, you'd strip down your armor while you weren't seriously expecting combat, leaving only the gambeson (cloth padding) or gambeson and chain mail. Much more comfortable, but now you're vulnerable.\nLogistics, on an organization level\nLet's say you've got an army. One of the important bits about your typical medieval army is how far they can march in a day for a given level of exhaustion. So your army isn't going to be wearing plate mail 24\/7. If they're not carrying their armor on their persons, it has to be brought on carts. This means more carts, more draft animals to pull the carts, and more resources for those. It adds up. You also need more blacksmiths to help maintain the armor.\nTraining\nFirst off, many medieval armies were levies\/drafts, where they basically grab 1 out of every N men in an area. These are not professional soldiers and they would not know how to fight in plate mail, both because of weight and because of the vision impairment. It would take longer to train them in fighting in plate mail.\nDon and doff\nPlate mail is not easy to get into and out of. It usually required someone to help, and if your entire army is wearing plate mail, along with the gloves (that need to be secured) then you'll have problems.\nThis is also important because you can't always predict when combat will happen long enough in advance to get into armor. If you're sleeping, outside your armor (see comfort) then it will take you a bit to get into armor. In which time someone will probably stab and\/or shoot you.\nTrust\nIn modern times, we have these things called security clearances, because we don't trust everyone. You can't fly a fighter jet without passing a background check, nor will you be hired as an information security officer.\nThe same principle applies here: as a government, I don't want to give every Tom, Dick, and Harry armor that makes them very hard to put down. I don't trust them. That's reserved for my most loyal troops and bodyguards. With an equipment advantage, my palace guards and bodyguards can compensate for numerical or informational (i.e. ambush) disadvantages.\n\nC:\n\nPlease, please, don't use the word \"mail\" as the general term for \"armor\". Mail (or maille) meant an armor made out of interlocking metal rings, aka chain. So you are just saying \"chain chain\" and \"plate chain\". Please, just don't. It's unfortunately prolific enough, so at least at high quality sites such as this we should avoid this.\n\nC:\n\nPerhaps a minor consideration that I can't say I've looked into much, but even if wearers of plate armour can stay mobile and agile I imagine skirmishers, scouts and similarly \"independent\" roles (perhaps including adventurers depending on the setting) would presumably forego plate armour as much on the grounds of stealth as anything else.\n\nC:\n\nI like your idea on trust, it is not something i considered. Perhaps you\u2019d need a license of some sort to own full steel plate, similar to how you need a license to own a gun in our modern world.\n\nC:\n\nOf note is that draft animals are also susceptible to the tyranny of rocket equation. You need more food to feed more donkeys or to feed them over a longer journey, and you need more donkeys in order to transport that food.\n\nA:\n\nArmor was chosen based on how good it was for its actual purpose. This is the same way modern armies use to choose their equipment.\nAs an example the rifles used in the world wars had more powerful cartridges and were expected to be accurate to greater distances than modern assault rifles. And you could get them in automatic versions even. But starting in the 30s (I think) more and more armies realized that most soldiers never or extremely rarely shoot beyond 150 to 200 meters. Or need the extra penetration that a full powered rifle cartridge gives.\nThis means that the rifles are not really better than an assault rifle in actual use. Equipping your common soldiers with those will give you no benefit over using cheaper and lighter assault rifles shooting weaker and cheaper ammunition.\nSame logic applies with arming medieval armies with armor. A plate mail is heavy and expensive armor designed for repeatedly getting hit by heavy weapons without taking lethal damage. And it works very well.\nBut most medieval soldiers do not actually spend that much time getting repeatedly hit by heavy weapons just like most modern soldiers do not spend much time taking long range shots.\nRanged and light units are supposed to avoid taking heavy hits altogether. Equipping them with heavy armor would just make them slower and encourage them to do things they really should not be doing.\nEven normal front line melee units where soldiers do get hit with heavy weapons do not really need soldiers to take repeated heavy hits. There are other soldiers behind him who can take the next hit. So such units are equipped with armor that keeps them from taking lethal or crippling injury and keeps them fit enough to fall back.\nSo who does plate mail make sense for?\nHeavy cavalry and heavy infantry. These units are expected to smash thru enemy formations where falling back would leave you alone surrounded by enemies. Or to take a charge without needing to fall back. And it is much easier for the unit not to fall back when individual soldiers do not need to.\nOfficers in other units usually can use extra protection as having them injured makes other soldiers less effective. You can also have specific elite soldiers with better armor in a melee unit. Typically they would also act as NCOs. This is because they have better abilities or even weapons as other soldiers so having them injured actually makes the unit weaker.\nAdventurers in modern RPGs or fantasy are an important group as well. They need all the protection they can carry. Since they are most familiar group of people to use medieval armor to modern people, this kind of skews how most people see armor.\n\nC:\n\n@gowenfawr Yes, it is. I just didn't feel comfortable talking too much about rifles when the question is about armor. But you are right, it would actually be a pretty good example if properly elaborated. Lots of those factors would work the same for medieval armor.\n\nC:\n\nIt would improve this answer to complete the rifle analogy by stressing that shifting to \"cheaper and lighter\" rifles cost in range but brought benefits in mobility, transport, load-out weight, cost, reliability, and usability.  It's all about cost-benefit analysis.\n\nA:\n\nMobility\nThe key benefit that lighter types of armour offer both individually and militaristically is not having to lug around an extra 25-50kg all day\/during a battle. Well fitted full plate armour offers a surprising amount of mobility, and is in fact lighter than most chainmail hauberks, but compared to an unarmoured person it is still a significant amount of weight. This study (albeit with armour on the higher end of the weight scale) found that moving in armour takes about twice the effort as moving unencumbered, with the majority of the issue coming from the additional weight on the legs. It posits that this could have been one of the deciding factors for the English victory against greater numbers of very well armoured French knights at the battle of Agincourt.\nHowever, that's not the only example.\nThe clash between lighter armoured troops and heavy infantry was very common in the ancient world. Between Greek phalanxes and Roman legionaries the heavy side is well covered, and plenty of 'barbarian' and 'civilised' cultures around them specifically chose to forsake heavier armour.\nExample 1: Greeks vs Thracians\nEarly hoplites were heavy infantry that fought in close formation. Wealthy hoplites would be armoured in a bronze panoply weighing around 32kg, and less wealthy hoplites would usually be unarmoured aside from their large shield and large spear. Early engagements with the lightly armoured Thracians to the north did not go well for the Greeks.\nThracians usually fought as peltasts. They were unarmoured, with a small shield called a pelte, javelins and a short sword. When fighting a phalanx, they used their extra mobility to keep their distance and pepper the formation with javelins. If the hoplites broke out and tried to chase them down, they'd again use their superior mobility to retreat before picking off the stragglers and resuming the attack. Once the phalanx had been thoroughly disrupted by casualties, javelins encumbering shields and exhaustion the peltasts would close to finish them off. It was such a successful tactic that it was adopted wholesale into Greek military tactics, and the Thracians remained a feared people by the Greeks even afterwards (despite not taking up heavy infantry tactics themselves). They were also used to excellent effect by the Macedonian army of Alexander.\nExample 2: Romans vs Dacians\nThe Dacians were a group of peoples from a similar location as the Thracians (perhaps even being a Thracian people). They were a wealthy people, benefiting from trade with the Greek colonies on the Black Sea and plentiful gold mines in their territory. During the 1st century BC two of their kings carved out a significant kingdom in modern-day Romania which had significant conflicts with Rome.\nThey're primarily remembered for their defeat marked on Trajan's column, but their empire lasted from 76BC-106AD (182 years), weathering Roman retaliation during much of that period. The wiki article seems pretty Romano-centric, focussing on their defeat by Trajan, but there's a hint to their capability in one of Trajan's motivations being to 'reclaim their standards'. The reason the Dacians had those standards in the first place is that they'd defeated two previous concerted military assault by the Romans.\nThe Dacians fought primarily as light infantry. They were certainly wealthy enough to outfit themselves with armour should they have desired, and some did with mail in the Celtic style. However, the vast majority fought lightly armoured and were successful against the Roman heavy infantry on at least two separate occasions. Their tactics and weaponry were so successful that the Romans had to modify their armour to protect against them.\nIn conclusion\nIf you get looking, there are plenty of other examples around of lighter troops prevailing over equivalent heavy troops, even in close combat. Romans vs the Spanish, Mongols vs Polish and Hungarian knights, and Roman Velites (peltast equivalents that were famed for their readiness to get into close combat, catching many armies by surprise).\nWith the correct tactics, weaponry and environment lightly armoured troops can be every but as effective as heavily armoured ones, and in many cases moreso.\nIndividual level\nTo touch on the individual level as an adventurer\/lone traveller, you're unlikely to be walking around fully armoured the whole time due to the aforementioned double-effort it takes to move around. Knights didn't. They travelled around unarmoured and geared up before a battle.\nAs a lone traveller or adventurer, you're unlikely to be fighting many set piece battles. Most of your conflict is going to come without much warning, and you're unlikely to be able to get fully armoured up before you're fighting. Heavy armour isn't much use to you if it's sitting on the ground, and is just a burden to carry around if it's not used.\nBetter to pick something lighter that you can comfortably travel around in all day.\n\nA:\n\nI will structure my answer into three parts.\nIn the first one, I will be vaguely railing against the arbitrary restriction on the cost and other economic factors )\nThe issue here is not only in the straight up monetary cost. The biggest resource is the work time. Late plate armor needs a lot of effort of a fairly specialized professional armorer to produce. It's not a task that can be scaled by throwing more people at it, unlike the production of maille, for example. It also needs a lot of personalized fitting. So, it's not an item that can be taken 'off the shelf' or from the municipal armory - it needs to be ordered in advance by a person who plans to do nothing but fighting in the near time, or even for most of his life.\nAnother factor to consider - in the medieval army an armored knight needs a fairly large retinue. However your army is composed, someone needs to care for the horses, forage, build the camp, dig fortifications and latrines, help the knights to put the armour on, and so on. And unless your warfare is heavily ritualized form of mass joust, where non-knights are out of bonds and can't be attacked, it makes sense to arm and armour at least some of those people. So, every infantryman and squire would also need plate armour by your logic. Time being the most precious resource, you are not able to equip every one of those with fitted white plate, so by necessity munitions grade armour enters the equation - and it is 'worse' then knightly armour, being either heavier or less protective or both.\nMoving to my next two points, I need to say that I actually do not quite understand your question. Seeing your replies above, I can't say which of the two are your asking:\n1) why would any individual person choose 'inferior' armour if he has an access to full plate?\n2) why would a nation in a world where plate armour is available, armour it's heavy cavalry and heavy infantry in inferior armour?\nSo I will try answering them in turn.\nAs for the first variant, the answer is party covered above. Any army has many more roles then heavy cavalry and heavy infantry. Actual fighting takes a minuscule proportion of the time any warrior or soldier spends in the field. Most of the time is spent marching, riding, putting up camp, sleeping, eating, standing sentry and dicing ) However comfortable full plate may be, you can't spend 24 hours a day in it. Some soldiers can opt for armour that is easier to put on and take off (one of the advantages of the brigandine, actually, is not the cost, but the ease of putting it on by yourself), or easier to do daily tasks in. You can dig latrines in full plate, but it's absolutely not optimal way to spend your time. 'Inferior' types of armour can have other logistical advantages - ease of field repair, for example.\nAlso, the soldiers that are not expected to enter melee would not wear full armour even if they had time to prepare. You can even see that on the the medieval miniatures the archers are drawn wearing full plate, but with open faced helmet and without gauntlets. So, archers, pikemen, siege weapon and artillery crews would not wear full enclosed plate.\nThe main idea in this part is - soldiers often sacrifice protection for comfort. And throughout the history, the average infantry armour is some sort of torso armour and open helmet. So unless the soldier absolutely needs full armour, he won't use it. It goes double for 'adventurers'. Unlike soldiers, they won't have an advantage of having the baggage train where they can stash their armor. If you have a group of adventures, one of them could be clad in full armour, while the rest serves as his retinue, helps him carry it, and protects him, while helping him to put it on.\nWhatever the gripes people may have with good old Tolkien, the Fellowship is one of the best description of a group of adventurers in terms of their traveling kit - they have only two shirts of maille among them, one is worn by superhumanly strong dwarf, another weighs almost nothing, a single sidearm per person, while the main bulk of their belongings is spare clothes, ropes, water, food and occasional firewood.\nCompared to that, the more weapons and armor your adventurers have, the more unarmored helpers they need - servants, native guides, packhorses etc.\nThe answer to the second variant of the question is more complicated. It's also hard to answer, why a nation would not use full plate armour without resorting to the economic explanations.\nThe easiest case is isolation. The country is pretty isolated, it had it's own martial culture, own tradition of arms and armor and had only recently come into the contact with the 'mainstream' cultures of your world that use plate armour (think 16 century Japan).\nSome nations can be in the perifery of your world, or these are the peripherical regions of bigger nations. They have a constant low-level conflict with nomadic tribes, so mobility is a higher priority over protection (think the whole Eastern Europe on the border with Great Steppe for the most of the history).\nSome regions can be very distinct geographically, so it's hard to use heavy cavalry there - broken terrain, bogs, mountains, etc. (think Scottish Highlands).\nSo, some specific local factors can prioritize light infantry or light cavalry as the backbone of the military in the region.\nDifferent economic factors can also be in play here. The particular region can be poor in local resources, or not urbanized enough to produce plate armour locally. While it is possible to import, it adds additional complications, so that poorer local armour still becomes a more 'optimal' choice in a lot of situations. If you need it as a plot point, there can be even a trade embargo on a particular nation, where everybody agrees not to sell their better quality arms to them.\n\nA:\n\nOne answer is that the lesser armour type is lighter, and allows for more rapid troop movements and deployments. If said soldiers have to cross rivers or hike up mountains, lighter armour may be a necessity. Another answer is that full steel plate armor will become a lot hotter in warmer climates. This could be problematic an a desert environment. Another answer is that steel can rust. This might be an issue in a humid environment like a rain forrest.\n\nC:\n\nCame here to mention mobility as a key issue. Look up the history of greek phalanxes vs thracian peltasts. An interesting point about armour in the heat is that with a cloth robe over the top, armour in the crusades was found to act as a heat sink during the battle and keep you cooler than you'd otherwise be for a reasonable amount of time. Not long enough to walk around all day in it, but enough for a short engagement.\n\nA:\n\nYour limitation of unlimited resources takes out the most obvious answers. Is work going into the production of the armor not a factor either? Otherwise, this would be the most simple reason. Plate armor simply requires a lot of work hours from skilled craftsmen.\nWithout special circumstances there is no reason to settle for inferior protection, neither on a individual nor on a military level. If you can equip youself in a superior way without any disadvantages, why wouldn't you? (caveat here for militaries, sometimes the good old mass assault with arrow catching cannon fodder will still be superior, yet your resource catch negates this, unless manpower is also an unlimited resource or mass necromancy is a thing in your world).\nPlate armor will also not limit agility or endurance significantly, as some people will certainly attempt to tell you. Even plate armor still allows you to do acrobatic tricks or scale a climbing wall (there are some cool videos of this in Youtube made by the Kingdom Come game developers). The endurence side of things can and should be fixed with training and drills. There might be people who are simply too weak to cope with plate armor, but they would fare poorly in combat against a plate user anyway, so there's no need to debate dead meat.\nThat all said, here are some circumstances where other armor might be chosen. \n-Plate armor is ineffective:\nThis is what happened irl. Guns simply got too powerfull, and the performence of plate armor wasn't worth the money. \n-Naval warfare:\nSteel plate doesn't like seawater, and swimming in it gets awkward real quick. Naval landings turn out horrible if your equipment drowns you. (This refers to permanent sea troops (aka sailors)). You might still use platy boys (this is a real word xD) for specific operations.\n-Magic:\nStrongly depends on the magic system. Yet if there is something some form of metal-bending (no pun intended) like in Avatar: The last air bender, plate armor becomes impractical and dangerous. On a similar note, many role play systems have metal interfere with spell casting, so there is a good reason why mages would wear cloth armor. \n-Covert Operations:\nIf you want to take a city with the help of infiltration forces, enemy guards will consider a bunch of people coming into the city in gambesons (which can be seen as normal winter cloaks), a lot less conspicuous than a bunch of platy boys. And if the mission will involve fighting, taking the most protection you can get away with is reasonable for individuals as well as for soldiers. \n-Local Customs:\nThis applies more to individuals. If plate armor is readily available, local rulers might decide to make private ownership illegal to have a military advantage over the people. So any adventurer will be forced to use the next best tier of armor: mail over gambeson.\n-Prestige and Sports:\nIn the Renaissance, rapier fencing was popular, as it was a test of style and skill. Platy boys bashing their heads in with halberds and half-sword techniques might be seen as clumsy and brutish. Going to battle (or rather duels) with no armor sends a statement and makes winning more prestigious. Maybe there is a tradition that dictates armorless fighting under certain circumstances. \n-Logistics:\nYour infinite resource caveat limits this, but this is a serious limitation. Plate armor is maintenence heavy and heavy in itself. A Gambeson only needs sewing kit, but plate needs a forge and a skilled blacksmith to fix. Likewise plate might not be ideal for jungle warfare and especially an army needs significant infrastructure to supply plate to everyone. \n-Tradition and Culture:\nA weak one, as any culture that is technologically inferior will be conquered quickly, but \"we've always done it this way\" can be a strong argument.\n-Plot Armor:\nI said no one would go for suboptimal armor, but in a medival setting plate armor isn't the strongest armor, plot armor is. Why would your hero, or any main character, bother with any type of armor if they can't get hurt anyway. \nTLDR: Under your limitations there is no general good reason to settle for inferior armor. There are a number of exceptions, the only general non-quirky one being anti-armor magic. \n\nC:\n\n+1 for incognito mode.  The need to send _Sir Bond_ in with just a nice suit does not stop him infiltrating the enemy.\n\nA:\n\nSay we have a knight in full steel armor, fighting a guy in practically nothing. Certainly, the armor should be useful. However, fire and blunt weapons will both be worse for the knight, because dodging is presumably far harder. A skilled fighter also may opt for lighter armor to outmaneuver the knight, such as using a sword (armor blocks slash attacks), and stabbing joints with the faster and more accurate movement the light\/no armor can allow. \nPerhaps armor stands out. A knight in full metal must be a clear target to raiders than what appears to be a poor \"unarmed\" beggar\/peasant.\nArmor also is very annoying in terms of heat (protective fencing gear is bad enough with sweat, I'd hate to imagine 60 pounds of armor). \nTraveling also would probably be bad in armor. I highly doubt armor is comfortable for normal situations, nor would I believe knights would always wear armor at all times (sounds like paranoia to me). \nAnother thing I'd like to note: Spartans would go into battle mostly naked with a shield, breastplate, and helmet. I don't have any idea of the accuracy to this statement, but this getup will already weigh more than 50 pounds in metal, explaining why minimal armor would be favorable. EDIT: Clarification, \"naked\" as in wearing no more metal armor except the helmet-shield-breastplate combo. Cloth and leather being ignored here. Thanks to pluckedkiwi for pointing out my vagueness.\nAs a final side note, there is something called the \"murder stroke\", slamming the hilt of a sword into a helmeted person's skull. Regardless of armor, the impact should still kill. If I face a swordsman of considerable skill, I personally would take the no-armor route and sprint full speed away from them, if I could. \n\nC:\n\n\"However, fire and blunt weapons will both be worse for the knight, because dodging is presumably far harder. A skilled fighter also may opt for lighter armor to outmaneuver the knight, such as using a sword (armor blocks slash attacks), and stabbing joints with the faster and more accurate movement the light\/no armor can allow.\" Have you ever actually fought in armor? While I don't have experience in plate, even plate users stay very mobile and can still do acrobatic tricks. When I fight people dressed in sports cloth wearing mail or gambeson there is no harder dodging or faster attacking.\n\nC:\n\n@thedyingoflight It's true that well made armour allows for a hell of a lot more movement than most people credit it with, but 50kg of extra weight will take a toll regardless of how well it's articulated. Perhaps not immediately noticeable, but as the fight drags on it will become more and more tiring.\n\nC:\n\n@thedyingoflight Troops are rotated in battles that are well organised and go to plan. On the whole, I sincerely doubt that most battles are well organised or go to plan. And individual duels are over quickly, but set piece battles drag on for hours and hours. Exhaustion is a major factor. Agincourt was short at 3 hours. Hastings was 8-9. Towton was 11. That's fighting as well, not including chasing down routing men: https:\/\/www.google.com\/amp\/s\/amp.reddit.com\/r\/AskHistorians\/comments\/1llhwk\/how_long_was_the_average_medieval_battle\/\n\nC:\n\n@Ynneadwraith Yes it becomes more and more tiring you stay in the fight for a long time. But thats a rare and umfortunate scenario, as most fights are short and allow for breaks. Frontline troops get rotated too. And it is not a good argument against plate armor as a greatsword to the chest will take a bigger toll than exhaustion.\n\nC:\n\n@Ynnawraith Does length of battle equal combat time though? What's truely exhausting is the man on man combat situation. Only a few percent of total battle time are in this situation for an average soldier. Units attack and reform and attack again after a break. Warfare is a lot of waiting, ask any modern soldier. Marching and waiting in formation and cover isn't that exhausting and allows for stamina recovery. Additionally I found this https:\/\/www.quora.com\/How-much-weight-does-the-average-US-Army-soldier-carry-on-each-part-of-their-body , it's how much a US-soldier carries into battle (60kg)\n\nC:\n\nPlease don't promulgate the myth of Spartans fighting practically naked - movies based on absurd comic books are not a source of historical information. Traditional hoplite armor was 3 components: helmet, breastplate or linothorax, and greaves, because their shield was their primary protection. Consider fighting in the Mediterranean - layers of armor would bring heatstroke, but still nobody went naked as armor was over their clothing, not instead of it. Spartans did also wear a heavy cloak on campaign, but this was not worn in battle as it was basically their tent\/bed.\n\nA:\n\nArmour trades mobility for protection.\nYour basic assumption is somewhat wrong:\n\n\"[Full plate armour] allows for a high level of mobility and\n  articulation without restricting the wearer too much.\"\n\nMobility\nWhilst good plate armour does allow mobility, it's certainly not full mobility. I fight HEMA, and even lightly armoured gloves limit your wrist movements; this is why there are heavier gloves for longsword than side-sword than rapier (which require more mobility and finesse, but do not take such heavy strikes).\nEndurance\nFurthermore, whilst troops in plate armour can run, they tire quickly.\nOne study showed people used twice as much energy moving in it: https:\/\/www.popularmechanics.com\/culture\/a6749\/medieval-knights-on-a-treadmill-put-historical-myths-to-the-test\/\nMany battles or other tasks require endurance, and wearing full plate armour will greatly reduce endurance. Tired troops fight badly, and are easily out-manoeuvred. In a formal pitched battle with both sides using plate armour, this obviously affects both sides equally, but in any other scenario, it's going to hurt the team with plate armour if the other side can draw out the conflict (e.g. by retreating).\nParticularly for roles such as adventurers or travellers, plate armour would have many drawbacks, and would not be practical to wear continually. It could be carried on a horse pack, but this would then mean you're not wearing it most of the time.\n\nC:\n\nI did not imply it allowed for a full range of mobility, of course it restricts movement to some degree. However, it is not nearly as much as people assume, which is what i was alluding to. Originally i wrote \u2018drastically\u2019 but, as i\u2019d already used that word in the previous sentence, i changed it to \u2018too much\u2019. There are videos on youtube demonstrating that plate armour is highly mobile, so much so that, in general, the restriction it does impose is hardly worth mentioning.\n\nC:\n\n@LiamMorris - certainly it restricts less that one might imagine, but it\u2019s certainly not at all insignificant, and definitely limits the fighting styles open to users of full plate armour - for example, it would be impossible to fight later rapier with full plate armour. Even the relatively light and thin stuff We wear limits movement, hence we wear lighter stuff for some styles. It\u2019s definitely a trade off between mobility\/endurance, and protection - even we see it as such with modern armour, and there\u2019s no way I\u2019d want to wear our kit for a full day\u2019s hiking up the mountains of doom.\n\nC:\n\nModern sparring gloves are nothing like a good well-fitting gauntlet. They are huge awkward things so bulky that the swords themselves tend to be made with extra-large hilts and guards because of it. We use them to reduce the risk of injury and they are cheaper than needing an armorer to fix dented\/bashed metal, but they significantly change the feel of the fight (cue purists about sharp edges and binds). And really, if fighting in plate use a pollaxe rather than a sword, and if you forgo your armor for better mobility you're not going to survive a melee even if you leave a less tired corpse.\n\nC:\n\n@pluckedkiwi - you\n\nC:\n\n@pluckedkiwi sorry, accidentally hit send! Yes, longsword gloves in particular are very bulky, though I don\u2019t think our sidesword guards are larger than they used to be - mine is a replica of a historical weapon. But yes, we prefer protection to mobility as we fight for fun and even minor finger damage is very serious for us as we need them to type etc.\n\nC:\n\nBut that\u2019s what I\u2019m getting at - every option is a balance between mobility vs protection (plus other factors such as price, maintainability, etc), and for different situations, there\u2019s a different optimum. Lighter protection like bucklers were carried regularly on the street by civilians, but no one ever wore plate armour to walk down to the shops...\n\nC:\n\n@DanW many people only getting one set because they get expensive, so they get the melon mitts. Actually measure your hilt and compare to historical finds - even good replicas often lengthen the hilt because purely accurate swords don't sell well, especially when talking about something like an Ulfberht. But it is amazing how people forget that almost all of the time was spent just carrying it, hence sword and buckler instead of a hoplon and spear to wander down to the street. Mentally picture a lot of fantasy characters, and include *everything* they are supposedly carrying...\n\nA:\n\nTerrian\nfull Plate is fine is in relatively flat land in a temperate climate, but that is not the majority of the world. \nIn a hot humid climates plate has far to much insulation, you will overheat far too easily. It becomes impossible to wear it for any length of time. This is still a problem in hot climates in general but humidity just compounds the issue. \nIn swampy terrain the added weight makes you prone to sinking and getting stuck, worse the padding can get very heavy when wet, weight becomes a major problem. \nNaval combat, plate is a deadly in naval combat, if you fall in the water, you die, period. Of course this only matters in navies where the people could swim, which was not all of them. Worse ships are often tight cramped spaces that demand a lot of climbing and squeezing through tight areas the very things plate impeeds. There is another hidden problem exposed polished iron and steel and salt water spray are not a great combination european style full plate will rust pretty quickly. \nArchers, archery produces a unique problem with armor, the proud chest plate and flared joints that makes plate armor effective also gets in the way of of a bow, even the most heavily armored archers the early samurai had armor with less coverage to eliminate anything that might impede the bow. \n\nC:\n\nWell-fitted armor should not interfere with archery, it just has to be made with that in mind. All armor is adapted to suit the needs of the wearer, which is why we see differences in styles of plate armor (it was more than just fashion). Armor for those participating in a heavy cavalry massed charge style combat is different from those expecting to fight on foot, and armor for archers would be adapted to such. Likely no bevor and smaller flanges on the left couter, but otherwise little different than the English style man at arms fighting on foot.\n\nA:\n\nJust want to throw in an aspect here.\nIn the Bloodborne Game for PS4, armor and protective gear were used in the beginning to protect oneself from injury when fighting a mysterious outbreak of werewolf-like monsters. The lore and backstory state that this armor was found to be too cumbersome and didn't really make a difference anyway when fighting monsters of the strength and size that they faced. So armor was in general, discarded completely and replaced by light cloth and pieces of leather to protect from surface injuries and scratches. \nThe new and light attire enabled the \"hunters\" to move swiftly and dodge the monsters easier and thus have a higher chance of survival than wearing armor that didn't work anyway.\n\nA:\n\nWhy do you want there to be different types of armour? If it to create some interesting dynamics then something natural to those dynamics that you seek after would be the answer.\nTerrain\nThe full steel plate men could dominate the plains while the leather guys would have the forests to themselves. This would create scenarios where neither parties want to get off their preferred location.\nSkills and weapons\nWizards with anti-plate skills such as rusting. The spell hits only one piece, so it is ineffective against chain mails. Molotov cocktails or such would make full plates quite an oven. There could be a muscle grow skill\/potion. Moving in too big armour is not possible and too small armour would make the user be crushed.\nDeus\nand his ex machinas would always favour someone or grant access to magic. Some are more favoured by the god, for example, those that do not use metals, wood, leather, magic... Many gods having their own preference on whom to support. Does the forest god like or dislike people using wooden shields and animal hides? Or if the god just has an eye for certain aesthetics.\n\nC:\n\nThe reason i want different types of armour is to allow for different aesthetics. However, the problem is that not all armour is created equal, whilst someone might like the look of one piece of armour, they likely wouldnt choose \u2018form over function\u2019 if their life would depend on what they wore. So the reasoning behind the question is to explain why someone might choose a less effective set if given the choice. Personally, i know a lot of the reasons why, though there is no harm in asking incase there is something i did not consider.\n\nC:\n\nEssentially, i want different types of armour, like those i mentioned in the question, to all be in the same place and all have some reason to choose them over others. Theres the obvious heavy vs light armour debate but that is not what i am after. I am more after what type of heavy armour? What type of light armour? So if i wanted heavy steel armour, why would i choose a coat of plates over full plate, for example?\n\nC:\n\nThe question is too open. It leaves many degrees of freedom. Otherwise, the answers will be and have been all around. Some armour is in all aspects inferior because they are not as developed technology like steel is always better than iron. What are the aesthetics you would like to incorporate in your world?\n\nA:\n\nEffective is a relative term\nArmour is a tool to do a job. Sometimes a sledge hammer isn't the best hammer to use. You need to consider what the job is to select the best tool.\nWeight, speed, flexibility, noise, bulk, cost and what you're up against is just as important as protection.\nSomething good for bullets isn't always the best for knives and what's good for knives isn't as good for blunt weapons.\nChoose your tools to fit the job.\n\nA:\n\nYou want to evoke a tough martial mood, but you don't intend to fight.\n\nhttps:\/\/www.p66.me\/cpa\nImpractical, expensive and really great looking weapons and armor have probably been around almost as long as real weapons and armor - ceremonial maces, decorative swords, parade armor.   All that stuff is what you often see in museums because it never got down and dirty, and is sweet eye candy, and costs loads, so people kept it safe.  Rich (men, usually) want to show off their wealth and importance but don't want to seem like wusses and so they glam up their military regalia.  Authors and artists of fantasy want to show off the bodies of their sexy heroines, who will get hurt in battle according to authorial discretion, not efficacy of their armor.  \nPeople in your world might (under the right circumstances) wear less-than-optimal armor to evoke the mood of real, practical armor but in a way that is more beautiful and spectacular than ordinary working armor can accomplish.  \n\nYou are hard pressed, and grab what is handy.\n\nDefense Secretary Robert M. Gates has reassured Specialist Zachary\n  Boyd, stationed in Afghanistan, that his military career is in no\n  danger for having appeared on the front page of The New York Times\n  dressed for combat in pink boxers and flip-flops. Quite the contrary.\n\nhttps:\/\/lens.blogs.nytimes.com\/2009\/05\/21\/behind-the-scenes-man-in-the-pink-boxers\/\nIf you have a big budget and leisurely access to your neighborhood armorer you can have him make you a nice suite of full plate.  If you wake to find the battle has started on your front porch, you might grab your big jacket and go.  People in actual battle might not have had much time to set up.  The pink boxers soldier did get on his helmet and flak jacket and then it was time to start shooting.  \n\nC:\n\nI thank you for your answer and, whilst perfectly valid, it does not quite answer the question. It is true that, in our own history, the wealthy often had highly decorated armour (which may have meant it was heavier or less protective). However, i was more focusing on why people would choose less effective *types* of armour, rather than armour in general. As i say, i can see what you\u2019re getting at and how it could apply but your answer does not refer to why they would choose different types of armour.\n\nC:\n\nHaving just read your recent edit, again that is also true but does not consider the \u2018choice\u2019 aspect of the question. If that soldier had a choice, i doubt he would have gone out in his pink boxers and flip-flops.\n\n",
        "meta": {
            "source": "worldbuilding.stackexchange"
        }
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    {
        "text": "Q:\n\nWould a dominant species of a planet generally consist of a single species, or multiple species?\n\nI'm working on a planet wherein the dominant species isn't humanoid (in this case, mantids.)\nHowever, I'm unsure as to whether or not it'd make more logical sense for the dominant species to be comprised of a single species of mantis, or multiple species of mantises. Mantises, after all, are an order, not a species. There are thousands of mantis species, and hundreds of genera.\nI know that humans are classified as a single species with multiple races\/ethnic groups. Would that be how the mantis planet would develop, or would it make more sense for it to be comprised of multiple mantis genera or species?\n\nC:\n\nSee also [What factors would allow for two dominant species on a world](http:\/\/worldbuilding.stackexchange.com\/questions\/577\/what-factors-would-allow-for-two-dominant-species-on-a-world). A bit different than what you're asking, but still might be helpful.\n\nC:\n\nWhat exactly are you looking for in your dominant specie(s)? Technologically advanced? Simply top of the food chain?\n\nC:\n\nI think it would be much like humans, where each of the mantids are adapted to their environment and have slight mutations in their DNA, but I don't necessarily think there would be different species.\n\nA:\n\nAs you said humans are one species.  But we also have the other great apes, Chimpanzees, Gorillas, orangutans, etc.  We also have other farther monkey species.  Though there were several other homids that got wiped out, such as Neanderthal and Denisova, who died out with some cross breeding.  So either they died out or were absorbed depending on interpretation.\nSo you'd more likely have something like that.  species that are 'similar' but not the same.  You might even still have some of species that are separate branches, maybe there was enough separation that one didn't dominate and wipe out the others (yet).  If each one was locked on a continent, it is possible that there might be multiple species.  But you'd have to keep them mostly separate for a long time.   \n\nC:\n\nAlso note that humans may not in fact be the only sentient species on this planet.  We're slowly figuring out the dolphin language (they have names) whereas corvids are tool users.  The \"things that make us different\" is a rapidly diminishing collection of items.  The other examples might be on the more simplistic side of things, but we went through a similar stage a few million years ago.  In a few million more the difference might be \"we did it first.\"  And everyone knows their opinion of the guy who replies \"FIRST!\"\n\nC:\n\nAlso, chimps and monkeys have entered the stone age](http:\/\/www.bbc.com\/earth\/story\/20150818-chimps-living-in-the-stone-age)...\n\nC:\n\nDon't forget the mice either. http:\/\/hitchhikers.wikia.com\/wiki\/Mice\n\nA:\n\nNo\nA niche is an N-dimensional hypervolume the dimensions are spatial as well as environmental variables and resources. Species compete when they overlap the overlapping hyperspace is ceded to one or the other or divided up. If the niches overlap completely or by too much one of the species goes extinct. (or you get symbiosis) \nOn Earth there is a kind of old world monkey that is such a generalist that it's niche literally overlaps with that of every bit of macro life on the planet. This could be a special case and on Mantvald the mantids species are all specialists with non-overlapping niches. Some only eat Craykits\nothers are Vegetarians, fisher-mantids etc. If there is no competition between the species then there is no reason for them to compete with each other.\nThere is a paradox that emerges that on the individual level a crayket-eater would have less to fear from a fisher-mantid than from his own species as there is no resource to fight over.     \nIf you mantid's niches are non-overlapping there is no reason that there cannot be any number of sentient species especially if sentience is an ancestral trait. I.e. the common ancestor was sentient.  \n\nA:\n\nIf you looking at a technologically advanced species, one thing you need to consider is the significant difference between the physical evolution and the technological evolution. The differences between these makes it possible that two sapient species could evolve at the same time.\nAs a species, Homo sapiens came into being 200-500 thousand years ago. This means that if you had a time machine and brought a young child from then to our time, they would be able to fit into modern society1.\nWe know that agriculture has been around for at least 10 thousand years. So it took over 90% of our existence as a species so far in order to develop agriculture. Agriculture has allowed us to live in much larger groups. Living in large groups, we have the ability to systematically destroy any threat that consists of only small groups. This is why reaching the milestone of agriculture means dominance over non-agricultural threats.\nSo now, what about that window of 190 thousand years? What if another species capable of developing technology evolved during that period? It would be a race to develop agriculture, with the winner being the species that developed it first. This means that it is very unlikely that there could be multiple dominant species unless the two species did not have to compete with each other.\nConsider the dog. According to the first result of a quick Google search, there are around half a billion dogs in the world. Most people would agree that they are not dominant, but dogs are clearly doing well as a species without any level of technology at all. They were able to attain this status by being capable of things that we can't do and helping us.\nOver time, dogs have been bred to emphasize the traits that we find useful. One result of this is that most dogs have been bred to be more obedient. As such, dogs have proliferated by not even trying to be the dominant species anymore.\nSo what needs to happen to have multiple dominant species? They can't be in competition, or else the first to agriculture will likely wipe out the other. Also, they should be of roughly the same level of intelligence, with other features to distinguish between them. For example, suppose one species is stronger and the other is quicker. This would allow for interesting ways that the two species could work together\u2014predators against which the stronger species has a distinct advantage, and others against which the quicker species has the advantage.\nAnother possibility is, as others have mentioned, physical separation. Suppose that instead of being different races, Africans and Europeans had been separate species. By the time of the \"Age of Discovery\", European society had advanced enough to no longer be immediately concerned about survival. The Europeans would likely have still chosen the slave trade over extermination. The slave trade may have lasted longer with the Africans being a different species, but as society continued to progress it would still be eliminated. It still would not have been enough time for intelligence to be bred out of the African species, allowing them to join the European species as dominant.\n1. Assuming that the child did not have mental disability due to malnutrition during their mother's pregnancy, diseases that we no longer have to worry about, etc.\n\nA:\n\nHumans have been fighting for resources for 10's of thousands of years. Some homids are known to be lost to history. This fighting is still going on today. However one could easy argue that we are getting more similar as we cross breed. Also our technology is reducing the radical responses to our visual and cultural differences.\nSo to answer the question ... \nIf the mantids could not interbreed then over a long time the most adaptable\/advanced group of mantids would dominate the most habitable regions of their planet leading to enslavement \/ extinction of the weaker\/less adaptable groups. This may leave mantid groups acting like horses or bullocks or maybe like pets cats dogs?\nIf however they could interbreed then there would more assimilation's into the most adaptable\/advanced\/numerable group of mantids leading to that group's dominance. \n\n",
        "meta": {
            "source": "worldbuilding.stackexchange"
        }
    },
    {
        "text": "Q:\n\nHow would calenders work on tidal locked planet with no accompanying natural satellite?\n\nEarth-like planet, same mass and distance from it's parent star, the star is Sun-like too. Suppose I have humanoid intelligent herbivores that also practiced agriculture in the stone age period, how do their calendar works?\n\nC:\n\nWhy would they even need calendars? Without day\/night cycles or notable seasons (unless orbit is quite eccentric) a calendar would be of little value in a stone age society.\n\nC:\n\n@Gary Walker: I think to tell time since they need to explore the land.\n\nC:\n\nThere is a question closely related to this one. And not to toot my own horn, but [toot toot toot](http:\/\/worldbuilding.stackexchange.com\/questions\/32657\/how-would-people-tell-time-if-it-was-always-day).\n\nC:\n\nAssuming native life, you will have know that their biology as well as the biology of their plants (and thus their agriculture) will differ **a lot** from what we know. Might be quite unrecognisable without a diurnal cycle, which not only govern our biology but also culture and arguably what we view as intelligence. So what else in that environment produces natural cycles? A satellite (i.e. moon) or other easily visible planets? Are there seasons due to the home planet's orbit? Do these creatures have biological cycles similar to heartbeat (seconds), digestion (days) or menstruation (months)?\n\nA:\n\nThere would be no calendar - only passage of time.\nThere's no meaningful suggestion for seasons or days or months.\nTime passage could be measured by natural processes: for long times, a standard could be set for the amount of time it takes a certain plant to reach a certain height.\nFor short times, it could be the amount of time it takes a leaf to flow a distance from one point to another on a river that has a pretty regular flow.\nThese are irregular, but so was our measure of the length of a forearm in ancient days.  Soon these get standardized.  Finally, if you prefer to apply them to healthy sleep cycles or any other designation you may; and then create the calendar as you like.\nI presume it would be more like a metric: One Hundred X's is a Sleep Cycle, One Hundred Sleep Cycles is a Y; One Hundred Y's is a Z.  And so on, substituting your constants and variables as you like in your story.\nThere is no calendar of sorts, with the exception of your later advanced astronomers.\nHappy Writing!\n\nC:\n\nUnless people have only four fingers. Or they decide they like the base five instead of base ten.\n\nC:\n\n@XandarTheZenon - haha, exactly.  Thus the caveat, \"substituting your constants and variables as you like.\"  :)\n\nA:\n\nFor a tidally locked planet settled by spacefaring humans, they would simply remain on whatever clock or time system they brought with them. If the day isn't quite \"x\" kiloseconds long they might add leap time to adjust but otherwise follow the time cues that their various appliances give them (we used to use watches as timekeeping appliances, but now use cell phones. You can imagine whatever sort of timekeeping appliance would be in use by an interstellar civilization).\nFor a native life form evolved on the planet, part of the answer would have to depend on their evolution. Are they mobile, and can they see in the visible spectrum? Some ideas about tidally locked planets include constant strong winds from the hot pole top the cold pole, which would make mobility difficult or even challenging (if you are evolved for one of the warm climactic bands on the hot side, how will you survive on the cold side?). As well, since the output of a red dwarf star is pretty dim, it might be advantageous to \"see\" in the infrared spectrum, which would make stargazing difficult to impossible.\nBut if the life forms are mobile and can see in the visible spectrum, they will be able to see the stars once they reach the twilight edge and move towards the night side. The planet will be orbiting the sun relatively quickly, so they will see the motion of the stars across the sky, and since most planets have elliptical orbits, will actually see effects like precession and the movement of constellations across the elliptic over a relatively short time span.\nJust like Earthly astronomers were often priests or shaman, the alien astronomers will be able to use the movement of the stars to calculate time and (perhaps) offer predictions. If the planetary system also has other planets, then they will see them as \"wandering stars\", which can also help develop a rich system of timekeeping, mythological imagery and perhaps even science.\n\nA:\n\nHourglasses\nMade of sand and glass. The time taken by sand to empty out completely from one chamber is one hour. Once all the sand is in the lower chamber, the hourglass is inverted.\n\nWater Clock\nSame as hourglass. But using water instead of sand.\n\nEvaporation Clocks\nThese are simpler to construct accurately and much easier to manage. You simply take a tall jar and grade it. Then fill it up with water and place it in a sandbath. The sandbath is placed above a measured amount of fire (e.g. a kerosene lamp with 3 mm thick wick). You would be able to tell the time by seeing upto which point the water in the jar has evaporated. Note that you must not use a heat source that sends water boiling. You have to keep the water at 50\u00b0C temperature.\n\n",
        "meta": {
            "source": "worldbuilding.stackexchange"
        }
    }
]