Titan V and the flight of the Phoenix

The Phoenix, Zephram Cochrane's first warp vessel, was a pretty great design. It looks like a very realistic modern rocket, then transforms into an unmistakeably Trekkish-looking spacecraft, which is clever, since those are often two very different looks. And the name really fits beautifully with the swords-to-plowshares metaphor of its construction.

(Twenty year old spoiler warning: Clip from Star Trek: First Contact)

While reading about it, what caught my eye was that the First Contact designers built their Phoenix around the Titan II missile. This is interesting in a few ways. The Titan II launched the Gemini missions from 1964 to 1966, a century before the Phoenix (which every young Trekkie now knows went up on 5 April 2063). The Titan II was in use for 41 years, and the whole Titan family of rockets were launched for 46 years over all, with the last Titan IVB going up in 2005. When First Contact was released in 1996, Titan II had been going for decades and Titan IV was still quite new, so it wasn't crazy to assume that later versions of the Titan rocket might still be flying many decades later, especially if the fictional Titan V (as the movie-makers dubbed their version) had similar longevity to the Titan II

That said, is over a century of persistence likely for a rocket family? We have no idea. There hasn't been a full century of spaceflight yet. We can say that some families have endured well so far, notably the R-7s and the Atlases. But we can also say that some rocket families are really only families on paper, with early models and late models having very little in common. Sometimes, I suspect, the family name is only transferred from one design to another, totally different, design, as a sort of marketing gimmick, a brand recognition thing. So it's certainly feasible that a future ICBM with roughly the same specifications or role as the Titan II might be given the same name. Even so, I would guess that the Titan V that Cochrane's team launches must have been a museum piece to them, a very old left-over missile. If the 40 year lifespan of the Titan II is a guide to what's feasible, then the Phoenix's first stage may well have been built in the 2020s or 2030s.

What we do know is that the Titan V must have had the same 3 meter diameter as all other Titan first stages, partly because the real Titan II museum piece that represented it is clearly seen on screen with that diameter (you could do the geometry on some screen captures, but we don't have to, because that's a real, retired missile body they filmed with, we already know for certain how big it is), and partly because we're told in the movie that the cockpit section is about 4 meters long, which scales well with the 3 meter diameter.

The Titan V (or 5?), compared with real Titan rockets.
Mixed image credit to Ex Astris Scientia and Historic Spacecraft

The Titan V in the image above fits in well enough, apart from bucking the general trend of moar boosters(!) and increasing height. It also has a distinctly larger first-stage engine bell, replacing the pair of smaller engines of the Titan I & II, and the single small engine on the III & IV. The V's engine bell looks almost as big as those on the SRBs that most IIIs and IVs had strapped to their sides. This was a result of the movie people needing to build one as a physical piece of their set, when people are seen walking around the bottom of the launch silo; apparently the real engines had been removed and no realistic fakes had been installed by the museum. We later see that the Phoenix's second stage engine is roughly the same size, though not quite the same shape. [Edit: If the second stage is intended to operate solely in a vacuum, we can surmise that its similar size actually produces different performance, as explained here.]

(I also listened carefully, and the Titan V sound effects do not include the Titan II's distinctive ignition bwoop.)

Most of the interior of the cockpit section seems to be hollow and unused. It's very spacious in there; compare with the much more cramped Gemini crew module. With the pilot sitting in the front and the engineers in the rear, it's clear that most of the cockpit section's length is dedicated to crew space, and it probably doesn't have a big equipment bay right behind them.

Phoenix cockpit section. Mostly empty space. Approx. 4 meters long. Three crew.

Gemini crew module (greeny-blue in this image) and equipment module (white). Combined length of 5.6 meters. Two crew, cramped. Only the crew module returns to land on Earth, while the equipment module is abandoned.

What's interesting about the Phoenix's one known flight is how we can see it's reached quite an altitude, and Earth keeps quickly shrinking further away, and only then is the first stage jettisoned. We never even see the second stage firing; the warp nacelles immediately extend and it goes to warp without any further chemical boosting. This is an altitude comparable to the highest Gemini flight, which needed two Titan stages and an Agena booster rocket (joined in orbit) to get that far up. How does Phoenix manage it with only one stage, even with a much more advanced 21st century model?

Top: Phoenix, first stage still firing, after travelling/boosting for no more than 55 seconds.
Bottom: Gemini XI, all ascent boosters spent, after travelling for over 40 hours, including total apogee-boosting time of around 7 minutes.

A rough eyeball suggests fairly similar curvature to the Earth, so probably fairly similar altitudes, roughly.

It would be easy to dismiss this as typical Hollywood bad science, but I think there's a better solution. The answer lies in the Phoenix's trajectory, pretty close to straight up. You can also see that it's still over North America, so there's not been much horizontal motion. So, I would guess this was a suborbital launch, pretty close to vertical. The advantage of this is that if the warp drive test fails, you're probably going to fall right back to Earth, without the need for a retro burn. I use this trick for simple test flights in Kerbal Space Program all the time, letting gravity do the hard work of getting you home. And if the warp drive does work, then you can just warp out of Earth orbit, and then presumably either warp back again or fire the still untouched second stage rocket to push back towards Earth's gravity well. (Note that there is no clear, canonical relationship between warp speed and realistic sub-warp momentum, so that's harder to discuss.) If the Titan V can reasonably be assumed to have a more powerful, more efficient engine than the Titan II, then this sort of high-apogee suborbital boost may be wasteful, but it's inherently safer for a quick systems test than a full orbital flight. Assuming the landing systems all function...

I have two thoughts about landing the Phoenix. On the one hand, it's assumed (I think even by original designer John Eaves) that the cockpit section is jettisoned as a traditional, parachute-equipped crew module. Only the crew would come home, and the warp drive, the first of its kind, would be abandoned and burned up on re-entry. It would be sad and wasteful, but much easier. This method has plenty of real precedent.

On the other hand, that second rocket motor is pretty damn big for a mere retro booster. It could instead be a landing engine, for a vertical powered landing of the sort that the New Shepard and Falcon 9 rockets have recently demonstrated. The concept was already known in 1996, with the DC-X testing various necessary systems at lower altitudes throughout the '90s. I have no evidence that anyone connected with First Contact was thinking about this at all, but we can at least consider the possibility that Phoenix could potentially make powered vertical landings.

A compromise possibility is that the warp section and crew section each land separately under their own parachutes, perhaps also jettisoning the heavy second stage rocket motor to make things a little easier.

Image credit: LCARS24, I think, if not J. Anderson.

Since we have no idea how big Phoenix's warp core is, we don't know how much internal space it fills. But if we trust the fan diagram above, then the fuel tanks on the second stage rocket might be relatively tiny. You wouldn't get much delta-v out of that, pushing so much heavy warp drive section plus the cockpit section. But it might just be enough for a suicide burn on a vertical landing, or for a last-ditch emergency de-orbit burn. Does someone want to do the maths?

Remember that when the warp drive works, presumably exactly according to plan, it ends up out beyond Lunar orbit. If there isn't a warp trip back in the other direction, then the Phoenix would have had to take a slow sub-light drift back, something similar to the 3-day return trips that the Apollo Moon missions experienced. I'm not sure where they keep the life support (and snacks) for that scenario. But since Cochrane is back on Earth by nightfall the same day (the movie strongly implies), I think we have to assume that not only did it warp back closer to Earth, but it also landed (by whichever means) with great precision very close to Bozeman, so that Cochrane could get pissed with his (surviving) engineers just in time for the Vulcans.

My last major thought about the flight of the Phoenix is how weird it is that it didn't fry all the spectators on the ground and set fire to at least some of their shacks. I don't know what the minimum safe distance from a Titan launch is, but I've got a hunch it's quite a lot more than the maybe 10 meters between the silo opening and the bar.

He's dead, Jim.

And I also suspect that NASA rules would usually prevent people from standing this close to even quite a small rocket.

Maybe I worry too much, but I've got a suspicion that Newton's laws and a powerful rocket exhaust would at least knock these people over and deafen them, if not actually roast them. Little wonder the camera pans away from them so quickly.

Baby Algebra

They say that as soon as you put an equation into any discussion, you automatically lose half your audience. In my experience teaching maths, it can be up to a 100% loss. But I think my blog audience is better than that; most of my blog audience is automated bots who are made of maths. So, when I say I'd like to challenge the common refrain that "poor people shouldn't have so many babies they can't afford," I'm sure you'll all accept that this is a topic where the numbers are crucial.

Also, I've read that people like maths-themed pictures of kittens.

Let's start with a simple model: We have two sets of babies, R rich babies and P poor babies. Rich babies each consume S resources, while poor babies each consume Q resources. There are T total resources in the world. Obviously, T must be greater or equal to (P.Q) + (R.S), and so the upper limits of P, Q, R and S are all restricted by each other. Because Q is defined as a small number, P can be larger. S is defined as a large number, so R must be smaller. But P and R also limit each other, as do Q and S. Because, no matter what, you can't ever have more stuff than T.

So there's competition, even when we make things more realistic and consider all the ways in which PQRST can be more subtle and complicated. That basic model can be manipulated and expanded by thousands of extra variables, but the basic point it illustrates remains true: You can't have more stuff than exists, so more people using more stuff means more pressure on the supply of stuff. And when (P.Q) + (R.S) ends up greater than T, the only possible result is starvation and death.

My whole life, I've heard from (mostly well-meaning) people that poor people disadvantage themselves by having more children than they can afford to support, perpetuating a cycle of poverty, because those under-resourced children are ill-equipped to compete with the health, education and general supporting mechanisms the rich kids have.

This is, thinking it over, a very sad version of victim-blaming. If S = 10.Q, then one rich baby is effectively depriving 9 poor babies of their resources. If S = 1000.Q, then our rich baby has stolen from 999 poor babies! If parents with only Q resources have 2.P babies, they have deprived half their babies (or more realistically, partially deprived all their babies), but that's still a 1 to 9 ratio of over-consumption compared with the S = 10.Q rich babies. Put that way, it's entirely possible that rich parents are the ones we should be condemning for having so many over-indulged babies that we collectively can't afford. The cycle of poverty can be perpetuated by people who aren't poor and may never be poor.

Filling in real-world numbers is a little trickier, because we need to define terms and shit, and you could argue over exactly how to make things fit best. But as a quick, simple demonstration, I'm just going to yank similar-sized national populations with very different GDP per capita (from here, noting that it's 2008 data) and make the crude assumptions that GDP per capita is uniform within each state, and represents solely and entirely the resources available to all their current babies. There are definitely more appropriate and specific figures, instead of those, but I'm only trying to show that a rough approximation is possible that can be assembled by non-specialists with limited familiarity and limited research, which still shows the same basic pattern of results.

I pick Tanzania (P = 35 million humans, Q = $500) and South Africa (R = 46 million humans, S = $29 000), and the GDP per capita alone immediately shows that Q and S can be vastly different in reality. For those without calculators at home, this S = 58.Q, indicating that one South African kid is taking up resources that 57 additional Tanzanian kids would be using, on average. If we take the UN's dollar-a-day minimum survivable income guideline, we can see that Q just barely beats this bedrock minimum of $365. Since P is sort of close to Q, we can further say that even if the Tanzanian population doubled overnight, that population pressure would still be less harmful to Tanzanian babies than the resource competition pressure from South Africa. In this simple case, Tanzania is taking (P.Q = 17,5 billion) units from T, while South Africa takes up (R.S = 1 334,0 billion) units, 76 times more. If T were exactly 1 trillion units, the shared shortfall would hurt South Africa, but it would wipe out Tanzania utterly. Defining the actual value of T, deciding what we should and shouldn't include in it, is another frustration I will gloss over for today; just accept that it's not a very flexible figure at the best of times.

(Of course, reality is even more granular and messy, with stark inequality within both those countries. We could draw an even more dramatic comparison, two decades after apartheid was officially voted out, between the top average white male income and the bottom average black female income in South Africa alone. And then there's the whole rest of Earth to look at. We could discuss the finer details for decades and still not cover it all. Hence my focus on the big picture.)

Obviously I'm looking at this through somewhat Marxy-tinted glasses, but even if you want to take a strictly capitalist-meritocratic view, that different work merits different pay, then please remember that those R babies have done sweet fuck all to earn their wealth, and the P babies haven't yet had a chance to test their merit at all either. I don't believe there is any coherent argument for intentionally keeping the value of S higher than Q, other than naked (and deeply instinctive) self-interest. And that's not a good thing.

There are, of course, still good reasons for cutting over all population growth among everyone, rich and poor. The smaller the sum of P and R, the bigger the sum of Q and S can be, plus we benefit from enormous and fantastic ecological and technical benefits if we totally arrest the growth of P+R. And individuals should certainly do the basic personal maths on their own household economics, as one part of the decision to make any new human. But that personal capacity can't be the only thing we consider. A wider societal perspective is also important - more important, I argue!

So what do we do with this model?

Any sane, self-interested potential parent would want their kid(s) in the R population, and they'd want S to be as high as possible. And most people will openly agree to that, I'm sure. What fewer people will be open about, however, is whether they accept that P and Q will have to shrink to accommodate their private desires. In my experience, mostly talking to middle and upper income people, their public discussion of this comes down to ideology, but regardless of that, very few seem to be willing to admit that R fucking things up for P is a problem that they personally will change their behaviour to fix.

But I think the maths is clear. If we're not assholes, we want Q = S, so that all kids have as close to an equal and fair start in life. And until Q does really equal S, then every growth in R just makes the situation worse, at a worse rate than any growth in P.

I have a lot of wealthy friends and acquaintances* in the the age bracket where humans usually settle down and breed, and these people are basically good people. These people are mostly well educated; some are extremely well educated and unusually intelligent. (Most are atheist, incidentally, so religion is only a distant factor in this discussion.) Almost invariably, they've almost all been very eager to agree with me that overpopulation is a problem and that fewer people should breed and should be having fewer babies when they do (with the exception of one professional philosopher, who started from an argument from ignorance to claim that he didn't know - and wasn't willing to make any effort to learn - any reason for him not to breed, which was disappointing). Usually, with most of these people, we're all on the same page. And then they have a kid, explaining it as "well, we're only having the one," apparently totally oblivious to any inkling of the maths above. And then they have a second one, with the excuse "we're only having two, one to replace each parent," as if we actually want or need the parents replaced. (The other common yet moronic excuse for the second kid is that the first "needs a friend", as if the 7 billion potential friends who already exist count for nothing.) And then they spit out a third kid and all I can think is "Oh, fuck the fuck off, you selfish fucking fuckers!" But society tells me its rude to swear at people when they announce a pregnancy, so I usually restrain myself.

My point here is that there's a lot of irrational, instinct-driven hypocrissy around pregnancy and breeding, and we need to change what is socially acceptable to fix this. And I don't mean the swearing rules, I mean what is socially acceptable in terms of who should demand the right to breed and who we should be condemning when they choose to.

Whether we have formal pregnancy limit laws or vague social norms and mores on breeding, I think my bottom line is that it's important that we consider the global impact of the child's consumption on the world, and not only the local impact of the child's consumption on the child. From that point of view, the rich(er) giving the poor(er) shit because they had kids is clearly inappropriate, and instead the richest should be most worrying to us.

Incidentally, we can easily extend this line of thought to also cover non-human breeding. The environmental impact of the meat industry is massive, and there simply is no way to "fix" that with the current human population size. Even if you don't understand the individual-level animal rights arguments, it's just simple maths again to understand that X humans need Y plants to survive, while X humans need Z animals to survive, all of which will each need Y plants to stay alive until they get killed. And X.Y will always be smaller than X.Y.Z. But again, people** would rather insist that we breed more cows, more pigs, more sheep, more chickens, more gagh, anything at all, regardless of the costs, rather than admit that we can get by fine without eating meat. And this has the further effect of pushing up the value of S for no good reason, which adds to how much the P population gets fucked.

*Increasingly, it's become fewer friends and more acquaintances. People take this stuff incredibly, deeply personally. I've had conversations with otherwise reasonable, easy-going people who take my suggestion that a hypothetical person should hypothetically choose not to have any children, and somehow twist that through parental animal instinct into believing I've said we should take their actual, current, already-born children away from them, to roast them and eat them. And I only slightly exaggerate that interpretation. Obviously, those humans who already exist should be treated as well and fairly as possible (speaking as a human who already exists), but that's a totally separate question from whether we should, in principle, tolerate careless breeding and population growth before it's happened, in the planning stages. I guess people also don't like admitting they've made irreversable mistakes, especially on that scale.

**People take meat-eating almost as personally as breeding. It's weird.

The Ideology of the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe

I've been listening to the SGU since 2007. It's fair to say that they've significantly affected who I am today. So it's worrying to me to see them being silly. The mess over Dawkins attending NECSS this year gives a single, solid focal point to discuss this around, but I worry that it's a wider problem. Their discussion of this in episode 555 was interesting and revealing, especially the admission that frequent major changes in their public decision are a matter of private internal disagreement within their organisation. My highest academic specialisation (somewhat atrophied now) is in exactly that, the management of internal differences to keep non-governmental organisations running effectively, so this caught my ear. They should probably see to that, before it grows out of hand.

But what's actually prompted me to write this is a different few comments they made in that episode, showing a disappointingly poor understanding or acceptance of their own politics. I liked and agreed with (or at least accepted) many of their points. But they lost me when Steve started saying that they're neutral, that they're the middle ground, that they have no ideology. This is bullshit.

Literally everyone has an ideology; if you don't know what yours is, that's your ignorance. It's like saying that you don't have a pancreas, just because you've never taken it out and properly dissected it before. I groaned when Steve said they embrace [the ideology of] rationalism, rather than any ideology. Rationalism is nice, I like rationalism, but it is an ideology. An ideology is the set of beliefs you hold about how the world does and/or ought to work. Rationalism is the belief that the world functions in rational ways and that people ought to use reason and evidence to understand this. I like that, it's an ideology that makes good sense to me, but it is both clearly an ideology, and a somewhat limited one. There are important things that fall outside the strictest limits of reason and evidence, so it can't be the only ideology we rely on.

I was similarly bugged by the Rogues' insistence that keeping the skeptical movement together ought to be our common and chief goal. This is not how conflict resolution works. People don't cooperate and get along just because they happen to share one goal. That can be helpful, no doubt, a necessary condition for conflict resolution. But the sufficient condition, the real key, is to generate consensus on the things people don't already agree on. I felt this episode dodged that problem too much and leaned too heavily on the "guys, just pretend to get along, ok?" gambit. (I exaggerate for emphasis.)

The reason this approach is a problem is that it is close to impossible to be truly neutral (outside of D&D). There's a perfect Tutu quote on this:

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.

Dawkins is a clear analogue, in this case, of the elephant. His history and prestige and influence give him power over those he tries to shut up, and he abuses that great power like he never had an Uncle Ben. The SGU people know this, and the NECSS people should all know it too. Giving him a free extra podium to speak from as he pleases (even more) is not the same as challenging him to make a proper case for his dodgy positions, turning the skeptical goggles around for some thorough introspection. Who you do and don't invite to speak at these sorts of events is, to some extent, a statement in itself. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous. How and for what purpose you invite them also carries implicit and explicit meaning. It doesn't help to pretend that an invitation for Dawkins is no different at all to an invitation for, say, Bill Nye (or someone similarly unobjectionable).

(Cue someone trying to suggest that Bill Nye is some sort of huge asshole.)

But Dawksy is not specifically interesting to me, he's just an example of how the "we're the sane middle ground" trap works. Being a moderate sounds safer than being an extremist, right? But some things don't have sane middles. There is no sane moderate position to murder and rape threats, for example. There is no acceptable number of threats above zero, and on that issue I'd be very comfortable to position myself with the extreme opposition to that sort of thing. SGU claiming the neutral middleman role for themselves is either naive or dodgy. Considering how much I've heard the Skeptical Rogues complain about false balance in the media, I would have hoped they'd be better at spotting it in themselves.

I would say that the root of the SGU's problem is the assumption that everyone ought to be, first and foremost, a skeptic. Not surprising, but also not realistic. They point out, quite correctly, in ep 555 that neither the "free speech" camp nor the "social justice" camp (as they classify them) have absolute claim to being most important and essential. But they don't seem to have grasped that the "skeptic" camp is just as artificial and non-essential, and just as biased by its own preferences. They could even have used that angle to justify at least some form of partial neutrality. But instead, they just come across as tone-deaf and/or arrogant. It's a fucking pity.

I am quite aware of my own biases, and admit them freely. It doesn't solve all my communication problems, but it helps. I side unapologetically with the feminists, and maybe I'm crazy to, or maybe I'm not. The thing is, I'm pretty sure, if I was wholly with the Dawkins fan club instead, that I could construct almost exactly the same complaint against the SGU's attempt at false balance. I think that suggests that their approach really was flawed. I'm happy to accept that they genuinely want to make things work best for everyone, that there's no malevolence behind it, but this time they really should have thought through at least their choice of words better, if not also their choice of ideas.

Bloodwaddle (A brief Fiasco game summary)

We tried Fiasco for the first time last week, and I didn't immediately have time to write down everything I remembered about it. I wish I had, because I had been worried that the excellent Tabletop play-through of the game was misleadingly good (because they had such unusually excellent and expressive players, all professional storytellers) and that our amateurish attempt at creating a story from scratch would never reach that level. But it's such an excellent rules system, so cleverly made, and we're apparently not half as inexperienced at this stuff as I worried - it is still basically roleplaying - so everything turned out great. The story ran smoothly without feeling too obvious or forced, and we had a great time.

We used 'The Ice' playset, and as one of the first elements to come up was a bookie/gambler relationship between two of the characters, everything was built around trying to justify that. And so we had a tale of murder and deception flowing out of the illegal penguin-fighting ring of MacMurdo Station. Please bear in mind that we took this all dead seriously, even though we'd all already watched this video clip in our pre-game research into how penguins fight:

The cast was as follows:
Steve Kent, glaciologist, here for the first time, bunk mate of Pendlebrook (Damon)
James Pendlebrook, structural engineer, who found the body with Ekstein (Scot)
Janave Ekstein, outpost accountant who runs the penguin fights, owns Smitty's gambling debt (Sita)
Smitty, seal expert and research rival of Grant (Jamie)
Gavin Grant, ornithologist and fellow first-timer with Kent (me)
Cookie, another structural engineer, not a cook, who was found shot dead out on the ice at the start of play (NPC)

I immediately love how all the major defining elements are always shared between at least two players, never tied to only one of them, so that anyone tugging on any thread will eventually cause all other threads to shift too. We added official occupations to our character descriptions to help explain why they're there at all, but where traditional RPGs would almost entirely focus on what an individual character is, what it can do, what its skills are, what its job is, those are all fairly trivial, unnecessary considerations in Fiasco. I'm sure there's a Dumbo's Feather analogy here.

I also liked how easy it felt, unavoidable sometimes, to leap back and forth along the time line, doing flashbacks to fill in missing details as if it were perfectly natural and not (as it usually feels) like an erroneous break in the smooth flow of the plot.

I wish I'd written even minor notes about the order in which things played out, but it was roughly something like this:

Having stumbled across the body of Cookie and the gun that killed him, Ekstein wants to cover it all up and make sure she can arrange one last big illegal gambling event out at Ross Island (where the penguins are and the authorities are not) before winter darkness sets too fully and the fights have to stop until spring. Pendlebrook, on the other hand, is eager to get Kent involved in the investigation, and since Kent had once walked in on Cookie plucking and cooking dead penguins (I forget if this was to eat the evidence or just because he liked eating them, but either way, it's where his nickname came from), Kent was eager to help uncover more of the station's dark side. Grant tried to convince the station chief (we never looked up the correct title for the head person at MacMurdo) that Smitty was behind the suspicious decline in penguin numbers, but lacked solid enough proof. Meanwhile, Smitty had hatched a scheme to get out of debt by modifying a dodgy penguin (wings sewn to its sides and similar sabotage) and using it to rig a fight.

Ekstein and Smitty found mutual usefulness, stumbling into each other out at Ross Island, one dragging a dead man, the other carrying an obviously mutilated penguin. Smitty helped Ekstein hide the body, so that it wouldn't cause her gambling event to be cancelled, and in turn Smitty used this to blackmail Ekstein into slipping his dodgy penguin into the fights for him. Just as they'd agreed to this, Pendlebrook, Kent and Grant surprised them, on the literal trail of the murder. Grant, furious at catching Smitty red-handed with an abused penguin, bolted straight for him, and Smitty bolted straight out into the gathering evening mist. Grant stumbled on the loose snow over the freshly-moved body, losing sight of Smitty, but revealing the body to all.

Smitty managed to sneak back and slip Cookie's body away, sinking it into the ocean near an ice-fishing location he knew well. Ekstein was brought to MacMurdo, but with no body, the authorities saw no reason to hold her. She took the opportunity to make one last effort to secretly get a few people to the fights. She hadn't counted on so many people being excited about it, with rumours of the event spreading by word of mouth, and so the crowd ended up being far larger than expected. Pendlebrook alone tracked Smitty down to an ice-fishing hut, and the two of them negotiated a plan for Smitty's debt to be cancelled if he'd take the fall for Cookie's death. At the same time, Kent was searching through his bunk mate's belongings, and discovered evidence that Pendlebrook had a strong motive to kill Cookie (I forget what it was, something to do with accounting records, which also tied Ekstein in?). Grant, now armed with plenty of solid evidence, arranged for an official raid on the fights that evening, specifically aiming to pin it on Smitty. Pendlebrook came back to his room and realised that Kent must have found the evidence against him.

Storming in with MacMurdo's security people, the gambling crowd quickly broke into panicked flight in all directions. Grant spotted Smitty, but was knocked unconscious (by something?), and Smitty got away clean. Pendlebrook used the chaos to booby trap Kent's snowmobile, setting engineering explosives inside of it. Kent was extremely badly injured by this trap, with the explosion only adding to the chaos.

In the end, Kent's Antarctic career ended in disability and lifelong pain. Pendlebrook successfully covered up his first murder and his second attempted murder, but seeing Kent suffering in the base hospital brought him sudden realisation that it was his own friends he had been hurting. He fled to South America, never able to let go of the guilt. Ekstein was jailed for the illegal gambling ring. Grant continued his research, but lost most of his funding to Smitty, who not only escaped blame for everything, but was promoted and given a huge funding increase, partly taken from Grant's funds. With Ekstein gone, Smitty took over the penguin-fighting ring himself, with many others now in debt to him.

I'm sure there was plenty more to it than that, but this is all my frail human memory retained. Perhaps the other players can add more in the comments.

It might not be the absolute most original story ever, but it's clearly a functional plot, assembled from a small number of very simple random elements, which is cool. And the really exciting part, which is maybe lost in the re-telling now, is watching it all emerge in front of your eyes, as if from nowhere. If you've ever tried to invent a whole story from scratch, and especially if you're very familiar with writer's block, it's astounding how this game just pours a whole story out like it's the easiest thing in the world. It's a beautiful process, and Bully Pullpit can rightly be proud of it.

It's also a very social game. Some games, including even some roleplaying games, push players to keep quiet, to focus on their own characters/resources/pieces/whatever and treat other players as distant obstacles on the board. But Fiasco works best when everyone is talking to everyone else simultaneously, in an environment where creative ideas are encouraged and enjoyed. I really like that.

I look forward to trying it again, and I hope the basic mechanics can be easily adapted to other genres. I can see all sorts of other good uses for it already.

Periodic Pantheon

This interesting article summarising the recent history of element-naming controversies reminded me of an idea I've had for years, but can't seem to find a use for. In short, I thought it would be neat to have a mash up of the periodic table and a polytheistic pantheon, with each deity tied to a specific element. I think it could make an interesting background element for a (probably science fiction) story, a part of a culture (human or otherwise) that sits in the void between scientifically advanced and archaically superstitious. I simply haven't needed it yet, so I thought I'd drop it here and maybe someone else will make something interesting of it. I'm aware that elements (pun) of this idea have already been touched on elsewhere, but I have something less literal in mind, something that would work equally well in settings with and without anything supernatural.

Halfway there already.

I think this is a religion devised after the discovery of chemistry up to at least a typical modern high school level, so that the periodic nature of the elements is understood, but then explained as a pattern reflecting supernatural intervention. It's no more irrational than the interpretations of intelligent design believers who like to paint themselves as sciencey and rational. And then from that, you can branch out further into sects of the periodic pantheon that reject as much of the non-theistic interpretation as possible, sort of the opposite of the real-world progression from openly religious creationism to the rational-facaded intelligent design. My point is that it's probably believable enough that someone might develop a religion around this view of the elements.

How the periodic pantheon interacts with other religions, including presumably some older, pre-scientific ones, depends on the needs of the setting and the story, but it does seem to have one unusual implication. Most polytheistic religions in history have been quite tolerant of outside beliefs, often incorporating them into their own, mixing and matching deities like trading cards. But the periodic pantheon seems to me like it should be much more rigid, limited to only the known elements. This makes it an unusually intolerant, perhaps more dogmatic form of polytheism.

But those are all fuzzy side issues to me, things that would be determined more by the needs of the story you're trying to tell than by the essential, central needs of the pantheon concept. What I'd really rather focus on, for now, is how I see the deities of the pantheon as characters, with personalities embodying the physical traits of their respective elements. Some of this can be quite straight forward, with the iron god representing endurance and strength, generously distributed to almost everyone, while the polonium god is elusive and deadly. Hydrogen, oxygen and carbon should feature as special characters, dominant in the spheres of living things, fuels, all sorts of synthetic materials, etc. Fire is always a big deal in both religion and reality, and the idea that the oxygen god plays such a crucial role in fire would definitely earn it a lot of worship. In a setting with nuclear energy and weapons, the gods of uranium and plutonium are terrible super-monsters offering immense power, a devil's deal. Hydrogen as a Sun (and general nuclear fusion) god possibly sets up a good-vs.-evil dichotomy with the subterranean fission gods.

Beyond these individual deity characters, I also see the groups, periods and other repeating patterns of the periodic table telling neat, predictable stories about families and factions among the deities, sharing common traits. The alkali metal deities are all fiery and unstable. The noble gases don't represent nobility, but weakness, etherealness, lack of involvement. The halogens are frightening, too eager to change the world in nasty ways. The metals collectively represent similar traits of strength to iron, but not all to the same degree. The commonness of the elements in reality, roughly tied to period number, would tell us how involved in the setting the deities choose to be, or allow each other to be, or are allowed/required by some even higher law. Perhaps the older the deity, the more right it has to influence the world, while its children/underlings get to make only smaller contributions. The synthetic elements would need a fair bit of theological explaining, if your setting is aware of them. They're almost like compelling the gods to give us stuff, maybe even causing new gods to come into existence. Perhaps some sects might be horrified at this idea, while others are thrilled by it.

I'm undecided whether I prefer the interpretation that the actual atoms things are made of are literal pieces of physical gods, somehow distributed into the world, or merely the physical gifts given to the world by more ghostly, abstract gods. I think both interpretations could be embraced by different sects. In the latter case, compounds are not that interesting from a theological perspective, as that's then just crossing the line into natural science, making stuff out of stuff the gods dropped off. But in the former case, when part of the body of the sodium god touches part of the body of the chlorine god, we now have need for even more storytelling about conflict and cooperation between them as characters, and how this results in salt. You might not bother to do this with all of the millions of compounds, but a few parables and fables built around some of the most common and important compounds could flesh out the religion further. These stories give a chance to develop the character of each deity, to give them some personality and depth, or at least some dialogue for school plays to re-enact.

In a setting without the visual table representations of the elements that we're used to, this kind of semi-literal storytelling could be a feasible alternate way of explaining and remembering the periodic patterns of the elements. I wouldn't prefer that myself, I think the periodic table works brilliantly. But it's not an inevitable and unavoidable way to portray those facts, and it's interesting to think how we'd be teaching chemistry today if we'd never had a Mendeleev to come up with the table idea.

Finally, going back to the article about the naming of elements, it would probably be worthwhile to have a think about what these deities would be called, and what the elements are called if they're not sharing exactly the same names. In a setting based on our world, you'd have to either go out of your way to rename the elements, or you'd have to settle for some pretty dumb god names. Lead and Tin don't sound like very good personal names to me. Plumbum and Stannum at least sound more classical. But this is all pretty subjective. In a setting not based on our Earth, it becomes more feasible, maybe even necessary, to rename the entire list of elements. This could start drifting into conlangs. It all depends on how much world-building you want to do.