Schlock Mercenary/Headscratchers

• Why does nobody act surprised that the story of Killer that the Toughs hear from Rod accords with the version of events that Lady Emily and Chuck tell the rest of the amorphs? There are a variety of explanations that could fit (limitations on surveillance, senility, etc) but nobody even wonders why they had to break up the slave ring by chance, instead of with foreknowledge.
  • Rod and the rest of his species don't pay attention to stuff in the outside too much--he admits outright that even the most interesting thing in centuries only almost tempted him away from meals. It's perfectly plausible that they only heard the propaganda, and didn't bother listening in on Lady Emily's secretmost meetings.
    • Ooorrrr, Rod didn't say because he wanted to watch a 'war'.
• In the "Board of Accidental Tourism" arc, we find that the explosion of even a minuscule annie-plant could level a city, or make a volcano erupt. Later on, the much larger plant in Elf's minitank blows right under her, and all it does is take off her feet.
  • Simple. Tanks are expected to come under fire, damaged, etc. Thus, their annie plants have some sort of safety feature to keep a breach from killing the pilot, perhaps directing the blast somewhere else, or something. Also, Elf was wearing armor good against 30th century artillery strikes, which probably helped.
  • The amount of fuel in the annie plant might also be a factor. The tank was expected to run for a few hours and return. The uplift robot that caused the volcano to erupt was fully fueled for an expected operating time of roughly five hundred years (though admittedly, it consumed a lot less power than a grav tank).
    • It's pointed out here and elsewhere that an annie plant can be prevented from going supercritical if it's first "stepped down." Presumably, this is an automatic procedure in the event that something starts to go wrong with one of the tanks.
  • Also, the annie-plants involved have different uses. Yeah, the annie plant in the computer made a big boom, but it was designed to last for centuries. The annie plant in the tank is designed for something that is going to get shot at a lot. The tank's plant is almost certainly designed to not cause an epic explosion if it goes up, because military hardware that blows up cities when it gets damaged is not viable.
    • Also keep in mind that the annie plants are getting blown up by dark matter entity weapons, which consistently create small-scale explosions using whatever weapons system that the dark matter entities like to fire at us baryonic life forms. Those weapons have consistently been shown to blow up annie plants without causing earth-shattering kabooms.
  • "if it got breached before it could dump". All in all, energy of antimatter and neutronium inside the ball is going to be released if it's destroyed, but exactly how may differ. Antimatter as such turns into pure gamma rays, which can be mostly absorbed by neutronium, absorbed by PTU, absorbed by environment if it meets solid metal or stone - or mostly pass through less dense matter (it's called "penetrating radiation" for a reason) and go away. In less than nuke-grade amounts, gamma rays as such do very little "boom" - unless something absorbs enough of them to be vaporized. And people in SM consistently fail to give a damn about non-lethal doses of radiation as such - probably nanobots fix the worst damage if the patient won't die before that. Then there's a question of how much of antimatter is actually injected into the plant and how it's stored outside.
• According to the Toughs' implanted memories, Petey abandoned them to some pirates, or something along those lines. Why doesn't anybody question things when Tagon's new tailorbot gets delivered through TAD? Furthermore, Petey could have made excuses to future!Kevyn to get out of doing this, but apparently, he could tell that nobody would think it strange for an aloof AI who had abandoned its former friends to help give one of them a birthday present? Am I missing something?
  • To my recollection, only the UNS (and the residents of Petey's space-Australia) actually knows Petey can ignore teraport interdiction. Further, only Tagon was party to Tailor's method of arrival, and he's both too bright and not bright enough to question where Tailor came from, especially in the frazzled state he was in at the time. The rest of the crew likely assumed he just went and bought Tailor to get him a new suit as a self-birthday present.
    • The Toughs had their memories changed at the end of Book 9. The Tailor is given to Tagon halfway through Book 10, so of course they remember where he really came from.
• Okay look at this comics: http://www.schlockmercenary.com/d/20081125.html A group is making antimatter weapons. Fine. To get antimatter you need a huge amount of energy. True. Their power source is... antimatter. That has to be a huge theromdynamics fail or a huge economics fail.
  • ...."Annie" plants don't use antimatter. Annie plants work by annihilating neutronium, and are essentially giant mass-to-energy converters.
    • When antimatter meets matter they are both converted into energy... to convert neutronium into energy, you use anti neutronium (unless they have some magical way to do so in the strip without using antimatter).
      • They do have a magical way. All we know about the process is that it involves gravitics. Presumably this vagueness is to avoid giving wiseacre tropers like us any specific targets.
        • They do indeed have a magical way. They take in matter and compress it against the neutronium, or manipulate the gravitics to allow a very small chunk of the neutronium to explosively vaporize into energy. Either process will release a butt-ton of energy.
          • Ordinary matter is compressed gravitically until it becomes neutronium, which is used to fuel the annie plant. They then use some magical technology to annihilate this neutronium (perhaps by converting neutrons into antineutrons). In any case, "annihilation" implies a total conversion.
    • Either way, the short version is that they don't use antimatter as a fuel source.
      • Annie plants must be refuelled, though it happens rarely and is mentioned even more rarely (e.g. in Credomar arc). Thus they use antimatter as a primary energy source, while neutronium is created inside the bubble where it can be kept stable, and as such is involved somewhere in the middle of the process.
    • Neutronium probably is used as the second component of annihilation and (more importantly) as absorber. Releasing energy of annihilation is the easiest part, it needs to be gathered and converted. Both high-energy gamma and antineutrons are penetrating, so catching them needs something either fairly thick or absurdly dense (PTU alloys are dense as metals go, but not comparable with neutronium). Now, protons and electrons from neutron decay are charged and thus can be put to use more easily, so neutronium could be an intermediate stage.
• Why didn't Schlock remember that his contact had smelt of Boomex?
  • I got the impression that he was careful enough to avoid the stuff--until he loaded that aircar he gave the ellie with the stuff. That's what Schlock smelled, not the older batch. But, the stuff in the aircar was from the same batch (that's why he blew it up in the first place), so they smelled the same.
• The baryonic people committed genocide of the dark matter people over a form of transportation. They can communicate. The baryonic people know how to stop teraporting.
  • A: If you mean by teraporting, the strip's only said it "pollutes their space," not "kills them." It's never been made clear just how much damage the teraport was doing. B: If you mean by the attack in the core, the only Pa'anuri who were killed were soldiers sent to ensure the destruction of the Milky Way; they're from Andromeda, remember? C: The F'sherl-gaani did stop teraporting. The Pa'anuri responded with a time bomb, a hundred thousand years before the humans started again.
    • Actually, terraports do kill them. That's how the Core War was fought. The point about the time bomb still stands, though.
    • Teraports only kill them when the density of teraports-per-volume-of-space gets very, very high. One large teraports might annoy them; a blanket of teraport as area-denial can kill them. So normal transport just annoys them, for which they attempt to kill everybody.
    • Don't forget that their word for baryonic matter is "ANNOYING."
    • The moral side of the Core War is addressed by Petey in this strip. He explains that while they will attack the Pa'anuri unilaterally, the hostilities technically started when the Pa'anuri planned to destroy the galaxy, and the baryonic life-forms will simply announce that they have finally noticed.
  • Teraporting is annoying. Teraport area denial fields kill. Kind of the same way a water balloon hitting you is just annoying, but filling an entire room with water can kill you.
  • What's amusing is that the entire thing was addressed in a single strip that both explained why they were at war and that the Paan'uri plotted the genocide of an entire galaxy. So the very issue that OP brought up was addressed in the same strip that it was introduced in.
  • Oh, it's worse than this. Pa'anuri were created by one of the previous Galactic civilizations, to be used in power sources, and then, surprise, Turned Against Their Masters.
• In recent story - why Doctor and Reverend thinks they are not married while they were by captain, whose parents were ortodox las veganists? Sure it was tactical marriage but still should be honored. (PS. I'm not surprised why they cry as many parts of memories are... radically different.
  • Their memories were wiped - being married in jail wouldn't jive with the cover story, after all. All they remember is the fake wedding. This might turn out to be a plot point. It is, at the very least, effective use of irony.
• In regards to petey's ghosts, how come nobody realized that the engineers who built him could have intentionally designed the sewage system to produce haunting sounds if you run air through them?
  • Because there's no reason for the engineers to do that.
    • I think his point was that there is a non-astronomical chance that an engineer with a weird sense of humor had rigged the sewage system - Thus preventing Petey's insanity. It's a good point. I assume the answer is Rule of Funny.
    • Actually, Petey is embarrassed that he got caught in a recursion, and Kevyn mentions that its somewhat common for super-minds. In other words, there was an easy answer, but he couldn't stop calculating the ridiculous improbabilities long enough to think of it.
    • It was always my assumption that Petey's crazy-spell was the cause of the voices in the pipes, not the other way around. Think about it: something happened to cause the mutineers to abandon ship, something which also caused them (or Petey himself) to destroy the ship's original AI control switch, since Kevyn mentioned when they first bought the Post-Dated Check Loan that the switch was destroyed. It makes a lot more sense than random noises: being ordered to exterminate his own crew causes Petey's mind to fracture. The broken part takes control of the air line attached to the plumbing, and uses it to create a disembodied voice to terrorize the mutineers. They eventually abandon the now insane warship. The "sane" part of Petey's mind spends the intervening years thinking about ghosts, until he's rebooted and ordered to repress the entire incident.
  • Voices began to appear only after the massacre. Until then, the sewage system used to work without any anomalies Petey considered worth a mention or raising probability of a non-ghost coincidence enough to prevent the silly dilemma that led to recursion.
  • Theoretically, it's possible that one of the dead guys was infected with a weird advanced nanobot swarm (after seeing what Laz'R'Us swarm did, it seems well within their capabilities) that rigged the sewers and self-destructed. But that's more of WMG.
• Why doesn't the battle at the core seem to have any long-term ramifications? "Everyone" was there, and the battle was said to have 35% casualties - even assuming those were mostly on evacuated "expendable" ships like the Peacemaker, unlikely since Petey didn't evacuate the Peacemaker until asked to, that must have been a massive loss of materiel. If only the Sol system forces managed such massive deployment, that's even worse, since that must have hugely upset the balance of power both within the UNS and between it and other governments. And yet there doesn't seem to be any real aftermath other than the Fleetmind's formation.
  • It was actually more like 100% casualties, if you count the fact that every shipmind allowed into the Fleetmind refused to leave it at the end. However, nobody sent more than about half their navy, and everybody got their ships stolen, so the balance of power is intact.
    • Except for the Ob'enn who didn't help out. But presumably the Fleetmind continues Petey's work at keeping them contained.
    • It is extremely likely that the Fleetmind is, as Petey is the dominant force within the AI collective. There's a reason why everyone refers to the Fleetmind as "Petey."
  • Also, anyone who tried to take advantage of the instabilities caused by the Fleetmind's formation will very quickly discover the Fleetmind's capacity for intervention in a spectacular and decisive manner, right before being drafted to help fight in Andromeda. The Fleetmind tends their backyard, after all.
• If the Jurisindependent Security Covenant screens out any potential members who aren't unwilling to kill, why did they admit Landon, who finds killing regrettable but sometimes necessary?
• In Big, Dumb Objects, part IV, Petey spent an unprecedentedly vast amount of energy to capture Oisri without killing anyone, saving "thousands of lives". If spending the less-vast amount of energy required to punch through teraport area denial on the scale of two squads of Toughs means sacrificing "billions of lives" now that the Pa'anuri have their own core generator, how was confiscating Oisri like that worthwhile? It was a great show of power, but Petey's dominant plenipotence seems established enough by that point that he wouldn't need shows of power. Certainly he has reasons to capture Oisri beyond stopping other people from fighting over it, but it seems like capturing it militarily would have cost fewer lives.
  • One possibility would be that Petey is no longer resource-constrained by the time of Big, Dumb Objects. However, that he had to hack the battleplate Manicouagan to teraport it away from Oisri suggests that he still doesn't have energy to spare to overcome TAD, as, back in Emperor Pius Dei, before the Pa'anuri had a core generator, he forcibly teraported Popigai to Jupiter (and then to Celeschul) without hacking it.