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Another item: Sol, have you had a chance to look at the functioning of spellchecking on various important TNBW text fields? I no longer recall which ones had/didn't have spellchecking, but there definitely was more of it before the crash. I especially find myself looking up plenty of words when posting to the forum.

EDIT: Found the problem. My browser (Chrome) is able to spellcheck words in at least some TNBW text fields (e.g., forum posts) but the feature was off. Not sure how that happened. But that seems to be the fix.

EDIT 2: Did a little more testing. Chrome's spellchecking seems to work on ALL major TNBW text fields except the closing comment to an inline review and the closing comment when responding to that review.

Thanks
Dirk

Sol, could you please add me as a moderator of the following existing groups?

Historical Fiction
medieval fantasy/magic
thriller/mystery/suspense
YA/New Adult crossover
Brave – Community of Christian Writers
New Novelists

Also, please add the following members as moderators of the groups listed next to their names:

Bill - Romance
Lynn - Memoirs
Kdot - medieval fantasy/magic

Please do not remove any existing moderators.

Thanks
Dirk

I pity whoever gets caught in this weather with a broken down car. Someone going from a heated garage at home to a heated garage at work, or the reverse, is likely to get very complacant, especially those young enough to reproduce. Which reminds me, I need to order a better blanket for the car. Or a winter-weight down comforter.

Supposedly, living in a warm climate (NY/NJ) thins the blood somewhat, but after 8 years back in Canada, I'm still waiting for it to thicken. :-)
One cool thing, though, a new medication I'm on makes me warm enough I can keep the thermostat down by 5+ degrees and be totally comfortable. Weird side effect.

It can't be torpedoes because it needs to be a weapon that eventually overloads the Hercules's powertron and cripples key systems, including her weapons and her stardrive. Also, it needs to be so dangerous to the firing ship that the Imperium abandons them, otherwise they'd be in the next two battles, which I can't have. It also has to be something the Colonies learn how to protect themselves from as a result of the data returned by St. James (the Colonies deploy a solution on all Colonial ships shortly thereafter to better resist the weapon's effects, rendering it obsolete).

Hmm. Great feedback. I didn't realize how confusing my descriptions were.
1. Yeah, I didn't copy over the description of the dish and it's location. My bad. If you're going to beam something into space, you should pretty much have some sort of external gizmo to actually do the beaming. Previously, it was massive guns. Now it's a big parabolic dish. Normally partially recessed into the forward hull, it extends forward/out when in use, so it can beam in pretty much any direction except backward. Not sure what you mean by streamlined.
2. I used "as you know" to provide information to the reader that St. James would know. If scientists discovered/proved that we are 4 dimensional beings, I would expect an admiral to know that. I'll see if I can write it without the as you know.
3. Not a portal. If I said you were a four dimensional being (but the 4th dimension is not visible to you), I would think you'd have to imagine something rather weird since humans don't think in 4D (eg look up tesseract for an example of such weirdness).
4. Ok
5. The blast doesn't appear inside the ship, nor does it skip the shields. Perhaps this is clearer: imagine (in 3D) that the back of your ship is unshielded and the enemy could hit you from behind. The back of your ship is simply one side (the 4th) of your three dimensional ship. By comparison, the ship's 4th dimension is similar to it having a "fifth" side. That fifth side has no shields, and the Imperium has figured out a way to see it and shoot at it. If you breach the ship's fifth side, it's just as deadly as if you had breached one of the other sides of the ship. Since it's the 4th dimension of the ship, it must exist in hyperspace (anything greater than 3 dimensions is hyper, by definition).

Looks like the new approach may be too complicated to explain easily/quickly. Not good.

Thanks, George.

The Warming/the Albuma winds is now the Basting, a contemptuous term intended to convey the notion that the Earth is cooking people in their own juices (sweat). Requires virtually no explanation, unlike the Albuma winds, whose explanation was too long/tangential.

njc, I reread the article more carefully and now I'm not sure what they actually accomplished. Did they simply observe the quantum Hall effect in lower dimensions? The wording in the article is just vague enough and technical enough to be confusing in places (to me in the middle of the night, lol). In hindsight, if they had actually seen something real, it would be all over the news.

Here's the link:
https://bigthink.com/technology-innovat … hysicists/

I'm going to spend a little more on it. I'm almost done revising the first act, including an upcoming battle at the end of this act that causes Apollo to act. Although later battles don't use the 4D cannons (too dangerous), they use similar tactical maneuvers, which are affected by the first battle. Besides, I have most of it in my head. If I stop now, I'll forget the details (shocking, I know), and have to rediscover everything later.

I called it 4D space, short for the fourth dimension (another "physical" dimension, not time). No reference to hyperspace at all. All matter in the universe exists in all four dimensions, including us. You blow something up in one dimension, there's a good chance you'll destroy it across all four dimensions.

I keep running into problems though. Every time I think I've accounted for all obvious plot holes, and I write it up, I find new plot holes.

One thing I don't understand is that hyperspace is usually referred to as a higher dimension. Shouldn't that be dimensions (plural)? You still need three of them. Four if you count time (hypertime?).

I'll take another crack at trimming it. And of course it's been done in Star Wars 7, when Starkiller Base blows up the Republic's capital planet from light years away. They fired through hyperspace. Screw it. I'm doing it anyway. My hyperspace cannons work at a much more granular level (ship to ship rather than planet to planet). After the Death Star, the folks at Lucasfilm kept trying to outdo themselves in the books with ever more dangerous weapons.