Pfff you got me there. Say TreeWyrm, Do you have any input to possible scenario?
Or is that locked up in your secret volt of Nomad knowledge?
I never would have thought about the open space temp drops, and raises, what not. You completely got me there. It's sorta late here for me anyways to stay too attentive.
Depends on what do you want to do with it and what you want to achieve with your idea. Some things can be adjusted if necessary, even re-written, provided there is a damn good reason for that. In other words: "open for ideas if ideas as a whole are right and useful, and not every idea is right, let alone useful".
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' Wrote:Open space is far more hostile environment actually, temperature drops and rises vary greatly. There are gravitational pulls, dangerous asteroid fields, nebulae of various chemical composites... If they didn't have sufficient protection they would not have survived there at all.
Biology student says it's not the thickness of the skin that matters with disease resistance, as opposed to the composition. Nomads feed off solar radiation, which implies live cells on the surface of the skin. Human skin is resistant to disease, because the outer layers are dead meaning bacteria (and viruses especially) cannot pass through the protective layer by active transport. Active transport needs live cells, because it's needs the additional energy from them. No problem there, seeing as Nomads are energy based.
Next, each organism has immunity cells. In humans this is mainly Macrophages, B Cells and T Cells. I assume Nomads would have some sort of equivalent. If a new deadly virus is introduced into a human system, your immune system will scratch is head in puzzlement, as it tries to work out what the hell is doing the damage. Depending on the toxicity of the virus, you'll probably be dead before a primary immune response can be mustered (in the case of HIV, the immune cells that prompt the primary response are destroyed).
Because their skin would probably be pretty vulnerable to unknown pathogens, I'd assume their primary defence mechanism would be their shield/veils. So, if in a combat situation, the veil could be lowered, it'd be fair to assume the Nomad organism would be open to infection.
That is of course, is based on the assumption that Nomad physiology bears any resemblance to a human's. The concept of active transport it universal though. That's biochemistry.
I didn't say anything about thickness actually, not ever mentioned that in the context, also I've not said that they cannot have infection, what I have implied is that it would not propagate through the rest of the collective and would be isolated to individual being. Considering their technology goes as far as creating veils and controlling them such disease if happens is likely to be cured as well, perhaps may take some time, and if not by being itself then through the help of others. I suppose Nomads' biological shell is quite responsive to attacks of that kind.
Quote:Would a Nomad attack a giant group of humans, knowing that it would die in the process, or try to kill them, but run away if needed?
Death and quasi-death subjects are extensively covered in the lore. In terms of behavior the nomads are willing to take up bigger risks, which sometimes could be mistaken for "suicide runs" by humans. Nomads are quasi-immortal, but the death toll is partial memory loss, meaning they might loose valuable information or some personal set of skills. Here is a simple analogue: think of it like of any hack'n'slash RPG - your character cannot truly die (unless in "hardcore" mode) but the game punishes you for dying by either subtracting character's experience, money or both. Similar happens to the nomads: they can't really die, but they wouldn't suicide because it's a bad idea and cases when they would do so willingly are all too rare.
That does make sense, it doesn't really die, but it will loose memory. Now, would it because some of the brain tissue regenerating would be the cause of that, while the whole Nomad Forms again?
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' Wrote:I didn't say anything about thickness actually, not ever mentioned that in the context, also I've not said that they cannot have infection, what I have implied is that it would not propagate through the rest of the collective and would be isolated to individual being. Considering their technology goes as far as creating veils and controlling them such disease if happens is likely to be cured as well, perhaps may take some time, and if not by being itself then through the help of others. I suppose Nomads' biological shell is quite responsive to attacks of that kind.
In context with "There isn't much of a layer of skin protecting them is there?" I'd take that to mean "yes, they do have thick skin".
As for disease, yeah, the idea of one disease being transmitted across the Collective is ridiculous. However, it would make a perfect assassination tool on individuals. Think about it. It takes a long time for the body to formulate a primary response and better technology doesn't necessarily equate to better immunity either - the process for the immune response is the same whatever tools you're using to prompt it.
The correct antibodies still need to find the correct antigens (when considering we'd be infecting the Nomads with forgien proteins, said antibodies may not exist at all) and once that'd been done, there would still be the process of clonal selection to kick start the division of immune cells.
Further more, immunisation would have to be done on an individual level. If the Collective intervened, they open themselves up to cross-contamination, which would result in a pandemic. Releasing a virulent disease on your own population, which has zero immunity would be pretty dumb. And Nomads aren't dumb.
So I guess individuals would be systematically 'killed' by the viral concoctions until one of their immune systems reacted. Then antibodies could be extracted, isolated and grown. Then your population is safe until i) the strain mutates (on average, once every 6 months for flu type viruses), or ii) a new pathogen is introduced (as soon as the humans judge immunity has been obtained).
Biological warfare probably wouldn't have any pronounced effect on the Nomads as a whole, but it would make human fighters alot more potent in skirmishes or assasination probe style missions.
And what would you assassinate? An individual Nomad entity? There are no "leaders" so to speak, no key figures to assassinate that would cause things to topple down. There is no hive queen. Hive model is heavily centralized, Nomads' is decentralized, akin to distributed peer networks.
Now I don't want to sound rude, but the bottom line is that as the nomads' lore editor I can always push the "down-it-goes" red button flushing all your "biological warfare" dreams since it's all based on assumption they have similar structure (which they don't) so mechanics would be similar too. Unless you have actual suggestions and ideas that would be interesting in long-term use I have no interest in arguing here. If you'd like to be constructive I'm all ears, until then solid "no" stamp goes there.
How Nomads will end in Discovery and when (if ever) is a different subject and I believe you are not a candidate for the discussion of it, nor this is a place for it.
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