this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 81 points 2 days ago (9 children)

It’s kinda sad.

I DM for my TTRPG group. One of the things I’m most proud of was a years long, multi-arc universe chock full off world building. (We were using the star drifter ruleset, though everything else was homebrewed.)

One of the the limiting factors for interstellar civilization is “luminium”; a faintly glowing semi-metal that’s a superconductor at room temperature and technobables its way to some kind of exotic energy source (I think I went with quantum tunneling from another universe or something.)

The problem with the stuff is that if it starts corroding it becomes unstable and explodes if conditions are right. The other problem is that the only known way to synthesize the stuff is lost to the Terranogene sphere. The only FTL is through wormholes that jump an enclosed spheres

That same society that figured out luminium also built “port ships” that were large dormant autonomous ships that had the portal generators on board.

Any how. Luminium’s atomic number is 1869 to honor this guy.

It was one of my favorite Easter eggs And they’ve still not noticed even though they now short hand it as “1869” (they didn’t know what it was called and that’s how they started identifying the stuff.)

Though im kinda proud of that campaign. I may have gone a little stir crazy during covid.

[–] I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Luminium’s atomic number is 1869

Even in the realm of fantasy, that is absurdly high. Like, that is insane. That's like putting an artifact in your campaign and claiming it can heat up to 150 zillion kelvin. Even if you ignore how impossible it would be for something like that to exist, physics would have some strong words about how catastrophic that would be for everything around it. And by everything around it, I mean the entire fucking planet and probably a few neighboring ones.

I'm usually fine with hand waving away pesky things like physics and the laws of thermodynamics when it comes to fictional worlds, but holy shit there is a limit.

[–] FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

(Chuckles in evil DM)

Yes. I know it’s absurd. (The island of stability is only predicted to go out to what? 120 something? And then isn’t really stable in a practical sense.)

That's like putting an artifact in your campaign and claiming it can heat up to 150 zillion kelvin.

This gives me…. Ideas. I know the math breaks down before the big bang, but if anything could get that hot…I would imagine pre-expansion universe. Now how to stuff them in one?

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