The BBC and Yellowstone National Park have both recently released extensive archives of sound effects into the public domain; you never know when you might have occasion to know the exact sound of a grizzly crunching bison bones, the klaxon of a Romanian trolleybus, a shot from an 1870 17-bore twin-barrel shotgun, or the moaning of a frozen lake as ( Read more... )

Hello, all. I am attempting to graduate to the realm of original fiction writing with a near-future dystopic about robots programmed to detect when people who are near death's door have reached the point of no return, thus freeing medical personnel and family members from a daunting decision. The majority of my work will either take place in a near ( Read more... )

I don't know whether this stylistic practice originated on Tumblr, but that and AO3 are where I see it the most: an alphabet soup of things like accent marks, dingbats, and characters foreign to the language of the context to convey a pictorial impression of swirling miasma of chaos--either alone or interspersed with conventional lettering as ( Read more... )

For a detail in a story I'm writing, does anyone know how likely it is for someone with general electronics engineering skills to be able to fix a shorted-out electric wheelchair? I need to know if the dad of one of the protag's friends could repair it or if they'd need to get it repaired/replaced by their medical insurance or whatever ( Read more... )

Hey friends! Today I need to know about city power ( Read more... )

NASA has a page for us space nerds and sci-fi writers! It's says: "The following items are found in science fiction literature as technologies useful in authoring a plausible setting for a sci-fi story"

SCIENCE FICTION SPACE TECHNOLOGY TERMSThere doesn't seem to be a tag for space re: rockets and things, or for NASA...or am I overlooking? Any ( Read more... )

Quite bluntly, I don't have the physics to understand the information I'm getting. I've searched EMP weapons, EMP itself, read some articles about what happens when the sun decides to kill us all, wound up on a couple of survialist websites (fun!), and gone through tags and found semi-relevant questions in weapons, catastrophes, and technology.

( Details of setting under here )

My story is set on a private island in the UK in the early 1930's. There is a mix of the latest/greatest technology (for the bosses) and run-of-the-mill/slightly out of date technology (for the support staff ( Read more... )

Researched: portable translators, text-to-speech devices, history of smartphones ( Read more... )

I am trying to find out how long it would take to build a production intent prototype car and what the likely cost would be.

The scenario is that a car manufacturer wants to produce a new design of vehicle that hasn't been done before. He has existing plant, factory and manufacturing process, and engineers that he can use, but the car will look and ( Read more... )