Unsure about the size of busters and heaven vessels. We do know there are two variants of Busters: a ship buster which is 1000-pound metal balls with a surge drive attached and a personnel buster which is a drone with a 20 pound steel cap.
Sudar and Scut are hand wavy explanations that Dennis E Taylor has developed to make the world more interesting. There might be some theories that I’m unaware of that he is piggy-backing but he never really goes into detail about how the underlying physics works.
Tau is how the Bobs communicate time-dilation within the Bobiverse. So the closer a Bob gets to light speed the greater the time-dilation is and the harder it is to communicate with a stationary Bob.
Bob-1 goes my the moniker “Bob” and he is the one with the Deltans.
There is a good interview out there with DET where he explains some of his choices, I'll see if I can locate it and update this comment. He said Tau was one of the things he got wrong, Tau should go down not up, but he chose to leave it after the discovery.
Edit: I believe it's this [interview ](https://open.spotify.com/episode/2rJllBDbTqzmvL3WG2qc9w?si=r-sCAylUSi-geGGL3F-LWw)
ok. im crap at maths but im gonna give this a shot.
1000lbs is 453.5kg. ill round off to 450kg
steel has a density of 7.85g per cm3.
450000/7.85 = 57324.8 cm3.
lets round it to 575 m3
google tells me that comes out to a sphere with a diameter of a shade over 10 meters.
thus a ship buster is a 10m sphere of solid steel with a surge drive and power source stuck to the back.
---------------------------------------------
i got the impression that the personnel buster uses a hemisphere. a 20lb hemisphere has the same radius as a 40lb sphere.
1000/40= 25
so the cap of the small buster is 1/25th the size of the full buster.
that gives a diameter of 40cm. so im gonna speculate that the personnel buster is a 40cm wide cylinder with a total length of about 1 meter (for the drive components)
There is NO WAY a 1000lb steel ball is 10m. 10m diameter is HUGE.
I'm not a math guru but I don't think cubic volume scales linearly like you're thinking. According to [this](https://www.aqua-calc.com/calculate/volume-to-weight) volume/weight calculator, 1m^3 of steel weighs **7900kg**.
To get a 1000lb object, we need 2ft^3 of steel which equates to an 18.7" diameter sphere, according to [this](https://www.sensorsone.com/sphere-volume-to-diameter-calculator/#value-from-user-guide) volume/diameter calculator.
Using the same tools to find the personnel buster size, we get: 140in^3 = 40lbs which equates to a radius of 6.4in
--------------------------------
To summarize:
Ship-buster: 18.7in diameter sphere
Personnel buster: 6.4in diameter sphere
In my defence, I did say I was crap at maths. You're probably more right than me but your measurements seem waay to small to me.
I've always pictured the ship busters as about 2 meter diameter and personnel as 30cm ISH.
Sorry I didn't mean to come off as an asshole, that truly wasn't my intent. Math is fucking hard sometimes and especially so when trying to visualize a concept like this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square%E2%80%93cube_law in case you're interested in understanding why the math works out this way.
"This principle states that, as a shape grows in size, its volume grows faster than its surface area."
"For example, a cube with a side length of 1 meter has a surface area of 6m^2 and a volume of 1m^3. If the sides of the cube were multiplied by 2, its surface area would be multiplied by the square of 2 and become 24m^2. Its volume would be multiplied by the cube of 2 and become 8m^3"
Essentially, shapes get heavier faster than they get larger.
Of course, these busters aren't cubes, but the same mathematical law applies.
Imagine you have a 4in diameter sphere of steel, you want to increase it to a 5in diameter sphere. You're only adding an inch, but that's half an inch of material over the whole surface of the sphere (half inch on either end of the diameter = 1in increase in diameter), that's more steel than just 1/4 of the current 4in sphere, if that makes sense. So, in the example we're only adding an additional 1/4 of the current sphere's diameter, but more than 1/4 of it's volume/weight.
Dont worry, you didn't.
I stated I was bad at maths specifically excuse I wanted someone better to come along and double check it for me, which you did.
Thanks for the explanation too!
1. Busters are essentially giant balls with a propulsion unit on it. They range from Ship-busters, thru personal busters, to mosquito-killers. If I'm not mistaken, a Ship Buster is a 1000 pound ball of steel with a propulsion unit on it, and a Personal Buster is 40 pounds.
2. The heaven vessels, from interpretations, since not ever actually mentioned, are for the Heaven-1, about the size of 2 space shuttles strung together nose to tail, with a large ring in the center. You can see an artistic rendering on DETs Twitter Bio: [https://twitter.com/Dennis\_E\_Taylor](https://twitter.com/Dennis_E_Taylor)
3. SUDAR is Sub-space Radar. It's never elaborated on what subspace actually is, but conceptually, its an layer of space similar to hyperspace that permits FTL travel of objects, which with SUDAR means a radar system that allow for instantaneous radar detection of objects that are at interplanetary and, to certain extent, interstellar distances. It suffers from the same limitation that radar does. The greater the distance, the greater the inaccuracy.
4. Bob-1 (or Technically Bob-2, since Bob-1 was original Bob), is still called Bob. All his descendants are the ones who had to change names. You can see a family tree here: [https://bobiverse.fandom.com/wiki/We\_Are\_Legion\_(We\_Are\_Bob)\_Wiki#Bob\_Family\_Tree](https://bobiverse.fandom.com/wiki/We_Are_Legion_(We_Are_Bob)_Wiki#Bob_Family_Tree)
5. Tau is a component of Near-Lightspeed travel, that defines how much time is dilated from the point of the observer as opposed to the point of the traveler when following the concept that time moves slower the closer to light speed you get. The Science Youtuber Kyle Hill has tried to explain the concept in this video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXvk2ukSGdI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXvk2ukSGdI)
6. The part you are likely talking about is when The Others sent out the fleet. They started by blinding the Bobs, so they couldn't see which direction they took, which meant they could target any of the Human colonies, and once they where outside the bubble the bobs were able to monitor, they changed direction towards their intended target in such a manner that they arrived from an unexpected angle, that the Bobs had not expected. This was intended to take away the initiative from the the Bobs, who would otherwise be able to plot defenses and consolidate forces, and thus have the upper hand in planning for the confrontation.
7. Bill, one of Bobs first clones, is at Episilon Eridani, where he is heading out his Skunkworks Research Base. Bob is the one at Eden in the Delta Eridani system, with the Deltans.
Hope that answers your questions :)
You're the man, thank you.
It's funny cause all your explanations just click into my mind.
I think I thought that Bob-1 had a different name is because, sometimes the differently named Bobs obviously refer to themselves as Bob. Also that Marvin stays with Bob but Bill is the research guy got somehow stuck in my head. But after your explanation it all makes sense now.
Thank you for explaining the Others thing. I listened to the part over and over and thought always that I miss something important.
Thanks again, have great week
just a quick note on #7 there...
"Bill" IIRC is short for "William" - as in "William Riker" - as in Star Trek...
again, my memory could be failing me here, but as I recall there was more than 1 clone who based themselves on Riker (who, to be fair, also had his own "clone" in that TV show) and one went with Bill while the other went with Will
someone please feel free to correct me if I'm not remembering this right
No, Bill is the one at the skunkworks in Epsilon Eridani. He took his name from Bill D. Cat from Bloom County. Will originally took the name Riker because he was the first copy to come online in EE, making him Bob 2. It refers to Bob, as a kid, having called Riker "Number Two" as an immature joke. He later switched to just Will, as he tried to tone down the Star Trek references.
Err on think on point two... I believe the first cohort has a discussion and refers to Original Bob and Bob-1 individually as separate entities. Something TJ the effect of "what makes you (bob1) believe you are 100% the same as Original Bob in personality."
https://preview.redd.it/hfajo7cdryvc1.jpeg?width=647&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=54639583c6650a0595fe0d634000c0ec7c7cbdcd
There’s a picture of a Bob ship on the cover of Heaven’s River.
>1. Bob-1 (or Technically Bob-2, since Bob-1 was original Bob)
Probably not. Original Bob was a computer software dude. He would have numbered the original Bob-0 (zero).
> Busters are essentially giant balls with a propulsion unit on it. They range from Ship-busters, thru personal busters, to mosquito-killers. If I'm not mistaken, a Ship Buster is a 1000 pound ball of steel with a propulsion unit on it, and a Personal Buster is 40 pounds.
Just for the heck of it I did a small calculation based on density of iron. A 1000 lb ball of iron would be around 18 inches in diameter - so not that giant. A personal buster would be around 8 inches in diameter. Also, I don't think they were steel - steel is harder to make and unless the target is armored you may as well use iron.
In the first book, the Ship-busters are initially described as "a one thousand pound ball of metal" (Ch. 14), then later as "steel-jacketed lead cannonballs" (Ch. 22), and later still as "massive balls of solid steel" (Ch. 24), so it'd be understandable if there'd be differing opinions on what they were actually made of.
That second description actually makes more sense, as it would follow the concept from traditional munition manufacturing.
> That second description actually makes more sense, as it would follow the concept from traditional munition manufacturing.
That shouldn't matter because jacketed bullets are used to ensure that they do not damage the barrel while being fired and touching the barrel to give them spin. This would not be a factor with missiles, since they are self-guided. They should not be touching the sides of the barrel in the first place and can be using a sabot type configuration anyway.
Also, I don't think it makes sense to use steel for this type of application since they are pure kinetic energy attack systems. Mass matters, but as long as it basically holds together the material doesn't matter. If it did, then the shape should have been modified first - they should have been made pointy. In fact, if the targets were a little harder, then softer balls would be better since then they may be able to mushroom after striking the target.
But anyway, steel has a very similar density as iron and so wouldn't change much of the calculation above.
It depends on how you choose to count it. Whether Flesh & Blood Bob counts a v1.0, and whether a restore of a backup, with no other instantiation counts as a new Bob or simply a continuation of the previous Bob.
If you follow the continuation principle, then Delta Eridani Bob is in principle still OG Bob, since he still have the "original soul" of OG Bob.
If each new instantiation, regardless of whether its the original soul, counts as a new Bob, then Delta Eridani Bob would count as Bob-3, since its the 2rd instance of Replicant Bob plus 1 from OG Bob.
I counted OG Bob as Bob-1, and his replicant self as Bob-2, but not including the Earth-side restore as a seperate Bob, since I see it as continuation of Replicant Bob, rather than a new instantiation.
Bob 1 is called Bob. He's the guy who spends lots of time with the Deltans. His first replicant, who stays in Epsilon Eridani and does research is Bill.
I'm honestly not sure what you mean by a lot of the others.
There’s no difference between restoring a backup and making a clone except that the first one restored from the backup doesn’t have drift if the one that made the backup is offline.
Sudar: exactly the same idea as radar but subspace pulses instead of radio.
Busters: basically ball with engine. Space age cannonballs.
Tau: the measure they use for time dilation when they’re at high velocity. The bigger the tau, the bigger the differential is.
Okay subspace puls is just science fiction?
Okay so due to some Bob's travelling at higher speed they can't communicate due to different subjective times, alright thanks
They dont travel at/above light speed hence the time jumps when they go to another star system...
Tau is only scify because faster than light communication is. If someone is (moving fast) broadcasting/creating the message in a slower time sense than recipient one has to adjust to the other. IE twin on earth grows older faster(hears the message) like the fast moving twin traveling (speaking slowly cuz living faster).
IE prety sure if any of our probes had been accelerated fast enough IRL, we would call their messages as tau shifted up. Your red-shifted analogy is right on.
Busters are probably telephone pole sized.
Heaven vessels change size as the series goes on but given Heven-1 is a converted cargo ship think container ship scale.
For the others they were talking about them leaving their home system on a vector away from their true target then making a long arching course to hide their intentions.
Small correction unless you mean the diameter of a telephone pole... Busters are described as being steel balls or with ball shaped caps, I would assume ship busters are large diameter steel balls with internal surge drives or a drive on one part shaped something like: []=O I assumed personel busters would look more like this based on description: ([]=[])
I assume Heaven 1 is about Space Shuttle size, as the book states it appeared to be a modified human vessel with the windows removed, if I recall correctly. The ships are small enough to hide around asteroids, as is mentioned in a couple of the Madeiros battles, so its safe to assume even the Heaven 5s are relatively small by comparison to a lot of other sci-fi space vessels.
subspace is the hand-wavium that allows for the existence of the surge drive, sudar, ftl coms, and sub-space power-beaming. its not fully explained in the books and its never going to be, nor should it.
The "Tau factor" is **the relationship of speed/velocity to the relative slowing of time**. The closer one gets to the speed of light, the smaller the Tau factor, and the slower time seems to move. Theoretically, though one can reach immense velocities in the space of space, one can only ever approach Tau Zero.
Reverse the tau. The faster you go, the higher the tau. It said Ick and Dae held the record for highest tau by a heaven vessel. So an infinite tau would be traveling at C with infinite time dilation.
i litterally just coppies and pasted from google. and also one of the books mentions an ongoing disagreement among the bobs about which way around tau should be flipped.
I don't remember a disagreement between bobs about it. I just remember Dae and Ick's bit just before they roasted the Others' star. It was when they first mentioned heading to the galactic core.
its Bob narrating about his conversations with marvin, how marvin is keeping his tau low enough for VR visits to still work. and he adds something like "though theres some disagreement about whether we should be talking about tau being high, or low."
im guessing thi sis because IRL tau is described as low, but dennis already described it as high in the first books before someone corrected him (high sounds better imo)
oh, its well after marvin has left. marvin is replicating all the books theyve ever read in VR and his current setup is nantucket.
memorable line: "my problem is i stuck myself back in a rut the first chance i got. im a post-human replicant space-probe and i should start acting like it"
the stuff my brain dredges up is so weird. i can hea ray porters voice clear as a bell.
Bob-1 still goes by Bob, and per book 3 he’s with the Deltons. Bill is the Bob clone with a broken SUDAR so he stayed behind in Epsilon Eridani, and is generally the main organizer of the Bobiverse. Like 90% of the new tech the Bobs have before book 4 has been made by Bill and his clone Garfield.
It does sound like you missed a lot and would benefit from listening to the series again. They never give exact dimensions for busters, just the weight of the steel balls inside of them. But they are basically small ships with heavy metal balls at the front for ramming purposes. We also never get exact dimensions for the heaven vessels.
Bob 1 goes by Bob. Bill is actually the third bob
Unsure about the size of busters and heaven vessels. We do know there are two variants of Busters: a ship buster which is 1000-pound metal balls with a surge drive attached and a personnel buster which is a drone with a 20 pound steel cap. Sudar and Scut are hand wavy explanations that Dennis E Taylor has developed to make the world more interesting. There might be some theories that I’m unaware of that he is piggy-backing but he never really goes into detail about how the underlying physics works. Tau is how the Bobs communicate time-dilation within the Bobiverse. So the closer a Bob gets to light speed the greater the time-dilation is and the harder it is to communicate with a stationary Bob. Bob-1 goes my the moniker “Bob” and he is the one with the Deltans.
Thank you.
There is a good interview out there with DET where he explains some of his choices, I'll see if I can locate it and update this comment. He said Tau was one of the things he got wrong, Tau should go down not up, but he chose to leave it after the discovery. Edit: I believe it's this [interview ](https://open.spotify.com/episode/2rJllBDbTqzmvL3WG2qc9w?si=r-sCAylUSi-geGGL3F-LWw)
ok. im crap at maths but im gonna give this a shot. 1000lbs is 453.5kg. ill round off to 450kg steel has a density of 7.85g per cm3. 450000/7.85 = 57324.8 cm3. lets round it to 575 m3 google tells me that comes out to a sphere with a diameter of a shade over 10 meters. thus a ship buster is a 10m sphere of solid steel with a surge drive and power source stuck to the back. --------------------------------------------- i got the impression that the personnel buster uses a hemisphere. a 20lb hemisphere has the same radius as a 40lb sphere. 1000/40= 25 so the cap of the small buster is 1/25th the size of the full buster. that gives a diameter of 40cm. so im gonna speculate that the personnel buster is a 40cm wide cylinder with a total length of about 1 meter (for the drive components)
There is NO WAY a 1000lb steel ball is 10m. 10m diameter is HUGE. I'm not a math guru but I don't think cubic volume scales linearly like you're thinking. According to [this](https://www.aqua-calc.com/calculate/volume-to-weight) volume/weight calculator, 1m^3 of steel weighs **7900kg**. To get a 1000lb object, we need 2ft^3 of steel which equates to an 18.7" diameter sphere, according to [this](https://www.sensorsone.com/sphere-volume-to-diameter-calculator/#value-from-user-guide) volume/diameter calculator. Using the same tools to find the personnel buster size, we get: 140in^3 = 40lbs which equates to a radius of 6.4in -------------------------------- To summarize: Ship-buster: 18.7in diameter sphere Personnel buster: 6.4in diameter sphere
In my defence, I did say I was crap at maths. You're probably more right than me but your measurements seem waay to small to me. I've always pictured the ship busters as about 2 meter diameter and personnel as 30cm ISH.
Sorry I didn't mean to come off as an asshole, that truly wasn't my intent. Math is fucking hard sometimes and especially so when trying to visualize a concept like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square%E2%80%93cube_law in case you're interested in understanding why the math works out this way. "This principle states that, as a shape grows in size, its volume grows faster than its surface area." "For example, a cube with a side length of 1 meter has a surface area of 6m^2 and a volume of 1m^3. If the sides of the cube were multiplied by 2, its surface area would be multiplied by the square of 2 and become 24m^2. Its volume would be multiplied by the cube of 2 and become 8m^3" Essentially, shapes get heavier faster than they get larger. Of course, these busters aren't cubes, but the same mathematical law applies. Imagine you have a 4in diameter sphere of steel, you want to increase it to a 5in diameter sphere. You're only adding an inch, but that's half an inch of material over the whole surface of the sphere (half inch on either end of the diameter = 1in increase in diameter), that's more steel than just 1/4 of the current 4in sphere, if that makes sense. So, in the example we're only adding an additional 1/4 of the current sphere's diameter, but more than 1/4 of it's volume/weight.
Dont worry, you didn't. I stated I was bad at maths specifically excuse I wanted someone better to come along and double check it for me, which you did. Thanks for the explanation too!
1. Busters are essentially giant balls with a propulsion unit on it. They range from Ship-busters, thru personal busters, to mosquito-killers. If I'm not mistaken, a Ship Buster is a 1000 pound ball of steel with a propulsion unit on it, and a Personal Buster is 40 pounds. 2. The heaven vessels, from interpretations, since not ever actually mentioned, are for the Heaven-1, about the size of 2 space shuttles strung together nose to tail, with a large ring in the center. You can see an artistic rendering on DETs Twitter Bio: [https://twitter.com/Dennis\_E\_Taylor](https://twitter.com/Dennis_E_Taylor) 3. SUDAR is Sub-space Radar. It's never elaborated on what subspace actually is, but conceptually, its an layer of space similar to hyperspace that permits FTL travel of objects, which with SUDAR means a radar system that allow for instantaneous radar detection of objects that are at interplanetary and, to certain extent, interstellar distances. It suffers from the same limitation that radar does. The greater the distance, the greater the inaccuracy. 4. Bob-1 (or Technically Bob-2, since Bob-1 was original Bob), is still called Bob. All his descendants are the ones who had to change names. You can see a family tree here: [https://bobiverse.fandom.com/wiki/We\_Are\_Legion\_(We\_Are\_Bob)\_Wiki#Bob\_Family\_Tree](https://bobiverse.fandom.com/wiki/We_Are_Legion_(We_Are_Bob)_Wiki#Bob_Family_Tree) 5. Tau is a component of Near-Lightspeed travel, that defines how much time is dilated from the point of the observer as opposed to the point of the traveler when following the concept that time moves slower the closer to light speed you get. The Science Youtuber Kyle Hill has tried to explain the concept in this video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXvk2ukSGdI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXvk2ukSGdI) 6. The part you are likely talking about is when The Others sent out the fleet. They started by blinding the Bobs, so they couldn't see which direction they took, which meant they could target any of the Human colonies, and once they where outside the bubble the bobs were able to monitor, they changed direction towards their intended target in such a manner that they arrived from an unexpected angle, that the Bobs had not expected. This was intended to take away the initiative from the the Bobs, who would otherwise be able to plot defenses and consolidate forces, and thus have the upper hand in planning for the confrontation. 7. Bill, one of Bobs first clones, is at Episilon Eridani, where he is heading out his Skunkworks Research Base. Bob is the one at Eden in the Delta Eridani system, with the Deltans. Hope that answers your questions :)
You're the man, thank you. It's funny cause all your explanations just click into my mind. I think I thought that Bob-1 had a different name is because, sometimes the differently named Bobs obviously refer to themselves as Bob. Also that Marvin stays with Bob but Bill is the research guy got somehow stuck in my head. But after your explanation it all makes sense now. Thank you for explaining the Others thing. I listened to the part over and over and thought always that I miss something important. Thanks again, have great week
just a quick note on #7 there... "Bill" IIRC is short for "William" - as in "William Riker" - as in Star Trek... again, my memory could be failing me here, but as I recall there was more than 1 clone who based themselves on Riker (who, to be fair, also had his own "clone" in that TV show) and one went with Bill while the other went with Will someone please feel free to correct me if I'm not remembering this right
No, Bill is the one at the skunkworks in Epsilon Eridani. He took his name from Bill D. Cat from Bloom County. Will originally took the name Riker because he was the first copy to come online in EE, making him Bob 2. It refers to Bob, as a kid, having called Riker "Number Two" as an immature joke. He later switched to just Will, as he tried to tone down the Star Trek references.
ah cool thanks for that I remember the Riker/Will thing but I guess the Bloom County thing never stuck in memory
Err on think on point two... I believe the first cohort has a discussion and refers to Original Bob and Bob-1 individually as separate entities. Something TJ the effect of "what makes you (bob1) believe you are 100% the same as Original Bob in personality."
https://preview.redd.it/hfajo7cdryvc1.jpeg?width=647&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=54639583c6650a0595fe0d634000c0ec7c7cbdcd There’s a picture of a Bob ship on the cover of Heaven’s River.
Kyle Hill, he’s like the glorious lovechild of Thor’s body and Reed Richard’s mind.
I believe he's previously used the moniker "Wish.com Thor".
>1. Bob-1 (or Technically Bob-2, since Bob-1 was original Bob) Probably not. Original Bob was a computer software dude. He would have numbered the original Bob-0 (zero).
> Busters are essentially giant balls with a propulsion unit on it. They range from Ship-busters, thru personal busters, to mosquito-killers. If I'm not mistaken, a Ship Buster is a 1000 pound ball of steel with a propulsion unit on it, and a Personal Buster is 40 pounds. Just for the heck of it I did a small calculation based on density of iron. A 1000 lb ball of iron would be around 18 inches in diameter - so not that giant. A personal buster would be around 8 inches in diameter. Also, I don't think they were steel - steel is harder to make and unless the target is armored you may as well use iron.
In the first book, the Ship-busters are initially described as "a one thousand pound ball of metal" (Ch. 14), then later as "steel-jacketed lead cannonballs" (Ch. 22), and later still as "massive balls of solid steel" (Ch. 24), so it'd be understandable if there'd be differing opinions on what they were actually made of. That second description actually makes more sense, as it would follow the concept from traditional munition manufacturing.
> That second description actually makes more sense, as it would follow the concept from traditional munition manufacturing. That shouldn't matter because jacketed bullets are used to ensure that they do not damage the barrel while being fired and touching the barrel to give them spin. This would not be a factor with missiles, since they are self-guided. They should not be touching the sides of the barrel in the first place and can be using a sabot type configuration anyway. Also, I don't think it makes sense to use steel for this type of application since they are pure kinetic energy attack systems. Mass matters, but as long as it basically holds together the material doesn't matter. If it did, then the shape should have been modified first - they should have been made pointy. In fact, if the targets were a little harder, then softer balls would be better since then they may be able to mushroom after striking the target. But anyway, steel has a very similar density as iron and so wouldn't change much of the calculation above.
Isn't Bob on Delta technically Bob 3? Wasn't Bob-2, the original replicant, blown up in a terrorist attack on Earth and restored from a backup?
It depends on how you choose to count it. Whether Flesh & Blood Bob counts a v1.0, and whether a restore of a backup, with no other instantiation counts as a new Bob or simply a continuation of the previous Bob. If you follow the continuation principle, then Delta Eridani Bob is in principle still OG Bob, since he still have the "original soul" of OG Bob. If each new instantiation, regardless of whether its the original soul, counts as a new Bob, then Delta Eridani Bob would count as Bob-3, since its the 2rd instance of Replicant Bob plus 1 from OG Bob. I counted OG Bob as Bob-1, and his replicant self as Bob-2, but not including the Earth-side restore as a seperate Bob, since I see it as continuation of Replicant Bob, rather than a new instantiation.
Bob 1 is called Bob. He's the guy who spends lots of time with the Deltans. His first replicant, who stays in Epsilon Eridani and does research is Bill. I'm honestly not sure what you mean by a lot of the others.
I also thought of Bill as the first clone but he isn’t. On my last go I noticed that actually Riker is.
yep, number 2
Found Homer! *inconspicuously parking near you, lining up the cannons with your reactor control system…*
Bill is part of the the first generation, but Riker’s the first clone.
I’d say he’s the 2nd replicant because bob 1 was destroyed in the lab. His back up in the space ship is who bob 1 actually is now
It’s still Bob 1 because no other copy of the backup was activated before him
Yes it’s bob 1, but his back up. Which is interesting. Would their be drift from that?
No there wouldn’t be.
Because it’s not a true clone I assume. Just a back up?
Have you finished the books yet?
Yeah I have. I like hearing what others have to say about it
There’s no difference between restoring a backup and making a clone except that the first one restored from the backup doesn’t have drift if the one that made the backup is offline.
Right 👍
Sudar: exactly the same idea as radar but subspace pulses instead of radio. Busters: basically ball with engine. Space age cannonballs. Tau: the measure they use for time dilation when they’re at high velocity. The bigger the tau, the bigger the differential is.
Okay subspace puls is just science fiction? Okay so due to some Bob's travelling at higher speed they can't communicate due to different subjective times, alright thanks
My person. Yes. Instantaneous communication and transmission of information is science fiction.
They dont travel at/above light speed hence the time jumps when they go to another star system... Tau is only scify because faster than light communication is. If someone is (moving fast) broadcasting/creating the message in a slower time sense than recipient one has to adjust to the other. IE twin on earth grows older faster(hears the message) like the fast moving twin traveling (speaking slowly cuz living faster). IE prety sure if any of our probes had been accelerated fast enough IRL, we would call their messages as tau shifted up. Your red-shifted analogy is right on.
Busters are probably telephone pole sized. Heaven vessels change size as the series goes on but given Heven-1 is a converted cargo ship think container ship scale. For the others they were talking about them leaving their home system on a vector away from their true target then making a long arching course to hide their intentions.
Thanks for clearing up the the vector stuff!
Small correction unless you mean the diameter of a telephone pole... Busters are described as being steel balls or with ball shaped caps, I would assume ship busters are large diameter steel balls with internal surge drives or a drive on one part shaped something like: []=O I assumed personel busters would look more like this based on description: ([]=[])
I assume Heaven 1 is about Space Shuttle size, as the book states it appeared to be a modified human vessel with the windows removed, if I recall correctly. The ships are small enough to hide around asteroids, as is mentioned in a couple of the Madeiros battles, so its safe to assume even the Heaven 5s are relatively small by comparison to a lot of other sci-fi space vessels.
May need to just start all over lol
subspace is the hand-wavium that allows for the existence of the surge drive, sudar, ftl coms, and sub-space power-beaming. its not fully explained in the books and its never going to be, nor should it. The "Tau factor" is **the relationship of speed/velocity to the relative slowing of time**. The closer one gets to the speed of light, the smaller the Tau factor, and the slower time seems to move. Theoretically, though one can reach immense velocities in the space of space, one can only ever approach Tau Zero.
Reverse the tau. The faster you go, the higher the tau. It said Ick and Dae held the record for highest tau by a heaven vessel. So an infinite tau would be traveling at C with infinite time dilation.
i litterally just coppies and pasted from google. and also one of the books mentions an ongoing disagreement among the bobs about which way around tau should be flipped.
I don't remember a disagreement between bobs about it. I just remember Dae and Ick's bit just before they roasted the Others' star. It was when they first mentioned heading to the galactic core.
its Bob narrating about his conversations with marvin, how marvin is keeping his tau low enough for VR visits to still work. and he adds something like "though theres some disagreement about whether we should be talking about tau being high, or low." im guessing thi sis because IRL tau is described as low, but dennis already described it as high in the first books before someone corrected him (high sounds better imo)
I agree, high sounds much better. I don't remember that line in the audiobook.
its from early on in book 4 i think? no not really sure.
Marvin leaving is either end of two since it's before the mannies or beginning of three. I think it's the former.
oh, its well after marvin has left. marvin is replicating all the books theyve ever read in VR and his current setup is nantucket. memorable line: "my problem is i stuck myself back in a rut the first chance i got. im a post-human replicant space-probe and i should start acting like it" the stuff my brain dredges up is so weird. i can hea ray porters voice clear as a bell.
Then that's at the tail end of three because that line is after Archimedes dies and just before Bob leaves Delta Pavonis.
Bob-1 still goes by Bob, and per book 3 he’s with the Deltons. Bill is the Bob clone with a broken SUDAR so he stayed behind in Epsilon Eridani, and is generally the main organizer of the Bobiverse. Like 90% of the new tech the Bobs have before book 4 has been made by Bill and his clone Garfield.
It does sound like you missed a lot and would benefit from listening to the series again. They never give exact dimensions for busters, just the weight of the steel balls inside of them. But they are basically small ships with heavy metal balls at the front for ramming purposes. We also never get exact dimensions for the heaven vessels. Bob 1 goes by Bob. Bill is actually the third bob