Assuming someone's identity: How probable is being caught on travel?
Story time:
In Prague, Czech Republic, I have met a person from USA who looks like me. Except the usual "Add glasses and change hairstyle" trope (Warning: TVTropes link). Lets call this fictional person Joe.
I befriended Joe ...
If dead body is found in Czech Republic, DNA test is done to be 100% sure that such person's identity. Because my original plan involved leaving all Pavel's belongings in that body, story Pavel is in deep trouble
But, it actually helped with the story itself, because that may be great plot twist :)
Ok, the big question I have is: I look like the guy on the passport. I have photocopy of US passport, deliberately done in way where the face is visible, but it basically resembles me. I am at US embassy, claiming lost passport. How much will they check if I am the guy on the passport?
@PavelJanicek Dunno, maybe? Especially if someone suggested it might be a good idea? Could have Joe tell a story about a friend that got mugged in Morocco, and how big of a pain it was to get back home. If he'd thought to bring his birth certificate then he would have had a much easier time
The good news is, if you happened to miss a detail or two, almost no one will know that you did, because very few have experience with it, and if someone does call you out on it, just say "Well, I didn't want to give a step by step on how to murder and steal someones identity."
Once again, I don't know if the emergency passport is actually needed. It would be interesting to talk to someone who has traveled internationally and returned by air, and if they check fingerprints.
@Shalvenay They're going really well. I'm making (very) slow progress on my airplane project. Work is going well (I'm not struggling to catch up on domain knowledge anymore) How's things with you?
@PavelJanicek From what I can tell, though the sources are several years old and may be out of date, they do not check fingerprints for US citizens returning from abroad. Everyone else gets fingerprinted and photographed, but not citizens.
@James Getting a duplicate birth certificate wasn't difficult, just time consuming. Turns out, if you know what to ask for and pay the fees, they'll just send you one.
@Green I had to get a replacement birth certificate for one of the kids, just dropped by the city offices, paid a small fee, picked it up. Wasn't a huge deal.
I later got singapore citizenship by virtue of being born here and living a while here but I couldn't renounce till I was 18, and singapore dosen't do dual nationalities
@JourneymanGeek Right, I've been to France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Greece...even with the language barrier enough people spoke English it wasn't a big deal.
But they are also culturally familiar which makes it easier...at least in my brain.
IIRC, China also doesn't do dual citizenship, but mostly they just refuse to believe it's possible. Like, a LOT of chinese women do tourist stuff in the US around their due date so they can have their babies born in the US. But their government doesn't officially recognize the US citizenship in addition to the Chinese citizenship
Funny story, I was in Athens, and I had this idea that I wanted to find a copy of the Illiad and the Odyssey written in Greek. Not because I can read Greek but I thought it'd be cool to have. So I went into a bookstore. The little old man barely spoke English (apparently not many tourists want to buy books). After 10 minutes of failed communication a woman who spoke English walked in and saved us all.
@Hosch250 Europe is weird for me...awesome, but weird. While we were in Greece we spent some time on an island we ended up spending two evenings hanging out with a British dude and his Polish girlfriend.
I don't want to be involved with that simply by association, and I'm mostly interested in ourdoorsy stuff, and the US is big enough to have everything I'd need--tundra to mountain to plain to rainforest. And Canada and Mexico have more.
@Hosch250 My wife and I don't run into this problem just by the nature of how and where we travel. We don't go to the super touristy spots (tourist traps are the worst), rather we go to the fun places where other tourists aren't. All interactions with locals happen on a one-on-one basis. Sure, they may be prejudiced about loud Americans but if you are polite, they'll adapt to you very quickly.
Still, I'll probably mostly stick in the US doing car trips to parks, but if I ever get unnecessary amounts of cash, I can always burn it that way without being too annoying :)
@Green This is my method too. One of my favorites was getting drunk in a little store in St Maarten when no cruise ships were in town. He was bored and we started chatting, then he offered us some of his homemade rum varieties...
@Hosch250 We also prefer a style of travel where we go some place we want to explore then stay for a few days. That's enough time to get to meet people in a capacity beyond "You American! You buy my stuff!".
@James Swigging rum would do me zero favors but that kind of experience is the kind I like the most.
But, on the other hand, I got allergies really badly from not having air conditioning and not bathing, and the campground host told me to not try the harder trails because they are some of the hardest trails in the country because they aren't maintained too well and I don't know backcountry packing.
@Hosch250 There's a balance there. No plans means you spend a lot of time making sure you have a place to stay or something to eat, which means you can't go exploring. Conversely, if you're scheduled down to the 15 minute interval, if you see something really cool, you can't change course because that will mess up the rest of your schedule.
I must say that one of the nice things about knowing what you're doing ahead of time is that it's almost always cheaper. You can go when the flights/hotels are cheapest and get all the good deals ahead of time.
Right. I mean, if I had enough money to where cost literally was no worry, to where I could throw down a black card or something and get any room that was available and not have to sleep on a park bench, that might be less of a problem.
When I was young we did a cross country trip to california, and booked all our hotels on the day we needed them. Like we'd start driving really early, figure out where the next place we wanted to visit was, and call ahead to book a room. That was a really fun vacation
How do you quantify the effect of weight on agility? I mean, suppose someone were to wear enough armor to double his total weight. What would that do to his ability to dodge? How would one figure out the general relationship between weight and dodging?
How would one estimate at what weight of armor a person would cease to be able to move, and how would a person's performance diminish when approaching that point?
@James That raises the question of the range of training. How much armor can an untrained person wear versus how much armor can a perfectly trained person wear.
Looking around the internet it seems that 30 kg of armor is a popular figure, and 45 kg of armor is quite heavy for armor. It's not clear if that is a practical limit or not.
@Geo Type of armor matters too. Greaves a pauldron and bracers is a whole lot different than leather and both are a lot different than full plate. Type, along with weight, will impact agility and flexibility.
I kinda feel this question is going to be incredibly subjective and dependant on random genetics as much as training. While training can make a huge difference, and give an advantage to someone who would normally be disadvantaged, biology is still going to play a huge part. Take the example of Secretariat again; Genetics gave it a huge advantage. Training also helped, but compared to another horse given the same training but smaller heart, and there is no contest.
@Geo It always has some flexibility but not the same amount. The more flexible the joints the more vulnerable they'd be. Plus the weight of the armour would make a difference to how easily you can move in it.
@AndyD273 Even so, there was a limit to how fast Secretariat could run. As fast as he was, he was still a horse, not a race car. There must be a way to establish the realistic range of human performance in armor.
I'd love to know how much weight a person can carry in terms of armor and equipment, how that load diminishes a person's abilities, and how much that can be improved through training, and how much through genetics. There must be numbers for this.
@Geo Sure, and you're talking a guy in armor, not a tank... You're comparing two people in armor, so it's fair to bring up two horses. Secretariat won by 31 lengths, and was still accelerating when he crossed the finish line. It's easy to establish an average range, but when you want to set limits you're going to run into trouble
One possible thing to look at is modern military gear
What's the heaviest load that a soldier is expected to carry on a regular basis
The army has probably spent huge amounts of money to figure out the exact optimal amount
@Geo Well, 50kg was suggested to possibly be too much for them to be effective. Most military look to have marches with around 30-40kg as part of their training so I'd assume that is about the limit of effectiveness.
> A century later, the Greek infantry soldier, the Hoplite, was thought to carry a load of between 22.5 and 32 kilograms when dressed in a complete panoply of breastplate, greaves, helmet, shield, spear and sword. For the Hoplites, who them-selves may not have weighed more than 68 kilograms, this equated to a load of between 33–47 per cent of their body weight.
@AndyD273 Should the performance impact of load be measured as a proportion of the weight of the soldier, or as an absolute figure? It seems like 50 kg is just as heavy no matter how much or how little the soldier's body weighs.
> Afer viewing a Canadian Exercise conducted in May 1942, Field Marshal Montgomery, in a letter to General Crerar (a Canadian General), recommended a load that would not have an impact on the soldier’s fighting ability—a maximum 22.5 kilograms.
It also says that the loads carried by US soldiers in WW1 meant they were exhausting themselves crossing no mans land when attacking.
@Geo Sure. There might be some people with the genetic advantage that would allow them to do it with less trouble, but 50 kg is should probably be on the upper end of the curve.
So you know what a bell curve is, right? You have the big hump in the middle, and the taper out to both sides. Most people are in the middle, and right on the very end of the long tails you have the extremes. Say Mr Glass on one end, and Mr Unbreakable on the other end, with most of us in the middle.
And it's not just a simple matter of whether you can carry a particular load or not, but rather there is a whole load of costs and benefits to consider.
I think I'll see if I can formulate this into a coherent question in the question sandbox.
@Green -- they're going alright here. kind of wondering what sorts of things you could get if you melted alumina and poured it into a suitably refractory mold...
Assuming someone's identity: How probable is being caught on travel?
Story time:
In Prague, Czech Republic, I have met a person from USA who looks like me. Except the usual "Add glasses and change hairstyle" trope (Warning: TVTropes link). Lets call this fictional person Joe.
I befriended Joe ...
The Factory Floor
The Factory Floor