Salda007

Can I say that the "max 3 elements" constraint is a remarkably subtle one? Even going up to just four allows for a giant chunk of organic chemistry and a very large range of metal alloys.

Is your idea specifically that the crew which makes its way back home is one of the ones that left originally? If not, that opens up a lot of other options.

It's not directly analogous, but look into Khyber Pass copies of modern firearms: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khyber_Pass_copy

You're asking "how do I make the seasons change faster" but it sounds like the underlying question is more like "how can I justify measuring time on a scale shorter than ~7 years".

Ah, yeah, missed the "mill" part. And I did say "hideously unsafe" for a reason. :-D

You don't necessarily need to reach melt temperatures for forging (just casting), but you do want to get up to at least yellow heat if you can, which is 1100+ ºC. OTOH, with the right reactor design, it could be designed with liquid uranium fuel in mind? Probably hideously unsafe, though...

How intelligent and how dexterous are your dragons? Can they understand and operate human-level technology, assuming it's been adapted to be used by them (scaled-up controls, different hand/claw configurations, etc.)?

Having fought in armor (SCA rattan), I can definitely say that someone taking a baseball bat home-run style to your head will hurt, even with the helmet. That's a lot of force that's all getting transferred into your head and neck, and a concussion is a distinct possibility. A better analogy for purposes of this question would be a baseball bat vs. a main battle tank.

See Star Wars: A New Hope for my rebuttal. ;-)

@Halfthawed - not necessarily. If the weapons are effective enough that armor against them isn't practical and small/cheap enough that swarm tactics become viable, then your massive motherships become sitting ducks and evasion becomes the primary mode of survival, at least until an effective screen against those swarm attacks can be developed. See: armored knights vs muskets, battleships vs torpedo boats, tanks vs shoulder-launched antitank weapons, and heavy bombers vs single-engine interceptors, among others.

Double-check the subject? "when armor has out-paced armor"

If you're making ceramics, you're within arms reach of glass, and you can definitely make functional melee weapons out of glass (see the Macuahuitl that @Mormacil mentioned -- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macuahuitl ).

I fail to see how FTL breaks causality. Yes, it allows interaction outside the light cone ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_cone ), but it still doesn't allow someone to attack into the past. Sure, you can attack before the target would normally receive information of your attack, but we could just as easily state that supersonic weapons violate causality because they allow attacks outside a "sound cone". Just because the bullet hits before you hear the bang doesn't mean they attacked from "the future". Time is still flowing in the same direction, the cone of past influence is just wider.