Moriarty

hmmm... the aliens are clones, aren't they? DNA imprint wouldn't work, as they are genetically identical (within each race, that is). it would, however, be a possibility for the X-Corps soldiers. perhaps if the aliens would pick up human weapons and use them against you, this might be prevented by making human weapons human-only via DNA imprinting (even fingerprint scanners would work).

That just doesn't work, it would be very bad sci-fi, I'll elaborate on that later. please do. why shouldn't it be possible to detect something this way? cosmic background radiation is almost evenly distributed and comes at us from all sides. if you look in one direction, and there's a point where no radiation comes from, something must be blocking it, causing a "shadow". where's the problem?

looking at the awd models again now, I have to amend my judgement. they do have receivers. unfortunately they are mounted so that they will only receive rays hitting the dish from angles below the horizon. duh. perhaps we could convince vaaish to at least flip them upside down before starting to texture the models? I agree with mad, the most convincing explanation would be to say that the dishes are used to receive some kind of characteristic conventional radiation emitted by the UFOs (x-rays for example, or perhaps they detect the cosmic background radiation "shadow" caused by the UFO?). But because the dish can only scan a small area of the sky, the neutrino detectors tell the computers where to look.

my main problem with the dish is that a parabolic dish only makes sense for reflecting something, focussing it on a receiver which is mounted at the center, where all reflected waves converge and are therefore amplified. as far as I can see, our model does not even have a receiver. and neutrinos definitely can't be reflected. so maybe the neutrinos-hitting-iridium-plate-generate-electric-current idea isn't all that bad, but it still is a fix for a problem that should be corrected at its root. btw, even if neutrinos would generate a current like the way we write it, you still couldn't determine where they are coming from with a 2-dimensional detector.

... you might not have researched that mission yet.

I like this one. perhaps strengthen the motorcycle-allusion a bit? hmmm... airbrushed? spray-painted? painted? I don't know which sounds best.

I didn't yet have time to read through the whole text in detail, but these two paragraphs kind of caught my eye... I think this needs to be restructured a bit, because the first described spherical tank with photomultipliers really isn't a technical revolution at all. that's how neutrinos are detected today. okay, in much larger tanks, but still, that's only a quantitative thing, nothing revolutionary. The dish covered with iridium oxide that can detect neutrinos, now that's a real revolutionary thing, because neutrinos interact really really rarely with any kind of matter, iridium oxide or not. that's the whole reason why the huge tanks are needed today to detect them. if X-Corps were able to create a conventional antenna which can pick up neutrinos, great, but then they wouldn't need the tanks anymore, would they? perhaps the tanks are used to detect the neutrinos, and the antenna dish detects something else, something that would normally be too weak against the background noise, but can be followed once you have a general idea of the location of it's source (hence the necessity for the tanks)?

very nice. it's a bit dark for my taste, but it is way better than the old one good job!

as far as I recall, fire could spread in XCom, so why not? I agree that we should probably use a fictional substance, because incendiary ammo as it was in XCom doesn't really exist. the "everything within a certain radius spontaneously combusts" thing sounds a little bit too hot for me... something _that_ hot would do more damage. in XCom, fire could stick to people, so why not use some kind of incendiary gel, kind of like napalm, only more advanced? perhaps something that doesn't use environment oxygen, but brings its own oxidant. otherwise we'll run into trouble explaining why it works on mars

it would certainly add complexity. the trouble with complexity is that when things get too complex, they are not fun anymore. I like the idea, but it must be implemented with a lot of consideration.

kind of carries its own hidden humor, doesn't it? xenium is something humans didn't know before the aliens arrived, therefore it is a kind of present, since in the aftermath of the war, it will bring a lot of technological advancement. but the aliens surely did not want to give it to us. so the name is accurate

I think this is sufficiently obscure for us not to worry about it

well, a firecracker under water _will_ do some damage to a fish swimming near it... that's why I want to avoid the whole explosion thing. since xenium does do some space-bending, we might as well use it for this

sooo... some science guy sat in a corner playing Quake III, and when the Stun Bomb went off, the game froze for a few seconds? why not... it could "stun" microprocessors, somehow stopping them for a few seconds without turning them off - somehow the charges are preserved so no information is lost. kind of hard to explain, but hey, we have Xenium™, explanation for everything! "The special construction of the Stun Bomb creates a space-time flux which induces weird magnetism in electronic circuitry, causing the electrons to chase their own tails for a few seconds before continuing to travel as before."

very nice. hmmm... the stun bomb will probably appear early in the game, but robotic aliens later... I don't really know how to resolve this. we need to say something about stun bombs being able to stun those robotic aliens, but at the same time the player does not necessarily know they exist at the point the stun bomb is researched. duh. if the membrane tears that easily, why doesn't it tear when you drop the stun bomb? best not mention xenium in this way, the player might not know about it yet. or at least say "caused by the alien substance we know as xenium" or something like that. btw, if there is an explosion, why does it not do damage? my idea was that the xenium does not explode, but is used to "teleport" the other contents you mentioned (nerve gas etc.) over the area of effect. something like "When the bomb is activated, an intriguing effect most probably caused by the alien substance we know as xenium instantly spreads the contents of the bomb over the surrounding area. Precise measurings have shown that this spreading happens without measurable delay between any two points within the area of effect. While massive objects appear to be able to somewhat block the spreading, traces of the bombs contents have been found inside a radioactive containment box that happened to be inside the area-of-effect."