ICHIBAN11 wrote:
Boiling and fermenting does soften leather and allow it to be broken down. It does not break down as fast as fresh hide, but they do break down. If allow to boil or decompose long enough it will get soft enough to cut and chew. It may not have any nutritional value left and not to flavorful, but you can eat it.
Boiling, burying, or otherwise treating a given material only makes it into a somewhat softer version of what it was before -that is to say, even the softest, supple leathers are still leather, and a turtle-shell processed eight ways to Sunday is still a Turtle Shell.
Expecting MDC material of any sort to be able to be somehow converted to edible, nutritious SDC foodstuffs by treatment goes far, far, far beyond the suspension of disbelief -and on top of that, even if it were "true," that still doesn't explain how 99% of the Stone-Age Technology Level SDC people on Rifts Earth get by everyday -Tanneries and specialized Curing/Smoking/Controlled Aging-Fermentation facilities are rather hard to come by for most.....which is why so many of those cultures just strip off what they can from the MDC carcass, sew it together, and go running around in that without any fear or worry that those MDC byproducts will some "rot down" to mere SDC material.
Unless the MDC hide is processed it would decompose. This same decomposition process could be used to process the internal meat to be made fit for consumption. If the hide does not decompose then you'd have a landscape full of dead MDC Critters.
SDC tissues and bone and hair decompose into the SDC materials they were originally made of; likewise MDC materials.
Again, you are overthinking this far, far, far beyond anything the Authors of the Books ever planned to have to deal with.
So by that logic a SDC person can apply sufficient acid to breakdown the MDC meat to a level it can be consumed. All they would have to do is rinse the meat prior to eating. Similar proesses are used to make Lukefisk and Hominy.
You don't really seem to know how Real World digestion works. much less a FICTIONAL process in a FICTIONAL book that the authors never cared to go into such detail about.
Right now, in the real world, most non-ruminants can't digest (SDC) cellulose in large part because of its physical durability -and even Ruminants (animals with multiple stomachs who regurgitate their cud to chew it again) have a hard time of it. A human being could literally starve to death over time if he had all the celery in the world to eat, for example -it takes more effort on the body's part to process the stuff than any nutritional value we non-ruminants could ever get out of it.
If we can't even digest SDC cellulose -and by logical extension neither can the carbon-based lifeforms in this fictional series of books -what make you think that a character could digest MDC organic matter?
20 year nuclear batteries: The core is made from a radio isotope with a radioactive half life of 20+ years. As it decays the radiation given off is captured by cells similar to photo-cells which convert it to electricity. This electricity is used by electronics developed 300+ years in the future to be efficient.
Making a Radioactive Battery that lasts 20 years is child's play; after all, Uranium has a half-life of 4
billion years, and IIRC Thorium lasts even longer than that.
It's the
energy requirements of the Robot/Mecha/Vehicle/Energy Weapon over significant periods of time that are inexplicable.
Not that Kevin ever cared enough about their inner workings to want to describe them anyway.
Counter-Orbital Debris Field: The Kessler Syndrome. In addition to the orbital colonies adding debris from salvage work, war, general trash, and their own break down would keep the field up.
Even more over-thinking.
As bad as it is in the first place to think of a CODF that reliably covers the entire planet and has done so for the last 300 years without the orbital decay of a significant percentage of the individual objects in the field, you have to go ahead and stretch the Rubberband of Incredulity well past its breaking point by trying to posit that a small handful of humanoids -probably less than the population of a small Earth city -can somehow manage to keep enough material supplied to the CODF to, effectively, cover a region of low-to-high Earth orbit that represents a sphere (in terms of the area covered) many times larger than the planet itself.
FTL Drives: Grab a Startrek, Star Wars, or Honor Harrington tech manual and any of those explanations would work for the generic FTL drives. Magical FTL is just that Magic. Phase tech FTL is explained as being unexplainable and secret. If anybody can make a functional FTL Drive in reality there's a Nobel prize with your name on it.
Even Star Trek FTL Drives, like most sci-fi engines of this type, don't even bother with the various relativistic effects that a massed body encounters and causes as its speed moves closer to that of light. Most such drives just ignore them altogether, while other types of FTL simply add yet another layer of fiction on top of fiction and create a realm where relativistic effects don't apply (e.g., Hyperspace, or Subspace).
And to repeat the point once again, Kevin has indirectly shown by the blatant lack of exposition in this regard across many books that he doesn't care about the inner workings of it. Just like the eating of MDC material by SDC creatures.
Do yourself a favor and stop assuming that every person who ever writes into their fictional works things of science fantasy or science fiction are trying to win the Hugo Award or get themselves commendations from DARPA or NASA for realism.
The vast, vast, vast majority of people who do so are, instead, concerned only with "I need the characters/objects in my fictional setting to do X, Y, or Z;" at which point, for most who write this sort of stuff, the
science in 'science fiction' begins and ends.
So true. 
and hunting a Lake Dragon (Apparently the best kind of Dragon for the Dragon Cuisine...and slaying a Dragon with Magic ruins the flavor), Lina and the gang head back to the Restaurant with the Chef for their well deserved meal of Dragon Cuisine...
): Has to be boiled continuously for three months...
) I miss stuff.
