RELEASED Avali Race Mod, The second thread!

I think what Reks is suggesting is a biological mechanism for protecting hearing similarly to how humans' irises close in bright light; not that they'd be immune or even resistant to loud noise.

Though I'd also like to point out that Hertz is a measurement of frequency, not volume. I can't say how many decibels an Avali could withstand, but I can hazard a guess that their hearing range in Hertz is broader than a human's but shifted up in frequency (relative to a human norm) due to their methane atmosphere.

 

Could they, possibly. But this falls into a similar catagory to using gas grenades (when your side if fielding gas masks) to flood a location, at the end of the day it's a technique for making ingress - there's no such thing as a "universal achillies heel" one weapon that could universally defeat an entire enemy side with a button press, simply because they'll deploy countermeasures (In their case, sound cancelling hearing protection that filters out nuisance noise levels). I'd be surprised if that sort of equipment wasn't standard issue for assault troops,

Makes sense, I wonder how you could structure a hearing system to have built in protection... some kind of muscle that tenses or relaxes the auditory structures, increasing or decreasing fidelity, at the cost of being more vulnerable to damage when in high sensitivty "mode"

 

Natural defenses aside, I would imagine that avali soldiers' medical nanites might also be able to set up some form of sonic dampening in extreme cases. After all, prevention is preferable to curing after the fact. Maybe by accelerating the preexisting natural barriers.

Derp, I completely overlooked the middle of your post on that subject, Ryu. Never mind me.

 

The moment you said that, I thought I remembered reading somewhere that bats use that exact mechanism to prevent damage to their ears when they use sonar. I did a search, and it looks like that is indeed the case:

Kick, Shelley A. and James A. Simmons. "Automatic Gain Control in the Bat's Sonar Reciever and the Neurotechnology of Echolocation." Journal of Neuroscience. 4.11 (1984): 2725-2737. Web. 8 May 2014.

"Bats possess mechanisms which protect their hearing from the full strength of their sonar transmissions. The sonar sounds themselves are projected primarily forward toward targets rather than back toward the ears (Pye, 1980; Schnitzler and Henson, 1980). Also, the bat’s middle ear muscles contract at the time of vocalization to attenuate direct self-stimulation of the inner ear (Wever and Vernon, 1961; Henson, 1965; Suga and Jen, 1975)."
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So there you have it, I guess. It sounds like a set of muscles that can reflexively relax the eardrums during exposure to loud noise would do the trick. Now, as for how well these would work against the levels of noise present in a mechanized setting, I can't say (hearing protection techniques developed for hunting don't seem adequate to protect against a jet engine, for instance).

 

about the Colony ship concept.... would they be somewhat like the Quarian LiveShips in Mass Effect? massive factory, and food cultivation ships, and the heart of any large scale civilian fleet?

 

could be a mucus produced when a threshold is reached. that's the simplest method I can think of. Downside is reducing overall hearing

 

I'd imagine that their Med-chip and nanites would detect dangerous and/or harmful frequencies of sound and probably, depending on the situation, would selectively "Block" signals coming from their auditory nerves, primarily the "pain" signals, until the danger has passed, at which time, the nannies would go to work repairing the damage caused; whenever you start envisioning medical nanotech, you have to keep in mind that the nannies are restricted primarily by how much they can be programmed, followed closely by the raw materials they have to work with.

With Nexus, and reliable, fast, and safe neural interfacing, as well as a Med chip that, for all we know, could contain a nano-AI, the programming issue is suddenly a non-issue; there'd DEFINITELY be SOMETHING in the Nexus archives to deal with the situation. Thus, they'd likely be running off a program that many, many people would have seen, worked on, and revised as necessary.

 

Let's for... arguments sake, ignore the mechanical world. A countermeasure purely of the biological scale. Such things are, as already mentioned a muscular based defense or a mucus based defense.

 

Well I stopped getting alerts from this thread and missed 15 pages or so wich mens I probably missed 200 pages in the nexus thread.

Got some catching up to do.

 

The original question was whether or not the Avali would have internal biological protection mechanisms for hearing. If we start considering solutions involving technology, I think a much simpler explanation than nanites would be earplugs or muffs.

Not to say that nanites couldn't do what you say, but I prefer to avoid using them whenever possible. Once you get nanites powerful enough that they can act as tiny independent machines, then they're powerful enough that they can do anything. Assemble a tank, destroy a world, strip-mine a planet, kill a population with a certain genetic marker, make supersoldiers, the list just goes on. Without any clear restrictions on their power, nanites are a plot device, not a technology. Need some healing magic for your character? Nanites. Need a supersoldier without doing any research into genetics? Nanites. Need a nasty, world-ending threat? Nanites.

It's becoming a dated plot device, just like "radiation" was to the 50's and 60's. Radiation doesn't solve everything, and neither would nanites. So if I can at all help it, I avoid using nanites to solve my problems unless I have a very good idea for the particular setting of how they're built, why they work, and what their limits are.

As you say, a mucus would take time to clear out of the ear structures and hearing would be impaired until it could clear. That's a deal breaker, I think. Imagine applying the same basic concept to humans: when a human walks into bright light, his eyes secrete a thick black gunk which blocks out the light but leaves him mostly blinded for a few dozen seconds. Such a mechanism would be ludicrous, because sight is our primary sense, and we're helpless without it. For the same reasons, the Avali cannot afford to suddenly, but temporarily, go mostly deaf. It'd leave them helpless, and in the wild, all a predator would have to do to get a free Avali lunch would be to screech before attacking.

 

Kinda goes back to what I'd said earlier, the most realistic and unobtrusive role the medical nanites could play with regards to aural defense is simply to accelerate and augment the body's preexisting natural reactions. This would cover both the mucus theory, (increased rate of clearing,) and the muscular theory, (stimulating the muscles to improve responsiveness.)

And my vote's for the later, by the way. The mucus theory has a few too many downsides by comparison.

 

I don't think any artifical response is needed.

Imagine if they had tiny filament hairs in the tips of their long ears; the moment the hair pick up vibrations on sufficient scale to indicate an approaching shockwave (travelling at the speed of sound), then a signal is sent to the muscles inside the audiotry organs (speed of electricity, much faster than sound), telling them to relax immediatly, so by the time the shockwave reaches the ear (milliseconds), it has protected itself from harm. In the same way your blink reflex shields your eyes from particles.

Interestingly this means if you flicked the tips of their ears you'd trigger the same reflex, in turn triggering a "reflex" action of being slapped

 

That is quite an amusing mental image, not gonna lie.

 

don't the Avali have fingertip claws, though? being "slapped" by one would be kinda bloody if so!

 

Would that mean flash bangs wouldn't be so effective? How sensitive would they be to the light and sound?

EDIT: Reason for asking, I want to make racial characteristics in my story as accurate as possible, sensitivity to sound and light stimulus was something I pondered but didn't quite get around to asking.

 

Trigger hairs, eh?

Seems like they'd be easy to accidentally trigger the reflex for, though

 

Well, if you look at the official concept art, it appears they do:

Not significantly easier than triggering a flinch reflex in a human by moving something quickly toward their face, nor significantly longer lasting though.

I'd also assume they could also will their ears "off" just like humans can squint or tightly close their eyelids, thought that's just a guess on my part.

 

Do Avali have a concept of cosmetics? Maybe they clip claws off and replace them for fake, good looking ones like humans.

 

I think feathertip dyes were mentioned at one point in the old thread.

But if I had natural weapons on my hands, no matter how puny, I'd keep them.

 

I dunno if I'd go so far as to call them weapons, they're more for gripping icey surfaces, trees or the armoured hide of a giant monster, than for dealing damage. Their bite is where it's at; a mouthful of serrated nasty that makes piranha's envious ;p