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You are rounding off to whole turns, which is not a valid thing to do. The monks' expected survival times include fractional turns, which you ought to calculate. Also, you are tacitly assuming that the monks always win initiative over all their opponents, which is not valid either.

Then I miscalculated. Trogs have AB +1. Dextrous Monk has AC 13. Trogs hit on a 12 or better, which is 45%. Trogs do 4.5 hp/hit. 45% of 4.5 is 2.025 hp/trog attack. Trogs have AB +1. Strong Monk has AC 12. Trogs hit on a 11 or better, which is 50%. Trogs do 4.5 hp/hit. 50% of 4.5 is 2.25...

Oops. Escape velocity is actually proportional to the square root of the product of surface gravity and radius. Surface gravity is proportional to density times radius. Which is to say that escape velocity is proportional to radius times the square root of density. A habitable planet or moon...

No, not for that reason at all. For the reason that diffraction places a fundamental limit on the minimum width to which a beam can be focussed, which is related to the ratio of the wavelength used divided by the diameter of the emitter. Microwaves are 'micro' by the standards of radio waves...

The trick actually requires a certain escape velocity, and the escape velocity of a sphere is equal to its surface gravity times its radius. So moons (which are presumably small) need higher surface gravity than planets (which are presumably larger). For a world to be habitable (and to stay...

It would. Gibberingly large quantities. Comparable to the gravitational binding energy of a habitable planet. And even when you had done it, you would still need to deliver or synthesise the atmosphere.

That depends on how much you think about the effects of tides and orbital resonances on rotational periods. Between tidal kneading of moons in close orbits around their primaries, and extremely long days for moons in more distant orbits (and both for those in orbits in between) it is very hard...

And in practice. In fact, masers were demonstrated before lasers. Yes, of course.

No, they didn't. That is a common misrepresentation. The truth is that someone showed that bumblebees would not be able to fly if their wings were rigid.

Case in point. To focus a microwave beam tightly enough to attack an area thirty miles across, HAARP needs an emitter consisting of 72 towers 360 feet tall spread out over four acres. Good luck getting that into a hip holster.

No. Addressing the OP. "A common fallacy I see in many sci-fi games is the thought that beam weapons would eventually replace ballistic weapons completely." -- Warlord Ralts (emphasis added).

Indeedy! With a little help from Summer Time I'm seventeen hours ahead of Minneapolis.

G'day I'm not in general a big fan of the traditional Christmas. But I think that we could do with a bit of peace on Earth, and more desperately for some goodwill among men. So lets not worry too much about why we are doing it now in particular, and just wish our fellow men and women all the...

It does if you are a proper raiding barbarian! Live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse. Let your posterity make their own fame.

IF you were to imagine that the population of Indonesia were hypnotised into behaving as though the were Classical Greeks…. If things in general actually had animating spirits, daimons, genii, kami… If the Pathetic Fallacy were not a fallacy… If mystic disciplines really gave people the...

I am referring to the full EM spectrum, as it happens (sorry, I did not make that clear). All wavelengths are subject to diffraction, though the effects are larger with short wavelengths. The limits I calculated about were for light with a wavelength of 100 nm, which is well into the...

First you have to identify a project worth working on. If your preliminary engineering studies show that something is fundamentally impractical, then the sensible course is to choose another approach to solving the problem. (And our problem is to put the enemy out of action--energy weapons are...

Indeed! A friend of mine was just telling me about his 1 TW laser operating at a wavelength of 6 nm. That would be a dandy weapon for a spaceship, assuming that you could aim it accurately enough (a bit of a problem as you can't aim X-rays with a mirror). And assuming that you could get the...

Diffraction can't. It is fundamental to the nature of light. Do you even know what diffraction is?

Just so. Ditch it. You might, if the sun in question were 810,000 times as luminous as Sol. More realistically, a B-class priimary might be hundreds or thousands of times brighter than Sol, which would give you a habitable zone ten or twenty times as wide, and you might get 30-60 planets in...