Re: Ninja chemistry?

Bernard Peek skreiv:
Eivind <eivindorama@xxxxxxxxx> writes
Bernard Peek skreiv:

If the felinoids are furry then a wet-suit won't work,

A wet-suit works by, essentially, limiting circulation. It is elastic and tight-fitting, and has an outer-layer that is more or less waterproof along with fairly tight elastics around neck, hands and feet.

That protects them while they are in the water but as soon as they get out of it they will be chilled by evaporation.

If they remove the wet-suit, then they are just a wet cat, sure. If they're worried about freezing to death in the immediate future they would keep the wet-suit on though. The same pretty-much-waterproof layer that prevents water from circulating will prevent the same water from evaporating all too rapidly.

So, he keeps the suit on, which means that he stays wet, but which also means that he stays alive.

Until he can get to a warm shielded place where he can survive simply being a wet, exhausted, cat, that is.

Being wet in a wet-suit is only colder on land than in the water if either the air-temperature is much lower than the water-temperature, or there is strong wind.

adequately waterproof and also invisible. In any case air trapped in the dry fur would prevent the felinoid from swimming semi-submerged unless it carried heavy weights. It's possible but it's not going to be easy.

If they've developed wet-suit-equivalents there's no reason these can't be weighted to give a comfortable swimming-position for an average cat. It's not as if sewing a few small pockets and put clumps of lead in them is very high-tech. This sounds a lot like invented problems. It's not as if we have a problem with bobbing like a cork on the surface when going diving in dry-suits.

5-7mm long fur on a "slimmer than supermodel" humanoid aproximately 160cm tall isn't going to trap *that* enormous amounts of air, a common formula for the area of skin on a human is (mass[kgs]*height[cm]/3600)^0.5 which gives this creature a surface-area of 1.3 square meters. If the 5-7mm of fur when compressed under tigth-fitting wet-suit still traps 2mm of air, then that is aproximately 3kg of buoyance, not *that* much of a "bobbing on the surface" thing for a creature massing 40kg.

A "rock in the mouth" won't do it, unless the mouth is rather large or the rock -very- dense, you'd need 280 cm^3 of lead, aproximately, (9.5oz) besides, even if that worked, it'd give you a tendency to float head-down which may be undesirable.

A simple lead-belt would do the trick trivially though.

Eivind
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