First off, I am sorry.
Tried to hold this in, but I always lose these fights with my brain.
Lets tackle the seasickness first.
Seasickness is caused when our eyes and inner ear disagree. This is caused because our inner ear tells us we are standing stable on a floor that is ( to our senses) unmoving. Our eyes however tell us that the horizon is moving. They can't get on the same line and as all arguments. Everybody stuck inbetween is screwed.
Or to keep it in the science mood. Our brain listends to both and decides that one of them must be wrong. AKA your halucinating. This tends to be caused by toxins and most toxins are ingested orally your brain will induce cleansing treatment.
This basicly means upping the production of histamine which will treat the believed infection as an allergy.
Implant, nice idea but faulty at best.
Problem here is our bodies hate us. The implant would keep on injecting us with anti-histamines to keep the reaction down. Now here is where our bodies come in.
They build up a tolerance to substances thet either exist in our bodies naturally or those we put into them.
Hence addicts need to up their dose to keep gettin the high of the first time.
We supress the histamine level, our bodies get annoyed and make more.
We up the anti-histamines to supress it further and the body make more.
This is an endless loop till the meds can't keep up and seasickness returns.
And the whole 'people will cope with it and grow over it'. Sorry, but no.
It will take many many MANY generations to get over it, if we are lucky a few million times.
Not to mention the whole being up above the clouds means the air is to thin to breathe normally.
Let me offer this solution to the whole problem.
Again, it has to deal with the city.
We need a city that is both level and able to keep in the air.
Think of the city as a cup in a bowl.
The bowl is the section that is essential to keeping the city flying and all pieces we prefer to ignore.
This piece is made of the tungsten metal with the mesh we talked about earlier. It contains the fans to keep us from deviating from our location. The water purification system, sewer collection, air filtration and all that stuff.
The liquids and air will move through fexible and strong tubes into the inner cup.
The city itself and the fundation are seperated by an liquid cusion. This allows the fundation to move while keeping the inner city compleetly level.
Now the air problem and the horizon.
A semi permable forcefield. It will register the amount of O2 in the city. It will allow for circulation and winds, but will keep the atmosphere sustainable for human ( and animal) life. We will still get powerfull winds but the forcefield will lock up during treathening winds. On the lower part of the forcefield an low level hologram will show an fake horizon so to everybody there is always an stable horizon.
This allows us to live without seasickness on the city.
The balloons will just be to give people a safe feeling.
Basicly, please don't get me wrong, people are idiots. If they don't know how something works for which they rely on to live, they freak out. Science will be pushed down the rabbit hole and killed in it's tracks.
City will burn, people will blame science and things go from bad to worse.
Happened befor and will happen every, single, time.
As we are going for semi sci-fi and to cut down on the weigth and because anti-gravity fields are fun.
The cities had to be brought there. Underneath every floating city, at the planet's survace is a propulsion system.
Underneath the city there is the second part of the system allowing the city to float up from the earth to it's current location.
We don't have the ability to do this now, but the first systems have been build. I'm assuming we get better at things as we go. Also we don't have to explain how the city can carry so much weigth by balloons and fans.
The system on the survace will use termal dynamics plugged into the planet's core and sercived by androids or an unnamed work force.
Now I must confess I am not a vegetarian, not planning to and neither is Damien.
However I'm sure people will cry if we build a animal processing plant inside a city.
Let's create a secundary floating facility we will never visit.....Maybe....Possible.......
Every city gets one. Now will part of the veggies and fruits will be grown in the city. Not to be green, but to be effecient.
The water will be in large tanks and through these tanks there will be pipes. These pipes will contain warm air and other warm thuff that needs to be cooled down. First tanks will contain plants that need warmth and each tank will have plants that need less and less warmth. Cooling down the pipes and lowering the heating bills.
But to get enough food for large amount of people, you need more room than the city can handle.
So the secundary facility just for food. Plants will again be grown in water and the tanks will again be used to cool down the pipes.
Instead of simply growing animals and slaugthering them, Just grow the parts we need.
Science is already growing meat, lets keep going with we get better and grow meat there. Atleast that is all we know.
Lets see.
Floating cities, check.
Food supply, check.
....
Oh yeah, bird people.
It is true, our skin cannot carry feathers as it is.
So apart from the blood and bone changing through both forms, lets do the same for the skin.
All animals but us have loose skin. Meaning the skin is not stuck to the flesh. With us it is. It's less of a major change than the bone and blood thing.
Wanted to say placement of wings might be a problem, but yeah.
We don't have to lose the arms.
lookie lookie
True our wings will be longer, but our wings don't need to be 3 times our charries side.
If our wings are placed just below our shoulderjoints, like in the lookie link, if our wings reach from below their shoulders and stretching down to their butts, the wings should give us enough lift to fly.
I can understand farting out a tail everytime we grow wings feels weird.
If we go with the altered skin so we can have feathers, why not a a row of longer feathers on the outside of the legs. Keep the legs together and you have a tail. Keeping them seperate and you have legs with nice looking sideburns.
To have our wings, we need more muscles in our chest. Now this gives us good news and bad news.
First off we will need to alter our chest shape. For better muscle attachment a V shaped chest would be helpful for this and if makes us more aerodynamic. Now here is the problem with muscles in the chest area.
Let's look at the amazones. Take their archers. The ones that only fired right handed didn't have a breast on that side.
Those that are trained to fire with both arms have no breasts at all.
Breasts are mostly fatty tissue. So I am sorry but the double D's are going to shrink.
Thing is, I have a problem with the transforming if there arn't rules attached to it.
I don't mind the transformation itself but not like this.
Person runs off, chased by the guards. Turns a corners, changes and flies/free falls away befor the guards reach the corner.
Changing takes time and causes pain.
So with the growing of wings it should take atleast a 30 minutes for the transformation to take place and it should hurt. We are tearing open skin, feathers will pierce the skin all over the place.
Also it should take atleast a week for our bodies to have changed to the lighter bonestructure and such.
Thinking about it, we don't even loose that much mass. We do grow a pair of wings.
However even though our blood changes, we still need a ton more air.
Here the birds come back in. Birds have other lungs than we have.
They have a lung, followed by an airpocket which is connected to an airpocket that runs past their intestines.
We have a diaframe to pull vacume and open our lungs.
Birds use muscles over their body to pull air into the airsack the farthest back. The air will run towarts the lungs, allowing the lungs to get two passes to get the oxygen out of the air.
And please, don't tell me birds don't have airsacks and just have lungs.
During my job I've done enough necropsies on birds to know how their organs are placed and how they look like.
which isnt' a bad thing, but maybe we need to tone it down just a little, give some lee-way t the Magical aspect and the Futuristic aspect.
