Sunday, October 26, 2014

Catherine of Lyonesse




Is that a gorgeous cover, or what?

Considering that the book has now been out, in the UK, for about ten weeks, it is high time and then some that I highlighted it here, (But possible good news on my sluggish posting - fingers crossed! - below.)

How it is selling, as yet I have no idea. On Amazon, not very much, but I am told that it is not a "major channel" in British trade publishing sales, and the fact is that a first novel depends heavily on old fashioned sales off the bookstore shelves.

A public acknowledgement and thanks is due - and overdue - to Tamora Pierce, official Friend of this Blog, and the faerie godmother of Catherine over many years. Also to blog reader and occasional commenter Anita, who originally worked out the genealogy at the front of the book. But I assert sole credit for mistakes.

I should also tip my hat to a reader, 'Gracie,' who posted a wonderful reader review at Amazon. Five stars are always wonderful, but her elegant and insightful comments even more so. Courage and panache, indeed!

And also a tip of hat to a couple hundred of Tammy's fans who responded to her wonderiffic Goodreads review by putting CoL on their to-be-read lists.

Finally, I should say that while the ebook version is not currently available in the US (pending a hoped-for US edition), the paperback version can be ordered from anywhere.  :-)


Biochemistry Note

As I've noted here previously, the life sciences tend to get relatively short shrift in space discussions. I rarely remember life support ecology getting anything like the detailed discussion given to shiny stuff like propulsion systems.

But these things matter, as I have been reminded by being diagnosed with diabetes (type 2 - the kind that doesn't require daily insulin), AKA the American disease, the result of a lifetime of bad dietary habits coming back to bite me. I seem to be responding well to treatment, but one effect of the disease, relevant to this blog, is fatigue.

So, as treatment progresses, I hope to overcome that and start posting here more frequently.


And a Return to Space

Those loyal readers who still drop by here from time to time will surely (?) be glad to hear that I have lately been reading and thinking more about space again. I hope to post some of the results here soon. Meanwhile, I encourage everyone to (re)visit the wonderful Atomic Rockets website, which has been greatly expanded over the past few years even as this blog went relatively quiescent. 

Talk to you again soon!

457 comments:

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jollyreaper said...

Thanks, Eth. I think the setting has some real potential. Looking at Star Wars the Original Trilogy has been positive inspiration; the nuTrilogy and Expanded Universe has been wonderful disinspiration, something to strive to be better than. There is a wearisome parade of Darth Dookiepants hopping about trying to out-evil each other. It is a boring trudge to get through.The way the good stuff worked is that there was an underpinning of a premise behind all the swashbuckling but it didn't get in the way of the swashing and the buckling. Compare the Death Star speech at the beginning of Star Wars with the trade federation nonsense in Menace. The conversation between Vader and Tarkin and Tarkin and his underlings about the last vestiges of the Old Republic being swept away, there's quite a bit of material there. Even Obi-Wan's exposition dump in his hermit shack when he hands over the lightsaber, that could have been some thick and dreary material but Alec invested it with real weight and power.

The story I have in mind starts on a minor world in an important location. Its primary sits at the nexus of several useful space lanes. Remember, it's faster to follow gravity lines between stars and very slow going to move off them. So this planet has made a tidy profit running a space port for repairs, refueling, that sort of thing.

A recent battle won by the dogmatic do-gooders has opened up the whole sector and so they're moving to secure the best routes. They're visited by the rebels who offer to enlist them in the cause. They decline, just as they did when the do-gooders came along. Well, the do-gooders come back and this time with a civilizer-class capital ship, Selection Pressure. This is the ultra-battlestar I mentioned, capable of "civilizing" entire star systems.

What I've got a mind happens here, I see the captain as being similar to a Roman general, the kind who gets put in charge of a legion as a stepping stone for political office. This is his way of making a name for himself out in the savage systems. He doesn't have time for the hemming and hawing of backward planets and he decides to teach them a simple lesson in planetary bombardment.

So what I'm thinking is he's got a visitor from back home who doesn't have any appreciation for what the "civilizing mission" is actually like. So he gives her a demonstration by ordering a counter-force bombardment of the planet.

Our hero in this case happens to be one of the starfighter pilots in the local space force. He scrambles along with the rest of the squadron but suffers a blown engine and can't achieve escape velocity. He's away from the base when it gets plastered and is able to limp along to a designated dispersement point. It's been hit, too, and there's one survivor, a junior technician. She was out here with the rest of her team as a precaution when the civilizer showed up. Her CO fired up the coms in violation of standing orders when the bombardment began, panicking. A turboblaster took care of him and the communications van and anyone standing near. Fortunately, she was far enough away and enough equipment survived. She helps patch up the engine as best they can and limp along to a new rally point.

jollyreaper said...

So the Selection Pressure heads out-system to try and catch the rebels and a small occupation force is left in place. They're more than enough to handle anything that might be left planetside and the space force is pretty much in tatters.

The big surprise is that the rebel fleet didn't head where the do-gooder commander thought: they were lurking a half lightyear out, lying doggo. They could see the FTL drive of the Selection Pressure coming and going and were ready to pounce. Weak as the rebel fleet is, they're still stronger than the garrison force. So they come out of warp and catch the garrison unprepared. The local space force scrambles their remaining fighters to participate in an unintended pincer movement.

Our hero isn't able to get his fighter operational in time for the attack and the tech he picked up told him to suit up, there's no way either of them are going to miss this fight. The electromechanicals for his engine are fried so she's going to operate them by hand from the jumpseat.

The garrison is obliterated.

The planetary government realizes that there's likely to be worse consequences for them when the do-gooders come back because they weren't acting properly cowed from the merciful bombardment. They decide to attach the surviving fighter wing to the rebel carrier in the hopes of giving a big FU to the enemy.

One of the conversations I imagine happening is why the enemy commander's ship is named Selection Pressure. He considers it a personal joke, how the unruly and untamed will be killed off and the docile and tractable will be the only ones left to breed, leaving the savages tame. A parallel conversation will happen among the rebels about how killing off the weak and unwilling to fight will only leave cursed stubborn and vicious survivors, the kind of people who will never forgive and never forget. The thing about evolution, you always have to be careful about what you're selecting for, it might not be what you think.

The initial story would be up to the local planet's fighter wing joining up with the rebels. That would be relatively self-contained. The end point would be the crippling of the Selection Pressure. As I imagine it, they won't be able to destroy it but will leave it wrecked and having to be hauled by tugs out of the sector.

The enemy commander I'm seeing as young, ruthless, capable but not yet wise. The experience here I don't think will teach him compassion but a necessary humility, being a bit cagier about the kind of atrocities he commits. His behavior was needlessly mustache-twirling and there's cannier ways to enslave people. When you next encounter him he will be a far more formidable adversary.

jollyreaper said...

Eth,

Regarding ship classes, I get what you're saying. A favorite example I have is from EVE. The way their fluff works, ships can have their warp drives scrambled, keeping them stuck in place. It has to be done from close-range. So a tackler is a ship that can warp in and then make a fast dash towards the target and scramble the drive before it can make an escape. There's nothing like it in real life and it is purely dictated by how the fluff in the setting works.

For my personal notes, I'm sticking in the real world examples of what the names are and will figure out a better in-story name for it later. For example, the most important ships in space are antimatter transports. They have a similar mystique as the Spanish Treasure Fleet, galleons full of unimaginable riches. Antimatter is the basis for all interstellar travel. So these transports are armed to the teeth and beyond. They are self-escorting but can be augmented with escorts if there's a particular risk. The closest comparison would be SSBN's. Those ships are supposed to remain hidden and launch nukes but they also have torpedoes and excellent sonar and are formidable opponents. A hunter-killer sub that finds a boomer is in for a real fight.

I'll let you know when I have more material together.

jollyreaper said...

Ferrell,

You raise excellent points.

The kicker I'm playing with concerning starfighters is that they may resemble their oceanic counterparts (because they're AWESOME) but it'll feel more real if I take advantage of the differences in space.

Two points I find interesting. One, the A-6 electronic warfare variant takes a two-seat attack aircraft and stretches it into a four-seater. It makes me think of it almost as a throwback to the older torpedo bombers that had three crewmen in a plane not much bigger than a standard fighter.

The second point is the platypus-nosed SU-34 Fullback. It looks like an oversized fighter but when you get a load of how the crew get in, there's a ladder under the nose! It's high enough off the ground they climb into the fighter, there's no raising canopy. Interior photos are thin on the ground but there's supposed to be enough room to get up, move about, there's a galley and a head. Since it's a maritime patrol aircraft that's got to make it a lot more comfy to live in. That's more luxurious than the B-2 which goes on far longer missions.

I'm also trying to keep in mind what a good compromise would be for practicality and realism (for rule of cool levels of realism) of starfighters. For ground-based fighters, there's a lot to be said for using a layout like the gunstar from Last Starfighter. That was a four-engine tailsitter. The typical Star Wars fighter can VTOL with antigrav but that certainly adds to the cost of a ship. I like the idea of smaller fighters doing without antigrav completely and just using the reaction control system for landing. You come in low over the spot you want, stall the aircraft and as you bellyflop out of the sky and cushion it with a powerful blast from the RCS. It uses gases vented from the main engine. So, when it comes time to launch the reactor gets cranking, the engines are hot and a sharp blast lifts the starfighter into the air with the nose pointed up and then the engine blasts away at full power.

I like the hotrod fighters like the original Galactica vipers, the A-Wings, the heavier contenders like the X-Wing (all-time classic) and the unusual heavies like the B-Wing.

If the vehicle is operating mainly in a planetary atmosphere then they'll probably stick with conventional hydrocarbons for the fighters, assuming they don't have much of the super-heavy elements. The helicopter analogs would use antigrav which needs the super-heavies.

jollyreaper said...

One thing I'm trying to tease out is the idea of the galactic economy.

I'm thinking that something like 90% of galactic-level technology is open-source, going out with the colony ships. The 10% that's not common knowledge is locked up in guilds. These guilds have mixed agendas and a sense of the bigger mission such as the Dune organizations did, the Bene Gesserit and Bene Thileaxu (I have no idea if I remembered the spelling on those.)

The kicker is that they budded off missions to go with many of the colonization efforts and those missions were effectively autonomous for all of those years, the best you could to to phone home was beam a com laser at lightspeed. So as the galaxy gets smaller there can be some unacceptable dogmatic drift in some missions. (I'll need to come up with a better name for that, to indicate the kind of autonomy involved.)

The Flesh Guild (in the common vernacular) is the place to go for life extension technologies, limb replacements. If you can't afford their work, you're stuck using robotic prosthetics which are discriminated against in many systems. When you consider what the flesh guild has to offer, they represent one of the most powerful factions in this universe. Talk about dealing with the devil and what you can get for it. They have a lot of pull when manipulating galactic politics.

The antimatter guild will be pretty important since they control the creation of antimatter and thus the galactic economy but they are in a contentious relationship with the transmat guild who fabricate the artificial elements responsible for all the gadgets. They both rely on each other and would love to get the trade secrets.

The newest guild would be a bit of a borrow from Battletech's Comstar, responsible for running the limited FTL communications networks. Likewise, they're devious bastards and you don't trust them. They're necessary in the setting to explain why some messages can travel instantaneously and some only as fast as the courier ship. (Whichever is more dramatic or serves the needs of the story.)

So a pre-FTL planet's economy has to be self-contained. Once contact is made, they have no currency to trade on the galactic market. This is where the guilds step in. If guild missions survived on those planets, their offices will be the base for guild banks offering easy credit. That gets the high-tech doodads coming in and provides more leverage. As for what would be traded, that's a sticking point. It's hard to imagine a luxury good worth trading across lightyears for. I can see the attraction of importing galactic tech finished goods, antimatter, etc, but can't imagine what sort of exports would be worthwhile. It seems a little odd to talk about food exports, timber, other extraction industries such as you usually see in developing nations. The petroleum analog is of course antimatter and isn't coming from planets where most of the people are living.

jollyreaper said...

The homeworlds aggressors I'm thinking are going to be a collection of factions with varying goals. You'll have the ones believing in the mission of civilizing the galaxy. You'll have the ones who are in it for the political advantage foreign conquests will bring back home. (except it's not conquest because it's not a war, obviously.) But the really big idea that won't be clear is that someone wants a whole lot of antimatter.

There's the whole low-hanging fruit debate we've had here about advancements in physics, how there's no more easy discoveries and pushing the boundaries requires bigger and bigger colliders operating at higher and higher energy levels. If Big Science requires big energy, it might not be too crazy an idea to think Really Big Science requires stupendous energy levels.

With the whole human sphere switching to a war economy and an all-out push for creating more antimatter facilities, we'll end up with tremendous, unbelievable capacity. And once the fighting is over and a homeworlds victory attained, all that surplus capacity can be put towards running some crazy-large accelerators and breaking new ground.

One other conflict I didn't mention, the coalition against the homeworlds is a really rough mix of mutually competing ideologies. Think of the divide between free and slave states in the American Revolution. Some systems treat mechanoid minds as human, some do the same for sentient bioroids. Some systems grant no rights, some systems ban them as abominations. Then there's also your usual mix of clashing cultures and practices us 21st century readers would agree are abhorrent and stuff we'd find perfectly normal and cultures in the story would be in disgust over. If you thought the temperance movement was rough, the antisimulationists are going to help you redefine prohibition. Simulationism would be any kind of immersive VR world, you feel you're in there like the Matrix. It can be highly addictive. The more sophisticated systems typically look down on using immersive simulations as pathetic, someone is incapable of finding sufficient interest in the real world. The less sophisticated cultures who are usually blindisded by introduction to the tech end up binging and then having a militant backlash. I would say it bears a relation to the Christian prohibition against suicide. If a peasant becomes a Christian and is promised a paradise in the hereafter, this world sucks so why wait? Top yourself and hang with the angels in short order. Well, soon enough there won't be enough peasants anymore so the priests right quick had to make it clear that shortcuts to heaven won't work, no sir! Gotta serve your time here on this miserable ball of mud and die properly, as God intended.

Anyway, the threat of the homeworlds and their civilizing agenda make strange bedfellows out of cultures that can't stand each other. If the war is ever won, bookies are already taking your bets on who the next wars will involve.

Geoffrey S H said...

"A Storm Ship? ("...If that thing makes it into orbit, it'll bring a storm of fire and metal to our world!") It might depend on if it evolved from an Astroid Deflector ship, or a Planetary Defense Ship, as to what it's called. It might just get it's name from a prominate feature on the original vessel of the type. Whatever it's called, it should be logial and unique."

Let's assume that the spacecraft in question has many weapons, none dominant, so you can't just call it a laserstar. Let's also assume that it has a number of roles to fulfil, but not too many.
Finally, let's assume that it is the largest craft in the constellation.

So it has to have a name that indicates it dominates the battlespace in the depths of the blackest void.....

How about Nightking?

'Sir, three interceptor-killers, four shield stars and two nightkings broke away from the main constellation. I think they mean business!'

P.s.: I wouldn't use 'interceptor' as a term on its own, because too much of space combat may involve intercepting a target, with both spacecraft and point-defence missiles. 'Interceptors have been targeted' might mean your screening force is about to take heavy fire, or that you yourself have targeted pds missiles on incoming ordinance. This could cause some confusion, with perhaps fatal consequences.

If you pick a name, make sure it can't be confused with anything else. 'Intiller' is rather smeerpy, but should be have a unique usage, so I will keep that one...for now. For heavy spacecraft though, I hope 'nightking' is suitable, though it is a bit of a portmanteau. After all, 'dreadnought' merely is a portmanteau that means 'fear nothing'.

jollyreaper said...

I couldn't find where they invented the hunter/killer term for submarines. We've seen a number of different subs historically from fleet submarines to coastal submarines to aircraft-carrying submarines to submarines with big guns (submersible cruisers) to transport and supply subs. Today we are pretty much left with attack subs and boomers. American nuclear boats are called fast attack subs, which is a little excessive in the naming department since we don't have any slow attack subs to differentiate them from. Hunter/killer is the other general designation given to attack subs but, as I said, there's no clear history of the term hunter/killer.

A tank is meant to be a generally useful combatant with a main gun that can engage armored vehicles, buildings, fortifications and machineguns for use against infantry. A tank-destroyer is a cheaper fighting vehicle that is specifically focused on destroying tanks and might have several compromises to make the design more affordable such as placing the gun directly in the body of the tank so that it can only be elevated from a standstill, the tank has to turn on the treads to traverse.

I'm really leaning towards borrowing a little of the logic from the age of sail, especially seeing as those ships had very long service lives with technological changes accumulating at a much slower pace. First rate, second rate, third rate, and the passage of decades seeing a former first rate downrated. The gun count gives a very good shorthand for just what sort of a ship you're talking about. This is the Reason, a 90 gun warship. Without getting into the particulars of construction and layout, you know it is a more powerful unit than the Dreadgnat, 20 guns.

I'm thinking that space travel is rigorous enough that there's not quite as much difference between civilian and military construction as there is today. The main difference will be in the level of armor. Given that shields exist for active defense, the performance difference between a convert warship and a purpose-built is closer than you might think at first.

Sublight ships would have been from the early days of colonization when the warp drives couldn't yet break the light barrier. Those ships could then be upgraded to better drives, better reactors and have more guns added. I like the idea of centuries-old hulls getting modified over the years, the virtue of competent engineering being timeless. It's cool to see relics like the Iowa-class battleship updated with CIWS and cruise missiles, B-52's dropping JDAM's, late model Herky-birds fitted out with glass cockpits and modernized engines. Hell, DC-3 airframes are still going strong seventy years later and can be equipped with modern turboprop engines. It's pathetic to see something like the rapid obsolescence of the pre-dreadnoughts and post-dreadnoughts where a worldbeater becomes as unwelcome as week-old fish in about as much time. The design cycle was so brutal you'd think they were designed by Apple.

jollyreaper said...


SH, your suggestion of an influential class naming the the concept might work, similar to the dreadnought.

I don't know if I pointed this out already but one feature of the drive system I'm imagining is that weapons can't be effectively fired in warp. Ships under warp would remain vulnerable from the sides but not the front and back.

What I envision is space gets scrunched in front and stretched in back and there's a lightshow involved as virtual particle pairs are split apart and rob power from the drive system. The brighter the glow, the less efficiently the drive is working, likely also the harder it's being pushed. The fusion rocket exhaust would be called the torch or candle depending on the navy and the warp drive glow will be the coma and tail, as with comets. The area lacking the light show is the waist and that's where blaster fire could impact the ship. But it's pretty hard to get a 90 degree deflection shot on a ship since anyone sitting there in space is likely looking at the coma or the tail. A defending planet can keep firing at the coma until their guns overheat and those blasts won't make it through until the ship drops from warp.

Now, a ship trying to intercept another ship under warp will come in and dance around the other ship. Civilian ships have safety cutouts that will drop the drive if a collision is imminent. Collisions mean the warp drive gets blown like a surge protector in a lightning strike, if you're lucky. If you aren't lucky the ship could get blown in half. Bigger ships can shrug off collisions with smaller ships. If both drives are of equal power, both ships will likely suffer damage. What I'm thinking is that sharp turns can cause the warp field to collapse and drop and leave the ship vulnerable so the whole art of intercepting a ship under warp turns into a game of chicken. The target is trying to get away from you and you are trying to force them into position where they collapse the field while they are doing the same to you. And to make this work I think the angle of impact has to be important. The tail is stronger than the coma so in a coma to tail strike, the lead ship has a lesser chance of blowing the warp engine and the trailing ship is at far greater risk.

Once the fight is taken out of warp, now it's time for guns to come into effect. Inertia is preserved so regardless of the speed under warp, the ship will proceed upon the same vector it had when it entered warp. Thus if both our combatants were in an equivalent orbit around a planet and went into warp and started a fight, when they dropped out of warp they would both preserve their vectors relative to one another. This means that regardless of what a maximum effective range is on the guns, the fight can sometimes start are disturbingly close distances. The ship that's dropped from warp will then be raising shields and powering up the main batteries while the attacker still under warp would try to select the best angle for approach before dropping as well. The defender gains the advantage here.

This is a variant on the hypersail idea I played around with but modified a bit to fit better with balls-to-the-wall cinematic space opera.

fro1797 said...

Geoffery said:"Let's assume that the spacecraft in question has many weapons, none dominant, so you can't just call it a laserstar. Let's also assume that it has a number of roles to fulfil, but not too many.
Finally, let's assume that it is the largest craft in the constellation."

A Jack of All Trades in Battle: a Battlejack? Warjack? a heavy, all-purpose combat craft with sufficent Delta-V and crew endurance to complete any mission, either alone or as part of a constillation.

Astroid-interceptor, ship-interceptor, fleet-interceptor?

Just some thoughts.

Ferrell

jollyreaper said...

Thinking about it abstractly, you have two missions: area control and area denial. The US Navy is about control, control of sea lanes, control of foreign shorelines. Because the US is a maritime power and if we can't move goods across the sea we're sunk. The USSR was a continental power and their navy was built around area denial. They had transports but didn't need them to fight WWIII, they needed to deny American reinforcements.

A "fleet in being" safely in port might not be out actively doing things but it can keep an enemy's fleet tied up waiting to react to them.

The Japanese took a page from the Europeans and had an obsession with the Decisive Battle. They wanted to get the enemy's capital ships in a single go. The Americans knew that would could go poorly and instead tried to avoid head-on fights.

Generally speaking, Mohammad goes to the mountain or the mountain comes to Mohammad. You either need to bring the fight to the enemy or they will bring the fight to you. If big ships are slow ships, they're not going to chase down smaller, faster opponents. But if your big ship hits their base, that doesn't matter.

In my particular setting big ships are tough ships. There are no cruise missiles or torpedoes, aka no concern about small, nimble attackers punching the lights out of the bruisers.

So as far as this setting is concerned, an interceptor mission would call for a fast ship to intercept another target that's too fast for the big ships to catch and still carries enough firepower to be decisive at the end of the chase. The light ships are great for this. Likewise, any starfighters the big ships carry.

As for the design of major combatants, I think that a wedge is likely, star destroyer-inspired. Weapons provide all around coverage but at least 70% should be able to cover the forward arc, front of the ship is the most heavily-armored, will be pointed at the enemy. Also the angle that presents the smallest profile. Using a wall of battle, you try to stack your ships in a way to concentrate fire and minimize exposure. Damaged ships will fall back behind the wall for protection.

jollyreaper said...


The lesser ships, small and medium, will not take part in the fight between heavies though they could engage in running skirmishes. Scouting is of concern beyond the light cone. Your enemy deploys his fleet from Mars to Earth, you'll see his fusion drives flare in forty minutes. You'll see the warp tails on the same delay. Your enemy deploys from Alpha Centauri, you need a scout to bring you that information. Even if he's only a day or two ahead of the fleet, the warning is crucial. But the other thing the smaller ships can do is leap to exploit holes in the enemy formation or hit weak ships. A mauled heavy would be like a wounded lion surrounded by jackals.

As for starfighters, I like the idea of hull-skimming and getting in close to poke out the eyes. No matter how strong the hull armor, useful bits always need to poke out, sensors and optics and antennae and turrets. A well-placed balloon full of paint can leave a main battle tank blind.

I'm thinking that it will be difficult to go superluminal in star systems since even pebbles aren't that agreeable to warp drive impacts. Ships under warp use astronomic catalogs and their own sensors to plot debris and avoid them. I'm thinking the in-system fight will more closely resemble the usual rocketpunk idea of "no stealth in space" and the tactical situation being a chessboard where you'll see almost all the pieces your opponent has and when he makes his move.

I do find history useful in noting that there's usually a maximum effective size for many weapons. Trying to make something powerful enough to win any conceivable fight often winds up with a weapon that's awesome yet impractical. The Yamato and Musashi were super-battleships and fairly useless. Heavy tanks like the Tiger, too complicated and unreliable to depend on. The super-heavy tanks lacked mobility and were cumbersome. Same with the nazi giant railway guns. Only a few weapons ever came out as all-around awesome, the lightning bruiser as TV tropes calls it. M1 Abrams, the F-15. The drawback there is expense. Maximize speed, defense, firepower, price goes through the roof.

Thucydides said...

While much of your setting is entertaining and even rather self consistent, you actually made one huge "hole"; antimatter.

Since antimatter is the ultimate method of storing energy known in this physical universe, a small amount of antimatter makes a hugely impressive "boom". If we are in a setting where treasure fleets of antimatter tankers are moving in convoys, then there is no reason whatsoever that every ship does not carry as many antimatter torpedoes or missiles (depending on your use of terminology) as possible.

No amount of armour is going to protect your ship once an antimatter warhead makes contact, and even near misses are going to make life very short and exciting for ships caught in the storm of energy and radiation being released (any self respecting antimatter warhead will be like an implosion bomb, with an equal amount of matter and antimatter contained within).

Consider that the reaction between the electrons and positrons in the warhead will be releasing gamma radiation at 512 kEV, and the nucleons and anti nucleons will be releasing showers of radiation and charged particles (such as mesons), then the only practical way to survive would be that every ship be coated in a shell of rock or ice tens of meters thick to stop the radiation.

The old Traveller RPG (glad I found the rules in the back room...;-) had a "meson gun" as the ultimate high tech weapon. By generating a controlled reaction between matter and antimatter in the "gun", an stream of Pi0 (neutral) mesons could be beamed towards the target. By very carefully controlling the speed of the beam, the particles would decay (in our frame of reference) inside the target (in their own frame of reference inside the beam, the mesons would decay in few hundredths of a microsecond, degenerating into high energy electrons and neutrinos. In Traveller, the most advanced meson guns could shoot at targets on the other side of a planet (presumably the targeting information was in the form of neutrinos emitted from the target's reactor...)

So even with fleets of ships built out of asteroids or inside the cores of small ice moons, an determined enemy could deliver enough antimatter to destroy their enemies, and hammer the enemy home planet into a molten ball as well. This makes "fighters" or "missile corvette" class ships more probable (the defender has to deal with a swarm of incoming craft, each capable of carrying enough antimatter to cause severe, if not ship killing, damage.)

Taken to the logical extreme, logistics and resources would suggest that you launch your attack with the equivalent of swarms of cruise missiles, each one with a bus carrying multiple warheads and penetration aids. not fleets of dreadnoughts.

jollyreaper said...

While much of your setting is entertaining and even rather self consistent, you actually made one huge "hole"; antimatter.

Always a sticky topic.

Since antimatter is the ultimate method of storing energy known in this physical universe, a small amount of antimatter makes a hugely impressive "boom". If we are in a setting where treasure fleets of antimatter tankers are moving in convoys, then there is no reason whatsoever that every ship does not carry as many antimatter torpedoes or missiles (depending on your use of terminology) as possible.

The drive technology tends to futz electronics. I'm still working out the details but I'm trying to keep it so that remote weapons and drones aren't the obvious solution. But even if I had no starfighters but wanted to justify big warships, viable antimatter torpedoes/missiles leaves us back in missile spam territory and smaller ships being the default since any hit means you're dead.

What I haven't yet calculated is how expensive antimatter is. It's vital to FTL travel. When pitting fleet against fleet it's ultimately throwing money against money. A billion credits worth of antimatter in a missile barrage might be worth it if the alternative is five billion credits worth of warships with guns trying to do the same work and burning another billion credits to run the reactors and blasters.

No amount of armour is going to protect your ship once an antimatter warhead makes contact, and even near misses are going to make life very short and exciting for ships caught in the storm of energy and radiation being released (any self respecting antimatter warhead will be like an implosion bomb, with an equal amount of matter and antimatter contained within).

There's also the matter of antimatter bombs smuggled planetside. Civilized systems require all starships to escrow their antimatter at an impound station, only have enough reserves onboard for descent/ascent. Heavily audited. They're Singapore-strict on this sort of thing. Any starship is also a potential WMD.

Consider that the reaction between the electrons and positrons in the warhead will be releasing gamma radiation at 512 kEV, and the nucleons and anti nucleons will be releasing showers of radiation and charged particles (such as mesons), then the only practical way to survive would be that every ship be coated in a shell of rock or ice tens of meters thick to stop the radiation.

That's actually something of concern with the turboblasters. If they're capable of bombarding planets and causing nuclear winters, how survivable would a ship be against its own weapons? It sounds like megatons of firepower in every salvo.

The simple answer is I'm going to fudge and handwave against that as best I can.

jollyreaper said...

The old Traveller RPG (glad I found the rules in the back room...;-) had a "meson gun" as the ultimate high tech weapon. By generating a controlled reaction between matter and antimatter in the "gun", an stream of Pi0 (neutral) mesons could be beamed towards the target. By very carefully controlling the speed of the beam, the particles would decay (in our frame of reference) inside the target (in their own frame of reference inside the beam, the mesons would decay in few hundredths of a microsecond, degenerating into high energy electrons and neutrinos. In Traveller, the most advanced meson guns could shoot at targets on the other side of a planet (presumably the targeting information was in the form of neutrinos emitted from the target's reactor...)

So even with fleets of ships built out of asteroids or inside the cores of small ice moons, an determined enemy could deliver enough antimatter to destroy their enemies, and hammer the enemy home planet into a molten ball as well. This makes "fighters" or "missile corvette" class ships more probable (the defender has to deal with a swarm of incoming craft, each capable of carrying enough antimatter to cause severe, if not ship killing, damage.)


Yup, but it breaks the story I'm trying to tell. So I'm trying to patch those holes as best I can. Mind uploads would break things so that's "impossible" by author fiat. Same with strong superhuman AI. Frank Herbert in Dune had to create the Butlerian Jihad to remove AI's from his story, the idea of "let computers do all the work."

Taken to the logical extreme, logistics and resources would suggest that you launch your attack with the equivalent of swarms of cruise missiles, each one with a bus carrying multiple warheads and penetration aids. not fleets of dreadnoughts.

Yup. Valid points. Missile spam doesn't work in this setting and I need to explain why. Remember, this is a setting where manned starfighters make sense. It's taking a lot of special pleading to bring this about.

jollyreaper said...

So just to reiterate how I'm breaking stuff that should work (torpedoes, drones)...

Electronics are what we have now and going forward. Computers, too.

Positronics is the stuff involved with the AI's and mechanoids.

Electromechanical computers are usually used in fighters, miniaturized gears and microscopic vacuum tubes, pointless in the civilian world but necessary when normal computers won't work. Computer displays are pretty simple in fighters.

Both get seriously borked by drive radiation from unshielded units and you can't really afford shielding until you're talking mid-sized starships like cruisers.

Positronics don't exist so I can easily say neutrinos break them just because handwave. With electronics I might just have to break reality to make this a "fact."

Humans have to remain in the loop at the point of the spear because automatic systems can't be trusted due to the above limitations.

Note: capital ships have shielding between the reactor and the rest of the ship. It doesn't shield from other reactor sources. So in combat situations positronic systems have to be taken offline, can't be relied upon. Shielding is super expensive and only a few critical systems are hardened.

And a reiteration on how I plan to keep robots reigned in, pasted in next post.

jollyreaper said...

This is from my setting bible, subject to revision as I find blunders and holes.

Yes, we have robots, but they’re different:
Organic minds beat mechanical minds for size and performance. People are better than machines. People fly starfighters because machines can’t keep up.

The kind of mechanical mind that can be placed in a humanoid robot is not very bright. Useful for simple, routine tasks. Mechanical minds that fill buildings can be quite subtle and useful but generally planetbound. (By choice, for the most part. Space travel is exceedingly dangerous by their standards.) While there are some exceptions, they are difficult to create and expensive. You would not employ them to do a task a cheaper human could instead.

Mechanical minds can be manufactured easily enough but the contents are not easily replicated. You can’t just press a button and copy the mindstate of one brain onto a blank brain and get two. The minds must be trained up through experience, just as an organic mind. However, this can be done with direct sensory inputs.

Mechanical minds are difficult to shield against neutrino radiation from antimatter drives and fusion reactors. They become erratic and glitchy, as if undergoing a seizure. Large starships can afford the expense of shielding the reactors but smaller ships cannot. Mechanical minds will typically go into sleep mode at this point to avoid damaging themselves or their surroundings. This radiation passes through organic minds with no consequence.

The gray matter of the mechanical mind is a prolate spheroid (like an egg with no narrow end) and looks like a clear, black glass, but is a kind of fluid crystal. When active, light sparks from within, the working of the mechanical mind inside. The firing of these synapses causes mechanical and chemical wear which puts an upper limit on the service life of a given mind. The body may be replacable but the mind is not. And as stated previously, the mind cannot be copied, duplicated, or cloned.

Mechanical minds seem a little autistic. Focused, very literal-minded, no sense of humor, not creative.

Machine intelligences are known as mechanoids

Machines that try to be as human as possible are androids

Organic robots are bioroids

Organic robots with sentient minds inside, a type of bioroid, are servitors

Cyborgs, see below.


jollyreaper said...

Cyborgs are the big threat. Machines make for lousy soldiers, even though their bodies are powerful and durable. Organics have the smarts to outfight mechanicals but have squishy, vulnerable bodies. Combine the two and you have a powerful fighting machine. Organic minds do not like giving up the bodies to which they have become accustomed and there is a galaxy-wide aversion to massive cybernetic tinkering. The aversion can be as strong as rejecting a medical prosthetic like a hand to rejecting prosthetics that don’t make an attempt at looking organic to drawing a line at full body replacement.

The worst crime committed by rogue polities is the forcible creation of cyborg soldiers. Paralleling the child-soldier outrages on Earth, these cyborgs be full body replacements, typically using brains from children 6 to 12 years old, whose minds are old enough to be trained and young enough not to be too stubborn. They are brainwashed during the conversion process and become obedient killing machines. A few of these child-cyborgs have been rescued and returned to organic bodies. The psychological trauma is far harder to repair.

Cyborgs are usually an organic brain in a machine body. Occasionally a machine will be used to drive an organic body.

***

The last bit gives me a perfectly space opera enemy, self-replicating cyborg war machines. Draws from the same well as Dr. Who Cybermen with a dash of Dalek and Trek Borg and a heaping portion of body horror. One of the characters is a woman whose brain was recovered intact from a damaged war machine. It's been placed inside a full-body prosthetic. While she looks human to us, she's still a cyborg and thus anathema to many civilized worlds. She desperately wants to return to the flesh but that costs serious money. The flesh guild doesn't do pro bono work.

The other easy mcguffin is that the guild secrets are worth everything to them. There's many examples of proprietary knowledge that has fallen into the public domain. The guilds will stop at nothing to kill defectors, spies, reverse-engineering projects or any other dabbling in their domain.

jollyreaper said...

One other thing, I picked antimatter as a key bit of mcguffinite. Why? Because there doesn't seem to be any real reason for resource scarcity in space. Want more territory? Make another habitat. Need energy? Here's the sun. It seems all post-scarcity and I need scarcity for this kind of space opera. And super-heavy artificial elements are tied in with antimatter generation.

It's perfectly possible to live nicely on planets with renewable power. You can live out in the beyond with fission plants. But if you want FTL, if you want to run with the big dogs, you need to sign the deal with the devil, you need antimatter. And you need antimatter to fuel the ships to defend the orbital assets to get more antimatter to fuel the ships ad nauseum. It's a red queen race, running as fast as you can to stay in place.

jollyreaper said...

The other nut to crack, relativistic kill vehicles. Nothing I've made up rules them out yet. You can spend a few months building inertia ten LY out and then FTL the weapon into range, drop out of warp right outsize the planet's gravity well and the defenders barely get to panic before obliteration.

I figure large rocks can get blown up easily enough so the high speed is not just for the kinetic effects but to minimize exposure.

The only problem with an RKV is that they would wreck planets so you wouldn't use them on territory you wanted to hold. And the cost of fueling could be prohibitively high. You want to take the planet, you need warships in orbit and an army.

If there's nothing to stop them from breaking the setting I'll need to fiat them away somehow.

Geoffrey S H said...

Not sure if this would help, but one of my settings has a 2500-3000Ad civilisation with the same problem. They have therefore strengthened the earth and mars to physically withstand such attacks with much of the population in strengthened shelters when this occurs. girders running through parts of the earth and nano material distributed across the surface [designed to avoid contaminating wildlife and humans] that can form instantly into a mesh to physically hold the planet together, amongst other handwavium items like 'atmospheric strengtheners'. Such technology is also useful in the event of a asteroid strike. Spacecraft and ground forces can therefore fling rkvs and fire light-year strength lasers at each other with planets modified to withstand this.

My other setting dictates that worlds are very rare, and that multiple empires rarely cover a whole world, they can be multi-planet but usually end up sharing the planet with their enemies (planets are big things after all). Therefore rkv destruction is expensive, often self defeating and idiotic.

Not sure if those would help at all. While the settings are reasonably hard sf that's all I could do to combat this problem.

Eth said...

Many interesting things there.

I like your way of keeping VR excesses out. It's believable and actually possible in the future, and the parallel with suicide is a good one.

About avoiding missile spam:
Let's say that energy weapons (here, turbolasers) are powerful enough. Let's say that better defence is only for bigger ships, as it is proportional to the size of the ship.
Then, missiles would be shot down by point defences. You may not even need point defences if main batteries can target them, and I see no reason why they couldn't.
Then a missile barrage big enough to overwhelm a combatant would be economically uninteresting, and everyone uses turbolasers.
Btw, Combatant could be a working name for your battleships. Again, that's what they do (best)

Missiles may still be used as the future equivalent of IEDs: if you can conceal them, say in civilian clutter, then you can try and fire it at point-blank range and catch them by surprise.

Meson beams were based on a now-obsolete science IIRC (mesons actually don't work like that - and they retconned it by saying the gun was invented by someone named Meson), but the principle can still stand with a yet-undiscovered particle with such properties.
It would have to be a neutrino-like ghost particle (only interacting with strong interaction force, i.e. only when hitting it square in the middle) or even (hypothetical IIRC) sterile neutrino (no interaction at all), but have a half-life making it decay in particles that interact with stuff (like photons or baryons as we know and love).
AFAICT, there is nothing forbidding such a particle from existing in our models. Nothing saying it should exist, but that's not much of a problem.

Also, Traveller have a handwave defence made specifically against such weapon, the Meson Screen, that neutralize it. Though it may complicate things.
If I ever use such weapon in a setting, I'll call the particle "Maion", so it would be a Maion gun. No signification there, simply it sounded like it could be a particle's name.

Such handwaved weapon/defence could explain why ships can survive attacks against massive planet-wrecking weapons.
Ships have specialized defences that are efficient at dispersing this particular type of attack. Planets are too big to shield, so even if you shield one particular zone, the attack will simply dump energy in the stuff around until the heat and blast will destroy the fortress. Though you can have fortresses arbitrarily strong against it if you want to change balance around.
I.e. defence is efficient but only works in vacuum.

Some other weapons could theoretically defeat such defence, but would be harder to produce/easier to defend against by other methods. Still, you can keep that around if you need a game-changer (some side comes up with a new deadly weapon) or if someone uses the element of surprise (No-one tried to use an electron beam on them for decades. It would be trivial to defend against by magnetizing the hull, but they got lazy over time - now's our chance!)

Eth said...

I would avoid calling the disrupting radiation "neutrino". Better just saying that it emits disrupting radiation, or the reader may think "wait, neutrinos barely interact with anything, how could it be such a problem? And what are they even using to shield against it anyway?" Which may not be a plothole in your setting, but some will think that regardless.
If you keep it unnamed, the reader won't question whether said radiation could effectively have such proprieties.

About RKVs, the only parade I found apart from conventions/self interest impracticability (both of which are temporary at best), or going full Kardashev with galactic engineering and planet factories, is a variation of the tractor beam handwave.
First, it's a stuff that is pushing on the local mass(es), for example a planet or even a nearby star. Second, it is more efficient and gets more range the more velocity differential there is between said mass and the target object. Third, you can only use it to make said velocity differential decrease.
So it's a bit like hitting the RKV with your planet, but at a distance and not as instantaneously.
If it's fast enough, the energy will turn it into plasma while the planet (or star) will be negligibly heated up all around its core. If it's slow enough, it won't be meaningfully affected but wouldn't be a kinetic danger anyway. You can use it to slow down (and thus deviate) incoming asteroids, though.
It could also be used to protect a ship from tiny relativistic projectiles as well, depending on how it scales.

The advantages are that you can't really use it offensively (if you can accelerate a planet at enough speed for that, then you went full Kardashev anyway) or even for much else than protecting planets (or ship) from RKVs.

jollyreaper said...

Geoffrey,

Interesting for your setting! That's some pretty high level science there. I'm trying to keep mine a a bit more restrained from that. There will be some impressive power played around with, antimatter, the potential for some floating cities when combining the fusion reactors and fancy gravitics, but armoring a planet like you describe sounds like tech an order of magnitude or two beyond what I'm thinking.

Planets are going to be relatively plentiful here. Several waves of human expansion and colonization and collapse means that it's possible to find "virgin" planets with human "natives" that are really just survivors of hard crashes.

I did some reading about plausible ideas for "Life, Jim, but not as we know it."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemistry

I haven't made any hard decisions yet but I'm thinking that there will be several popular biochemistries, ones that keep coming up in nature, and homogenized as planets "close enough" for terraforming to those standards are then terraformed. The generic split in scifi is between oxygen and methane-breathers. I'm not entirely sure how plausible methane-breathing is. The kinds of environments silicon-based lifeforms find comfy might not even be amendable to the development of technology. Sentient sky jellies in a gas giant's atmosphere could be quite brilliant but I don't see them building spaceships on their own. I can't really see it for dolphins, either, not without someone else lending them a helping flipper.

What I think it will come down to is that any non-terragen aliens in the setting would only be interested in our planets if they had similar biochemistries. They would only be interested in our resources if there's nowhere else to obtain them. And given how much stuff is out there in space, I can't see them fighting over asteroid mining rights and conquering a planet to steal the water is just silly. I'm thinking the only real conflict would be antimatter harvesting.

jollyreaper said...

Eth,

I'm calling them turboblasters due to Star Wars already having the turbolasers. I'm not using the laser term because I'm not wanting these weapons to be coherent light. You can't really see an incoming laser beam and dodge it. I like the idea of shit-hot pilots dodging the incoming fire. I have no idea what these "blaster bolts" will be but they wouldn't really be a laser.

I'm a fan of ginsu-beams as were introduced in Bablyon 5 but they're probably a bit too powerful. I haven't decided if I can get away with having them and not breaking the setting.

By 1944, the Japanese couldn't operate surface ships without getting plastered by carrier planes. Their planes in turn couldn't really attack our battle groups without getting plastered by the defensive fire. The point that gets missed is American carrier aircraft would have been very ineffective against comparably-armed opponents, i.e. another American battle group with proximity-fused AA shells. This never came up in real life, of course, but if it did we could have seen a resurgence of the battleship because the dive-bombers would have been too delicate to penetrate the defensive fire of an enemy formation and only heavier combatants could close and engage with big guns and torpedoes.

Now, the one issue with having super-good defensive fire is that what ruins guided missiles also ruins starfighters. That's why the compromise I'm trying to find is one that allows for the combined arms approach while not having any facepalm logic failures.

So what I think it will come down to is non-warp missiles are very vulnerable to defensive fire, warp missiles are pretty dumb and, if the target is not under warp, it's probably inside a planet's gravity well which means it would have to drop from warp and make a long, exposed run to reach the target. And the drive noise makes the missiles pretty dumb, not much good for maneuver.

In real life, there's been a kind of give and take between gun and missile. You can stick a TOW on a HUMVEE and it's a potential tank-killer. An equivalent gun could not be equipped. But the HUMVEE is a pretty delicate ride and not survivable. When talking about tanks, you can fit 30 shells (more or less) in a typical MBT and thus have thirty shots. You couldn't get thirty TOW's or Javelins in the same space, even if you removed the gun. And if the missile was the best weapon for a tank, they'd have missiles, not guns. So it seems like missiles are a way of getting by when you can't mount a gun.

That same calculus seems to be at work on navy ships but could change in the near future if railguns pan out. Potentially a railgun will have a range of hundreds of miles and can hit with the same kind of firepower as a tomahawk cruise missile and for a small, small fraction of the price. Missiles $1.5 million a pop, railguns estimated to be $10k between shell and fuel.

In real life right now missiles don't really need any armor because they are small, fast and are only briefly in the engagement envelope for defensive weapons. Saturation is easy to achieve. In my setting, if missiles need warp to get to the target, shielding to endure defensive fire, and aren't very survivable without live minds running those systems, you may as well have a manned ship closing and engaging with guns whose bolts cannot be intercepted, every shot that connects will do damage to shields or hull.

What makes me weary of missile spam is stuff like David Weber. That man makes Macross missile massacres look restrained.

A missile as IED probably works, especially if hidden in civilian ships. Active defense systems only work when they're turned on and pointed in the right direction. If the missiles are inside the defenses, they can hit targets before anyone can react.

jollyreaper said...

Eth,

Regarding neutrio radiation, the handwave is we don't have positronic circuits and so there's no way you can't say some mumble-mumble in their positro-magnetic fields mumble-mumble.

My problem was trying to imagine something that futzes with electronics and positronics that wouldn't also do violent, terrible things to organics.

What you said about RKV's, I don't want to go Kardashev here. That gives us a Lensman-style arms race that has star-powered lasers and planets as missiles.

In real-life, ICBM's represent a similar "your civilization is boned" threat as RKV's and we've found that they tend to contribute to limited wars since any conventional war that could threaten the existence of a nuclear-armed country would see them launch. The idea of any defense system that could negate mutually-assured destruction was seen as disruptive and dangerous.

So it may well be that nothing prevents the use of RKV's except sheer horror, the same way the Mafia stuck to a code of leaving families out of it because you just didn't go there, the blowback was too huge. Poison gas was used all over the place in WWI, was stockpiled by all sides in WWII but even Hitler never used it on the battlefield, not even in the final year. Somehow, the cat was put back in that bag.

The other idea is that there might be more subtle weapons to use to similar effect. The Screwfly Solution was scary as hell. I'm straight out calling genocidal bio-attacks Screwfly-731. The big advantage here is for a planet with many enemies, it's very difficult to determine who launched the attack.

One other thought is that embargoes can be pretty effective. Planets can't make antimatter on their own. If you destroy the space fleets and blast the ground-based big guns, the planet is neutralized. Japan was ended as a military power before the atom bombs were dropped. The whole idea of the pending land invasion was to utterly break the political machine. Without that, you'd be stuck with needing to keep all those forces mobilized to prevent Japan from rearming. But it's a bit more economical if you can just ring the planet with kinetic kill vehicles and drop rods from God on anything they're doing you don't like. If you need to secure the system for a transit route and the planet itself doesn't interest you, then a quarantine like this keeps their heads down while avoiding the complication of genocide.

Thucydides said...

While I am encouraged thst you are thinking deeply about the implications of your world building exercise, the handwaving is approaching relativistic velocity ;-)

Perhaps you should take a cue from Niven and Pournelle, who stated they had started with the world building assumptions for "The Mote in God's Eye" (the operation and limitations of the Alderson Drive and Langston Field) and allowed the story to develop from there. The end of Mote is pretty much a result of the limitations of the Drive and the Field, rather than the Drive and Field being shoehorned into the story to make things fit.

I also think there is another hole that you should look into. If antimatter is so important, then it makes space control contingent on controlling the area in close solar orbit where the energy collectors for the antimatter factories are located, rather than planets. And of course this means solar space can be heavily defended becasue the energy density is so high (solar powered lasers would be RBOD's almost by definition), while the deep gravity well would make space battles far more dynamic than out where *we* are.

Pulling into a tight solar orbit while attempting to dodge incoming antimatter missiles and being zapped by RBOD's (which are being diffracted by the coronosphere, luckily for you) while attempting to line up the shot on the enemy antimatter factory will be a fantastic scene...

jollyreaper said...

While I am encouraged thst you are thinking deeply about the implications of your world building exercise, the handwaving is approaching relativistic velocity ;-)

I freely admit it. I've put something in physics drink and am preparing to do violence to strict plausibility.

As I said, it's trying to create self-consistent space opera which really isn't in any way possible. What I'm coming up with is space-tinged fantasy more akin to Lord of the Rings than the Foundation Trilogy.

Perhaps you should take a cue from Niven and Pournelle, who stated they had started with the world building assumptions for "The Mote in God's Eye" (the operation and limitations of the Alderson Drive and Langston Field) and allowed the story to develop from there. The end of Mote is pretty much a result of the limitations of the Drive and the Field, rather than the Drive and Field being shoehorned into the story to make things fit.

That's my normal approach. In this case, I know the feel I want for the story and so am trying to hammer and saw at the fluff to make it consistent with that.

I also think there is another hole that you should look into. If antimatter is so important, then it makes space control contingent on controlling the area in close solar orbit where the energy collectors for the antimatter factories are located, rather than planets.


Agreed. that's in the bible. Will paste following.

And of course this means solar space can be heavily defended becasue the energy density is so high (solar powered lasers would be RBOD's almost by definition), while the deep gravity well would make space battles far more dynamic than out where *we* are.

Pulling into a tight solar orbit while attempting to dodge incoming antimatter missiles and being zapped by RBOD's (which are being diffracted by the coronosphere, luckily for you) while attempting to line up the shot on the enemy antimatter factory will be a fantastic scene...


Hadn't thought of solar-pumped lasers but that does make sense.

What I haven't determined yet is the formula for the warp radius, i.e. how far away from a gravity well you need to be to safely warp. I want there to be some consistency but if I do it wrong a decent distance for a planet like Earth might prove ridiculous for a star and make antimatter platforms unassailable. I have to tweak it.

jollyreaper said...

From the setting bible:

Territories
The choicest real estate in any system is control of the primary for antimatter production.

The second best territory is around gas giants where antimatter can also be produced. Prosperous gas giants may have a lot of infrastructure, orbitals, shipyards and such as well as the defenses to secure them. Orbitals (i.e. ginormous space stations) use spin gravity and free solar power, are quite comfortable. If the gas giant is too far from the primary, light must be artificially generated which means fusion reactors which means antimatter is a must.

Habitable planets are the most cost-effective real estate in the system, confer enormous prestige and are highly-prized. Usually the people who control the antimatter production control the planet. Extremely secure and defensible with galactic level technology. A mature planetary defense grid is almost unassailable. Major orbital infrastructure will likely be located in orbit around a planet to take advantage of the defense grid.

Inner system in the goldilocks zone. Orbitals are common here, near the center of civilization represented by the habitable planets but with cheaper rents if the planet is exclusive. Orbitals are usually near the habitable planet but not always.

Asteroid belts, excellent access to cheap minerals up-well. Planetary mining can make sense for planetary use but is inefficient to move bulk ore up-well. As with gas giants, prosperous belts may have a lot of infrastructure, orbitals, shipyards and such as well as the defenses to secure them.

The outer system is effectively the wastelands. There’s no antimatter, no free solar energy. Power has to come from finding fissile material to refine and burn in nuclear reactors. If there’s no antimatter to be had, everyone is reduced to using nuclear rockets to move about and no warp drive, not even the sublight kind.

Rogue planets in interstellar space are the ultimate hideouts. Because of their great mass, entire civilizations can live in their hollowed out interiors, their heat signature lost against the great bulk of the planet. The further off the normal hyperspace lanes the better. But these planets, once their coordinates are discovered, can go back into hiding only with great difficulty.

Worldships are planetoid-sized monstrosities that house entire civilizations. They are dependent on trading with proper solar systems for antimatter but their mobility means they can light our for friendlier skies if things get too hot where they are. They often remain hidden in the interstellar reaches and conduct most of their trade via smaller starships.

Point of distinction: worldships would be heavily armed for defense but likely not that resilient against serious weapons. A warship is a weapon you are prepared to lose, even if it's as valuable as a chess queen. Something like a worldship is more akin to the king, capable of capturing pieces but at that point your game is seriously in rough shape.

fro1797 said...

Jollyreaper said:"What I haven't determined yet is the formula for the warp radius, i.e. how far away from a gravity well you need to be to safely warp. I want there to be some consistency but if I do it wrong a decent distance for a planet like Earth might prove ridiculous for a star and make antimatter platforms unassailable. I have to tweak it."
Here's a suggestion; you can either use a percentage of the bodies radius or use that body's escape velocity (example: you have to achive Earth's escape velocity to go into sublight warp, and solar escape velocity to go into superluminal warp)anyway, whatever you use, you might want to be a little vague, to give you a little more flexability in your writing.

Ferrell

Thucydides said...

I did a bit of thinking about your setting and may have a somewhat less handwavium way of dealing with the issues which still takes most of your points into account. (If you are doing "Lord of the Rings" in space, you are on your own with the Lunar Hobbits....)

1. Antimatter. This is the core of your idea, as I understand it. Since antimatter can only be made in economical quantities in a high energy density environment, antimatter production is primarily in close orbits around stars. While making antimatter is relatively easy (so to speak), it is hugely expensive (change in story setting) because you expend a vast amount boosting "fire goblets" of the stuff out of the Sun's gravity well. SSTO type boosters are used because by law and convention you don't want expended boosters or other "stuff" in tight orbits around the Sun near the antimatter factories.

2. Star lords. So the richest and most powerful people are the owners and operators of the antimatter factories. Most of the story may be their plotting and scheming against their rivals in other star systems, which triggers the action.

3. High radiation environment. Since you have to operate near a star, and space is a heavily radioactive environment anyway, ships and structures tend to be massive due to the amount of passive shielding needed (minimum of 5 metres of water or rock). This is one of the reasons antimatter is so desirable, since it takes a lot of energy to move a ship around. This also explains the computer/robotic issues; high density electronic devices are adversely affected by radiation, so unless they are immersed in a deeply shielded enclosure, they rapidly degrade. This is not an issue for a ship, but missiles, "corvettes" or space fighters cannot carry the amount of shielding needed to protect electronic computers (much less exotic devices like quantum computers). Most computers have devolved to high tech versions of mechanical computers or analogue devices, which also limits the avenues to reach AI level computing.

4. Space battles are fought with dumb weapons. Since missiles are controlled by the equivalent of "clockwork" computers, they don't have much in the way of smarts to defeat countermeasures. Even laser weapons, being mounted on the outside of the ship, have fire control issues (having cables leading back into the computer is a huge weak point in the shielding). Since we can't use "smart" weapons it is back to manned turrets and volume of fire. Ships become much bigger to carry the huge batteries of weapons and absorb damage (which leads to a spiral of antimatter demand, and more pressure to occupy or KO enemy antimatter production facilities.

5. Space opera. Since you need huge, "dumb" spacecraft to safely operate in space, and even bigger, dumber vessels to act as warships (active screens and similar devices will eventually fall prey to radiation, so passive protection and brute force engineering is the order of the day), then you need proper fleets of ships to get things done. Since you are in a mature spec based economy, getting vast amounts of building materials, water or rock for shielding and even hydrogen as reaction mass for in system space flight (or D2 for the on board fusion reactors) isn't an issue. Everything grinds to a halt when antimatter production slows down or is disrupted for any reason at all.

Hope this helps.

jollyreaper said...


I did a bit of thinking about your setting and may have a somewhat less handwavium way of dealing with the issues which still takes most of your points into account. (If you are doing "Lord of the Rings" in space, you are on your own with the Lunar Hobbits....)


They're Space Halflings.

1. Antimatter. This is the core of your idea, as I understand it.

It's a special class of mcguffinite, like Dune's Spice or Robotech's protoculture. It's a rare, expensive resource, utterly vital to the setting, not freely available, helps drive the interstellar economy. If I allowed cheap fusion in the setting there's not as much need to leave the home system, I should think.

Since antimatter can only be made in economical quantities in a high energy density environment, antimatter production is primarily in close orbits around stars. While making antimatter is relatively easy (so to speak), it is hugely expensive (change in story setting) because you expend a vast amount boosting "fire goblets" of the stuff out of the Sun's gravity well. SSTO type boosters are used because by law and convention you don't want expended boosters or other "stuff" in tight orbits around the Sun near the antimatter factories.

I hadn't yet worked out the handwave of how the generation works. If we were only talking about concentrating solar power then using up an entire star's output is dyson sphere territory. I've got a notion that the antimatter platforms do use giant concentrators to collect and focus solar energy but the other part they're doing is using the sun's own magnetic field to focus and skim out guffin particles that are fairly rare and that's the magic sauce that allows for antimatter generation. So they're only using a sqintillioth of the start's photonic output but 100% of the guffin output. If we're talking solar power in a desert, your production limit is how many panels you can afford to put up. I'd like this to be a little more like hydro where there's only so much water you're going to dam up in a river.

The expense of antimatter to my mind is a) the platforms are ridiculously expensive for a good reason and represent the near pinnacle of Galactic technology and b) the guild gets to set the price. The sweet spot is expensive but indispensable. There's no ready substitute. OPEC was worried about getting oil too high and spurring the development of alternative energy sources. One of the deals cut with Reagan in the 80's was to keep the spigots on if he'd nix alternative research.

jollyreaper said...

2. Star lords. So the richest and most powerful people are the owners and operators of the antimatter factories. Most of the story may be their plotting and scheming against their rivals in other star systems, which triggers the action.

That's part of it. The balance of power can vary from system to system. Some systems are a unified polity and the antimatter guild is folded into the royal family by marriage. Some are more diverse.

Most of history in this setting has seen the star systems basically on their own. Why would guilds go out to the planets? Because there's not much more to discover on the tech tree, technology is at a plateau. 90% of what's there to be discovered is public domain. The guilds jealously guard the 10% they know, which is some pretty powerful stuff to be sure. Thing is, if they could learn it, so could anyone else. Half the problem of building an a-bomb was deciding it could be done and convincing the government to fund you. Once an a-bomb is demonstrated, your government will throw money at you to get one for themselves. So the guilds head out to all inhabited systems to set up shop and maintain the monopoly on their knowledge. In cases where locals have made the discoveries on their own, the guild will attempt to bring them into the fold, keep it proprietary. Sometimes what you'll get are rival guilds in the same specialty

As the galaxy becomes a smaller place, all the old power dynamics are changing.

The real kicker here is that the war the homeworld do-gooders kicked off is causing the formation of serious interstellar quasi-governments to oppose them.

jollyreaper said...

3. High radiation environment. Since you have to operate near a star, and space is a heavily radioactive environment anyway, ships and structures tend to be massive due to the amount of passive shielding needed (minimum of 5 metres of water or rock). This is one of the reasons antimatter is so desirable, since it takes a lot of energy to move a ship around. This also explains the computer/robotic issues; high density electronic devices are adversely affected by radiation, so unless they are immersed in a deeply shielded enclosure, they rapidly degrade. This is not an issue for a ship, but missiles, "corvettes" or space fighters cannot carry the amount of shielding needed to protect electronic computers (much less exotic devices like quantum computers). Most computers have devolved to high tech versions of mechanical computers or analogue devices, which also limits the avenues to reach AI level computing.

Well, not all fights would take place around the platforms near stars. They're usually the last places anyone wants to fight.

And we have electronics working on space probes just fine. I think we'd need more than natural radiation levels to explain missiles not working.

Oh, I know. Combat sees a lot of EMP? Loads so high missiles can't be shielded?

4. Space battles are fought with dumb weapons. Since missiles are controlled by the equivalent of "clockwork" computers, they don't have much in the way of smarts to defeat countermeasures. Even laser weapons, being mounted on the outside of the ship, have fire control issues (having cables leading back into the computer is a huge weak point in the shielding). Since we can't use "smart" weapons it is back to manned turrets and volume of fire. Ships become much bigger to carry the huge batteries of weapons and absorb damage (which leads to a spiral of antimatter demand, and more pressure to occupy or KO enemy antimatter production facilities.

Yes, something like that.

5. Space opera. Since you need huge, "dumb" spacecraft to safely operate in space, and even bigger, dumber vessels to act as warships (active screens and similar devices will eventually fall prey to radiation, so passive protection and brute force engineering is the order of the day), then you need proper fleets of ships to get things done. Since you are in a mature spec based economy, getting vast amounts of building materials, water or rock for shielding and even hydrogen as reaction mass for in system space flight (or D2 for the on board fusion reactors) isn't an issue. Everything grinds to a halt when antimatter production slows down or is disrupted for any reason at all.

Hope this helps.


Yes. Echoes my thinking. Thanks!

Thucydides said...

Yes, I was trying to specify EMP loads for radiation, but has some sort of headspace issue while typing...;-)

While you might not want to fight near a star, this is the locus of everything, since you are ultimatly after the antimatter production facilities, either to capture them for your own use, or to destroy them and deny them to the enemy.

A very clever stratagist might be able to finess things so the enemy is drawn out of position and the epic space battle takes place "somewhere else", but given the setting parameters it is hard to imagine how that would work.

jollyreaper said...

Also, I figured out what class the battlestars are going to be. The homeworld do-gooders have a civil religion central to their societies. This sort of ideal saw the original colony ships sent out in the first place, the goal of spreading humanity to the stars. Expressly not a commercial undertaking. Given culture drift over thousands of years, interpretation of charitable acts can drift. The conquest of these colonies is seen as saving us from ourselves (See civilization collapse theory several posts back.)

So, what they're doing is the Great Work, the Great Mission. These battlestars are Civilizer-class Mission Ships. But that's not what the natives call them. They're Worldtakers.

I spitballed some names. I do like the unusual, like the Culture ships. CMS = civilizer mission ship

CMS Selection Pressure
CMS Object Lesson
CMS Compliance Rewarded
CMS Learning Experience
CMS Humble Servant
CMS Historic Inevitability

Rebel ships might be plays on the British tradition of adverb names.

The cruiser Insouciant
The cruiser Indubitable
The cruiser Impertinent
The scout Prying Eyes
The (whatever the super-dreadnought is called) Tender Mercies

jollyreaper said...

Yes, I was trying to specify EMP loads for radiation, but has some sort of headspace issue while typing...;-)

While you might not want to fight near a star, this is the locus of everything, since you are ultimatly after the antimatter production facilities, either to capture them for your own use, or to destroy them and deny them to the enemy.

A very clever stratagist might be able to finess things so the enemy is drawn out of position and the epic space battle takes place "somewhere else", but given the setting parameters it is hard to imagine how that would work.


You know, that's something I hadn't fully fleshed out yet. Antimatter platforms are important but the other parts of an inhabited system are important, too. But depending on how close the battles would be to a star, that would tend to influence ships designs. If the USN had to operate in the Arctic 50% of the time, the ships would have to reflect that in their design.

I don't know how close the platforms have to be, how bad the heat loads will be and what constitutes normal operating environments for spaceships. Also, I need to make sure it makes sense with the rest of the fluff. I can't make a lot of noise about major warships risking their hulls boiling away getting close to an antimatter platform when it turns out the insolation they're experiencing is half of what they're usually shrugging off under a turbo-blaster barrage.

Eh. I think what I need to do is get some stuff actually written and then see where the holes are. Got a story idea for a smuggler, excuse me, I mean a practitioner of the discreet trade, running the Bal-Toth Blockade. He's Gentleman Rabe Sarthe of the good ship Hushful Slip. Should be a nice and simple space yarn.

jollyreaper said...

One other thought. The reason why what the do-gooders are doing is so astounding historically is that nobody had ever waged war on such a scale before. With the constant rise and fall of civilizations in different systems, you might see orbitals abandoned because the expertise to maintain them was lost and at least planets provide light and air for free. (Assuming they're biologically stable enough at this point. If they're still under active terraforming when civilization collapses, they'll regress and become uninhabitable.)

Anyway, the greatest economic size anyone had ever heard of was a solar system. Only with the more recent era of fast FTL could you talk about meaningful trade.

There were still wars, of course. A system with two or more habitable worlds could war, the orbitals could war. And planets, orbitals, other properties could be invaded, conquered.

When systems were relatively close to each other there could even be interstellar invasions, quite doable if you retain the technology for starships and your target does not. You can threaten to drop rocks on them if they don't come around to your way of thinking. But you're not sending tribute back to the home system. That might have been a twenty year voyage to get there.

Well-developed, defended worlds could not be taken, historically. That the do-gooders are doing it and doing it wholesale is something that's taken decades to wrap the brain around.

Geoffrey S H said...

I have been reading your description of the worldtakers, and I have had an idea on what they might look like. With your permission, could I make a drawing of it? It might take some time, but it is an interesting challenge.

jollyreaper said...

Be my guest, Geoffrey!

jollyreaper said...

Just a general note on the visual aesthetic for the ships. I really liked the work done on Star Wars and Galactica in the 80's. I know some of the same people worked on both. I love the "used future" look. I love the detail and greedling that goes into the designs.

A shape I have in mind for a cruiser vessel is a squashed cylinder, tapered at both ends narrowing to a blunt, bullet-like tip, the stern a bit blunder and that's where the space deck is for embarked craft. The engines are located in four bulging nacelles on the outer hull at the waist. From the front if you drew a line across them diagonally you'd have a big X, not a +. The exhaust ports are armored and can be sealed in combat. Like Babylon 5's starfury, they're front and back. Civilian ships usually just put one set of engines in back and do a turnover maneuver if they need to slow down. Military ships spend the extra mass on flexibility because a warship can pull backwards while keeping the armored front pointed at the enemy.

Much as I like the imperial star destroyer design, the superstructure doesn't make a whole lot of sense. That bit was clearly modeled on prior wet navy ships and has no application in space. These ships will have some observation decks outside the armor line for people who want to get a look at the stars but these spaces are understood to be completely expendable in real combat. The bridge is not on the outside but buried deep inside the heart of the ship.

Blaster turrets should have good lines of sight over as much of the ship as possible. I think smaller starships might even have them out on sponsons that have a greater than 180 degree field of fire, like the Independence War/I-War video game. I want to avoid the oddness of the Star Destroyer where the guns on the model can only be used in broadsides.

One thing that could be an issue, ships would be fairly blind with the warp model I'm describing, poor visibility ahead and astern. So I'm thinking it might be necessary to have a pair of sensor masts that poke out from the waist and try to see around the coma in front. Seeing behind would remain difficult due to the wider tail. This means a ship that isn't checking the baffles could be snuck up on from behind while under warp.

The other thing for warp is I have an idea that it might look nice to require doodads to emerge from the hull to generate the field properly. They're delicate which is why they are recessed behind serious armor when in combat but they have to be run out when preparing to go to warp. I'm not sure what they should look like but it adds to the tactical complexity of combat. You nail the emitters and you can end up with a Bismarck situation, jamming the rudder and leaving a major warship crippled. It's the kind of thing captains expect to have damaged, damage control is equipped to swap them out in emergencies, but it is difficult to do in combat situations.

What I'd like to avoid is having any one design be the obvious solution for all situations. Modern submarines all look distressingly similar for obvious hydrodynamic reasons. Many 4th generation fighters all ended up with the same twin engine, twin tail appearance. Again, optimal shape. And all tanks look alike. I'd like to keep the range of valid designs open.

Thucydides said...

Once again, letting the story flow from the parameters helps solve some of your problems. IF ships by default need 5m thick shells of water or rock to stop the normal ionizing radiation from space, then they have a huge amount of "armour" and thermal mass to absorb hits and near misses by even RBODs and nuclear warheads. Antimatter warheads pack enough of a punch to gouge huge craters in the side of a ship of this size, or even crack them open like eggs (although large antimatter warheads have a few obvious drawbacks of their own; like how to keep them stable incised your ship before you need to use them?).

So a ship like that should be able to operate in close orbit around the sun for a limited period of time. If they carry a large heat sink inside then the time becomes greater, and if they have some way to eliminate heat during close passage of the star, then they can operate for prolonged periods.

This leads to a fairly simple handwave. "Refrigerator lasers". This concept has been around for a while, and simply means the thermal energy is being converted into a high power laser beam and used to dump the heat even against the high background of the star's corona.

The refrigerator laser obviously uses a bit of handwavium to ensure it's waste heat does not cook the ship or platform either, but you are writing a story, not the ship engineering manual.

This also goes back to the antimatter factories themselves. Antimatter can be made without any "Applied Phlebotinum" simply by focusing enough energy on the task (giant particle beam colliders do this today). The refrigerator lasers on the platforms also supply the defensive firepower (if things get dicey, then a barrage of missiles and even detonating filled "Fire Goblets" of antimatter can be used to beef up the defense.)

So your ships are already capable of operating in the solar environment by default, and a huge battleship with it's multiple heat sinks frozen inside and a honking refrigerator laser can sit in the photosphere and slug it out with an antimatter factory and its retinue of equally large defending ships.

And given the parameters you have set for the story, so long as the local Star Lord has control of the in system antimatter factory, then he is "not losing". The enemy occupation of the Gas giants is meaningless so long as the ultimate source of economic and political advantage is in enemy hands. So at some point Admiral Sun Tzu needs to find a way to entice the enemy fleet to come out and engage, or he is going to have to lead his fleet in an essentially head on "Death ride" into the enemy sun's gravity well.

Geoffrey S H said...

This will take about 3 weeks to do I think due to work. I will try and do it as a side-on 2d picture and a 3d (sketchup) picture as well.

I did a little sketch before you responded, and your description about the front end of the cruise and its fat cylinder shape weirdly echoed what I'd already done! Regarding the front bullet end, have you considered having that bit open up beak-like to disgorge frigates, if it is large enough to carry such craft? Just a thought. I will get on this asap!

jollyreaper said...

Concerning the setting I've been mentioning, here's a thought I had for the early STL colony ships. I don't think there will be any working hibernation technology so anything going interstellar, even if there's massive gene banks, it's going to have to be a generation ship. So the resulting vessel is going to be unbelievably massive with a working biosphere inside.

These name I had for these ships was voidspanner but a quick googling shows this is not an original name. So I guess I'll have to relegate it to a working title. Anyway, the ships will be built along the lines of Arthur C. Clarke's Rama, a main cylindrical pressure hull tens of miles long, miles across, containing an entire working biosphere. The reaction mass, engines, stores and other stuff would be mounted on the non-rotating space frame the cylinder attaches to.

The compliment would run to the tens of thousands. Only a small portion of them would be involved in the specifics of ship operations, engineering and astrogation and the like. Most of the crew will be involved in running what is essentially a town in space.

The original conception I had for this sort of ship has been knocking around in my head for a while. After a ship like this has been in operation for hundreds of years, it's easy for the operations crew to become an elite who will draw promising recruits from the common ranks who themselves increasingly lose perspective on just what the ship is and what it does. The biosphere becomes a bit of a jungle that they need to survive but can also be dangerous with the flora and fauna that thrive there. This is a ship so large it's easy for tribes of runaways to live in deep in the habitat.

The political situation on a ship like this can be complicated. By sheer necessity, the constant function of vital systems must be preserved for the failure of any system means the death of all. It's not like on a planet where the elite can lay away stores and outlast a famine caused by their wars. But the lesser struggles can be intense and deadly nonetheless.

With the development of FTL, the ships have been retrofitted. Their immense size was once required because there was no other way to cross the stars. They are obsolete in that regard. But as mobile homes for populations that don't wish to be tied down to any one system, who value prompt mobility, they remain unmatched.

DinduGoy(ransomcheckyouremail) said...

I just read CoL. It was amazing! I hate romance books, but i thought i would try yours. Unlike all other romances i have tried, this one made the main character's search for a husband feel real and needed. Her reasons for rejecting the different suitors were also great.

I was very happy to find that her decision to dump the dauphin, rather than being played for drama or angst, was used to show how much she had grown and how much she realized her duty was to her people and her kingdom.

Very well done, sir!

Geoffrey S Hicking said...

I have a small question for people here:

I have been reading Alastair Young's 'Eldraeverse' and he is writing some incredible stuff. Unfortunately for e, some of it has some similarities to my own work (though it is far superior to mine) and given that I haven't put any of my stuff out to be published I am therefore trying to change it so that it doesn't look like I've copied him if I do.

One particular problem though is his references to phased array lasers that cover spacecraft hulls and work almost like offensive shields. I am trying to change my near identical, independent thought up version, but I am asking people if they know of anyone else that has used this idea- I don't want to change it slightly and then find I've merely replicated someone else's efforts. Any ideas?

fro1797 said...

I think that several people have had this idea, so you might not need to stress too much about it. Emphisize the unique aspects of your idea and not so much the common elements. After all, most people se hulls to contain the crews and stuff in their spacecraft, and no one points at that and accusses the author of copying some else...

Ferrell

jollyreaper said...

i don't waste a lot of time worrying about whether or not something has been done before; I can guarantee you it usually will be. With any story there's going to be fluff and meat. Fluff is the background, the setting, the technology. The meat is what's specifically going on with the characters, the big plot.

The usual definition of proper SF is that you can't really transport the story to another time and place, the sciency stuff is key to the story. But I think that's a bit rigid. Asimov's robot stories are seen as clearly SF, you can't really move those plot points into a western setting, but even at that it's not new. Pygmalion involves a sculptor creating a sculpture that becomes imbued with life. The whole idea of the alchemist creating homunculi again plays with the same tropes that later come up with robot stories.

Let's put it this way. If you were writing a story that has a robot character in it but the point of the story isn't the obsession over human identity and what it means to be alive and so forth, you're not really ripping off Blade Runner. If your shields are actually active lasers but it's not really the point of the story, I wouldn't worry about it.

As a case in point, Marvel is currently in the process of blowing up all their universes. Blah, blah, universes are colliding, the heroes of each alternate Earth are having to make the choice of whether they accept oblivion with honor or ruthlessly kill off the impacting universe.

Well, this actually is exactly like a story idea I had, Universe-0. The basic nutshell is physicists are performing an experiment to test multi-world theory. The end result: there weren't multiple worlds; there are now. The worlds are multiplying and advancing entropy so that the universe will suffer heat death in a matter of years, not eons. So what happens is all of the world governments throw their full resources into researching this problem. Teams are sent through portals to the other worlds to figure out what needs done. The story would proceed with a series of revelations. The first big surprise is the first scene: we see a man sitting on the ground outside his ash-covered house.

jollyreaper said...

It looks like WWIII just happened and he's buried his family. It looks like he's the last man on Earth. Then a truck rolls up. They ask for him by name and say come with us. They drive back into town and go through a portal and they're back in the lab. He's informed that he's back in universe-0, the hypocenter of the multiple universe crisis. They just lost one of him on a field team and they need to pick up a spare. Don't worry, his wife and kids are still here in universe-0. They don't need to know he's the replacement. Then you get a series of mindscrews as you learn what's going on. You find out that the scientists know they're the original universe because all the other universes have faster time and are thus further in the future. Nobody is as far back as they are and none of the other projects ever had a successful experiment -- this is the primary universe. And they're deploying physics packages on the other side of the portal to collapse those universes, incidentally killing everyone in them. If they handle this just right they will control the collapse of all these universes and universe-0 will be the only one remaining. Of course, then they discover a universe further in the past than they are and their team is deploying physics packages, too. You also find out that there's mumbo-jumbo about not being able to have multiple copies of someone in one universe for long periods of time, can't be done, only to discover that not only can it be done, the whole project has been duplicated. There's a dozen identical teams sandboxed from each other working on the same project.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is Marvel's idea and mine have superficial similiarities but the execution is totally, radically different. I don't feel like a plagiarist, especially since I came up with it first.

Geoffrey S Hicking said...

Thanks guys, I admit I panicked slightly when I saw his ideas.

I've had a small thought in regard to the fermi paradox. You see, one possible explanation for it is that the universe is potentially cleansed of life by some 'berserker' civilisation, and therefore there are no emissions or radio signals. Mr Chung has put some new material on his website about how there might be multiple civilisations at the same time that might try to wipe each other out, and might do this with the concentrated power of the sun so as to hit something at such a long range.
My problem with this is thus:

If this has been happening for so long.... why can't we see the evidence of relativistic missiles and petawatt lasers crossing the expanse as we gaze out with our telescopes?

Of course we might miss more stealthy methods of civ killing (and the 'gun going off in central park' analogy laid out on Atomic Rockets would justify such a stealthy approach) but it does nonetheless seem a reasonable flaw to point out for that variant of the fermi paradox.

Thucydides said...

An interesting idea I saw once (can't think of where it came from, though) is that a really advanced civilization uses the same amount of energy needed to travel between the stars to create "basement" universes which are custom designed to their own particular liking.

Instead of travelling endless light years looking for stars and planets that are close enough to the ones you left behind for a viable colony; you create a universe with initial conditions that favour the development of the types of stars and planets that are desirable for you. Once the basement universe is instantiated, you follow it down the wormhole neck, and it closes behind you, leaving no more traces of you or your civilization. IF everyone does this (as a way of maximizing the desired outcomes) then there is no large scale stellar exploration, universe shaping events or mega engineering in our "baseline" universe; no civilized race would bother to do so when creating their "own" custom universe is so much more efficient.

Geoffrey S H said...

jollyreaper! I got the Mission ship drawing done. I can only put it on deviantart so that you can see it. If I could have found a more private way I would have done so.
I missed out the waist antennae by mistake, my apologies. The drawing may not look much but my computer cannot handle any more detail. I may have added one or two things that it could handle for the sake of extra greebles/detail. I hope this approaches what you were looking for. I also posted your original explanation for the sake of context.

If you are unhappy with any of it, then please let me know (and if you don't want that idea online for others to pinch it then I will remove it asap).

Let me know what you think!

http://gs78.deviantart.com/art/Mission-Ship-537827569?ga_submit_new=10%253A1433589172

fro1797 said...

Geoffrey, I just took a peek at your design for Jollyreaper; awesome design. You two should collaborate more often!

Ferrell

Rick said...

Hello all - I'm baaaaack!

Adventures in Orbital Space

DinduGoy(ransomcheckyouremail) said...

Hey! Thought you were lost to us. Just read the book. Really good. Is there a sequel in the works?

Rick said...

Thank you - glad you liked it!

There is indeed a prospective sequel. Random House UK is all shook up, but my agent is in touch with the now-indie editor who originally bought the book.

Rick said...

I was so wrapped up in relaunching the blog that I didn't add that - shameless plug here - I would *love* a few words of comment at Goodreads, or Amazon or wherever, to encourage some discussion of the book!

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