Trope-a-Day: Generation Ships

Generation Ships: The Empire itself has never used generation ships, despite thinking of the concept.  Regular lighthuggers don’t count – the whole immortality thing means that while children may well be born en voyage, the people who got on will by and large be the same people who’ll get off.  Their first burst of interstellar colonization (the Thirteen Colonies) was done subluminally, but the Deep Stars carried frozen colonists, so they don’t count either.  And the wandering city-ships don’t count simply because they’re not a means of transport, they’re places people live – and people come and go all the time, any time they pass through a system.

Which is not, of course, to say that the concept’s never been used by anyone else; I’m sure it has, probably quite a bit, and still is in places beyond the Associated Worlds, or where they’re still en route.  And, arguably, the couple of nomadic cultures (the londian, for one example) who live on wandering city-ships and have nowhere to leave them for but other city-ships might well count.

Trope-a-Day: Gendercide

Gendercide: Happened, incompletely (two-thirds of the female population killed), to the shan kari, when their learning robots generalized their anti-self-replication police-code to things that weren’t robots, and therefore concluded that it was necessary to wipe out the female of the species due to their built-in factories for making more of themselves.

Today, the Shan Kari Confederacy is known for its skewed sex ratio, its extensive use of forced-growth cloning, and its extreme hostility towards robotic technology and digital sophonts.

Trope-a-Day: Gender is No Object

Gender Is No Object: Played almost straight with the eldrae, due to any and all of: lesser sexual dimorphism; population demographics that made it impractical to waste much of the capacity of half the population – at least if one didn’t want to get one’s ass kicked by one’s neighbors with a less bizarre approach to sophont resources; other consequences of low birth rate; and the even distribution of mental strength and in particular qalasír which would render trying to enforce such a thing highly unwise. ‘Cause she’ll/he’ll kill you with her/his brain.

(Note: that’s not a comparison of women to men, but eldrae to humans.  We’re willing to put up with a lot more bullshit, as individuals and as a species – hell, it’s right there in the brain architecture differences – than they are before doing anything about it.  This plays out in any number of ways, in their social context – it just happens that one of them is that were some benighted sod, in the rough-and-tumble days of yore before current civilization, to have come up with a doctrine of male supremacy, he undoubtedly would have acquired a blade in the gullet from the first woman who understood what he was driving at.  Which is almost certainly sufficient to explain why no such thing ever made it into the historical record.

The gender-flipped reverse, naturally, also applies.)

Of course, that is almost straight.  A few professions are gender-imbalanced, mostly for various historical reasons, although occasionally for physiological – the legions are 2:1 male-heavy and the navy 3:2 female-heavy, for example, if we eliminate the herms and neuters and other from consideration – but every profession – yes, including all those ones we hang stereotypes off of – has all genders represented, and generally accepts and treats them all without distinction.

Of course, it’s all rendered even more meaningless in the modern era, seeing as changing sex is something that’s not merely easy, it’s something that’s widely practiced, even just out of curiosity, so it’s not like those gender ratios are made up of the same people all the time anyway.

(And yes, all the ‘freshers are unisex.  But then, they’re also not shared.  That’s barbaric.)

Non-Standard Starship Scuffles

(So there’s this trope which I missed when I originally put my list together (and which I will no doubt get to again in due course).

It’s called Standard Starship Scuffle, and it pretty much encapsulates every TV-scifi cliche imaginable. So, y’know, since I now have various fictive people critiquing it in my head with extra sarcasm, here’s some metafictional commentary on the way things actually work:)

Detection and Stealth

Before you can engage the enemy, you must first detect the enemy. Paradoxically, this is both extremely easy, and rather difficult.

To begin with, detection itself is easy. There is, to sum up many an armchair strategist’s lament, no stealth in space. Running the life support alone makes a starship stand out 300K hotter – for warm-blooded oxygen-breathers – than the background of space. Using power plant, thrusters, weapons systems, or anything else aboard only makes it more visible. Starships stand out plainly against the near-absolute cold of space, even across entire star systems, and this is inescapable.

Stealth, such as it is, would be better described as masquerade. One cannot avoid being detected; but one may be able to avoid being identified, or identified correctly. Performing such masquerades by altering one’s sensor signature is an important part of the function of a military starship’s defense drones.

It is difficult, on the other hand, because light, that sluggard, imposes an absolute limit on the currency of the data available. No sensor yet developed is capable of detecting objects in real time at a distance: at best, one can see what the situation was when light left that region.

Longscan

The answer to this is longscan.

Shortscan is what one’s own starship’s sensors, passive and active, are reporting.

Longscan, on the other hand, is the informational gestalt of that shortscan information along with all informational available from other sources (other starships in one’s formation or elsewhere in the system; tactical observation platforms; civilian navigation buoys or stargates, when available; and so forth), along with AI predictive extrapolations of what each starship or other object visible in longscan has done since the last update and/or will do, based on further extrapolations of what their longscan is telling them – and projections, likewise, of what they can know about your actions.

(Establishing this is in turn complicated by the nature of the tactical networks that provide that informational gestalt; modern navies provide their ships with tangle channel FTL communications between themselves and their own observation platforms, but since tangle-channel relays are point-to-point, this does not apply to most civilian sources except, in wealthier systems, as relays between STL EM communications buoys. Determining the “shape of the information wave” – who can know what, and when – is one of the most complex problems a warship’s tactical department faces.)

All of this information is displayed upon the tactical display, along with probability and reliability estimates, in graphical form. Learning how to read these tactical displays at a glance is, in itself, a significant part of naval officer training.

Observation Platforms

One of the greatest advantages one can have, therefore, is expanding one’s informational gestalt. Thus, virtually all military starships carry observation platforms with them for ad hoc deployment; and indeed, most navies routinely seed their own systems (and neutral systems in which they may operate) with dormant, concealed observation platforms awaiting activation when necessary by starships on the scene.

It is, of course, much harder to sneak concealed observation platforms into the sovereign systems of other polities, current enemy or not, and as such the information advantage in invasion scenarios is almost always with the defender.

Information Warfare

The nature of this data environment highlights the importance of information warfare in naval operations. One of the most valuable things it is possible to achieve, when still maneuvering for engagement, is to successfully infiltrate the tactical network of the opposing force. While direct stealth in space is impossible, the ability to distort one’s sensor signature, inject fake signatures, and otherwise falsify the information upon which one’s opponent is basing their tactical decisions is extremely valuable.

As a result, any major naval engagement is invariably accompanied by high-intensity information warfare, as each side attempts to corrupt the tactical networks and other data systems of the other.

An even greater coup, of course, is to penetrate the internal networks of an opposing starship and, having established a degree of computer control, simply order it to drop its kinetic barriers, shut down its point defense, vent its fuel, disable its life support, or otherwise change sides. Although remarkably difficult to achieve at the best of times, such a victory is almost always complete.

Offensive Systems

Mass Drivers

The main weapons system of most military starships, mass drivers propel solid, dense-metal slugs at extremely high velocities (a respectable fraction of c). These are usually pure kinetic energy weapons (KEWs); at the velocities attained by the projectiles, the damage done by KE alone renders most warheads superfluous.

(While provision is made on some larger vessel classes to add antimatter warheads to mass driver projectiles, it is usually thought that the increased potential for damage is more than offset by the additional potential risk posed by a magazine full of antimatter.)

Of these, the primary is usually a spinal mount weapon (since a longer accelerator barrel is capable of achieving higher terminal velocities, and therefore greater impact), aimed by pointing the entire ship, although most of these are capable of firing between 30 and 40 degrees off-bore by magnetic field adjustments. Larger ship classes include banks of “broadside” railguns, capable of firing both forward and to the side, for additional flexibility.

Lasers

Usually considered the secondary weapons system, the majority of military starships also mount banks of “broadside” lasers separate from the point-defense laser grid, intended to pump heat into targeted enemy vessels. Due to the nature of modern armor (see below) they rarely do significant direct damage, but contribute significantly to the task of wearing down one’s opponent.

AKVs

AKVs – autonomous kill vehicles – are extremely smart multi-bus, multi-munition, multi-mission missiles.

An AKV is, in effect, a small, stripped-down, AI-piloted starship – capable of much higher acceleration and greater maneuverability than a standard design, albeit with much less endurance – designed to act in multiple roles – as a mobile reconnaissance platform; as a “fighter craft” used to swarm and destroy larger starships from inside their own point-defense zones; or, when it loses all other fighting ability, as a kinetic energy weapon in its own right.

Other

For the sake of completeness, it is also worth mentioning two other potential offensive systems. These are:

First, gravitic weapons: which are not a specific weapons system in themselves, but which constitute repurposing standard tractor-pressor functionality in order to grab, shake, crush, shear, etc. other vessels. These do possess a slight advantage inasmuch as they cannot be shielded against other than by precise counteruse of one’s own gravitics, and as such software for this is included in most tactical suites. However, since using such weapons requires closing to a range far below even “knife-fight” range and placing oneself not only within the inner engagement envelope but deep within the point defense envelope of one’s opponent, they are almost never of any practical use.

Second, one’s drive, the high-temperature emissions from any reaction drive in use being very readily weaponizable; anything in the danger zone when such a drive is activated tends to melt like wax under a plasma torch. Its practical limitation, however, for any drive smaller than a lighthugger’s, is again that one must close upon the enemy to an unacceptable degree before this use is possible – although leftover superheated and/or radioactive emissions may pose an environmental hazard in a “knife-fight range” battlespace.

Defensive Systems

The innermost of a starship’s defensive systems is its armor. The primary armor is a multilayer (“honeycomb”) system over the core hull, composed of multiple vacuum-separated layers of refractory cerametals, sapphiroids, and artificially dense metal nanocomposites, strapped together via flexible, shock-absorbing forms. Atop this, a thick sprayed-on layer of foamed-composite ablative armor (whose vaporized form is designed to scatter incoming energy weapon fire) provides additional protection.

To provide thermal protection, each of these layers is threaded through with a mesh of thermally superconducting material, preventing heat input from lasers or other energy weapons from creating localized “hot spots”. This mesh spreads out external heat inputs, and ultimately dumps them into tanks of “thermal goo”, an artificial substance of very high specific heat capacity. Under normal circumstances, this heat is disposed of via the ship’s radiative striping and external radiators, but if necessary, the thermal goo can be vented to space, taking its heat (and, unfortunately, its heat capacity) with it.

Outside the armor, starship defenses come in three more layers:

First and innermost, the kinetic barriers. These are not a single, all-encompassing bubble; rather, they are a grid of plates of gravitic force, instantiated as needed to intercept incoming material objects. (They cannot shield against massless radiation.) They don’t attempt to directly retard incoming projectiles; rather, their job is to “slap them aside”, imposing enough sideways vector on them to generate a miss.

Outside that, the defense drones: a military starship at general quarters surrounds itself with a “cloud” of small defense drones, serving multiple purposes: as electronic warfare platforms to obscure its signature; as participants in the kinetic-barrier generation and point-defense grid; as additional sensors; and ultimately, as sacrificial platforms capable of physically intercepting incoming projectiles or AKVs before they reach the ship itself.

Outermost is the point-defense zone guarded by the point-defense laser grid, extending substantially outward from the ship itself. Composed of phased-array plasma lasers which can be generated across large regions of the starship’s hull, the point-defense grid is used to vaporize incoming projectiles (or to use partial vaporization to decelerate incoming projectiles for the kinetic barriers and armor to deal with more effectively) and to force AKVs operating nearby – which have relatively little heat-dissipation capacity – into thermal shutdown.

The point-defense laser grid can also be used as an offensive weapon against any other starships unwise enough to stray into its range, but few captains are stupid enough to bring their starship into another ship’s point-defense zone.

The final defensive system that any starship has is drunkwalking: when at any alert state higher than peacetime cruising, every military starship engages in a pseudo-random “drunk walk” of vector changes around its station-keeping point or base course. This ensures that the starship is almost impossible to achieve a firing solution upon from a distance, since its movement since your most current observation of the target is unknown, and further increases the difficulty of achieving a solid firing solution in close.

(Of course, this depends greatly upon the quality of your drunkwalk algorithms and that they have been kept secure from the opposing force, which again underscores the importance of information warfare in the modern battlespace. A starship whose base course is identifiable and whose drunkwalk algorithms are known is a sitting duck even in the outer engagement envelope!)

A Note on Classes

The armament mix described above is accurate, in a well-balanced form, for cruiser and battlecruiser class military starships. These have been chosen as representative for the purpose of tactical illustration, as the classes designed specifically to operate independently.

Other, more specialized classes have different armament mixes (comparing, for instance, the mass driver-heavy armament of a battleship or a destroyer with the AKV-heavy armament of a carrier) intended to operate in interdependent squadrons. Operations involving these classes will not be covered in detail at this level, although certain specific details will be mentioned where relevant.

Engagement Envelopes

All battles in space take place at what are, by groundside standards, extremely long ranges, measured in ten-thousands, hundred-thousands, or millions of miles. Not only do these battles take place outside visual “eyeball” range, but even starships in the same formation are outside visual range of each other, being hundreds or thousands of miles apart. (Closer formations would pose both an unacceptably high risk of collision under battle conditions, when ships in the formation are drunkwalking independently, and would be likely to cause point-defense fratricide.)

The only exception to this rule are AKVs themselves (even when not acting as auxiliary KEWs), which often come within single-digit mile distances of their targets; i.e., operating effectively inside the innermost point-defense zone.

Outer Envelope: The Wolves at Hunt

The outer engagement envelope begins, depending on various environmental factors, at between one to one-half light-minutes range.

Battles taking place in the outer engagement envelope are essentially always inconclusive. While historical examples of lucky hits from these ranges do exist, the probabilities of such are sufficiently low that no-one would count on them; and at such ranges, it is virtually always possible for the weaker opponent to disengage at will.

(The exception being, of course, when someone has managed to sneak an observation platform in close to the opposing force without them noticing it, which gives them a great – albeit temporary – advantage in generating long-range firing solutions.)

Rather, the purpose of engagements in the outer envelope is to wear down an opponent closing upon one’s inner envelope, forcing them to generate heat and expend point-defense resources; and to herd opponents away from the danger zones generated by one’s fire.

While it is impossible, without both fortunate geometry and superior acceleration, for a single force to bring an opposing force to battle if it is actively trying to refuse such, it is sometimes possible through strategic outer-envelope engagement and misdirection to force them to pass through the inner engagement envelope of one of a set of multiple forces (including, for this purpose, fixed system defenses). This is the end to which tactics are directed in the outer engagement envelope.

At these ranges, the primary weapons are the spinally-mounted mass drivers of larger ship classes. Carriers may attempt to use “missiles” – actually strap-on, discardable thruster packs – to deliver AKVs close in to the opposing force, but many captains prefer to reserve their AKVs for inner-envelope battles where they can be better supported.

Inner Envelope: Let’s Dance

The inner, close-range engagement envelope – in which actual battles are fought – begins at roughly a light-second of separation. This reflects the difficulties of accurately targeting an opponent engaged in active evasion (drunkwalking, ECM, etc.) when the light-lag is greater than that; essentially, you have to close to within a light-second to get a firing solution whose hit probability is significant.

Reaching the inner engagement envelope implies either that one party is attacking or defending a specific fixed installation (such as a planetary orbit, drift-habitat, or stargate), or that both parties have chosen engagement. It is relatively rare for such battles to take place in open space otherwise, since in the absence of clear acceleration superiority, it is usually easy for the weaker party to disengage before entering their opponent’s inner engagement envelope. The only way to guarantee that an opponent will stand and fight is to attack a strategic nexus that they must retain control over.

Within the inner engagement envelope, all weapons come into play. Light lag becomes low enough that information warfare can come into play in full force, firing solutions are usually possible on all craft, and AKVs have the range and maneuverability to be committed.

As the opposing forces enter the inner engagement envelope, larger ship classes typically keep their distance, maintaining formation and lateral drunkwalk evasion, as they engage in mass driver artillery duels.

Cautious admirals also hold their screening forces back at this point, preferring to weaken the enemy force before pressing further. More aggressive admirals press in immediately, moving their lighter squadrons into the center of the battlespace and deploying AKVs likewise.

Unlike the larger ships, cruisers maneuver aggressively for advantage, forming the characteristic “furball” as fleets intermingle; once this stage is reached, it becomes very difficult to retreat in good order. Cruisers attack each other with close-in, off-bore mass driver projectiles and heat-pumping lasers; the highly maneuverable destroyers and frigates engage in “wolf-pack” tactics throughout the battlespace, both targeting each other, and swarming damaged larger ships at relatively close range.

Knife-fight Range

Any battle in which the battlespace is smaller than a tenth of a light-second in diameter is referred to as taking place at “knife-fight” range. Such engagements usually occur around fixed points when the attack is pressed hard, are short and vicious, and typically result in extraordinarily high casualties – usually for both sides.

Defeat

Unlike starship armor, neither the point-defense laser grid nor the kinetic barriers are subject to direct attrition; if subjected to low-volume or low-power incoming fire, either or both could continue to destroy or repel it essentially forever.

In order to defeat these defensive systems, it is necessary to swamp them; to concentrate incoming fire to the point at which the defensive systems are unable to handle it all simultaneously. At this point, attrition may take effect as kinetic effectors and laser emitters are destroyed, but more importantly, it generates heat.

Heat is the primary limitation on combat endurance. Maneuvering burns, the use of high-energy equipment such as the point-defense grid, the kinetic barriers, and so forth, as well as the ship’s normal operation, all produce heat. In combat – when the ability to radiate heat is limited, usually to radiative striping and small (and exhaustable, if the starship is forced to maneuver) droplet radiators alone – military starships generate heat more rapidly than they can radiate it to space. As heat increases beyond the critical point, the efficiency of onboard equipment begins to fall (processor error rates rise, for example, and tactical officers must conserve their remaining heat capacity), some equipment goes into thermal shutdown, and the crew spaces become increasingly uninhabitable.

While some starships in any major space battle are destroyed physically, reduced to hulks, the majority of starships are defeated by either heat-induced equipment failure, or by being forced to surrender and deploy radiators lest their crew literally cook.

– excerpted from “An Introduction to Elementary Starship Combat Tactics”,
37th ed., IN Civilian Press

Trope-a-Day: Gender Blender Name

Gender Blender Name: There weren’t all that many of these in historical times, but in the modern era, there are a great many – or at least, names adjusted such that you can change their gender with a tiny flip of the ending syllable(s).  After all, with gender changing becoming such a trivial exercise in the modern era… well, just because you’re going to be a different gender this year doesn’t mean you want to change your entire identity, amirite?

Trope-a-Day: Gender Bender

Gender Bender: Fairly trivial to achieve with Empire-level biotech, whether done by growing an opposite-sex bioshell (or, y’know, other sex; it’s not like hermaphrodite and neuter haven’t been invented, and not every species uses the same sexes anyway) and mindcasting into it, or if one is of one of the clades that has the facility built in (hermaphromorphs).

Also, not exactly uncommon. It’s distributed much like the Kinsey scale mentioned in Bi The Way; while there are at one end of the notional scale people who have one preferred sex they use all the time, and at the other end of the scale people who change sex about as often as they change pants, the majority of people are somewhere in the middle and are mostly/but sometimes. Certainly, it would be very unwise to assume that the person one’s talking to had always been the same sex, even if only just to see what it’s like.

(ObControversy: Gender-identity-wise, the processes use involve rewriting the subconscious – but not the conscious – aspects such that one feels comfortable in one’s new body. After all, it would rather suck having to figure out how these new organs work and what they’re telling you, or having to relearn how to walk ’cause your hips don’t work that way any more, etc.

*Here*, some people would undoubtedly suggest using that to “cure” transsexuals, rather than the equally possible “so, change your sex to what you feel it ought to be, already” option.

*There* – well, a people who worship with fluency, fervor and zeal at the altar of self-identity and personal autonomy aren’t, obviously, going to have any truck with that idea. And, if asked for an opinion, would tell people to go with whichever option they felt best represented their own concept of themselves, because who you want to be is your own damn business, other people’s narrow views and naturalistic fallacies be damned. [In practice, I suspect that usually means the latter option.]

And on an authorial note, I find it preferable to depict a society that refrains from being assholes even when the technological option exists rather than ensure that the option doesn’t exist because many-real-Earth-humans would be assholes with it. YMMV, but mine feels no need to project monkey-brain phenomena on the rest of the universe. It has its own.

Here endeth the speechifying.)

Trope-a-Day: Gattaca Babies

Designer Babies (formerly known as Gattaca Babies): Well, yes, absolutely, as seen everywhere in the Empire and in many places beyond.  Both the people who start out as biosapiences, and the empty vessels cloned for the benefit of minds in need of bodies.  (And, also, technically, nanocyborgs, because simple genetic engineering doesn’t cut it any more, but let’s not dwell.)

Actually, averting this one is illegal, by Imperial standards: Unlawful Genesis, or possibly felony Dysgenesis if you succeed in the aversion but produce someone damaged in some way.  The notion being, essentially, that there’s a certain legal minimum standard of health and capabilities for a given species, and deliberately creating a new person who falls either (a) below that standard, or (b) below the equivalent of a natural-born child of those parents, is a crime against said child; a pre-birth “actual bodily harm” of sorts.  And since around these transsophontist parts, the legal minimum standard is well above the natural endowment of most of these species…

Trope-a-Day: Gate of Truth

Gate of Truth: The Transcendent Core may not know all knowledge in the universe, but it does know everything any part of the Transcend knows, and whatever a weakly godlike superintelligence can reasonably deduce from that that it’s had time and occasion to think about, including a small amount of information harvested from the future via acausal logic processing.

And yes, you can ask it to share, hopefully in quantities small enough to fit into mere postsophont minds.  Just visit your local contemplationary.  And be prepared to have a real personal religious experience…

Trope-a-Day: Gargle Blaster

Gargle Blaster: Several of them, indeed.  Most notable would be much vereldrae liquor (made from only fruit and sap, really, but distilled in ways designed by demented alchemists and with a kick that mules or moonshine would envy – and a lot of these are flammable), essentially everything brewed on Paltraeth (the kaeth enjoy their tests of strength, including booze that is high in alcohols – including the ones that make humans go blind – high in heavy metals, and not quite highly radioactive), anything produced by a Military Moonshiner or indeed a spacer moonshiner, especially if it mentions reactor coolant, thruster fuel, or antimatter in its name, and in general, lots of things made for species whose biochemistry doesn’t quite match one’s own, which may not kill you, but will certainly void your ‘shell’s warranty.

There are also the nano-powered drinks that stimulate various brain regions in interesting and unlikely ways, but honestly, given what people will do with simple chemistry

The Perils of Memetic Contamination

I have, so far, sat down on at least three to five occasions to attempt to wrap some firm-SF details around the group of technologies in my universe which go under the general name of ‘vector control’.

Thus far, I have devised three to five different versions of the mass effect.

Well, not quite, but almost the mass effect.

Grumblesmurf.

Trope-a-Day: Military Moonshiner

Military Moonshiner: Played straight for some reason, despite the fact that neither the Imperial Navy nor the Imperial Legions is a dry organization.

(Also in the Imperial Exploratory Service, which contains the expected number of people who consider “can we make booze out of it?” to be one of the mandatory tests worth performing on alien plant life.)

Trope-a-Day: Futuristic Superhighway

Futuristic Superhighway: Well, now.  They have lots of those.  Apart from a few changes in materials, most of them look much like roads everywhere; the differences come in the technology buried in the road, such as the built-in power grid that lets vehicles recharge as they drive, and warms the road in winter to melt snow and ice, the road-grid that provides automated traffic management and routing (in cities and on the main routes, no-one drives on manual), the data connectivity, and the accompanying smart-road nodes that let the road itself provide you with local information and geosocial data.

While cargo delivery is mostly done at or below ground level (by wheeled – well, sphered, for ease of maneuvering in urban spaces – vehicles, even), the most common personal vehicle is the four-to-six-person vector-control flitter, a “flying car”; and while a fair few of them mingle with the freight traffic at ground level, even more are herded into the flyways at various heights above the highways to take them wherever they wish to go, all delineated by augmented-reality signs and guides (and, in urban areas, by actual building spars holding support hardware.

Oddly enough, while there is a lot more traffic than there used to be, the roads really aren’t that much wider, which is a combination of so much traffic being shunted into flyways above the highways, and of the road-grid automation letting cars pack much more closely together, when needed, than merely biological reflexes would support with the same safety margins.

And, of course, some changes in road features; the embarkation loops and bays where vehicles can stop to deposit or pick up their drivers before heading off to park themselves (and, obviously, no vehicles parked by the side of the road when the automation can let them drive themselves off and stow themselves in a buried parking hive until called for); the skymerge lanes in the middle of the highways where flitters transition between highway and flyway; and in general, a distinct lack of road markings and traffic signals which are all handled by AR systems – or at the very least, the vehicle HUDs – or automation in lieu of messy street furniture.

(And sometimes, they do have highway tunnel systems, extraordinarily long bridges – of multiple, even many miles – air-conditioned or environmentally supported highways on hostile worlds or in hostile regions, or highway tubes that dive beneath the oceans.)

Trope-a-Day: Future Food is Artificial

Future Food is Artificial: Played straight in one area, but averted in two more, depending on which end of the food range you are sitting at.  Averted first because there still is plenty of natural food at the high to middle end of the range.  Sure, it’s expensive, because after the changes mentioned below and under Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap, the surviving – due to economics, not environmental issues – natural-food producers are practicing exotic types of organic farming to beat the vats on quality, and so are producing the equivalent of top-grade Kobe beef right across the food spectrum, but it’s not out-of-reach-of-the-average-person expensive.

At the middle to low end of the range, where the most commonly eaten food, the express food, the served-in-your-local-eatery food is found – well it’s somewhat artificial.  Which is to say that the vegetable products are grown hydroponically in vertical farms (for groundlings) or skyfarms (for spacers), and the fauxflesh and fauxfish came out of a carniculture vat – but is still indistinguishable for most purposes from an actual steak, say.  Same tissue, carefully stimulated to reproduce its natural environment – with the exception of being guaranteed free of bacteria, parasites, etc., etc.  But, of course, this is not what most people mean by ‘artificial food’.

Where it is played straight is at the low, low end of the market, where you can buy algiprote (made from Spirulina-like algae, comes in pressed bars), mycoprotein (made from modified fungus, comes in cubes, like tofu) and/or nutriyeast (made from yeast, and comes in… well, glop, like Marmite).  Nutritionally complete, unbelievably cheap to buy – even the manufacturing equipment is unbelievably cheap to buy – and will support life indefinitely on even the tiniest resource budget.

Which is not to say all yeast and fungus based products are like this; some are expensive luxury foods, but those take time, care, specialist nutrients and attention to detail to achieve high levels of quality and deliciousness.  These were engineered for robustness in the face of inattention and low-grade equipment, nutritional completeness if you’ve nothing else to eat, and minimal resource cost, and they taste like it, too.  Even processed and flavored, it does not take long at all living on algiprote, mycoprotein and nutriyeast before you’re craving something else.  Anything else.

Trope-a-Day: Functional Addict

Functional Addict: In the past, quite a few of these, inasmuch as the Empire never has had any particular laws – and really can’t – against one type of hedonic or pragmatic pharmaceutical or another.  Averted, however, in the modern era… via the unconventional answer that the best solution to addiction isn’t removing the drugs, it’s removing (or modifying, rather) the neurokinin/nociceptin, etc., neural pathways in the brain that make the addiction process work.

Trope-a-Day: From a Single Cell

From a Single Cell: Well, by and large, this does not apply to individual people. Physical constraints are generally a bugger, and Healing Factor is about the best one can do. Otherwise, time to dig out the backups.

Civilizationally, on the other hand, this is what the Civilization-Backup Ships are for, vast collections of databases and genomes and mind-states and other such things that spend most of their time out in the deep, deep black between star systems – waiting on Proceed Unless Cancelled programs to head out for distant pastures and recreate the Empire’s civilization well away from whatever destroyed the original.

Just in case of existential risks and threats, belike.

Trope-a-Day: Healing Factor

Healing Factor: Another thing on the list of Stuff That Gets Engineered Into Everybody, although it’s not exactly the bizarre cinematic version that lets you come back from one cell, and beheading, exploding, or other long-term loss of essential functions will still kill you.  It does, however, include an extensive cellular-level emergency oxygen supply, a smart vascular net to prevent bleeding out and loss of blood pressure, improved blood clotting, pain gating and suppression, faster healing without scarring, anti-embolism filters, superior anti-infection systems and toxin resistance, and the ability to regrow severed limbs, and to regrow nerves up to and including spinal cord injuries.

It also does make you hungry as all hell when it kicks in, yes.

Trope-a-Day: Friendly Fireproof

Friendly Fireproof: Your modern weapons, seeing as they contain fairly sophisticated software and personal-area network integration, tend to come with FFI (Friendly Fire Inhibition) to ensure that this is realized in real life; they just plain won’t fire at targets positively identified as friendly.

(Yes, of course there’s an override mode.  There’s also a fancier civilian model that prevents you from firing if the collateral damage you might do exceeds the amount your tort insurer would be willing to pay for.)

Of course, all guarantees are off when it comes to grenades or other area-effect weaponry…

Giving Flak Some Flak

Don't do this. Don't ever do this.

Don’t do this. Don’t ever do this.

There is one other small point to make, it occurs to me, regarding lasers and appropriate uses of same.

One of which is that the Imperial Navy, by and large, uses carefully targeted laser weapons for short-range point defense, the intent being to vaporize small projectiles, blind sensors, overheat close-in AKVs and send ’em into thermal shutdown (being small, they have precious little heat-dumping capacity, relying instead on avoiding being hit), and convince missile warheads (for those people who feel the need to use missile warheads, kinetic energy being plenty of fun on its own) to explode before they actually get to their target starship.

Some folks (the screenshot on the right is from Battlestar Galactica) are of the opinion that an even better way to do this would be good old-fashioned flak. Mount point-defense turrets on your ship, and fill space around you with enough projectiles that anything incoming gets shredded by those before reaching you.

What those folks forget is that Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space!, ’cause all those projectiles – all those clouds of projectiles – will keep moving, with all their kinetic energy, until they hit something, and ruin its day. If you’re lucky, that will be whatever poor bastard is next to you in the same formation, weapons and small craft you’re trying to use, or your own ship on some future occasion, and you’ll only manage to hurt yourself. If you’re unlucky, they’ll just carry merrily on hitting things completely unrelated to the original target at random and providing people with casus belli, atrocity fodder, and other reasons to whup your ass for the next ten thousand years or more.

Cleaning up the debris after a space battle to ensure this sort of thing doesn’t happen is already a giant pain in the ass (the kind that there’s even a dedicated class of fluffship – crewing which is generally thought to be the worst job in the IN – to handle) when all you have to worry about is hulks, spallation debris, ricochets and accidental misses, and such-like, without deliberately making the problem a million times worse by filling the sky with high-KE flak. You don’t fire anything without a firing solution attached to it. Here endeth the lesson.

Or, as Mass Effect 2 put it in a somewhat more pithy manner:

Trope-a-Day: Frickin’ Laser Beams

Frickin’ Laser Beams: Invisible.  Recoilless.  Travel at the speed of light.  In short, just like actual frickin’ laser beams.

(See Energy Weapons and Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better for where they are used, and why they’re not usually considered the primary weapon set in the Eldraeverse, which I didn’t particularly feel like repeating right here.)

As a side note of things mentioned elsewhere on the defensive side, the chief purpose of lasers as ship-to-ship weapons is for pumping heat into the enemy. The defense against this is twofold: one, thermal superconductor (or, previously to the invention of this particular piece of exotic material, mere thermal-very-good-conductor-convector-etc.) plating to avoid localized hot spots heating up and exploding, and lots of goo of very high thermal heat capacity to dump heat into and then pump overboard. This doesn’t stop you from eventually having to heave to, extend your radiators, and quit the fight, but it does slow down getting to that point rather a lot. Similar plating to the former used in personal armor makes personal laser-arms, while not unuseful on the battlefield, certainly not the most useful thing which you can carry.

tl;dr They have their place in combat, but they’re not magically supreme on the field, and indeed are unlikely to be your primary weapons.

Also, while it would certainly be technologically possible to attach them to cyborg sharks, so far as I know, it’s never actually been done.