Trope-a-Day: Good Republic, Evil Empire

Good Republic, Evil Empire: Well, sort of – arguably, from one point of view, the Voniensa Republic are the good guys for those who like their humanity (or rather X-anity for various values of X, mostly kalatri) coddled, their transhumanism prohibited, their lifespans finite, their computers in their place, their technologies “sustainable”, and their government strong to guarantee security and equality and social rights/justice and other warm fluffy things, while the Empire is a chaotic, anarchic mess that guarantees almost nothing – and what it does guarantee, it guarantees too hard – filled with the unnatural, the alien, the inhumane, and the just plain mad and unregulated charging down the roads to singularities like there was no tomorrow.

Which is all very well, and indeed exactly what you want if you’re a cute widdle baseline (like, say, the average human who envisions the future as something undifficult, i.e. vaguely like Star Trek) who is comfortable ignoring just how unpleasant they’re being for and to all the species and cultures who don’t fit into their nice little closed world (see: The Federation), who sees the constraints of nature as holy writ, who is made uncomfortable by the presence of anything they might have to look up to, and who never, ever wants to have to acknowledge any thoughts outside the comfortable box of The Social Norm, As Defined By People Like Me.

Strongly averted by everyone else.  Even the Empire’s avowed enemies in the rest of the Worlds acknowledge that while they might be a bunch of mad, smug bastards, at least they don’t insist that you squish yourself into quite such high-grade soul-crushing mediocrity.

The Bear Necessities: Historical Trivia

In reality, the first orbital bear attack happened 137 years later, when a stage-one ursine uplift working as a nanny-bodyguard intervened successfully, if vigorously, in a child kidnapping case at the interplanetary cycler-port on Vevery Station. After hearing the testimony of the children and bystanders, the Near Orbit District Court ruled that ‘they needed killing; jolly well done’.

The Bear Necessities

Miralí Muetry-ith-Muetry floated in the center of Oculus Station’s stellarium. The view was at its most magnificent – the station had just passed periapsis and was approaching zenith, leaving the whole Eliéran Upperside spread out below her; a fuzzy-edged whorl of silvery-gray cloud over continents calen-green and fidur-blue amid the brighter blue of the oceans, spangled with cities gallé-warm, the whole glowing opaline with the reflected light of the suns. It was a view which, in reproduction, was hanging in almost every home on the planet below since Phoenix One had first captured it, but which no-one – from the newest rookie to the oldest hands aboard – ever tired of watching live in their off-shift. The stellarium, while one of the quietest places on the station, was also one of its most crowded.

But for a few minutes, during station-day shift-changes, it was possible to find some peace and solitude there; something which, on some days, Miralí found particularly appealing.

“Groundside wants to send a what to my space station?”

“A bear, Flight Commander.”

“Dare I hope that that is a project codename for something?”

“No, Flight Commander. It is on the list as Project Ursine, but the bear itself is, well –”

“A bear, Science Operations Coordinator?”

“Yes, Flight Commander.”

‘An entire bear, Science Operations Coordinator? Not, say, bear tissue, or a bear biosim, or, or even a teddy bear? The six hundred pounds of fighting mad with claws kind of bear?”

“Yes, Flight Commander. Although – a hibernating one.”

“I see. Inform groundside that the Festival of Cinníäs was last month and they should resubmit their proposals when they sober up, come down, or both.”

“Yes, Flight Commander. Really, Flight Commander?”

“No, not really.” She pinched the bridge of her nose in annoyance. “This is normally outside my department, Sian, but did groundside go into any detail as to why they want to ship us a bear?”

“It’s… an Initiative joint research project with Ochale Biotechnics, Flight Commander. Apparently bears don’t lose bone or muscle mass while they’re hibernating. The researchers want to know if that applies to microgravity too, in case it will help us out with adaptation-syndrome treatment, so they want to orbit one for ninety days and collect its biodata.”

“Ah.” Something important, then. Damn. “Well, they can’t have it in the science, habitation, or utility modules, or in anything plugged into any of those modules. There are many things I’m willing to go down in the history books for, and none of them are ‘lost half her science establishment to an orbital bear attack’. Preferably, we should avoid all mention or possibility of ‘orbital bear attacks’, yes? So tell them if they want a bear up here, they can put it in its own ‘can with independent life support, and we’ll hang it off the industrial truss. Their payload specialist’ll have to go for a walk every day, but so be it. FlightCom’s final word on safety – not negotiable.”

“Yes, Flight Commander.”

“And, Sian?”

“Flight Commander?”

“Warn Kael what’s coming, and that the words of the week down in Structural Maintenance need to be explosive bolts.”

Trope-a-Day: Honor Before Reason

Honor Before Reason: While it has occasionally been claimed about the Empire (mostly by people who have more experience with I Gave My Word than with their Combat Pragmatism, which is more confusing that enlightening on that point), if you were to ask – or observe – an actual Imperial on that point, they would point out to you, and support with a small pile of ethical calculus, game theory, etc., that given a couple of preconditions, namely:

That your values are slightly more sophisticated than mere survival – and actually, quite a lot of the time even if they are only mere survival – or shameless backstabbing fuckery for its own sake;

And that your honor-code is well-developed and comprehensively thought through, honor being cognate to neither stupidity nor thar;

Then honor is reason, the apparent lack of practicality is functional if you take the time to look at the Big Picture and iterate, the apparent denial of a value may well satisfy a metavalue, and the entire question that the existence of this trope presupposes is invalid.  So.

(Of course, this still looks very much like playing it straight to people who are less, ah, willing to do whatever is necessary to abide by their extraordinarily valued principles/values/metavalues.  To plagiarize the applicable line from Dragon Age II, “What would the eldrae be without principle?  You, I expect.”)

Trope-a-Day: Good Is Not Nice

Good Is Not Nice: For the Imperials, while distinctly subordinate to its cousin trope, Light Is Not Good, this is played very straight on the occasions that Light does align with Good.

Good, for a start, has principles (see: Principles Zealot).  Good is an appallingly ruthless Combat Pragmatist.  Good believes in its own awesomeness and the moral worth of competence, and so Good probably has a The Reason You Suck speech to deliver about exactly how your lack of these things led to you needing Good to save your sorry ass in the first place.  (This particular Good also comes from a culture that considers pride a virtue and finds even normal self-deprecation about as pleasant to listen to as fingernails on a chalkboard.)  And above all, being from a society that is not terribly humble about having its shit together, Good is very tired of this bullshit.

(To take another angle on it, too, Good in this case understands mélith, as a moral principle, and therefore prefers venture altruism – while Good may help you out of a sense of charity, Good expects to profit from the deal long-term as, if nothing else, a demonstration of success; and while Good may, in this case, operate on a pay-it-forward basis, Good expects to see it demonstrated that you did, in fact, do so.

After all, it’s perfectly logical: If the same resources can give a thousand men fish for a year, or teach one hundred men to catch their own damn fish for the foreseeable future, or set ten men up in the fishing industry to supply the entire town with fish and economic revitalization, then the latters obviously make more logical sense than the formers, in terms of net good done – let alone good done per unit effort – even if some people don’t make out so well in the short term.  Shut up and multiply, son, and send the desire for warm, fuzzy good feelings right to the back of the bus.)

Trope-a-Day: Light Is Not Good

Light Is Not Good: Well, the Imperials certainly look the part of “light”, being all shiny and glowy and identifying with all kinds of light- and flame-based imagery, philosophically and religiously, but “good” – well, unless your personal morality identifies the good really strongly with knowledge, beauty, excellence, negentropy, self-integrity, obligation, the inevitable march of progress, and remorselessly enforced free will (among other blue and orange things), not really.  And if your notion of the good runs counter to those things – most commonly with utilitarian commitments to Luddism or collectivism – then Light Will Crush You.

(On another note, it may be noted that while among the eikones of eldraeic religion, the bright lights to aim at, there are eikones of good concepts – order, peace, prosperity, joy, justice, liberty, healing, honor, etc. – there is not one eikone that embodies good, as a concept.  It is, ah, insufficiently nuanced.

Of course, there are none that embody evil, or indeed any concepts on the dark side of gray, either.)

(See also tomorrow’s trope-a-day, Good Is Not Nice!)

Trope-a-Day: Gondor Calls for Aid

Gondor Calls for Aid: Played rarely, but straight, on the responding end by the Empire as a polity, which has a firm policy of avoiding entangling alliances, but sometimes just can’t help itself. (Played straighter on this end by volunteer groups like the Sanguinary Enforcers of the Liberty Ethic.)

The Shipping Trade (2): Preflight

Kythera System, Lunar Transshipment One, outer docking zone
CMS Greed and Mass-Energy

The bridge of Greed and Mass-Energy was a typical example of Middle Empire Baroque – which is to say, wood paneling over the glassboard walls and be damned to the mass penalty, polished brass fittings, subdued lighting, comfortable and well-padded reclining couches for all – arranged five on each of the room’s opposing floors – surrounded by the various trigraphic displays each officer needed, and an auxiliary tracked-arm running about to serve drink bulbs and other comforts. Like any starship bridge, it was a room in which people went about the serious business of navigating the void between worlds without getting themselves killed in the process, but the designers of the Cheneos-class clearly thought that there was no particular reason why they couldn’t enjoy a few civilized niceties while they were about it.

Captain Athné eeled into the bridge with the ease of long practice, glanced at the data pillar in the center of the room (currently showing the critical path map to launch with all but a few of the topmost nodes glowing a cool ready-blue), and flipped expertly over the back and into his couch, shifting slightly as the gripfabric took hold of his shipsuit and the virtuality-port synched with his internal network.

“How’s the preflight coming, gentlesophs? By departments. Helm and guidance?”

“Guidance systems are on-line and tracking; five beacons, sunlock, starlocks, and inertials have concurrence. Gyros are spun up and RCS coupled. Prospective courses laid in as per flight plan. Flight controls are active for station-keeping and ship is aweigh. Helm and guidance systems are go flight in all respects.”

“Time?”

“Internal timebase is synched to empire time per station, no deviations. Frame differentials are go in inertial mode. Flight recorder is running. Mission Elapsed Time clock is reset and holding. Relativistics systems are go flight in all respects.”

“Eyes and ears?”

“All passive sensors are active and operational. Short-range actives are up and pinging. Shortscan is go and on the glass. We have valid longscan signals, station and three sources, with reciprocation, also on the glass. Comms systems are up and channels are clear; we have ‘weave interlink, listening watch on distress, guard, and hailing, plus open links to station, orbital ops and SysCon. Sensory and communications systems are go flight in all respects.”

“Data?”

Data Ops raised an eyestalk from hsis screens, tentacles twitching. “Yes, yes, Shipboard Information Service is up and running in onboard mode. Cache dump is downloaded. Packet routings and link pointers laid in all the way from here to Wynérias. Data systems are go flight in all respects.”

“Drive, heat, and power?”

“Reactors are up and running at warm idle. Radiators are flowing, ready to extend at clearance. Station docks an’ locks confirms that microwave beam is off; she’s on internal power. Drive mode is primed and ready for thrust at your discretion. Dampers are on and interlocked. And the tanks are fully topped off; we have all the delta-v we need and twenty-three percent over commercial reserve t’boot. Drive, heat, and power systems are go flight in all respects.”

“Mechs?”

“We have full function active on all internal mechanical systems. External mechanical systems are full function inactive and stowed for maneuver and burn. Mechanical systems are go flight in all respects.”

“Life?”

“Recyclers, conditioners, and distributors show blue, blue, and blue. Atmosphere is nominal. Reserve, aux, and emergency are all fully charged. Meat vats and aeroponics are growing away nicely, and the pantry’s fully stocked. Tonight’s dinner will be a roast leg of non-vat ftark, for a change, thanks to our Mr. mor-Tarvek and his gambling habit. All-in, life-support systems are go flight in all respects. Oh, and” – she took a moment to straighten some unruly black curls – “we think we’ve finally managed to clear the damn sulphogen out of the secondary gray-water ‘cycling loop, so give it a couple of cycles and the brimstone smell in the ‘freshers should go away, and you can all stop reminding me ‘bout it, ‘kay?”

“Cargo?”

“Container cargo is onboarded and locked down. And I got a good deal on a mixed seven-thou lot of Kytheran biologicals that’s riding in the spec space. Breakbulk is lashed and thrashed; cee-oh-emm-inert is in the computer and transferred to guidance.” He glanced up at the sailing master’s position, beneath him. “We had to run power cables out to some of the breakbulk in reefer pods; they’re rigged and running. Cargo department is go flight in all respects.”

“Docks and locks?”

“All natives are inboard and latched; all foreigners are clear. Airlocks and auxiliary connections show straight-line shut. Docks and locks are go flight in all respects.”

“Very good, all. Let’s get underway. Start the MET clock, and give me station ops.”

 

Random Thought of the Day

“What makes the Blood of Tyrants and the Sanguinary Enforcers of the Liberty Ethic extremists is that they divide the entire population of the universe into two categories: people who respect the principle of consent, and people who need to be shot. This eliminates the two additional categories the rest of us use: people who might learn better given time and information, and people who it’d be more convenient to shoot later.”

– Lorith Amanyr explains an important distinction

Trope-a-Day: Go Mad From The Revelation

Go Mad From The Revelation: Fortunately, it is theorized, just about everything that truly falls into this category requires considerable mind-expanding (i.e., technological vastening) in order to comprehend the revelation, which same expansion protects you from being driven mad by it.  And when you unplug from the vastening equipment, well, then blessed stupidity descends once more and prevents you from successfully recalling your understanding of the hypothetically mind-blasting thing.

(You may, however, still suffer some adverse effects from the godshatter, if you’re not used to that kind of thing.)

 

In Lieu of In Lieu

Well, I was going to post the second part of The Shipping Trade today, except that writing it didn’t happen because of day job, and so forth. Then, I thought I might post a sketch of the ship involved, just to give y’all an idea of what you’ll be looking at, but then that would require me to go out and hire a scanner. That, and I made said sketch, and then looked at it, and then concluded that I couldn’t possibly inflict such a terrible picture on my readers…

So permit me, please, instead to sketch a verbal picture for you of the

CMS Greed and Mass-Energy

To start with, Greed and Mass-Energy is atypically large for a free trader; in those leagues, which principally deal in small, high-value-to-mass/volume cargoes, lugging around 40,000 tons displacement of cargo is huge. (It’s still not in the major freight line league, though; those guys can use freighters that are million ton-displacement behemoths.) Thus, the shipcorp that owns her (it’s essentially a syndicate of officers, crew, and former crew, with executive power vested in the captain-owner) is pretty prosperous to be able to cover her running costs. Dealing in brokered cargo actually isn’t her main business – she specializes in contracts like the RCS-assembly charter from Kerbol to Kythera she just left, but an empty hold is a hole that drinks money, so you take the cargo when you can get it.

Also, obviously, at a size like that, she’s not streamlined, or built to land planetside (gravity wells being acutely expensive); and is even rather more massy than anything that most stations like to have dock directly to them. Her cargo’s generally ferried to station, or upwell and downwell, by local lighters at each end of the trip. Rather, she’s built very much in the classic mode; a long, relatively thin, open-frame truss structure. Attached to that, going from fore to aft, we find these different sections of the ship:

Right at the bow, sitting on the end of the main truss, is the command capsule, an ellipsoid slightly stretched along the ship’s main axis, relatively tiny compared to the rest of the ship, and containing, for starters, the bridge and associated avionics systems. (The bridge is actually buried in the center of the capsule, for its protection; it’s displaced off to the front end of the ship, however, because the command capsule is also where the primary sensors are housed to keep them out of the way of cargo, fuel, and drive radiation, and this positioning cuts down on sensor lag. It’s still pretty safe; it’s not like anyone’s going to be shooting at them.) The first of the other two notable features it houses is docks and locks, right for’ard on the axis where it’s easiest to match thrust and spin, which usually houses a couple of cutters used for taking the crew ashore and for occasional maintenance, and a skimmer for in-field refueling. (The fuel itself doesn’t pass through here – the skimmer docks aft to offload what it scoops. No fuel for’ard of the support plate, that’s the general rule.) The second, aft by the truss, is the robot hotel for all the little space-rated utility spiders you may see now and them crawling about the structure doing maintenance, thus saving the engineering department any need to get suited up and go outside for routine work, although they still may need to do so from time to time.

Just aft of that, accommodations and secondary systems are housed in a toroidal gravity wheel. This is actually a very unusual design feature in an Imperial ship-class; just about everyone and especially the spacer-clades are genetically adapted to microgravity, and the spacer-clades prefer it, as a rule; but the Cheneos-class architects originally designed her class for near-frontier work, and included this for occasional passenger service. Greed and Mass-Energy only rarely carries passengers, so they keep it geared all the way down, producing only a tenth of a standard gravity, which doesn’t offend the spacer-clades all that much. There’s a second, smaller wheel rotating inside it to null out the gyroscopic effects; it’s used to house some other equipment that likes a little gravity, but for the most part, this one’s just a countermass.

(The wheel does, however, provide enough gravity to let the CELSS Manager run a pretty decent microbrewery in the spare volume, and perhaps more importantly, provides a place where you can drink it off-shift without suffering from a nasty case of the zero-g bloat. [Remember, folks, bubbles don’t rise in microgravity!] And apart from crew morale, having decent beer makes for good PR when traders meet.)

These areas, incidentally, are one of the few places on board where the really high-tech ontotechnological stuff makes an appearance, in the form of inertial damping. The people who built her liked microgravity, and weren’t all that keen on losing that while under thrust, especially since she was built to fly brachistochrones or near-brachistochrones (bulk tankers and ore freighters, etc., are usually built to fly economic minimum-delta/Hohmann transfers; no-one else wants to wait that long for their cargo) and so would be spending most of her time under thrust. The job of the inertial dampers is to apply the thrust of the drives evenly across the entire area’s structure and everything in it, thus ensuring that no-one actually feels any acceleration, and the lovely microgravity environment is preserved. (It also avoids having to come up with some wretchedly complicated gimbal arrangement for the already wretchedly complicated seals-and-bearings for the gravity wheel, no longer having to do which is something that made architects particularly grateful for this innovation.)

Behind this, the cargo. ‘Way back along the truss there is a very large, solid plate, the support plate. The cargo containers are simply stacked “atop” – by which we mean for’ard – of it, in six big blocks arranged around the axis with sixfold symmetry (this arrangement being a reasonable compromise between use-of-volume and convenient straight lines), and are designed to lock to the plate, the truss, and each other to form a solid interlocked structure. There’s no hold or other walls around the cargo; the containers are themselves spacetight when they need to be, and so lighters can just drop them into place and pick them up freely while in port.

The breakbulk cargo, on the other hand, is messy. It has to be podded up individually when not spacetight, and then individually lashed down and made secure atop the cargo container stacks. This annoys the cargomaster, which is why breakbulk is unpopular these days despite the fact that breakbulk shippers usually pay a premium in exchange for you having to do this (the “lash comp”). Actually, what really annoys the cargomaster is that she can punch a button and have the ship automatically query the v-tags on the container cargo for its mass stats, and so forth, whereas for breakbulk she’s got to recall her Academy training, dig out the spreadsheets, and work out the corrections to the center-of-mass-and-moment-of-inertia chart by hand. Well, still by computer, but you know what I mean.

Aft of the support plate, still in sixfold symmetry, you have the bunkerage – fuel tanks, stacked three deep in multiple rows, all filled with slush deuterium, running right to the stern, where they surround the cylindrical shroud of the mostly-unpressurized engineering hull (you can take a crawlway right back along the truss to the small, pressurized maneuvering room back this far, should you need to examine the drives close-up in flight, but the actual machinery space isn’t), which contains the interlinked systems of the main power reactors and the fusion torches themselves, strapped to the aftmost extent of the main truss.

And there are lots of fuel tanks. Even though said fusion torches are miracles of a mature nuclear technology, capable of achieving near-theoretical efficiencies and outputs and delta-v per unit fuel that routinely makes naval architects from less advanced civilizations throw down their slide rules in despair and weep into their terrible coffee-equivalents, the one unchangeable rule of space travel is that your mass ratio is always much, much less favorable than you might want it to be.

Good thing deuterium’s so cheap, isn’t it?

(Edited to add: And I must have been half-asleep this morning, because I forgot…)

…and most prominently of all from a distance – dominating the entire view of the ship from a distance, by area as well as by temperature – sweeping out from among the fuel tanks (although comfortably retracted to sit alongside them, leaving approximately a sixth of their radiative area useful, while idling in dock – the vast panels and pipework of the heat radiators. Because the other one unchangeable rule of space travel is that you always have waste heat, too damn much waste heat, and you’ve got to get rid of it somehow. Especially once you fire up those fusion torches. (The radiators, however, unlike the rest of the ship, have only fourfold symmetry – so that they can be perpendicular to each other when unfolded, because there’s very little point in radiating heat right back at your own radiators.)

 

Handwavium: Inertial Dampers

Handwavium (in General)

I try to write the technology in my universe in such a way that at least 95% of it falls within the laws of physics as we know them, or at least as we mostly know them and assuming that they’re being fairly kind to us when it comes to technologies we haven’t developed yet.

The other 5% is powered by handwavium.

My chosen handwavium, for those who are new and haven’t heard the term before, is ontotechnology, a lovely term for “those technologies which let you reach into the mechanisms underlying reality and poke them in useful ways”. A fully mature ontotechnology would, arguably, be “that technology which you build universes with”; fortunately, what they have in the Eldraeverse is a very, very immature ontotechnology. From an in-world perspective/in the parlance of the Worlds, ontotechnology usually refers to some product of one or more of Information Physics, Matrix Theory, or  Ontological Precedence, those three being the leading contenders for the Next Big Thing in physics.

(Unfortunately, the evidence seems to be suggesting that all three of these mutually contradictory theories appear to be true, which most physicists and philosophers take as evidence that (a) the universe is far more complicated than anyone imagined, and (b) may just possibly be having a laugh at our expense.)

From an out-of-world perspective, ontotechnology means handwavium. Specifically, it means one of these:

  1. The handwavium that enables FTL travel (generating wormholes from entangled singularities, probably very related to type 2);
  2. The handwavium that enables FTL communication (tangle channels of the non-quantum entanglement kind, which implies that the universe is just full of non-local hidden variables); or
  3. The handwavium that enables a decent degree of control over gravity and/or mass (vector control).

All of which share certain characteristics, such as having been invented by transsophont geniuses in symbiosis with very large computing facilities, having theories behind them which – in detail – are very hard if not downright impossible for people without rather enhanced brains to understand, and so far as the vast majority of people are concerned, might as well come in black boxes with “Big angelic powers within. No mortal serviceable parts inside.” stenciled on the outside.

Apart from those, it may also mean one of the assorted gap-filling assumptions I’ve had to make in inventing the details of advanced technologies, in re everything from whether P=NP to enough theory of mind to have a decent handle on AI mental architecture; while none of that actively violates what’s known, that I’m aware of, it’s certainly extrapolating well beyond reasonability for anyone except… well, an SF writer.

Here endeth the summing up for newbies, ’cause we’re here to talk about the parameters wrapped around a particular example of handwavium:

Inertial Damping

So let’s talk about inertial damping. The first rule of inertial damping is that you don’t talk about inertial damping —

Ahem. Sorry. The first rule of inertial damping is that there’s no such thing as inertial damping, as a separate technology. There are “inertial dampers”, but they happen to be an application of the same underlying techniques – as a bundle, called vector control – which are your generic mucking-with-the-shape-of-space-time-without-needing-inconveniently-huge-masses tools, and which underlie related technologies such as, say, artificial gravity, techlekinesis, kinetic barriers, tractor-pressor beams, hopelessly inefficient reactionless drives (which aren’t even actually reactionless – in this universe, we OBEY the Law of Conservation of Momentum), and so forth. I prefer not to multiply handwavium beyond necessity, obviously, so I make all of these – and I didn’t actually start with all of them, some were just logical implications – examples of the same family of phenomena.

All inertial damping actually is is… artificial gravity.

This brings with it all the associated limitations. For example: you can only create the a-grav field between matching and opposed sets of gravity rotors. (Well, that’s not technically true – but not having the second one there means you’re trying to attract about half the universe with your a-grav field, energy requirements head asymptotically for infinity, fuses blow, and you’re done here.) It’s basically an internal closed field, with very little spillover at the fringes. Forget a-graving anything in open space or cheating your way to a reactionless drive with them; you need something to mount the rotors on, and that thing is not going to be within the field of effect.

It’s also quite energy-hungry, because it’s not like we’ve repealed the energy conservation laws or the inverse square law, either. That’s why it’s being used to damp only two small habitable areas and not, say, the entire length of the ship so you wouldn’t need all that heavy trusswork supporting the cargo and the fuel against the engine’s thrust; it’d be grossly uneconomic even if you had somewhere suitably strong – they would be holding the whole weight of everything, after all – to mount the rotors. The material construction is essentially always more cost-effective when doing jobs that construction can do. Also, of course, if your spacecraft is primarily held together by an inertial dampening field, under whatever name your universe calls it, then you’re pretty much going for a design that is guaranteed to undergo rapid unplanned disassembly as soon as the power goes out for the first time. Consolidated Mutual Mitigation & Surety aren’t going to write a note to cover that.

(Side note: These associated costs are why, artificial gravity or no, most habitats that want gravity spin to get it, and ships – including the Greed and Mass-Energy use gravity wheels, and so forth. One of my general rules of thumb in handwavium design is that handwavium that reproduces something that can be done comfortably by regular physics tends to be more costly, in one way or another, as roundabout, over-complex ways of doing things often are. In this case, the upshot of that is that artificial gravity is very useful for small-scale applications in the lab and industry, curiosities like the zero-g bed, and interesting spin-off applications like inertial damping and techlekinesis, but if all you need is regular old pretty constant gravity… start spinning.

Meanwhile, if you’re traveling on one of those dirthugger-friendly passenger lines that has gravity in the passenger sections and doesn’t have gravity wheels? There’s a reason you’re paying a damn sight more for your ticket than the people willing to live like spacers for the duration.)

What makes it function as inertial damping is that the gravity rotor network is tied into the engine controller, and the reaction control system, and – were this ship capable of atmospheric flight – the flight data computer, and various other systems which together understand the forces the spacecraft is about to apply to itself, or coming from sources which are reporting to it, and generates the appropriate matching vector on the contents of the damped area – insert assorted technobabble here – such that the net differential acceleration vector between them and the ship they’re in is zero.

The key limitation here is that it can only do anything to compensate for accelerations that it knows about; it can’t read the future or identify force-about-to-be-applied, it just follows in sync with the systems that accelerate the ship. If you’re in a collision, if something explodes unexpectedly on-board, if you’re being shot at, or in other ways you get hit by unknown sources of acceleration, the inertial damping system can’t do a damn thing about that. It gets you comfort, either as a luxury on half-gee freighters or as a practical necessity on twelve-gee fast couriers, but the bridge still needs seatbelts, the corridors still need handholds, and in the event that none of this works out, it may still be chunky salsa time.

Atomic Rockets!

Atomic Rocket: Patrol Level Gamma

I just became a patron, via Patreon, of Winchell Chung’s Atomic Rockets web site.

And I am taking this moment now to tell you two things.

Firstly, whether you write SF – in which case I’m sure you already know about it and don’t need me to tell you – or whether you just read SF and want some insight into how things might work behind the scenes and/or exactly how hard the SF you’re reading is, and you haven’t visited it yet, go. Now. Stop reading this, and go read that. Then come back. (Well, first make sure you’ve got a few hours free. But then.)

Secondly, if you’ve enjoyed what you’ve been reading here, this is exactly the extremely valuable resource for, well, people like me that it’s intended to be. And the best part is, there’s lots of new material coming, time and funding to put which up is what this Patreon is intended to raise money for. That prospect certainly inspired me to contribute, but it wouldn’t hurt, gentle readers, if you were to go and do likewise.

(Not that I’d complain if you were overwhelmed by the urge to give me some money too, you understand. Just sayin’.)

After all, as the eldrae would put it themselves: “anything worth doing is worth doing for money; therefore, anything worth having is worth paying for”.

Trope-a-Day: Going Critical

Going Critical: Averted.  In four ways:

Fission reactors in the universe are very well designed, ideally – although not always – to keep messy things like prompt criticality out of the possible performance envelope.  Some of them, the higher-power ones, can still quietly melt down (giving you basically a corium puddle in a highly refractory can to dispose of, but no major problems outside that), but most of them – like the ones they use in vehicles, for example – are pebble-bed designs that can’t even do that.

Fusion reactors depend on the continuous operation of their support systems to maintain the conditions that make the fusion reaction possible.  If they go wrong, even for extreme values of going wrong, what you get is a fizzle as the fusion plasma expands, loses its heat and pressure – all the more so if it escapes the envelope and touches the surrounding environment – and quenches.  A worst-case crash shutdown will screw up the inside of the reactor vessel, forcing you to replace the lining before you can restart, but it won’t penetrate it.

And no, they can’t go runaway.  There is a clever device built into the deuterium, etc., feed lines to stop that from happening.  It’s called a valve, which is attached to a big purely mechanical lever, which is labeled “IF SHIT HAPPENS, PULL”.

Matter/antimatter reactors by and large don’t do the equiavlent of going prompt critical, mostly because as long as you can pull the equivalent of said lever, the ambiplasma in the reactor vessel will quench much like the fusion reactor case.  (Remember, this isn’t Star Trek engineering – there’s always much more matter being fed in than antimatter, because it’s a lot easier to extract energy from hot plasma than from photons.  Thus, necessarily, no excess antimatter floating around inside the reactor core waiting to cause trouble.)  The remaining loose antiparticles that are there will chew the crap out of the inside of the containment, definitely, but it’s even heavier-duty than the fusion containment is, being designed for essentially this case.

Now, the storage cryocels where the antimatter’s stored, they can explode with great verve and drama, but that’s called “losing containment”, not “going critical”.

Singularity inductors don’t go critical because if the mini-black-hole falls out of the field knot and then through the containment, there’s usually stuff around for it to eat which will prevent it from going all Hawking-evaporatey on y’all.  Of course, you do then have a loose singularity chewing its way through your ship, station, habitat, or possibly even planet, so it’s not like your day isn’t going to suck anyway… but it won’t go critical.

At least not until it’s run out of stuff to eat.

The Shipping Trade (1)

Kythera System, Lunar Transshipment One, Docking Ring Gilek, Third Quadrant, Afterquay Level
Offices of Hyneral, Myninine and mor-Vertak, Bonded Cargo Brokers

“Good shift, brokers. Athné Calaris-ith-Calandia…”

“…master of Greed and Mass-Energy! Cheneos-class free trader, I seem to recall. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen you in-system, Captain. Good trading?”

“Still flying.”

“So, what brings you to us – anything to offload this trip?”

“No, not this time. We just came off a charter – unloading thirty and a half of reaction-control assemblies out of Kerbol System. Hold’s empty, lookin’ to fill it.”

“Got commitments, or free-course?”

“Thinking of heading out spinward, but no contracts as yet. And I’d like to keep ten free for spec. Apart from that, we’ll go where the cash points.”

“Spinward, huh?” The broker rattled his terminal’s keys. “Quiet out there this week. I can fill your mail locker, and give you… twenty of laser pigs, containerized, delivered ex-ship High Transit Station, Wynérias System, pays out at market local.” He steepled his fingers, thinking. “Now, if you’ll yield back some of that ten, I can throw in 12,750 of assorted breakbulk for Wynérias and points on a spinward routing from there, pays three points over market local for lash comp.”

“Any liquids in that?”

“None on manifest. You’ve got one-twenty drums on-board from here to Losen Actual highport, but they’re listed as ‘powder, ceramet, special formula’ – yard consignment. Will you take it? It’s cutting out warehouse space, and I’ll owe you a favor for the inconvenience.”

The captain hesitated only slightly.

“Sure. Deal. We’ll be done unloading and cleared to metal by top of the second.”

“I’ll have the cargo and my longshorebots lockside by third of the second. Want to grab some lunch while the contracts clear down?”

“Don’t mind if I do.”

Trope-a-Day: Goggles Do Something Unusual

Goggles Do Something Unusual: Since medical technology has long since adapted to the point of being able to fix just about any eye problem imaginable, any time you see glasses on someone’s face – and there are periods of history where you will see this quite a lot – you might suspect that they’re there to serve some other function.

You would be right.  Usually, that function’s just acting as I/O for a wearable or other PAD devices, which means that they combine a head-up display with stereo cameras (these enable augmented reality, freeze-frame, enhance and rewind, among other things; and even when neural laces replaced wearables, a lot of people kept them around as a popular way to lifelog), microphones, eye tracking, and ability to participate in a wireless PAD (such that they can communicate with your wearable, but also with any other networked devices you might be carrying, which is probably all of them; your gun, for example, certainly uses them as a scope) including a gateway to the greater network and all its facilities.

Of course, technological ingenuity being what it is, there could be anything from a T-ray scanner through a general-EM reader to a full SQUID in there, sensorily speaking, or a couple of nanomissiles or a few BIPS of processing power concealed in the frame.  It’s really best not to assume what the chap with the glasses might or might not be capable of seeing.

Trope-a-Day: God Guise

God Guise: Subverted; arguably, this is what a lot of the Transcend’s archai are doing when they adopt the trappings and guises of the mythological eikones as a means to interact with regular sophonts, but in this case, it’s not like all parties don’t know perfectly well that the deities in question are actually aspects of a weakly godlike superintelligence, not supernatural figures.

So there’s no deception involved; rather, the archai are accepted as the eikones because they can do the job.  (But see also A God Am I.)

Trope-a-Day: God Emperor

God Emperor: Originally, the “Divine Majesty” in the style of the Imperial Couple was merely metaphorical; one step above the “Imperial Majesty” previously used by the lesser Emperorships of Cestia and Selenaria, and deemed appropriate by those who deal in the semiotics of such things for Alphas I and Seledië III by virtue of, well, being a verb.  Defining reality around them by their presence in it, which, saith theology, is the single most important characteristic of a deity – even if not manifested in the manner or pure intensity of the actual eikones.

Of course, in the modern era in which part of the coronation ceremony involves the Imperial brains becoming permanently vastened and hardwired to the Imperial Presence AI, both as a standalone instrumentality and as an archai of the Transcend, it’s a lot more literal than symbolic…