Month: June 2014

Starships Are Not Boats

Posted by

As explained here…

(In short, down, when under thrust, is determined by the direction of your drive axis, and specifically, is the direction your engine is in – because it’s pushing you the other way.)

I feel somewhat bad, sometimes, for violating this one here and there, sometimes quite egregiously, but there’s a reason for that, and it has to do with the fiction in my science fiction. Specifically, the inertial dampers that I talked about here. See, way back in the day before those were invented, from the Phoenix stack on up, spacecraft and then starship design was indeed constrained this way; virtually all designs were tail-landers, with the decks perpendicular to the drive axis, and the only exceptions to that rule being belly-landing vehicles intended to operate in atmosphere and/or land planetside, in which case the need to deal with the planetary gravity field took precedence and those aboard pretty much had to suck it up and deal with the inconvenience when in space and under thrust.

(We omit, for the moment, the complexities of spin gravity and the combination of spin and thrust “gravity” that gave the world terms like thrustdown and spindown and realdown and lots of rather complex gimballing mechanisms.)

But then the inertial damper was invented, thus ensuring that the interiors of starships equipped with it were under microgravity all the time, even when they were under thrust, and naval architects almost immediately split three ways:

  1. The traditionalist school, who had been building tail-landers for a millennium and dammit, were going to keep on building tail-landers, because that’s how spacecraft ought to look, and for that matter, it’s kind of nice to still be able to fire up the drive if your inertial dampers break down, isn’t it?
  2. The convenientist school, who countered that people had been complaining about what a pain in the ass ladders, companionways and elevators were for getting about inside spacecraft for most of that millennium, especially if you’re not under thrust most of the time, that long corridors are much nicer, and that it’s good not to have large pieces of equipment split between a half-dozen decks, and so now that they could build starships as belly-landers, dammit, they were going to.
  3. And the spacer school, who pointed out that if there’s one thing that you could learn from modular and beehive habitat design over all that time, it’s that “down” is a strictly local phenomenon and one only useful under a few circumstances anyway, and that in a microgravity environment not only can you arrange your decks any damn way you please, but you don’t even have to be consistent in doing so, and proceeded to arrange their designs’ interiors in whatever way they felt was useful at the time and place.

In what I think of as the modern era, the spacer school has essentially won the argument, although examples of the other two schools do still show up. (After all, planet-landing craft have to be consistent one way or the other, what with that planetary field to contend with.) Among people who have the relevant technology, at least – the constraint still exists, and applies in full to anyone who doesn’t have fancy ontotechnological physics-editing tech to play with.

 

Trope-a-Day: Gunboat Diplomacy

Posted by

Gunboat Diplomacy: The traditional Imperial diplomatic transport is a cruiser-class naval vessel.  Need I say more?  (And the Empire in particular is quite notorious for this; the Don Pacifico Affair would not be in the least out of character for them, because No One Gets Left Behind.)

Also, refer back to Flaunting Your Fleets.

Trope-a-Day: Grows on Trees

Posted by

Grows on Trees: While not something that occurs naturally, the Imperial penchant for bioengineering have produced quite a lot of varieties of fruit and many more plants of pharmaceutical value than nature allows for, along with creations like an industrial bamboo-analog, metal-leaching plants that pull traces of metal from depleted ores and concentrate them for later harvesting – also used for pollution cleanup – and such.  And then there are those (engineered) house-trees…

[A comment on the original posting of this trope read:

“So, we have the potential for space elves that live in actual tree houses? Awesome.”

Yes, yes you do.  See Tree Top Town.  Also, even better, although I haven’t got to these yet:

SPACE TREE HOUSES! ( Dyson trees, etc. )]

Trope-a-Day: Tree Top Town

Posted by

1

Tree Top Town: More than a few, actually. Eliéra is – in a self-reinforcing cyclical way – cooler, wetter, and much more forested than, say, Earth, silviculture takes an equal place with agriculture, and one could put forward a not unreasonable thesis that eldrae are natural forest-dwellers in the same sense that humans are natural plains-dwellers.

So in quite a few places – Veranthyr and Cimoníë being the first two that leap to mind – people possessed of tall and large trees, often with convenient hollows, decided that they would be perfect places to live in. For a start, it saves trying to clear the forest, first. For a second, in the early days of civilization, it helps to live somewhere the nastier predators aren’t and the fruit and the sunlight and so forth conveniently are. Et cetera.

It’s not Bamboo Technology, though. The people who live here are as fond of shiny things as the rest of their culture, and just because it’s made of wood and in/on the treetops doesn’t mean it’s not as full of modcons as any house anywhere else.

Trope-a-Day: Grey Goo

Posted by

Grey Goo: Mostly averted, for the simple reason that the power (and thermal management) requirements are something of a bugger.  Breaking a great many of the chemical bonds which make up Stuff requires substantial amounts of energy, which is inconvenient for something the size of a nanite that’s trying to derive enough power from eating stuff to self-replicate as well as consume.

There are nanophage weapons, but they tend to require power from outside (usually in the form of pulsed microwave beams) to work; shut off the power, they stop immediately.  Other nanoweapons generally run to the limit of their stored power, and aren’t self-replicating.

Green goos – nanoplagues – are possible, because bio-life tends to contain a lot of energetic molecules, but really, they’re not much worse than regular bio-plagues, except for often having much worse fevers associated with them.  And there are plenty of industrial nanopastes that could in theory go golden goo on us, but since the vast majority of those work in sealed reactors or vats and depend on an external power source or feedstock, it’s not a terribly serious problem.

In short, it’s at least theoretically possible that some free-roaming antipollution nanite might cause some trouble one day, but it’s probably not going to be a worse problem than your average “red tide”. Which is by no means to say that it won’t be a problem, but it’s a manageable non-apocalyptic one.

Trope-a-Day: Government Drug Enforcement

Posted by

No, the other kind….

Government Drug Enforcement: Well, it’s not unknown.  The Equality Concord – you see what I meant under Generican Empire? – used to use a variety of interesting pharmaceutical cocktails before they figured out that the right kind of neuroprosthesis worked even better for enforcing the requisite egalitarianism, and it’s not like they’re the only obnoxious pharmacrats out there.

The Empire, of course, doesn’t touch this any more than it does anything else unpleasantly mandate-y.  On subvariants of the trope, while it’s not Super Serum, it is true that the members of the Imperial Military Service use a variety of combat drugs [1]; but seriously, it’s not like every other profession doesn’t, quite voluntarily (nootropics, mnemotropins, a few hundred other specific combinations by way of neurochemistry, etc., management… mostly manufactured by technocytes right there in the brain and body, just like regular neurotransmitters and hormones), since after all, proper management of brain and body is important.  Better living through chemistry, folks!

[1] While it doesn’t work nearly so well with citizen-soldiers when you don’t have, y’know, off-site immortality backups, when you do have those things, it is really awfully nice to be able to field legions who are functionally immune to pain, fear, fatigue, and combat stress – at least long enough to get the mission done.

Trope-a-Day: The Government

Posted by

1

The Government: Even though there is one, sort of averted in the (remarkably ungoverned) Empire.  There, it mostly means the Imperial Service, which is about as thin as air – apart from keeping their Universal with them, spending the Citizen’s Dividend, and mailing in their three-four percent on Empire Services Fee Day, the majority of Imperial citizen-shareholders barely notice that it exists in any given year, never mind have occasion to interact with it.

(Although some services it provides are fairly ubiquitous – infrastructure, copyrights, externality management, currency – they’re not really the sort of active, impositional, or obvious things that make people yell “government!”, the runér spend more time acting in their private capacity than via their strictly circumscribed governing authority, and most of the generalized-benevolence functions that get attached to Earth-style governments are devolved to the Citizen Oversight Groups of the Plurality, which lack the sovereign powers of government and aren’t tax-funded and so can be cheerfully ignored by everyone who doesn’t care about what they do.)