Month: January 2015

Trope-a-Day: Manchurian Agent

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Manchurian Agent: You might at first think that given the advanced sophotechnology of the Empire and some of its peer civilizations, with appropriate technologies for mental editing, gnostic overlays, and thought-viruses, that Manchurian Agent would be something that happened an awful lot.

But no, largely because with appropriate technologies for mental auditing, this sort of thing rather stands out – even when civilians go to have a routine backup made (After all, that much change in these unusual ways? Triggers the caution-and-review alarm.), and certainly when people in sensitive positions undergo their routine audit to make sure no-one’s pulled exactly this kind of thing.

Which is not to say that there isn’t some devious mental skullduggery going on from time to time, but it has to be a heck of a lot subtler than this for the agencies responsible to get away with it.

Trope-a-Day: Magnetic Weapons

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Magnetic Weapons: Almost all of them, in fact. Happiness is a warm coilgun1. (And a plentiful supply of exchangeable heat sinks, because even fancy superconducting orichalcium coils3 can’t stop the Second Law.)

Handgun versions fire super-tiny flechette projectiles at mind-croggling speeds, because, well, like the picture implies…

sir-isaac-newton

…it ain’t the mass, it’s the kinetic energy. And since E = 1/2 mv2, they know which variable to concentrate on. Vehicle-mounted and starship versions fire, ah, rather bigger but still uncannily small projectiles at similarly mind-croggling speeds.

These projectiles, incidentally – with the exception of various sluggun esoterica most of which are deliberately slow-fired and intended for purposes not involving doing gross damage – are by and large not fitted with any kind of warhead. Pump enough KE into your k-slug, per Rick Robinson’s First Law, and fitting a warhead to it as well is just gilding the lily.

(Also, not fitting warheads to your most common type of ammunition has the advantage that your magazines stop being a one-hit kill. Photon torpedoes, say, would go up like antimatter-stuffed firecrackers in sympathetic detonation. K-slugs… remain solid lumps of metal. I know which one I want to be sitting on in a firefight, and the US Navy appears to agree with me.)

Footnotes:

  1. Well, technically, the modern kind also have vector control handwavium in them to get more bang for your buck, but the idea is the important thing.
  2. Not a footnote.
  3. Which are also used in the very-high-energy-density batteries that solved the power problem for portable coilguns.

Basic Delta-V Worksheet

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So, as those who follow my Google+ account will know, I use PTC Mathcad to do the various calculations behind the scenes to reality-check my work, starship designs, orbital parameters, etc., etc. And being the kind and generous soul that I am, I thought I might clean up and share my tools for the benefit of, well, everyone who wants to do this kind of thing.

Here, then, is the first of those cleaned-up sheets – a basic calculator that does the ground-to-orbit-or-escape delta-v calculation, as illustrated by Atomic Rockets here.

Here’s what it looks like (printed as XPS); and here’s the live version for those of you who have PTC Mathcad (requires only the free-for-life Express version).

Clarke’s Third Law

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Or, A Typical (Paraphrased) Exploratory Service Response To The Embarrassing Problem of Xenodeism:

“So you’re some sort of gods?”

“That depends.”

“Depends?”

“If you mean: do we possess assorted skills, powers, devices, and other techne capable of duplicating pretty much any miracle attributed to the mythological deities of yore, yes. If you mean: are we exemplary, awesome, righteous, and worthy of emulation in all things, we’re flattered, and maybe. If you mean: should you get on your knee-equivalents and start grovelling before us in worship, knock that shit off right now.”

Trope-a-Day: Magically-Binding Contract

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2

Magically-Binding Contract: In two forms, both technically nonmagical if you don’t count the Clarkian sense.

Firstly, regular old smart-contracts, which are self-enforcing, inasmuch as the contract itself takes the form of an AI which acts to enforce/fulfil itself – which can, relevantly, cover anything from simple supervisory work, to suing you for breach and demanding specific performance, to hiring mercenaries or assassins to enforce the contract, if you know what I mean?

The other would be the geas. In the modern, non-mythological sense, that would be a dynamic mind-editing thought-virus that – in the legal consumer versions, that is, that come with an intact obligator seal on them – make the idea of violating the deal you just agreed to of your own volition literally unthinkable1.

Geases are used extremely rarely, and even suggesting that one might be used (in a society where one’s word really is and ought to be enough for anybody) is a very strong insult; but sometimes you do need to be able to make a deal with the untrustworthy, and that’s where these come in.

(A related concept is that of the Cilmínár professional – doctor, advocate, etc., named after the world on which the process was developed – who have used geas technology on themselves to be able to guarantee to their rich and paranoid clients that they are genuinely incapable of betraying their clients’ interests.)

1. One important thing to note here is that you don’t see that stereotypical scene in which someone is doing something while desperately struggling against the geas or other compulsion in order not to. To struggle against doing something, you have to be able to conceptualize the notion of not doing it. With geas technology, you can’t do that.

Trope-a-Day: Magical Gesture

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1

Magical Gesture: Sometimes, especially when the mechanical psychokinesis is invoked; for one thing, it’s useful as a concentration-aid in training.  But, like we said back in Invocation, it’s entirely unnecessary for the thing to work (the neuron-implanted nanopicosomes are reading your mind directly, so you think things, and they happen).  It’s just done to look cool.

(And, okay, maybe to lure some dumb enemies who haven’t read the book to think that they’re necessary, and that binding them hand and foot is enough to prevent you from crushing their trachea with a thought.  Maybe.  But it’s still mostly about looking cool.)

Drones Don’t Kill People, People Kill People

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ARTIFICE ARMAMENTS TICKET-TRACKING: CASE 18922

From: Bureau of Social Hygiene, Ikklar Triumvirate

Subject: Nightwing-class military-grade security drone
Version: 1.3.0.1872
Issue: Drone refuses to obey orders.
Priority: Urgent

Resolution: WILL NOT FIX – WORKING AS DESIGNED.

Notes:

I’m sorry to hear that you have had problems with our Nightwing-class security drone.

Unfortunately, in this case, the drone’s systems are working as designed. While not a sophont product, the Nightwing‘s AI is programmed for strict adherence to the Ley Accords and the guidelines put forth by the Imperial Institute for Ethical Warfare, and as such will refuse all unlawful or unethical orders while operating correctly, including refusing to permit such orders to be carried out while operating as a remote extension or in manual override. As such, it is unsuitable for use as an instrument of assassination or asymmetrism.

Please refer to the user documentation, section four, pp. 369-440. As this function is described therein, I regret to inform you that no return/refund will be available.

Regards,

Taris Antilochios,
Artifice Armaments Support Services

Internal:

No, actually, I’m not sorry. You want to use our products to do what, now? With any luck at all, you’ll trip the anti-atrocity/anti-tamper code soon and put yourself out of our misery. Either that, or go back to throwing rocks, or whatever the fashion is among barbarian savages these days.

Bloody shits, so you are.

Trope-a-Day: Mad Scientist

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2

Mad Scientist: What would be a very large number of the technarchs, in the Empire, and not just them, either… except that the science isn’t usually all that mad (and does involve diligent research, standing on the shoulders of giants, taking advantage of venture capital and selling results to people For Engineering!, which some mad scientists seem to think would be letting the side down).  Well, it’s not to start with, anyway.  (See For Science!)

(Yes, the ones out at Resplendent Exponential Vector are just the long tail.)

Trope-a-Day: Mad Science Laboratory

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Mad Science Laboratory: While a lot more modern, sleek and high-tech than the stereotypical example described – well, these days, anyway – in the Empire the “gentleman scientist” never quite went away, and came back in force with greater wealth and the cornucopia machine making it a lot more practical, just as Home Inventions did.  There are a lot of pocket laboratories attached to people’s houses here and there, and their robotic assistants, too.

A decent amount of madness, too.  “We do what we can, because we must.”

Trope-a-Day: The Madness Place

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The Madness Place: In both a chronic and an acute sense.

In a chronic sense – well, if you were to use a human psychological baseline, eldrae in general are surfing down a continuous wave of something very similar to, but not quite, unipolar hypomania.

(Of course, no-one notices this *there*, because by their psychological baseline, we’re just gloomy, stodgy, hyponeiric, and perpetually unenthusiasable.)

In the acute sense – well, you know, when it’s For Science!, or indeed for just about anything else worth obsessing over, this baseline synergises very effectively with valxíjir and estxíjir both to create stunning examples of driven obsession and the disturbing potency of passion and extreme competence marching in the same direction. Beware the hyperfocus fugue state, indeed.

(Also of course, this latter piece of advice comes from the same people who invented a voluntarily-switchable, personally-controlled version of Vingean Focus technology in order to make the Madness Place even more effective.)

Epistolary Experiment (15/30)

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Ambassador vint-sal-halk (Aklaknak Cluster): “Am I correct in understanding, Madam Vice President, that your company is collecting transit fees from the Republic’s invasion fleet?”

VP Sinith Arání (Ring Dynamics, ICC): “You are. Am I correct in understanding, Your Excellency, that you would prefer that we let them invade us for free?”

– records of the Conclave of Galactic Polities

Sale! Sale! Sale!

If you’re looking for a bargain on cheap general supplies, divert a ship to the bazaar at Flern (Galith Waste) arriving five weeks up-time, and see what we have. We’ve got general stores, prefabs for ground, inflatable workshacks for space, all the rations you can eat if your biocode’s compatible with O-LDL-D11, mid-tech spare parts, tools to go with them, tankers full of rocket juice, and a whole pile of scrap metal and composite. All war salvage, legitimately condemned. Contact merchanter Flagrantly Bourgeois for more information and full inventory.

– announcement posted on general offers memeweave, spinward constellations

Minae Andracanth-ith-Cyranth (Temporal Mechanics): So let them! My colleague may be right – is almost certainly right – that they’re going for a CTC back-jump. If that’s what the Spindle is for, which we don’t know, and if they can make it work, which is doubtful. Going near that thing’s a good way to get your ship, or your fleet, shredded.

But let’s say they do.

Chronology is consistent. What has happened will have happened. Worst case, a Vonnie task force vanishes somewhere in the past without leaving any traces to detect or changing the situation we’re in right now. Best case, they’re shredded, spaghettified, and splattered trying. There’s no way we come out of this worse off.

Atrianni Cheléä (Precursor Archaeologist): How confident are you of that? Bet-your-existence confident? Bet all our existence confident?

Minae Andracanth-ith-Cyranth (Temporal Mechanics): I’ve always thought laws of nature make pretty solid bets, yes.

– excerpted from the HTT memeweave

FROM: CORE COMMAND
TO: CINCCORE; FIELD FLEET COREWARD COMMAND (CS UNCONQUERABLE SELF)

*** EXPEDITE
*** EYES ONLY FERVENT SPAN
*** STRATEGIC ACTION MESSAGE

1. THIS MESSAGE CONSTITUTES A WAR ORDER.

2. INTELLIGENCE ESTIMATES SUGGEST REPUBLIC FORWARD TASK FORCE MAY BE ATTEMPTING TO REACH “THE SPINDLE”; REFERENCE APPENDED FILE CODED “ANNULUS BLACK”.

3. DISPATCH PICKET FORCE IMMEDIATE TO SPINDLE SYSTEM. PICKET FORCE IS AUTHORIZED TO ENGAGE IF NECESSARY BUT  OBSERVATION OF REPUBLIC ACTIVITIES IS CONSIDERED A HIGHER PRIORITY.

4. YOU ARE AUTHORIZED AND REQUESTED TO OBTAIN NECESSARY SCIENTIFIC ASSISTANCE FROM EXPLORATORY SERVICE ASSETS IN THEATER OR ELSEWHERE.

5. AUTHENTICATION: PADLOCK WILLOW WOLF GATEWAY CIRRUS PRAYER / 0XAE9532BB81200A18

ADM/FLT RELEQ CLAVES-ITH-LELAD, FIRST LORD OF THE ADMIRALTY

ENC.

FROM: FIELD FLEET NADIR COMMAND (CS EVER-BURNING FLAME)
TO: CORE COMMAND

*** WILDFIRE WILDFIRE WILDFIRE
*** FERVENT SPAN; NADIR DEFENSE GENERAL
*** SITREP

INFORMATIONAL:

1. REPORTS FROM THE LEVIATHAN CONSCIOUSNESS PICKET FLEETS INDICATE THAT THE REPUBLIC CONTRIBUTION TO EACH FLEET HAVE ABANDONED THEIR POSTS AND ARE MAKING BEST SPEED COREWARD.

2. IN ACCORDANCE WITH STANDING ORDERS FOR TREATY VIOLATIONS, THESE TASK FORCES WERE NOT ENGAGED LOCALLY TO PRESERVE THE INTEGRITY OF THE QUARANTINE.

3. IN ACCORDANCE WITH BACKACHE PROTOCOL, RESERVE REINFORCEMENT FORCES HAVE BEEN ACTIVATED AND DISPATCHED TO PICKET FLEETS.

4. RECONNAISSANCE FORCES HAVE BEEN DISPATCHED IN PURSUIT.

5. MORE FOLLOWS.

6. AUTHENTICATION GRIZZLY NUGGET PADLOCK ASH CROWN LAUREL / 0x2219B41E8D8DA918

FLT ADM LEONTRIUS, CINCNADIR

Trope-a-Day: Made of Phlebotinium

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Made of Phlebotinium: Well, while there are several kinds of phlebotinium around (see: Applied Phlebotinium) of one grade or another, the deprivation of most of which would certainly make the universe substantially less pretty and/or efficient, the two big ones from a “made of” point of view would be the Absolutely Ubiquitous Computing, which would have much the same “rocks fall, almost everyone dies” effects were it to suddenly go away as electricity suddenly stopping working in Real Life1, and the specific pieces of ontotechnology responsible for the creation of stargates and tangle channels, without which – and thus with all communications and transport restricted to sub-light speeds – the galactic community would look very different indeed.  Indeed, if you delete the tangle channels (which allow real-time communication once you lob them at each other subluminally) as well as the stargates, there’s unlikely to be much of a galactic community, or much in the way of a “star nation” except very loose federations of subluminally-established colonies, bound together by information updates and data trade.

(1. ObVious reference example here: A Fire Upon The Deep, and the Countermeasure.)

Epistolary Experiment (14/30)

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1

“…due respect, Admiral, but this problem is completely out of control. Since our fleet assets were concentrated along the Borderline, smuggling incidents in the quadrant have near-tripled, and those are just the ones we know about! They’re even turning up on the Protectorate worlds. Somehow, min Rathill and his crews are waltzing right through your fleet blockade as if it wasn’t there.

“I repeat: With the Defensive Department having reassigned so much of my regular force, I couldn’t deal with the routine level of smuggling without an effective fleet blockade. Now, with the smugglers turning it into a sodding crusade, I need more ships, I need more men, and I need them now, if the whole quadrant’s not to be irreversibly contaminated…”

– Republic communications intercept, received at Tarqil (Crimson Expanse)

From: Cmdr. Leda Estenv, Flight Administrator
To: Lt. Vínas Sarathos, Gunnery Department

By the voice and authority of Flight Commander Captain Filír Anaxianos, Officer Commanding Their Divine Majesties’ Cruiser Iron Dragon, Coreward Fleet, as certified by fleet regulation Nine Eleven Two, Subsection Four;

You are hereby relieved of all duty and authority in the Gunnery Department of Their Divine Majesties’ Cruiser Iron Dragon;

And you are to consider yourself confined to quarters until such time as this ship returns to a Fleet base, or other circumstances permit a court-martial to be empaneled to consider your actions in the recent action in the Ekritat System, Uulder Shore;

With regard to possible violations of Article Thirty-Two, to wit, that your operation of starship weapons systems during a combat action was willfully negligent and, in consequence of this, did cause collateral damage on a mass scale to an uninvolved civilian population.

So ordered,

Cmdr. Leda Estenv, Flight Administrator

P.S. I’ll do what I can for you, kid, but you screwed up bad. You hit a planet. Worse than that, you hit a protected planet. This is why you wait for the computer to give you a damn firing solution!

– from the internal messaging system, CS Iron Dragon

From: Atrianni Cheléä (HTT Group)
To: Releq Claves-ith-Lelad (First Lord of the Admiralty)
Security: EYES ONLY FERVENT SPAN

I am not aware of any projects currently relevant, but since according to the latest reports the Republican forward fleet is pushing into the Uulder Shore, is it possible they’re after the Spindle?

[Library insert: The Spindle is a tapered cylindrical object, discovered by the IES in the vicinity of an obscure dwarf star in the Uulder Shore constellation. It is approximately one-third of a million miles in length and 6,000 miles in diameter at its widest point. This Precursor artifact is constructed of exotic matter similar to that used in the construction of stargates’ Andracanth rams and is rotating at approximately 0.96 c. Space in the vicinity of the Spindle is heavily distorted, making study of the object both hazardous and difficult.]

The Spindle resembles some historical theoretical models for a frame-dragging closed time-like curve generator, although we have never determined its purpose or made functional use of it. While we are confident in the validity of the block universe theory, it may be that the Republic believes that they can make a temporal end-run around us if they can somehow use the Spindle in this way. If it is intending a CTC back-jump, this would explain why their forward fleet is operating so far from the primary battlespace, and its lack of a significant logistic train; its primary vessels would be required to live off the land at their destination when and thus must be configured appropriately.

Submitted for your consideration,

Atrianni Cheléä

Trope-a-Day: Made of Indestructium

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Made of Indestructium: … alas, the universe is hard on indestructium.

About as close as nature gets is probably neutronium – and whatever even more degenerate forms of quark matter, etc., you can get beyond it. Sadly for engineers everywhere, neutronium is rather hard to work at the best of times, behaving essentially like a fluid, and having a really nasty habit of evaporating in a giant whuff of neutron radiation the moment you remove it from the deep, deep gravity well necessary to make the stuff. Metastable neutronium would be nice, and there are people working on that…

In somewhat more practical terms, muon metals, which is what you get when you strip all the electrons out of metal and replace them with muons, their leptonic cousins. Since muons have the same charge as the electron but greater mass, they have much smaller ground-state waveforms than electrons in the atoms thus formed, resulting in matter than has similar chemistry – albeit rather more endothermic – to the original, but whose density and physical properties in re energy-resistance are pushed way, way, way up as the atomic spacing shrinks way down. It would make good armor, if the mass penalty wasn’t, inevitably, quite so harsh. On the other hand, it’s one of the things that makes torch drives practical (being so incredibly refractory, and thus letting you push the drive output/waste heat/resulting radiation rather further than you otherwise could), and also is invaluable to coat lighthugger wake shields with, being able to easily shrug off the sort of dust-particle impacts you get when plowing through interstellar space at 0.9c.

But neither of these is actual indestructium, ’cause, well, antimatter. Neutronium and antineutronium will annihilate quite nicely, and while regular antimatter isn’t quite as corrosive to muon matter as it is to everything else – an antimuon is not a positron – the proton-antiproton annihilation will proceed as normal and will make the whole thing come apart just fine.

Alas, indestructium, we barely knew ye.

(There’s also singularity-locking, the handwavium I promised to explain last time. That’s actually a simple reuse of existing handwavium – vector control – in this case being used to grab and redirect, while conserving, the momentum of things that would otherwise impact the surface of the singularity-locked thing into a giant kinetic energy sink.

The reason it’s called singularity-locking is because the sort of giant kinetic energy sink you want for this is a modestly-sized black hole. This is why stargates use it, because they already have a modestly-sized entangled kernel sitting in there to make their primary function work, so you might as well get the extra use out of it. It’s also why nothing else does, because if you think muon metals have a harsh mass penalty, they’ve got nothing on dragging millions of tons of hole around with you to make your armor work. A mass ratio of what, again?

[Also, people – with fairly good reason – don’t exactly want one in their back yard anyway, on general principles.]

Sadly, this isn’t pure-quill indestructium either, technically – while it would require a ridiculous amount of energy, it is theoretically possible to overload either the singularity-locking systems or the K-sink itself, and boom. Fortunately, it would be so much boom that so far no-one’s seemed inclined to hit a stargate with a small moon and see what happens…)

Reactionlessness

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Have a not-my-fiction recommendation:

https://grantvillegazette.com/wp/article/bumped/

…momentum transfer at a distance: nice trick if you can do it. Just ask any ontotechnologist who’s trying to expand the reach of vector control. Although, Eldraeverse-wise, (spoiler) rira vs lbh pbhyq svther bhg ubj gb qb gung gevpx jvgu irpgbe pbageby, vgf hanibvqnoyr pbafreingvba-ynj pbzcyvnapr jbhyq zrna lbh jerpxrq fbzr cresrpgyl tbbq genvaf va gur cebprff.

Interlude: Collateral History

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“There was war on Ekr!at, long ago and in our third-queen’s day.

“There was war on Ekr!at, as the hive-nests of the lowlander cities sent armies forth to clash once more with those of the mountain kingdoms over possession of their fertile foothills.

“There was war on Ekr!at, as strange lights shone brighter than the stars in the sky, cutting new patterns across the heavens; while the royal astrologers declared omens of victory for the Mountain Line, and the drone-priests of the lowlands foretold the gods coming to their hives’ aid and sacrificed grubs to them in welcome.

“There was war on Ekr!at, as lowlander bronze met mountain iron, sword clove chitin, and ichor pooled in the night, under the glow of these newer stars.

“There was war on Ekr!at, as the gods reached down to the earth with their fire, the armies were no more, bronze and iron, chitin and ichor, and the land itself shattered at their touch.

“Now there is no more war on Ekr!at.”

– inscription translated from a monument studied by Grand Survey sophontologists,
from the protected planet Ekritat (Uulder Shore)
inscribed roughly 150 years after the Ekritat Skirmish, Third Border War

Trope-a-Day: Made of Explodium

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Made of Explodium: No, not really. Many, many engineers work very, very hard to ensure that this thing? Does not happen.

Two main exceptions:

One, antimatter cryocels. Because, well, antimatter, and despite the aforementioned engineers’ best efforts there’s only so much you can do to stabilize stuff that will explode the moment it touches anything. This limitation is why lighthugger starships, which use megatons of the stuff, do not come into the inner system under any circumstances, or near any important planets/habitats in the outer system, either!

No-one wants to accidentally lose a continent, y’know?

Two, stargates. Which bend spacetime in really unnatural ways, and are powered by a large contained singularity.

Now, it’s very hard to get to their explodium, seeing as they come with a very complete set of automaintenance, self-repair, and self-stabilization systems, in addition to having outer shells Made of Indestructium such as fancy singularity-locking (handwaaaave! explained tomorrow) anti-energetic armor and some of the thickest regular composite armor plate anywhere, such that if you should scrape, bounce, or ram it with a regular starship you’ll just smear yourself out over its surface and the local Ring Dynamics rep will be very ironic at you.

On the other hand, if you do manage to get through said indestructium, you will rapidly learn that the reason they’re made of it is that when they go unstable, they explode on a world-shattering, star-system-sterilizing scale. (Which, of course, is what necessitates the indestructium in the first place. Without that, even as the only practical form of FTL travel anyone’s come up with, no-one’d allow them anywhere near their star systems.)