Month: February 2015

Epistolary Experiment (25/30)

Posted by

1

“Captain har-Rant Sathan.”

“Before you begin what I am told is an entire litany of complaints, let me make the current state of affairs clear to you. We have recovered Hand of Ilth‘s flag bridge log. We know, therefore, that not only was your fleet armed with abomination weapons, but that both your admiral and yourself vocally approved of this, as did the officers of the rest of your ships at the fleet conference.”

“As such, before you complain too vigorously about being treated in strict accordance with Article V of the Ley Accords, do try and remember that we’re legally entitled to throw every single one of you out the airlock as pirates and terrorists.”

“Now, what was it you wanted?”

– from the transparency log of CS Eyrie

EMERGENCY ALERT: EPIDEMIC FIREBREAK
FLASH FLASH DCr6¯I K@ ±« …@B0Q#N FLASH

Communications disruptions are in progress through all wacca9?†‡Á…w˜¸^†‚…’Xæmoeranev‡HH attack. Shut down all affectedm10tut8*&$ghostinthemachine*&#3092YYYYy storage systems at once. Sever all links to unaffected communications nodes. Terminate all .HX’™”(…a¯…J@‘B  œŸ¡D…’˜) R_Cˈ*‡…ÆÕœ<i%yÁ™÷-linked automation. Priority messages must be A%a…cƒ€…HX’™”(…a¯…J@‘B repeats.

EMERGENCY Êæ(ù;\8E›yuŸ¡jflj °  v_]g°A¨V÷zÖvËi FIREBREAK
FLASH FLASH FLASH FLASH FLASH

 ’pì}flì·äì7â . . break, break . JpÆZ’ˆ±´›ˆ?ˆ´¡’¯ˆ progress through all trailing sectors. We are under perversion attack. Shut down all affected communications nodes and connected data storage systems yEn(ƒay*m ©‰[  ñ&  ”Y[«/s\qu/Y˜‰ communications nodes. Terminate all non-essential communications and communications-linked ´§Q:UzY^¶b,ˆ´@V‰ must be sent by courier. Message repeats.

EMERGENCY ALERT: EPIDEMIC ¶Hºa´—t ÒZË/”„/æÎZ sfly FLASH FLASH FLASH

Communications ¨ÒÑ@èvÖ Êæ(ù;\8E›yuŸ¡jflj explosive storage regulations °  v_]g°A¨V÷zÖvËi 46öô] sectors. We are under perversion attack. Shut down all affected communications nodes and connected data storage systems at once. Sever all links to unaffected 3@’”@’@’·@’[ZS computerhacksyou ’pì}flì·äì7⠔VBBB@»¤±»´¨»+^•»[ non-essential communications and communications-linked automation. Priority messages must be sent Õ#^àøuÍÃù4äßØÄ÷ repeats.

– Republic broadcast, received at Tarqil (Crimson Expanse)

From: mor-Lissek Maraz (via SHUFFLE FOURTEEN)
To: Imperial Diplomatic Corps (Military Affairs); CINCCORE
Subject: AAR (Battle of Viridit)
Priority: WILDFIRE
Security: EYES ONLY FERVENT SPAN

Sha! That was bracing! The Republic finally found some admirals with spleen!

Both of their task forces emerged in Viridit jumping together, within four hours of each other, point-defense hot and in staggered-scramble formation – they knew to expect a fight here, and were set up for conventional tactics. They saw what was waiting for them, even shifted to net-sphere in time, but they came on anyway, straight through the minefields for the convergence point and their exit gate. The AKVs tore bloody chunks out of their formation’s outer layers, and they just kept on going. Icy hells, once the forces converged, the crazy bastards even ran fuel transfers in mid-battle.

The League is still running rescue ops and picking up the pieces, but we’ve captured a flotilla of logistics vessels, most of them empty and voluntarily surrendered, and my preliminary assessment is that the AKVs cost them at least two-thirds of their screening elements. Detailed battle reports and sensor logs are enclosed by Adm. Mal Calen’s courtesy, along with my more detailed estimates.

When the battle’s done, please pass along to whoever survives in command on their side the compliments of mor-Lissek Maraz on a magnificent fight, or else I’ll drink with them and their men in the Bloody-Jawed God’s halls.

mor-Lissek Maraz

(encs.)

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

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

1. THIS MESSAGE CONSTITUTES A WAR ORDER.

2. GENTLESOPHS, WE HAVE THEM.

3. AVAILABLE HEAVY SIX UNITS ACTIVATED UNDER WAR PLAN SARISSA WILL PROCEED IMMEDIATELY TO EYE OF NIGHT (LAST DARKNESS) SYSTEM STATION.

4. CURRENTLY ACTIVE COREWARD FLEET UNITS ENGAGED IN OPERATION FERVENT SPAN WILL ENGAGE REARGUARD AND FLANK ELEMENTS OF THE REPUBLIC TASK FORCE, HARASSING AND HERDING SAID TASK FORCE TOWARDS EYE OF NIGHT (LAST DARKNESS) SYSTEM.

5. ON ARRIVAL OF OPFOR IN EYE OF NIGHT (LAST DARKNESS) SYSTEM, ALL UNITS WILL EXECUTE MANEUVER PLAN TROVIAN BRIDGE

6. WARMAIN FOR THIS OPERATION REMAINS GND ADM, REPEAT, GND ADM INESMIR MUETRY-ITH-MUETRY.

7. SERVICE AND GLORY.

8. AUTHENTICATION: PADLOCK WILLOW WOLF GATEWAY CIRRUS PRAYER / 0xAE9532BB81200A18

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

Trope-a-Day: Mind Hive

Posted by

2

Mind Hive: Several – arguably, most people qualify as at least a mild form of this, since the habit of running a muse, a personal assistant AI, on your implanted headware is close to ubiquitous.  Of course, actions aren’t by consensus in that case, but the habit of turning your body over to said AI for boring maintenance-type functions while you go do something more interesting in virtuality is also close to ubiquitous, so.

But there are more than a few mental architectures that work this way deliberately, especially among native infomorphs that use ‘shells only for specific tasks and so tend to have them run by consensus of a team of specialists, rather than assuming that one-shell-per-process is “natural”.  And even relatively simple high-coordination AIs have multiple consciousness loops/narrative threads in order to multitask effectively, whereas most biosapiences only have one; of course, they share all data in real-time, so may not quite qualify.

And, of course, the “Ocean of Mind” of the Transcend is a functional soup made up of teleological threads derived from aspects of the transcended hyperconsciousness, the uploaded personalities of the dead, and instantiated expediters based on local entelechical maxima.  Thus, arguably, the Hive Mind is also the biggest Mind Hive of them all.

Epistolary Experiment (24/30)

Posted by

12

The Eye of Night (Last Darkness) System has the distinction of being the only black hole accessible to the Associated Worlds, and indeed, the primary reason for the existence of the Last Darkness constellation.

The black hole itself, Eye of Night, is designated as the system primary. It boasts a magnificent accretion disk, fueled by the asteroidal remnants of the system, and a stream of infalling matter drawn from the system secondary, the mottled red giant star Bloodshot. The three stargates into the system orbit 45 degrees off the ecliptic to avoid starships emerging directly into the high-radiation zone of the disk itself; visitors are advised to consult an ephemeris and make all appropriate drift calculations before selecting their emergence point.

Little civilization exists in the system. The majority of it is found on the Empire’s Edgewalker Research Station, a deeply-buried beehive habitat orbiting at the fringe of the accretion disk, again in an orbit 45 degrees off the ecliptic. The station is accessible for most of its orbit, with the exception of the two multi-month periods in each orbit in which it passes through the plane of the accretion disk. The station is largely abandoned during this time except for deep-level automation. Again, check your ephemeris for details.

Edgewalker Station is run jointly by Dynamic Spatial Geometry Group, a research collective, and by the Order of Endings Manifest, a monastic order of Entélith – indeed, there is much overlap between the two, as the devotees of the Lady of Death and Endings take great interest in such research. It also houses modest facilities for visiting researchers and tourists, and a small funerist, capable of performing appropriate death rituals for many species of the Worlds.

Orbiting much closer to the Eye is the Eft Sédir Containment Facility, a maximum security prison run for a consortium of Accord polities by a division of the White Hands mercenary fleet. The Facility is designed as a skyhook extending from its anchor asteroid (home of the prison administration facilities and its spaceport) down towards the hole; prisoners are held in modules attached to the skyhook and resupplied by one-way descender ‘bots. The Facility uses the increasing levels of gravity as the skyhook descends to assist in the containment of their more violent and dangerous prisoners; modules can be placed at levels offering from near-microgravity to a crushing twelve standard gravities. In the event of riot, attempted escape, or other trouble, separation charges can blow any module clear of the skyhook and drop it into the Eye, or the entire skyhook can be separated from its anchor, likewise. Approaching the Facility is not recommended for anyone except for an approved White Hands prisoner transport; the locals are unfriendly, and the station will fire on anyone entering its claimed million-mile security zone.

Points of Interest: The only other structure of interest in the Eye of Night System is the remains of a tarvic project to magnetohydrodynamically tap energy from the infall of stellar plasma originating from Bloodshot. While abandoned partway through construction, and obviously derelict, this miles-long megastructure is still remarkable, the more so that it continues to hold station within the plasma streamer despite centuries of neglect.

– Leyness’s Worlds: Guide to the Ecumene

FROM: ADM. GILEON CULARIUS (GRUMPY BADGER THEATER COMMAND)
TO: CORE COMMAND

*** EXPEDITE
*** EYES ONLY GRUMPY BADGER

1. I HAVE THE HONOR TO REPORT THAT THE SARAGÓS (OSIS DEEP) SYSTEM HAS BEEN RECLAIMED.
2. ALL IN-SYSTEM ILTINE FORCES, UNDER SENIOR SURVIVING COMMANDER CAPTAIN-OF-CRUISERS MINIK HAR-RANT SATHAN, HAVE SURRENDERED AND ARE UNDER TASK FORCE CONTROL.
3. AFTER AKV ATTACK TO DISABLE MISSILE FACILITIES, CASUALTIES AMONG THE ABOMINATION WEAPONS IN USE BY ILTINE FORCES WERE MINIMAL. TASK FORCE GRUMPY BADGER HAS CAPTURED 14,896 INTACT, 37 PARTIALLY SO, 892 DESTROYED. STATUS OF REMAINING EST. 15 UNKNOWN.
4. TECHNICAL DIVISION HAS BEGUN THE PROCESS OF TRANSFERRING CHANGELING AIS TO INACTIVE TRANSPORT SUBSTRATE. REQUEST FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS ON DISPOSITION.
5. IT IS MY INTENT, PROCEED-UNLESS-CANCELLED, TO ADVANCE UPON VENERI (OSIS DEEP) AND REQUIRE EXPLANATIONS OF THE ILTINE GOVERNANCE.
6. AUTHENTICATION WOLFPACK IRON AMBER WYVERN BASKET ANVIL / 0x1195BAEB33249C65

ADM GILEON CULARIUS

RRENAC (Cordai Gap) – Chaos reigns on the former throneworld of the People’s State of Bantral. While the war has moved out of this region, officially, with the fleets of the Nineworlds, First Interactivity, other local polities, and their mercenary allies destroying the established Republican forces or driving them them back beyond the Borderline, the fighting continues.

A multiple-front war is in progress, here, between the remnants of the old People’s Government – deposed by the Republic’s forces in the early stages of their invasion of the Worlds – several revolutionary organizations claiming to represent new governances – empowered by ideas, technology and other assets seized during the Republic’s retreat – offworld looters, and those who simply wish to be left alone.

The most violent of these, so far, is the war against the old regime. While it retains control, in theory, of the majority of Bantine territory and the remains of the Bantine military forces and other instrumentalities, it is also the most widely despised of the competing factions. Lynch mobs operate freely in rebel territory hunting down former regime officials, and, most dramatically, the opening shot of the revolution came when the House of State was destroyed, an action attributed to the One Plane Faction, by dropping a freighter from orbit as the People’s Government reconvened for the first time after the Republic’s departure.

Thus far, even mutually hostile revolutionaries have been observed to cooperate against them. But as the need for cooperation declines in the face of the dwindling governance, the situation on the ground can only heat up.

– the Accord Journal

Slag Them!

Posted by

To whet appetites while I feverishly write this day, here’s a comment I left elsewhere a while ago on the general topics of planetary invasions, and the ongoing argument of the “just slag the planet, no need for troops” vs. “massive world-spanning groundpounder warfare” schools of thought.

My conclusion, in a nutshell: on any post-colonial planet that isn’t easy to nexus-interdict, it’s less what you might prefer, and more what you’re going to get anyway:

For myself and my setting, I concluded that at least some aspects of the “kill it with nuclear fire” school are going to be more or less inescapable because of, as you point out, how good the planetary defenders have it.

What the Ley Accords – the Eldraeverse equivalent of the Geneva Convention, essentially – actually says is that you can’t use planetary bombardment indiscriminately on civilian populations or to make terror strikes, and once you’ve disabled the orbital defenses and “own the high orbitals”, you’re supposed to ask for their surrender before you start firing on the legitimate military targets…

…because once you’ve started dropping heavy enough hellflowers (air-burst antimatter sterilization/EMP weapons), stoneburners (sub-ground-burst anti-bunker burrowing antimatter shaped-charges), and plain old k-rods (Rods From God) to take out deep-running submarines, crust-embedded fortresses, giant planetary lasers, etc., etc., there’s no way not to do major damage to the planet even if you’re not trying to, or indeed if you’re trying not to. If you’re lucky, you’ll get away with a few dozen simultaneous earthquakes/tsunamis/wildfires/hurricanes/massive radiation events/etc. worth of damage. If you’re unlucky, you throw enough debris into the air to give you a particle winter and a major extinction event. And either way, depending on how careful the planetary government is to keep its military facilities in the middle of nowhere, you’ve got megadeaths to gigadeaths.

The polities that are both (a) established galactic citizens, and (b) halfway civilized, all understand this, and that you’re supposed to surrender the planet when you lose the orbital defenses, because while you might not be able to take it back, you definitely can’t un-wreck it.

(Even if you intend to fight a guerilla war groundside afterwards and are willing to absorb the damage from that, you may still find it worthwhile to surrender any formal planetary defenses you invested in. At least that way they’re only going to be dropping tactical k-rods on you…

…but there’s no upside to engaging in a pissing contest with starship-class weapons and their planet-mounted equivalents when the planet is going to take all the collateral damage, and the fleet in orbit doesn’t have to worry about that.)

Thus, Imperial admirals hate having to fight galactic newbies (who might be under the impression that you can fight and win an orbit/ground battle without taking horrific collateral damage), or worse, the kind of fanatics who don’t mind taking their population and ecology along with them when they go. (Although, in practice, there’s usually someone in the latter’s command structure willing to introduce their leader to a bullet rather than let him initiate Ragnarok.) Even Caliéne “the Worldburner” Sargas-ith-Sargas, the IN’s mostly-tame sociopath, thinks it’s a little messy and inelegant.

Trope-a-Day: Military Mashup Machine

Posted by

5

Military Mashup Machine: Oh, several.  Examining them by the categories of the original trope, we have:

Land Battleship: This one, actually, they don’t have.  Essentially, by the time it was practical to build this sort of thing, firstly, people who needed a heavy weight of fire on the ground were already in the habit of calling down the ortillery, either from the orbital defense grid or from an assault cruiser in low orbit over the battlespace – if they had orbital superiority.  And secondly, anything like this that you did build would be a giant radiating target for said ortillery – if you didn’t have orbital superiority.  Between them, these put paid to the notion of serious land battleships.

Submersible Carrier: Many wet navies have these, but they tend to be less the “plane-launching submarine” type and more submarines that can launch UAVs from missile tubes, control them for the duration of their mission, and then recover them at sea.  Which isn’t to say that the former haven’t existed, but the latter are usually rather more practical.

Amphibious Tanks: All tanks are amphibious tanks, pretty much by default.  By the time you’ve built a tank that can operate in all the various atmospheres, by composition and pressure, you might want it to (quick deployment and the needs of logistics sneer at air-breathing engines!) and incorporated the rest of the closed-cycle support you need to survive a modern battlefield in which nuclear, chemical, and nanoweapons are all in play, it pretty much shrugs off submergence, too.  You can pretty much drive a modern Imperial MBT from continent to continent across the ocean floor, although I can’t imagine why you’d want to.

(Incidentally, since a very large number of them have some vector-control capability and/or nuclear-thermal thrusters, they also arguably qualify as flying tanks – which usage, however, is a fast ticket to a court-martial, since playing flying games with something whose speed and maneuverability is very much not equal to dedicated air vehicles is a good way to win the Expert Pop-Up Target Award for your next instantiation.  It does, however, let you deploy your tanks with speed and convenience by kicking them out of the back of freight aircraft, and letting them ride their vectors to the ground.)

Amphibious Jet Fighter: Jet fighters, no, but we do have amphibious spacecraft – both certain shuttles common in orbital operations on worlds, water or otherwise, with extensive undersea development, and some types of system-defense vehicle whose ability to operate relatively deep in the atmospheres of gas giants – important to prevent enemy forces from field refueling, one way or another – permits operating in more terrestrial worlds’ oceans, which can be useful from time to time as a way to hide out and achieve surprise.

(It’s probable that gas-giant installation service vehicles and gas miners could also operate successfully in an oceanic environment, but there’d not be any point other than, well, saying that you’d done it.)

Mobile Factory: Even if you ignore the two hyperdreadnoughts with full on-board shipyards and the six Supremacies that act as semi-mobile bases for the fleets to coreward, rimward, spinward, trailing, acme and nadir, the Imperial Navy has to operate so often well outside reasonable resupply lines that it operates a large number of mobile logistics bases, large ships – with their own attached screens, parasite smelterships, etc. – which can be stationed anywhere to build new fuel, supplies, ammunition, and even AKVs to resupply task forces operating in their vicinity, using resources available locally.

And if we’re classifying the Cylon resurrection ships from Battlestar Galactica here, then we should also include the hospital ships – a historical designation – operated by large numbers of transsophont powers, which serve both as a well-protected place to keep the mind-state backup substrate, and also to house the large number of military-spec clone bodies used to resurrect anyone killed in action and send ’em back into the fray.

(If you manage to take one of these out, or even if you don’t, yes, this means that the number of bodies left floating around the battlefield afterwards bears no resemblance whatever to the number of people you actually managed to kill.  Assuming that you managed to kill anyone permanently, which – since most militaries that make use of this particular technology offer off-line backups back at base as a service benefit – is, frankly, doubtful.)

The Battlestar: Well, as mentioned above in the specific trope of that name, there are several battlecruiser classes that are designed like this, simply because the on-board AKV screen gives them much greater flexibility when they’re out running patrols and such on their own or in small flotillas, rather than being retained as fleet screening elements.

And then there are the fleet carriers which carry around entire task forces between those star systems not linked by stargates, when necessary.

Others: While these do a good job of describing the main variations, there are plenty of other weird vehicles hanging around in larger or smaller numbers: burrowing tanks for special siege applications;

The Pindareth-class aerospace-support cruiser, a flying Macross Missile Massacre whose whole design function is to dump entire holds’ worth of bundles of air-to-anything missiles into the battlespace from orbit, then designate targets for them once they hit operational altitude, intended to swarm and destroy entire air forces in one giant orgy of nucleonic destruction;

And, on the personal level, a number of gunsword designs which, yes, turned out to be pretty useless as guns and swords both, but which, after being corrected to not throw off the balance and forgetting about the projectile, work great for extracting your sword from someone if you should get it hung up on some resistant bit of innards.

Trope-a-Day: The Milky Way Is The Only Way

Posted by

1

The Milky Way Is The Only Way: Played straight, given the general uselessness of other experimental fittlers, and since the only reliable form of FTL the universe evidently permits is stargate pairs, the far end of which has to be dragged out to its destination at subluminal speed.  Thus, only a veritable tiny fraction of even this galaxy has been explored.

That said, the Elsewhere Society did manage to raise the mind-croggling amount of money necessary to have a stargate pair constructed and its Wandercompagnon lobbed at the Greater Ancíël Whirl (which is to say, the Large Magellanic Cloud) at near-light velocity, but it won’t get there for a long, long time.  They’re having rather less success in raising more money to build a second pair and repeat the exercise with Andromeda.

And it’s not like sufficiently powerful telescope arrays can’t see some interesting things going on Beyond The Space We Know, other galaxies included…

Epistolary Experiment (23/30)

Posted by

3

“I could almost kiss Kadrish har-Lan Sarkdor this morning.”

“You want to get smoochy with the Iltine Minister of Pacification? The Worlds’ leader in using children as missile components?”

“Well, I’d kill him afterwards.”

“Athenril, you’re perverted. Be sure and record that.”

“But seriously. Between him pushing the Union into attempted expansion, Bantine space collapsing into warwilds, the deshniki retrenching, the Tree’s resurgent militancy, and such, we have plenty of trouble at home. More than enough to counter the Sanguinaries and the Conclave factions demanding we push the advantage on beyond the Borderline.”

“I wouldn’t count on it. The Gradualist faction of the Sanguinaries is coming up reasonable – they’ve indicated they’d be happy if we take home Vontok System and the chunk of Vonis 31 trailing of it back to the Borderline. Rumor has it the Golden Chain’s backing them up, wanting evidence on how a de-meming would work outside the simulations.”

– from the transparency log at the Ministry of State & Outlands

Dir min Solsea, share-captain, CMS Mine, Mine Mine

Cousins,

I’m docked at Kernitrile Station in Galatas for resupply, and just spoke at dockside with a representative from an anonymous initiative, contact nyms attached below. His outfit is offering escrowed slice-contracts to anyone who’s making smuggling runs into the trailing half of Vonis 31, just show proof of cargo and delivery, and they’ll match your revenue. No strings attached, and I had that obligator-checked – all part of the war effort, I suppose.

I’ve always had a liking for being paid twice to do something I’m doing anyway.

– from the Solsea Clan & Affiliates memeweave

From: mor-Lissek Maraz, Military Attache, League of Meridian
To: Imperial Diplomatic Corps (Military Affairs); CINCCORE
Subject: League involvement
Priority: WILDFIRE
Security: EYES ONLY FERVENT SPAN

It seems the League is making its move. I spoke with Admiral Sef Mal Calen, Federated Meridian Navy, this morning – at his request. He informs me that their intelligence agrees with ours inasmuch as the two Republic fleets are expected to converge in the Viridit System, and that the FMN have chosen to respond by deploying minelayers to the Viridit system to interdict both entry stargates with enough dormant AKVs to, in his words, “blot out the stars”.

We have been provided with transponder codes to indicate friendly status to these (enc.; CINCCORE only).

Admiral Sef Mal Calen has extended an invitation to join his command as a military observer, which I have of course accepted. Please expect and direct future messages via tangle channel SHUFFLE FOURTEEN.

mor-Lissek Maraz

From: Imogen Andracanth, VP Research, Ring Dynamics
To: Adm. [blank], Imperial Naval Intelligence
Subject: Re: UNSEEN KEY; info req.
Security: EYES ONLY UNSEEN KEY

I have it.

The ancient data on that system – damn the current stellar alignment – suggests that it’s a red giant-black hole binary, modified for power generation. It’s also very close to where we lost trace of Serril and Athne. That’s got to be where their god-corpse is, feeding off the infall.

But they can’t understand the relic tech they’re mining. It’s physiologically impossible for a meathead. So all they know is that they’ve been mining – or making – their stargates from a system that’s most developed around the hole. They think it’s necessary. They’re going for our presumed stargate-core manufacturing facility, and they’re assuming from what they know that it must be around the only black hole we have access to.

They’re heading for the Last Darkness. Couldn’t be surer of it.

Trope-a-Day: Mile-Long Starship

Posted by

Mile-Long Starship: Some bigger classes easily fall into this category or above: dreadnoughts and superdreadnoughts, grapeship megafreighters, the top end of highliners, colony seedships, mobile factories, that sort of thing, and – of course – city-ships.

Special note here to most lighthuggers, which have to accommodate vast quantities of deuterium and antideuterium and whose antimatter-pion-torch engines are so ridiculously lethal to be near that you want them on the end of a very long spine indeed.

Questions: Economy and Habitats

Posted by

Got some more questions! Jamie asks:

It strikes me as odd that at the technological level the Eldrae work at that they appear to be working under an ideal capitalist system in an era of post scarcity technology. How is wealth determined? What is the currency based on? What kinda of inequality is there if any?

Well, the thing to bear in mind about “post-scarcity” societies is that virtually all of them are actually only “post-material-scarcity” (or “nearly-post-material scarcity”, which is how I’d describe the Core Economic Zone polities and regions in the Eldraeverse.) Some things tend to remain scarce – ideas (especially if we assume that inventors, designers, authors, and so forth like to be paid for their work for reasons over and above what the money can buy them, which as an author, I’m pretty sure of), personal services, availability (only so many people can attend X event), etc., etc.

This is true even if we step out of my universe and examine the ur-post-scarcity example, Iain Banks’s Culture, in which a plot driver running through many of the books is the competition to get into Contact, or Special Circumstances, which by no means takes even all the qualified people who want to get in. In Look to Windward, we also see the case of a live concert timed to match the light from a particular supernova – and thus obviously limited to only that one particular place and time and audience – cause such perceived scarcity that even the people who are very smug about “money is a symptom of poverty” immediately reinvent scarcity economics and trading favors in the quest for tickets.

So that’s why they still need an economic system. (Well, that, and nearly-post-material-scarcity only means that mining, generating, and manufacturing is super-cheap, not free, because it still takes energy and thought to do – thermodynamics, it is a bugger. People may only be paying the equivalent of $20/month, easily covered by the Citizen’s Dividend, for the right to manufacture a giant pile of consumer goods every day, but that trivial cost is still there on the back-end.)

As for capitalism – well, now, I find that something of an unfortunately loaded term in *here*’s politics, so I try not to use it to describe things *there*. Their system is both propertarian – inasmuch as it esteems private property, and makes great use of property rights in various areas – and agorist – making use of free markets (which, given their views on the essential nature of consent, is close to the only ethically permitted option).

When I say “loaded”, of course, one of the things I mean is that people assume that capitalism includes only for-profit corporations (which the Empire’s system doesn’t – as the link above says, CEZ economies have an extensive agalmic component, and usually support healthy gift economies, open source communities, alternative internal economic arrangements (co-operatives, ecodemocracies, etc., etc.), the bounty economy, the street performer protocol (like Kickstarter), etc., with wage-based employment (which is almost nonexistent outside indenture – see here, here, and here). It is, if you will, also a free market in free market types.

…and it stays that way, essentially, ethical issues aside for the moment, because the Empire got to become a wealthy nearly-post-material-scarcity civilization by being organized that way, and the wise man does not kick away the ladder that got him where he is today. Especially if he’s still standing on it.

As for how the currency’s based, there’s a good explanation of that here (look down in the article; the first part covers why it’s Very Much Not Gold). It’s essentially fiat, but a peculiar kind of independent fiat designed to match the currency base accurately to the production capacity of the economy (because inflation is a form of robbing creditors to pay debtors, and deflation is a form of robbing debtors to pay creditors, and that is just not on, no sir).

As far as inequality is concerned, I can do no better than point you at the explanation here: Trope-a-Day: No Poverty.

The other thing that seems odd is that they are very planet focused and mentions of space habitats of all shapes and sizes seems rare. How common are Eldrae habitable worlds? What makes planets more useful than more energy and resource efficient habitats? How have they varied the basic habitat designs?

Um, not sure where you’re getting that from. I seem to recall more than a few mentions of one habitat or another, and canonically about three-fifths of the Imperial population are spacers, only two-fifths living on planets. (By no means all of which are habitable, if by that you mean “shirt-sleeve habitable”; most of the populated planets in the Worlds are partially-terraformed Mars-type worlds, which are actually much easier to deal with than existing garden worlds, habitability-wise.) There’s a certain bias towards garden worlds in the Thirteen Colonies, back in the Imperial Core, because of the preferences of the old subluminal colonization days, but in general, it’s not so; and the list of “habitables” tends to include worlds like Sialhain (Venus-like, colonized in aerostats), and Galine (Titan-like), and so forth.

As for why planets – why not planets? People started out being used to them. Sometimes people like seeing landscapes that someone doesn’t have the architectural plans for, or smelling a few trillion tonnes of aeon-old biomass on the wind. (Or maybe they just like wind, who knows?) Or, y’know, because planets have oceans, and while there are aquatic habitats,  you’re not getting the cetacean uplifts out of the Big Puddles any time soon. It’s not a decision anyone’s making out of questions of efficiency, being nearly-post-material-scarcity, and all; it’s a decision people make because they feel like it, and why not?

As a side note: garden worlds are also extremely useful and valuable because they have ecologies, which are very information-dense. And even in the most crassly commercial sense, an ecology is a giant library-cum-research-program of new biotechnological and nanotechnological tricks to draw from. It’s just good business.

(Outside the Empire and other transsophont cultures, of course, many people live primarily on planets because they’re too Luddite or biochauvinist to modify themselves to live comfortably long-term in microgravity. But, hey, someone’s got to be the meek who inherit the Earth, right?)

Habitat-wise: well, I’m going to keep the details under my hat a bit until we see them in fic, but teaser-wise, what I will say is that while there are some O’Neill cylinders and the like, the majority of them could be classified as modular structures or asteroid beehives, operating in microgravity – and even the cylinders tend to operate under low spin gravity. After all, why live on a faux planet when there are plenty of real planets around? Spacers prefer to live spacer-style among spacer-style architecture, by and large.

Trope-a-Day: Microts

Posted by

2

Microts: Ah, the wonders of time measurement.

The Eldrae have a number of time measurement systems (well, when you’re an interstellar polity, you more or less have to, since local days and years vary all over the place and it’s handy if your time units bear some resemblance to what nature is doing). But there are two systems that are used more or less everywhere, so I’ll talk about those a little.

The first, “weavetime”, is the one that technical systems use internally, and as the basis for all the other systems, because it defines the base unit, the “pulse”. (It’s not actually the fundamental unit, I suppose, because it’s not the Planck time, nor is it a nice clean number in terms of things atomic clocks, etc., actually measure, but it’s the traditional “second”, if you will. It’s actually based on the length of a nominal resting heartbeat as a multiple of the Planck time – roughly 3/4 of an Earth second, in their terms.) And for scientific and technical purposes, weavetime just agglomerates pulses together, producing kilopulses (about a third of a local hour; 21.6 minutes), megapulses (24 local days; 26 of ours), gigapulses (124 of their years, 122.5 of ours), etc.

Weavetime is defined by consensus agreement of baseline clocks located aboard each and every stargate in the plexus, which together produces the “empire time reference frame”, a nice preferred standard by which everyone can agree what the time is despite all the wormhole FTLing. It also includes the standards for the frame-correction algorithms used to synchronize lighthugger starships and other objects moving at inconveniently relativity-invoking speeds up by defining the difference between the absolute pulse (“empire time”) and the local pulse (“wall-clock time”).

Said lighthugger starships, incidentally, generally make their own lives simpler by using “mission elapsed time” internally, thus avoiding having to use a pulse too different in length from everyone else’s, and go back on the local timebase when they arrive.

But weavetime is kind of inconvenient for day to day use – the nearest “day-length” unit, quite apart from not matching any planet anywhere, is the 144-kilopulse unit at 52 Earth hours, which is not that useful.

So for regular living, people use Imperial Standard Time, which in the finest traditions of hegemonists everywhere is essentially the same as planetary time for the eldrae homeworld, only using the precisely calculated weavetime pulse. It’s local time for there, and for everywhere whose day length is too short (e.g., space stations, where the local day can be around an hour), or too long (tide-locked worlds, where the local day can be around a year), or too weird (e.g., moons of gas giants, where argh conventional calendar does not work), to have a practical local calendar; it’s also used universally as the commercial calendar to work out public holidays, the financial year, etc., etc.

IST uses a local day that’s approximately 26 Earth hours long; that time unit is referred to as one “cycle”. It divides it in half precisely into day and night – which works well for their world, which lacks any axial-tilt-equivalent due to not being a conventional planet and so has no day-length variation – and then divides the day into twelve “hours” (~ 65 Earth minutes) and the night into six “watches”; each of these are individually named, although in writing them briefly it’s acceptable to number them instead.

The name actually doesn’t refer to the whole period, but rather to the moment the period centers around, so while an hour is divided into 72 minutes (each ~ 54 seconds), these are counted as 36 “rising” minutes before the named moment, and 36 “falling” minutes after it. Watches are, obviously, divided into 144 minutes, 72 before and 72 afterward.  And each minute contains 72 pulses.

The calendar divides the homeworld’s year (333.3 local cycles in length), into 333 cycles with an additional intercalary cycle (“Calibration”) added every third year (and omitted every thirtieth) to fix the lag, in turn divided into 37 weeks of nine cycles each, which pleasingly allows the weeks to fit evenly into the year and make each calendar date the same day of the week. It’s also divided into months (whose length is taken from the period of the more prominent of the planet’s moons, but which no longer follow its phases, since they’re now synchronized with the years) each 27 days long. This, obviously, doesn’t exactly fit into the length of the year, so there are nine intercalary cycles added at various points to make up the slack.

Trope-a-Day: MIB

Posted by

3

MIB: The five… ah, four, directorates of Imperial State Security would be horrified to ever be this unsubtle – as would, for that matter, the Librarians of Silence – and, frankly, even when secrets need to be kept, they know perfectly well that eldrae don’t intimidate worth a damn.  Using any standard MIB tactics short of actual memory redaction is probably the surest way to get whatever knowledge you were concerned to keep secret spread absolutely everywhere on general principles.

Got to be persuasive, and disappear stuff quietly.

Odious Sovereign Debt

Posted by

1

MirrorField asks, with regard to Author’s Note: Sovereign Debt:

If this is the case, I’m left to wonder on their opinion on the concept of “odious debt”, ie. debt incurred by government *not* representative of it’s constituents. Basically, do the eldrae believe that it’s a-ok to hold joe average responsible for debts run up by government he didn’t support (and possibly actively worked against)? Or is it a simple credit risk associated with lending to dictators? Or would they simply consider members of said regime *personally* liable for debts thus incurred? Inquiring minds want to know…

Well, the first thing to note at this point is that *there* , the concepts of what one might consider a legitimate government are somewhat different to begin with.

For the Worlds in general, as I mention in today’s out-of-order trope-a-day People’s Republic of Tyranny, unlike Earth, there is no general consensus in favor of representative democracy. (And, heck, the Accord has members for whom the entire concept would be meaningless – hive minds, say, in which The Man would have The Vote – or would need a lot of revision – sophonts with specialized castes, like those of many Earth insects, in which all sophs are definitely not created equal and some subcastes may not even be sophont.)

Now, where the eldrae, the Empire, and the Directorate of Gilea & Company in particular are concerned, the thing to remember is that they’re libertists, and pretty hard-core ones by our standards. So far as they’re concerned, governmental legitimacy can only come from the unanimous consent of the governed, not the “representative consent of the governed”, or the “implicit consent of the governed”, or whatever other excuse one might cobble together. That’s what defines a Society of Consent. All other forms of government are necessarily based on the coercion of the unwilling, and therefore korasmóníë, “force-states”, all of which are mighty obnoxious in the sight of the Freest of the Free.

Representativeness as we would define it, therefore, doesn’t exactly cut much ice with them. In an autocracy, one man is wearing the jackboots. In a democracy, >=(50%+1) men are wearing the jackboots. Neither of these cases is equivalent to an absence of jackboots, but both of them are suspiciously near-equivalent to a gang of nasty little slaving thugs who probably pull the wings off flies and engage in dubious sexual practices.

Now, on the specifics of odious debt, I suspect what matters to them is continuity. Recall, so far as they’re concerned, a government is just another type of business. If your revolution just happens to be a change in management, or a takeover that still lays claim to all the assets of the business – well, corporations don’t get to conveniently forget about their liabilities just because the shareholders fired the board for making deals they wouldn’t have approved of and replaced them. You don’t get to claim the assets, the name, the infrastructure, yadda yadda, without the liabilities that come attached to them. (Although we might be willing to talk about restructuring. Maybe. If it improves our chances of getting our money back.)

If, instead, it’s the equivalent of buying the company’s assets at the liquidation sale – well, fine, then, you don’t get the liabilities (they aren’t holding Joe Average responsible, you see; they’re holding the corporate governance responsible, in short). But you also aren’t necessarily the seniormost creditor in that liquidation – if the overthrown dictator borrowed a few billion exvals to spend on battlecruisers and palaces, and you don’t want to honor the loan under these circumstances, that’s fine, but you can’t have the battlecruisers and palaces either. We have a lien and a legitimate claim on the assets of the former regime. You can’t disavow the legitimacy of a transaction and simultaneously claim ownership of the assets that transaction paid for. That’s double-billing, and pretty odious double-billing at that.

This is, of course, arguably rather a harsh position to take – but should you point that out to them, the average Imperial will shrug and point out that:

(a) As long xenohistorical experience has taught them, The Revolution Was Not (Will Not Be) Civilized, and should this turn out to be the rare exception where the new regime isn’t a bunch of equivalent thugs wearing differently colored hats, someone will probably offer to help them out with their debts later on – and if they are, why exactly do they deserve a freebie?

(b) That in any case, there’s an established precedent for being oppressed, and it worked for them, and they are deeply cynical, therefore, about this supposed “lack of support” on the part of the many.

And finally:

(c) In any case, that loan is not the bank’s money to give away. It’s their customers’ money, their investors’ money, the people to whom they have a fiduciary responsibility, and it is absolutely not their place to decide to give away their customers’ money without their customers’ joint say-so. No matter who might claim otherwise.

(Every note, after all, has two ends – and that some governments are often happy to order the wiping out “odious debt” without so much as mentioning that the other end of that note is coming right out of a bunch of pension funds, small investors’ funds, etc., that don’t particularly deserve to be stiffed is another one of those things that the average Imperial would find headbangingly dishonest. If exactly what they’d expect from a korasmóníë.)

Trope-a-Day: People’s Republic of Tyranny

Posted by

3

People’s Republic of Tyranny: Mostly averted, if only because the Associated Worlds, unlike Earth, has no consensus that democracy is the awesomest, shiniest form of government ever, and so there’s no particular urge to genuflect in its direction by way of obfuscating your actual government type.

(There is the People’s State of Bantral, but you’ll note that it doesn’t claim any kind of democratic/republican credentials.  It is a brutal oligarchic tyranny, but the only justification it feels the need to make is that it’s acting in the name of the People – not that the people get a say, necessarily.  Others – say, the Equality Concord and Hope Hegemony – go similarly, but more honest and less self-conscious brutal tyrannies like, say, the Gazkas Autocracy don’t bother with even that fig leaf.)

Heavy Cavalry: Size

Posted by

Just occurs to me, I wrote all that and never once mentioned a size.

Well, the base platform is about 16.5 m (54 ft) long, 4.8 m (about 16 ft) wide, and 3.6 m (about 12 ft) high. For reference, that’s about twice as long as an M1 Abrams and a third again as wide, comparable in length to a short semi-truck. (Not exactly intended for fighting in cramped urban conditions, but then, that’s why the drive train is built with pleasing indifference to the direction you might ask it to drive in.) 8 m of the length and 3.5 m of the width at the front is the module socket; height of modules varies, but none take it much above the basic 3.6 m height.

Fortunately, it doesn’t actually weigh all that much more than the Abrams, thanks to extensive use of newfangled lightweight composites.

So now you know.

The Emperor’s Sword: Heavy Cavalry

Posted by

8

“Bash, bash, bash, bash, bash our way to glory…”

Making up the remaining one of every sixteen legions (i.e., one per three light cavalry or heavy infantry, and one per nine light infantry), we have the heavy cavalry. Direct-fire death on very large treads, which is to say, main battle tanks. The biggest of all the big sticks. Putting the “brute” into “brute force”.

For additional flexibility, the majority of Imperial MBTs are built off a common base platform, with a selection of swappable modules to provide specific functionality for specific cases. (Unlike many modular vehicle systems in this ‘verse, however, these aren’t hot-swappable; the need to remove and replace and integrate large and complex chunks of armor plate, etc., when doing it means that this requires some pretty major machine-shop type facilities. It’s not something you can do in the field.) Due to these functionality differences, MBTs are usually classified by the module.

So first we’ll talk about the capabilities of the base platform, and then we’ll talk about some of the more commonly seen modules:

Base Platform: Armor

The armor of Imperial MBTs is relatively standard: there’s just a lot of it. A honeycomb-patterned diamondoid-composite structural frame, covered with multiple slabs of interlinked refractory cerametal, electrical and thermal superconductor meshes, more cerametal, reactive-armor sections, and an outer anti-energetic ablative coating sprayed on top of it all, with additional side plating to shield the rollagons (see below), and an inbuilt nanopaste-based self-repair system. The survivability specifications on all this armor is that the vehicle should be able to survive a near-miss with a tactical-range nuclear weapon or equivalent orbital k-kill strike.

The entire vehicle is itself low-slung, to minimize its target profile, and keep the center of gravity low. Much like the heavy infantry, though, they don’t bother with significant chameleonic or stealth features, since there is absolutely no way to render one remotely stealthy.

Base Platform: Command and Control

An Imperial MBT nominally crews three: semi-specialized commander, driver, and gunner positions; of course, this is a mite fuzzy inasmuch as they’re both ably assisted by the vehicle’s internal synnoetic AI, and indeed linked to each other and the AI by internal conflux hardware, functioning as a loose, mesh-topology group mind for maximal efficiency. Primary control is routed through the AI and direct neural links – the vehicle seats are virtuality chairs, connecting to the crew’s implanted laser-ports – but auxiliary/backup manual controls are also available.

Core sensors and communications include all the standard options: radio and whisker laser communications, access to the OTP-encrypted military mesh, threat identification systems, teamware and C3I systems integration, thermal imaging, remote sensor access, 360 degree sensing, pulsed-usage radar and lidar, T-ray high frequency snoopers, ground-penetrating radar, target-painter detection – and, of course, plain old electronic visual and sound transmission, since the interior of the MBT is fully sealed and includes no portholes.

The MBT also includes a major-node-grade battle computer, and a full ECM suite.

Base Platform: Internal Environment

To the delight of those legionaries who like a little comfort in their soldiering, the internal spaces of an Imperial MBT are a comfortable – albeit confined – shirt-sleeve operating environment. (With climate control! And leather seats!)

This is partly because given the expense of building one of these things anyway, throwing in a few civilized comforts is barely a blip on the budget, and partly because – well, anything that successfully penetrates the armor tends to leave the crew as a hundred-yard long red/blue/silver-white/etc. (delete as applicable) smear on the ground behind the exit hole anyway, so there’s not much point in having them sit around in full combat gear.

This is also fully sealed and environment-controlled for NBCN protection and exotic atmosphere/vacuum use. It also renders all tanks amphibious tanks by default: once you’ve covered all the various atmospheres and pressures you might need to operate in, and obviously discarded air-breathing engines, you’ve built a vehicle that can shrug off submergence, too. You could drive a modern Imperial MBT from continent to continent across the ocean floor, given a case of rat bars and a good reason to try it.

Base Platform: Loadout

The base platform loadout includes a pair of bilateral cheek-mounted ortillery target designators, heavy mass-drivers, and slugguns/micromissile launchers at the front, on either side of the module mount and the armored prow (used for ramming/demolition), and a pair of rear-facing cheek-mounted medium mass-drivers at the rear for local defense. Completing the mix, a center-top-mounted “backscratcher” (a projector for downward-firing flechette shells) permits the vehicle to rid itself of pesky close-in infantry.

(Along with, of course, full-coverage point-defense lasers and autocannon, independently and automatically targeting all incoming fire.)

At the far rear of the tank, an externally-opening compartment can be used to hold resupply, infantry needing transport, or a thermal-thruster fuel pod to increase vehicle endurance.

Base Platform: Power

It seems a little inappropriate to say that the MBT is also powered by a micro-fission “hot soup” reactor, inasmuch as, well, it ain’t that micro. It is “mini”, perhaps, compared to standard-sized fission reactors, but it’s as large as the thorium molten-salt kind gets. The bigger ones all tend to be the safer “pebble-bed” design.

Naturally, this is buffered through a large set of superconducting-loop accumulators to handle immediate power draws and provide backup power in the event that you lose the power reactor – enough to withdraw, anyway, although probably not enough to fight with.

Base Platform: Propulsion

The Imperial MBT moves on neither wheels nor treads; rather, it sits atop eight semi-squishy rollagons, near-spheres rotated electromagnetically from within the sealed main hull, enabling it to move with equal facility in any direction, at speeds of up to 150 mph. The propulsion system also has considerable electromagnetic control over the shape of the rollagons; while they don’t have them normally, if you need spiked wheels or some other shape-variation to cross some tricky terrain, it can provide them on demand.

The base tank platform also includes a limited – by power availability and overheating, given the high mass of the vehicle – vector-control/nuclear-thermal thruster flight capability. This is typically used for skipping over tank traps, scaling vertical obstacles, and short ground skims, as well as being used in reverse to keep the vehicle on the ground with sufficient ground-pressure for the rollagons in low-gravity environments; since the vehicle has the approximate maneuverability of a lead brick in the air, it is strongly advised not to try to use it for anything more, lest you suffer from a fatal encounter with a real aircraft.

It does, however, greatly ease deployment from transport aircraft or shuttles, when used, since it lets you kick the tank out the back of the aircraft and ride their vectors safely to the ground.

And now, the modules:

Modules: Tactical Assault Tank (HV-10 Basher-class)

As close as it comes to a “standard” MBT design, the HV-10 Basher-class module loadout is similar to the V40 Ralihú IFV, scaled up; the Basher-class comes with a turreted heavy mass driver, but substitutes dual independently turreted quadbarrels for the Ralihú’s coaxial quadbarrel. (The heavy mass driver is also designed to function as a heavy sluggun, if required, and as such is entirely capable of delivering large-diameter canister shot for anti-infantry work.)

Modules: Long-Range Assault Tank (HV-12 Stormfall-class; also HV-12i Longeye-class)

The HV-12 Stormfall-class LRAT module is equipped with a super-heavy mass driver intended to be capable of long-range indirect as well as direct fire, and bilateral missile pods on either side of it, each capable of doing a simultaneous launch of up to 16 minimissiles with a short cycle time from internal magazines. Just perfect for those days when you want to fight in the shade.

By changing the missile loadout of the Stormfall, it can also serve as an active air-defense platform.

Rarely seen is the HV-12i Longeye variant, which trades in both super-heavy mass driver and missile pods for a graser installation, suitable for direct fire only but capable of punching out even more heavily protected targets. Also, notably, the Longeye graser is often capable of penetrating the atmosphere and reaching targets in low planetary orbit.

Modules: Drone Tank (HVC-14h Thunderbolt-class; also HVC-14l Stinger-class)

A drone tank, in legionary parlance, is the land-based miniature equivalent of an aircraft carrier. The HVC-14h Thunderbolt module contains nanoslurry and miniature drone components, which it uses to construct and deploy ad-hoc micro-AKVs to suit the requirements of the current battlespace, launching them into action as a centrally coordinated wing, for defense, reconnaissance, attack, or other functions.

The HVC-14l Stinger functions similarly, but substitutes swarm hives for the micro-AKV factory, and is thus able to saturate the local battlespace with microbot/nanobot swarms, be they the standard eyeballs, shrikes, gremlins, or balefire, or more specialized models.

Modules: Tactical Arsonier (HV-10a Flammifer-class)

Used for area denial, reducing bunkers and dug-outs, and to clean up nanoswarms, the Flammifer-class replaces the heavy mass driver of the Basher-class with a scaled-up nuclear-thermal flamer, while retaining the quadbarrels as-is.

Modules: Command Tank (HV-10c Strategos-class)

The Strategos-class is a specialized vehicle for coordinating tank-squadron activities and close air support. The Strategos module doesn’t add any weapons systems; rather, it adds two more crew positions for squadron command, a specialized tactical/logistics C3I AI, and a nodal communications suite and its antennae.

A pair or triplet of Strategoi are usually assigned to a tank squadron made up of other classes for command/control functions.

Modules: Pummel (HV-11 Pugnacious-class)

The pummel tank is a highly specialized variant, designed to rip apart buildings and fortifications. It carries sappers in its rear compartment, and is equipped with specialized demolitions equipment up front.

Modules: Wrecker (HV-10w Trison-class)

Another highly specialized variant, the HV-10w Trison and other wreckers are logistics units, used to recover wrecked tanks and other heavy equipment off the battlefield for repair or for scrap.

Drones

As with all other units of the Imperial Legions, the heavy cavalry too has its drone accompaniments, with each MBT usually having a pair of WMH-12 Skyorca drones attached to it for close air support, along with a pair of heavy ground drones matching its own tactical function.

Transportation

The Flapjacks were made for this. Apart from that, they mostly drive to wherever they’re going, because only the biggest transport aircraft can manage to carry them.

Trope-a-Day: Messianic Archetype

Posted by

Messianic Archetype: The seeress Merriéle, who founded the modern Church of the Flame, named and attributes all the (then) deities and (now) archai, was executed by fire-of-purification in Somáras, and may, just may – see Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions – have been directly instructed by one of the nearest things to a god this universe is ever likely to see.

Do I Consider Myself A Feminist Writer?

Posted by

4

…is the latest question to come through the anonymous message box.

Oh, boy.

“I don’t discuss my process.”

Oh, wait, I do discuss my process? I’ve discussed my process often, in the past? Well, crap.

Well, the unhelpful mathematician’s answer – that also does happen to be true – is that I don’t consider myself an “X writer” for virtually any value of “X”, except possibly “speculative fiction”. But I guess I owe you, anonymous questioner, a little more than that.

The more detailed answer is “it depends on what you mean by that”.

Do I endeavor to have an appropriately representative number of female characters who are competent, agentive, and not defined as some male someone’s accessory? Do I try to depict a society in which people are judged based on their individual merits and character, rather than by prejudicial stereotypes and situationally-irrelevant epiphenomena (specifically including sex, gender, etc., among many other things), and in which all sophonts (regardless of the aforementioned) enjoy the same natural rights, the same civil rights, equality before the law, and possess equal social opportunities1?

Well, yes, yes I do. I do not necessarily claim that I always succeed as well as I would like to, but it is my intention, and I do think my corpus bears it out.

(But, of course, this is never mentioned explicitly, which some might argue means it doesn’t count. But it can’t be, for reasons of worldbuilding integrity. You never hear a fish say, “my, the water sure is wet today” – because no-one comments on the status quo when it’s been that way for as long as the status has been quo. If you tried to explain the Earth-now way of these things, patriarchy, etc., to an Imperial citizen-shareholder, 95% of them wouldn’t understand what you were driving at, and the remaining 5% of professional sophontologists, adventure tourists, and the like, would nod politely and explain that that sort of thing is indexed under barbarian outworlders be crazy, yo.

This is also why this doesn’t come up even when dealing with said barbarian outworlders. An Imperial confronted by some icky patriarchy out in the Periphery isn’t going to think of it in specifically feminist terms, having neither interior nor historical experience with such a thing. She’s much more likely to think of it as just another rationalization-memeplex cooked up by noxious slaving fuckheads to justify strutting about with their jackboots on, because no rational being could possibly take such ideas seriously in the first place, could they…?)

Am I trying to depict a desirable social model, in feminist terms? (Or, indeed, in any other terms.) Well, inasmuch as I do think a social model in which people are judged by the truth of their talents and the content of their character without reference to the presumptions attached to the morphology of their genitalia would be a great improvement over our present one, perhaps. But I’m a writer, not a social engineer. I’m trying to depict a non-human society that is that way in terms that are true to itself, not as a prescription for how humans ought to live, and that is shaped by distinctly inhuman instincts and ideas.

Am I deliberately attempting to promote that particular viewpoint – as a political viewpoint – in/through my writing? No, and for two reasons:

1. I hate message fiction. To some extent, whatever the message, because subordinating the coherence of the world and the thread of the plot to a message usually makes for terrible, terrible fiction. This is even more the case when it’s a message that I might agree with, because I don’t generally think it helps to promote a particular thing to produce bloody awful anvilicious books about it.

Now, sure, my own views on The Truth Of Things And The Oughts Of Things I’m sure shape my creativity in plenty of ways; such is the nature of the game. But for my money, I’m much better off, and they’re much better off, just letting them come out in the nature of the worlds I shape rather than beating people over the head with sermons about The Right Thing, You Idiots. I’m a writer, a storyteller, and very much not a preacher.

2. I’m an ornery cuss who has never found any political or activist group ever, typically including both sides of any given debate, that I could stomach, and in the past I’ve rarely been shy of saying so. Even – maybe even especially – the ones I mostly agree with. So – whatever my views expressed above may mean for compatibility of desired ends – even if it wasn’t for the message-fiction thing, political feminism wouldn’t have me, and I wouldn’t have it.

All that being said, of course, if someone comes up to me in thirty years and tells me that reading my books as a little girl inspired them to give the finger to toxic social expectations and become a high-powered megacorp CEO like, say, Giléä Cheraelar or a bad-ass space navy admiral like Caliéne Sargas2, I reserve the right to be pretty damn pleased about it.

1. I can’t say social equality, inasmuch as they do practice hard-edged meritocracy to go along with their equality of opportunity, and it would seem odd to say political equality inasmuch as the political equality everyone has in the Empire is the opportunity to be shot in the face for attempting to practice politics. But, hey, anyone of any sex, etc., who tries to practice politics is equally likely to be shot in the face, so.

2. Albeit possibly slightly worried in this case, inasmuch as Caliéne Sargas is a bloodthirsty-and-proud-of-it functional sociopath. But, hey, it takes all sorts.

Trope-a-Day: Mercy Kill

Posted by

Mercy Kill: Members of the military/intelligence community, people whose work takes them into galactic bad neighborhoods, and hell, even overly paranoid tourists who’ve been listening too much to the It’s Barbarian Darkness Out There, Folks style of galactic reporting tend to have equipment fitted to let them do this to themselves, should things go horribly wrong, or even be obviously about to go horribly wrong.

Of course, since they undoubtedly have noetic backups elsewhere if not the extra-special version of said equipment that will dump a copy of their mind-state to a safe location via tangle channel should they need to use it, it tends to lack something in the Kill department.  That it’s also possible to have one fitted with enough extra antimatter on the power side of things to turn your head into a decently sized bomb when you trigger it may also put it somewhere in the Overkill department, albeit still not for you.

The Emperor’s Sword: Light Cavalry

Posted by

2

Today, we return to this series once again…

Making up a further three of every sixteen legions (equal in number to the heavy infantry, and one for every three light infantry legions), and again not counting the specialists built off their platform, are the light infantry legions – swift-moving scouts, raiders, flankers, and skirmishers.

The personal equipment of a light cavalryman greatly resembles that of the light infantry legionary; their armor is merely another variant of the N45 Garrex, the N45v Hasédár cavalry armor. In addition to the standard features, the N45v Hasédár includes electromechanical “saddle clamps” (to hold you to the vehicle), superior inertial compensation, and plug-in vehicle interface hardware (for C3I, HUD functionality, and life-support longevity). They even are outfitted with the same weapons as the light infantry legionary, including not only the sidearms but also the IL-15i Battlesystem – since it is often useful to be able to fight “dismounted”.

The vehicles of the light infantry are stubby-winged ground-effect “chariots”, or “skimmers”, which can sustain a hover of a few to a few dozen meters off the ground – in terrain-following mode –, turn and flip on a dime thanks to high-speed gyros and auxiliary propulsion taps, all while being propelled at up to several hundred miles per hour by a bimodal (to enable their use in vacuum) thermal rocket/ramjet. A “hot soup” micro-fission reactor powers this and other vehicle systems. The single pilot rides the vehicle in a semi-prone position, protected by a non-fully-sealed enclosed forward/flanking armored canopy; to save mass and increase flexibility, the pilot is required to wear their own environmental armor, as described above.

(A jettisonable anti-radiation fairing can be mounted on top of the canopy to permit the ready deployment of such chariots by Flapjack­-class dropship.)

Vehicle sensors and communication equipment include all the usual standbys, including the active systems, T-ray snoopers, and full ECM suite used by the heavy infantry, again powered by the platform’s greater reactor capacity.

Loadout

A typical chariot loadout includes three target-linked heavy mass drivers (for’ard, and on each wingtip), an underslung heavy sluggun/micromissile launcher, and full-coverage point-defense/automated-return-fire lasers and autocannon. A small undermounted cargo bay aft can be used to contain additional supplies/ammunition, or be replaced with a fuel pod, for greater endurance, a medevac pod, or a minelaying pod; above it, a swarm hive contains close-air support supplies of eyeballs, shrikes, gremlins, and balefire – which, as for the heavy legionary, constitute expendable recon assets, counter-swarm swarms, anti-machinery swarms, and anti-personnel/area-denial carbon-devourer swarms.

Drones

The light cavalry legionary is usually accompanied, as his counterparts, by AI combat drones, usually a mixed set of the WML-7 Skycat and its bigger brother, the WMH-17 Skyorca, depending on mission parameters.

When fighting dismounted, the chariot itself software-reconfigures to act as an autonomous AI combat drone for the legionary.

Transportation

The light cavalry  can be transported by the G5-TT Corveé tactical transport, with the appropriate module, but on the battlefield – and often also to the battlefield, it’s simplest just to let them transport themselves…

Trope-a-Day: Mercurial Base

Posted by

Mercurial Base: There are actually quite a few of these, as apart from relatively easy mining (assuming you have had to solve the heat problem anyway), those innermost planets are very useful places to put the antimatter generation infrastructure powered by the solar panels even closer to the sun, where power is dense and largely free.  Usually most of the colliders and other infrastructure doesn’t move around the planet – often the colliders are wrapped right around it – because the unmanned hardware can handle the radiation just fine, it’s just the squishy organics and more delicate computers and such that have to be kept out of the glare of the sun.

A variation, without the intense sunlight or radiation problems, is to be found on any number of spacer asteroid settlements, who sometimes wrap a track around their asteroid and mount a habitat on it to get spin gravity as a courtesy to visitors from places with the natural kind.