Trope-a-Day: Police Brutality

Police Brutality: Usually averted, day to day, as the Watch Constabulary is very well trained, highly disciplined, and – as the instrument of force that is legally permitted to apply it, law for the enforcement of – rigorously monitored and audited to make sure that it’s doing it properly.  Especially where the rights of the accused-and-therefore-not-yet-determined-to-be-guilty are concerned.

Played straight in a lethal, although not any other, sense inasmuch as the Empire, in general, maintains a very broad right of self- and other- and property defense where the regular citizen-shareholders are concerned – which is to say, there isn’t a reasonable force doctrine and you can shoot at criminals to protect any of those – and while the police are somewhat more restricted in that they’re obliged to try and arrest you, they aren’t actually any more restricted than regular citizen-shareholders where preventing crimes in progress are concerned if you are unwilling to be arrested.  Criminals caught by the Constabulary in the commission of a crime are advised to surrender immediately, for this reason.

Subverted where riots, occupations, and suchlike are concerned, inasmuch as Imperial law classifies these sorts of things as “insurrection”, and while the police won’t be brutal, that’s because insurrection is a military matter – and the situation will therefore be handled by people for whom “arrest” is outside their job description.

Trope-a-Day: Poke in the Third Eye

(While I’m posting – I’m going to be on holiday for the coming week or so, and specifically in transit for most of tomorrow, so posting here will be somewhat irregular. There will be things posted over the next week, for certain – never did quite figure out that “time off” thing – but expect the usual schedule to be scrambled all to heck and back.

See y’all later!)

Poke in the Third Eye: Given how telepathy works (i.e., WiFi), a simple set of radio jamming equipment set to the appropriate frequencies will do just fine.

Colder Than Space

ICE BLUESHIFT

MOST SECRET (INDIGO) / EYES ONLY ICE BLUESHIFT

NEED-TO-KNOW ABSOLUTE
ISE INTERNAL ONLY
TRACKED-COPY DOCUMENT
NOCONTRACT
NOFORN
SPECIAL SECURITY PROCEDURE BASILISK FIDELIS

Proceed (+/-)? +

SUMMARY:

[SSP image eluded from file]

ICE BLUESHIFT agents are specially developed units of the Fifth Directorate intended for deployment under exigent circumstances requiring extremal action.

An ICE BLUESHIFT agent is the product of extensive, specialized ethical training and testing, coupled with the focused pseudosociopathy induced by a [REDACTED] “SubHe” implant. The function of this implant is to disable the sympathetic faculties of the mind, while permitting the empathetic faculties to operate nominally. This strips the unit of all default-valued social restraints or ascriptions of value to other entities or entity-sets (although permitting the retention of specifically instanced ascriptions). This does not, however, impair the capacity for social operations. An enabled ICE BLUESHIFT agent remains fully capable of interpreting and reading social cues and performing associated social functions.

Thus, while retaining full sophont-interactive capability and the capacity for loyalty and other targeted attachments, an ICE BLUESHIFT agent is capable of whatever extremal actions are required for the completion of their assigned mission.

(It should be noted that, unlike crude forms of memetic pseudosociopathy used by various other agencies (see: REFULGENT LIAR; CINNAMON PONIARD; ICEBERG QUEEN), an ICE BLUESHIFT agent is not susceptible to malicious/sadistic deviance. To derive satisfaction from such requires an operative sympathetic faculty.)

A secondary function of the implants of ICE BLUESHIFT agents is automated psychedesign, performing self-justification narrative editing at the point at which the agent is disabled. This prevents mental stress and consequent breakdown of the agents upon the restoration of their sympathetic faculties.

The deployment of ICE BLUESHIFT agents requires the explicit authorization of the Imperial Security Executive.

WARNING:

Communicating ANY PART of this NTK-A document to ANY SOPHONT other than those with preexisting ISE internal systems clearance, INCLUDING ITS EXISTENCE, is considered an alpha-level security breach and will be met with the most severe sanctions available, up to and including permanent erasure.

Proceed (+/-)?

Trope-a-Day: Poisoned Weapons

Poisoned Weapons: See Combat Pragmatist – the eldrae would, once again, like to point out that being honorable should not correlate strongly with being an idiot.  Nor should being an idealist mean that you are obliged to give up all the efficacious advantages.  As the book says: if you have to fight, you’re fighting for something worth fighting for; and serving that purpose well means not conceding the advantage and using all the means you have available to win.

Ballistic Brew

Ballistic Brewery, ICC to Hanth & Mallon Restaurants (Pádíäz System), ICC, greetings.

Valmiríän Oricalcios,

Thank you for your interest in our selection of fine beers for the discerning spacer palate.

To be sure that we can satisfy your requirements, let me explain to you how the Ballistic Beer process works. The initial stages of brewing are carried out in our own facilities, in your case at Gallítra Station in the Pádíäz-Solar L4 point. We take grain from the skyfarms surrounding our station, malt, kiln, mash, and sparge it. We then copper and boil the resulting wort with the unique combinations of hops, sugars, and herbs that give each of our beers their unique flavor.

When we receive your order, the selected wort is transferred to one of our Puncheon-class fermenter-tankers, along with the appropriate yeast culture, and the Puncheon is dispatched to you. The transfer orbit of the Puncheon is carefully computed to allow for the necessary weeks or months of fermentation and conditioning under thrust gravity, in order to reach you at the moment of peak flavor. Once the beer is finally racked, wood conditioning or other late-stage refinements can be imparted in the Puncheon’s final tank.

When the Puncheon reaches your station, you offload the beer by fluid transfer, either directly into your own cask tanks or for local bottling or kegging (facilities and resale licenses for either of these can be leased from us). The yeast residue remaining in the fermenter can be returned to us with the Puncheon, or retained for local use for a nominal fee. We request that you refuel the Puncheon for its return voyage as part of your payment schedule.

(Note: All of our beers are naturally carbonic. As such, you should be prepared to accept the listed associated CO2 release into your local life-support capacity. We also recommend that they be served only in non-microgravity areas and that drinkers remain in these areas for the stated effervescence interval to prevent discomfort.)

Available for immediate shipment, in the Pádíäz System, are our Callaneth’s Finest, Starlight Irdesh, Miról Lambic, Three-Axis Pale Ale, Red Rocket Red, Singularity Stout, and Oúrghaz’s Heavy, each available in 25-barrel, 50-barrel, 100-barrel, and 300-barrel shipments. We will, of course, be happy to produce any of our other beers for you given sufficient lead time.

I have enclosed for your further information more details of our beers, along with full details of technical requirements and other necessities, and payment information for a variety of order sizes and schedules.

On behalf of all of us here at the Ballistic Brewery, we hope to be able to offer you a drink soon!

Talan Kellis, Brewmaster’s Second,

for and on behalf of

Ballistic Brewery, ICC

Trope-a-Day: Point Defenseless

Point Defenseless: Utterly averted.  The automated point-defense systems – usually plasma lasers or other Energy Weapons, for their speed and reaction time, gridded across the hull – will rip to pieces just about anything that gets within their range in an colorful orgy of photonic destruction, unless it’s extremely fast, capable of turning on a dime, and very smart about doing both.  (This is another reason why meat-piloted Space Fighters don’t exist, since AKVs can at least try to be competitive in this close-combat environment.)  Even then, defeating them is a matter of wearing them down (until heat buildup, primarily, lessens their efficacy) and swamping them with sheer volume of incoming fire.

Starship Scuffles: Location, Location, Location…

So, while it now seems to have disappeared from the Internet, my article on Non-Standard Starship Scuffles appears to have come in for some little criticism:

First, for having FTL in it; and

Second, for assuming that space battles will take place in open space, the commenter apparently not seeing any reason why they would ever take place except right next to whatever strategic nexus point they’re fighting over.

To a degree, on both points, I’m inclined to question the reading that gave rise to those comments because on the first, well, while there is mention of FTL communications with observation platforms to improve one’s longscan for tactical advantage, the ships themselves don’t – can’t – move at FTL speeds, and indeed, the entire rest of the article would be exactly the same if there were no such thing as a tangle channel.

On the latter, though, I first note this:

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

…but let’s ignore that for a moment. Here’s why starship battles, whenever possible, are conducted in open space despite this, and why the inconclusive engagement-avoidance-and-retreat is also more common than the aforementioned at-nexus-point battle.

Because in space, a weapon once fired continues on until it hits something. Hopefully that’s its target. If it isn’t its target. hopefully it’s a clean-up fluffship, or something big and ugly enough not to care (like the star), or some Oort cloud object no-one cares about.

But the bigger the solid angle subtended by an object from the point of view of the fighting starships, obviously, the greater the chance that it’s going to be shot right in the face by misses, not to mention ricochets and debris. And the closer you are to an object, the greater the solid angle it subtends, by the inexorable laws of geometry.

This is why the defender has a strong preference for going out to meet the attacker, because letting what you are trying to defend get all shot up as a side effect of the process of defending it generally makes defending it in the first place somewhat moot.

This is also why many attackers have a preference for luring the defender out to meet them: because firstly, Omnicidal Maniacs aside, you may want to capture some of those defensible assets reasonably intact and avoid any unnecessary effusion of blood; and secondly, because being casual about smacking relatively fragile civilian habitats and inhabited planets in the backdrop with starship-class weapons is the sort of thing that leads to bad press, unwanted reputations, and awkward interviews in front of war crimes tribunals.

All of which is to say: naval strategists have a term for admirals who plan their defensive engagements at point-blank range rather than maintaining a healthy strategic depth. That term is idiot.

Trope-a-Day: Pocket Dimension

Pocket Dimension: Alas, outside virtual reality, this seems to require basement universes (requires very high-energy physics, being worked on) or dimensional transcendence (requires emergent ontotechnology, also being worked on).

Being worked on very enthusiastically by starship manufacturers, I note, because holy mother of crap what would being able to keep your remass in a pocket dimension do for your mass ratio!

(Let’s hope that the mass of the contents inside doesn’t seamlessly translate to the mass of the dimension “mouth” outside…)

Trope-a-Day: Plug’n’Play Technology

Plug’n’Play Technology: Played mostly straight, at least in the Empire.  They’ve had a lot longer to work on it – and for various technologies to stabilize – and the consumers are both savvier about this sort of thing (because tinkering, integrating, and even Home Invention is so common) and much crankier when they don’t get it.  Compatibility problems generally only show up, if at all, with tech new enough that the standards haven’t even begun to settle – and you usually get them partially working instantly thanks to Imperial Interweave Protocol, the Universal Data Bus and associated protocols, ‘weave mesh protocol, Living Object Protocol, MetaLanguage, and embedded drivers – which just about everything down to paperweights implements.

Averted, occasionally, when you go cross-polity, especially when dealing with new folk on the galactic scene, or for anyone with a serious ideological objection to using those people’s standards.

Aftershocks (5)

CALMIRÍË, ELIÉRA – The Imperial Senate today rejected unanimously the petition of the Temporary Tyrancy of Ódeln for admission to the Empire as a stage-1 colony world. Announcing this decision, Incorruptible Secretary Tirill min Dinkoss stated, “While the Imperial Charter permits flexibility in local governance beneath its core principles, provided that the fundamental and imperial rights of citizen-shareholders are respected, and the Senate is permitted considerable discretion in approving admissions, we have chosen not to accept the application of Ódeln for membership at this time.”

Upon further inquiry, the office of the Incorruptible Secretary issued the following additional statement:

“In the interests of our existing citizen-shareholdership and prospective newcomers both, it is the responsibility of the Senate to ensure that new constituent nations are a good fit for the Imperial family. At this time, the Senate remains unconvinced of the Temporary Tyrancy’s ability to govern within the acceptable bounds of our libertist-technepraxic consensus, and is also skeptical that it is able to speak consensually for the population of Ódeln.”

The legate of the Tyrancy, rral-Fran-din, could not be reached for comment. Further commentary, including reactions on Ódeln to the Senate’s decision, will follow in later flash updates.

Trope-a-Day: Planet Spaceship

Planet Spaceship: Some of the largest city-ships (and, of course and rather more frequently, drifts and drift clusters) can reach large asteroid/small moon size fairly readily.

Offset somewhat, non-moving-under-power-habitat-wise, because when you’re in space, it’s not like you actually need to connect structures together to make ’em stay usefully together. (Just apply occasional station-keeping thrust on a per-element basis.) It’s not like it’s going to fall down if it’s not a single rigid structure, belike.

Before the Phoenix: Insufficient

MET+0:02:20

“Ah, Flight, we may have a problem here. Give me the telemetry numbers on thrust, commanded versus actual?”

Skyreach, we show 92% actual versus 100% commanded. We’re running diagnostics, but assume you are still go at this time.”

“Status on the Roughneck?”, Laras queried the Taliths.

“Roughneck is sub-nominal, estrev –”

“- thrust is now at 89% of commanded, still decreasing –”

“- we have amber warnings, combustion chamber press low, temp low –”

“- performing drive-running self-diagnostic –”

Laras broke the wire seal, and flipped up the cover over the sealed sequence switches. “Advise on readiness for mode two abort.”

“Negative on that,” came from the Taliths and from Nellis together. The latter pressed his headset to his ears, then continued. “Skyreach vetoes abort request unless diagnostics show red.”

“We’ve got no reds-”

“- still working the problem.”

“Very well. Fíöré, how is this malfunction affecting the delta-v? Enough remaining to reach some sort of orbit?”

“Ah, negative on that, fuel consumption is holding on the nominal curve –”

“- we must be achieving only partial burn –”

“- we can reach altitude, but my preliminary numbers show us far short of orbital velocity.”

“Right,” Laras said. “Recompute trajectory for the longest suborbital hop you can give me, and transfer it to guidance. Tell Skyreach the new mission plan, and to stand by to implement. We’ll dump the Roughneck at apoapsis and reorient.”

Trope-a-Day: Planet of Hats

(Incidentally, if you were wondering what I was doing this weekend, I was attempting to nail down the characters for my next ongoing longer series. I think I have a good handle on four of them, as of now. The fifth… is troublesome.)

Planet of Hats: Trying very hard to avert this one, except for in-world explicable exceptions like relatively new, low-population colonies, and odd cases like Valiár (Imperial Core), one of the Thirteen Colonies whose colony ship malfunctioned explosively, leading to the planet being populated by large numbers of clones of an original small group of archetypes.  (And even then, they’re not all that hatty.)  And, of course, some created species.

Trope-a-Day: The Plague

The Plague: In the ancient pre-Imperial past on Eliéra, the Gray Contagion, a wasting disease with the same sort of morbidity and mortality as the Black Death.  It was responsible for one of the two great prehistoric population diebacks there (the one not caused by the astrobleme/ensuing Winter of Nightmares), and is thought to have originated as a leftover Precursor bioweapon.

Two Minutes

The good thing about starship disasters is that they so rarely turn into catastrophes.

Which is to say, sure, you can kill yourself, and you get your crew and your passengers killed, and if you try hard enough, you can go hurtling out of the system into the deep black at ludicrous speed, even while glowing with enough hard rads that no salvor’ll want to touch your hull for the next hundred thousand years. But space is big, its contents are small, and dramatic screw-ups that manage to take out other people by the mucker-ton therefore require sufficiently extraordinary talent that the Fourth Directorate will be crawling all over the site even before the wrecker gets there.

That is unfortunately not the case with interface vehicles, where the gravity well and the atmosphere bend physics all out of shape.

And you are flying, let me remind you, a real starship. Not some dinky aluminum-balloon sounding rocket that will obligingly shred itself into confetti and fireballs if the launch goes wrong; you’re flying maybe 3,000 tons of titanium composite and cerametals – not to mention the hot soup – that will come down hard, and will not come down happy.

This is a problem.

It’s not a problem for long. Well, if you’re flying the vehicle in question, it’s a problem for even less long, but you know what I mean.

Most dramatic engine failures happen very quickly indeed – on the pad, or within the first seconds of flight – at which point the starport disaster team will be on hand to clean up both you and your mess. And if you can keep things running long enough to get to orbital altitude – even on a suborbital trajectory – the odds are good in any kind of developed system that someone has a tug or a powerful OTV that can meet you and drag you the rest of the way upstairs while you get on the horn and have an unpleasant discussion with your insurance carrier.

That leaves the couple of minutes in the middle. Too high and fast for the starport to assist you; too low and slow for help from on high.

So what do you do, in that situation, if your main drive is failing and the auxiliary isn’t kicking in and you’ve got a sad board on all your backups?

Make sure you have the other kind of backup.

See, they don’t leave handling that sort of situation up to the Flight Commander. They know the sort of people who become Flight Commanders, and that they’ll try to save their ship right up until the very last second after it becomes a major incident. As is right and proper, but does not lead to the optimal outcome in this sort of case.

And they don’t leave handling it up to space traffic control, either, as they come from the same kind of dedicated stock that will try to save their traffic up to the very last second, too.

It’s in the hands of one man, titled Downrange Safety, who sits in a bunker at the starport. He has a live feed of all the traffic control instrumentation, everything he needs to see when a launch or landing trajectory has gone grossly off-track and out of safety limits. He has priority “flammifer exigent” access to the orbital defense grid, and to the starport’s launching lasers, and to anything else that might be useful.

He has a fully-automated system with executive authority to blast any incipient disasters right out of the sky, and he has a button which holds that system’s fire.

For three seconds at a time.

And that’s why I don’t fly interface vehicles.

– Svínif Kalyn-ith-Kalyn,
Sailing Master,
former Downrange Safety at Anniax Interplanetary, 6022-6167

Trope-a-Day: Pimped Out Dress

Pimped Out Dress: Well, of course, for much the same reasons as The Dandy and his Distaff Counterpart, The Fashionista are so ubiquitous; namely, that arête, to be acknowleged, must be demonstrated.  It’s not universally appropriate for this purpose, of course, but when it is, it is.

The ur-example of that would be the gold dress worn on several social occasions by Merété Cheraelar, EVP of Speculative Investment at Gilea & Company.  And when I say gold, I don’t mean gold-colored, nor do I mean gold lamé or cloth of gold.  I mean a long and slinky evening gown made from finely-woven solid gold chainmail, complete with “embroidery” made of overlain and interwoven rings of gold alloy in variety of different tints.  (And with, it should be said, tiny flying microbots woven into it at various points to make it possible to move in the thing.)

As extremely pointed messages went, it was most effective.

Consequences

FROM: CORE COMMAND (STRATEGIC READINESS DIVISION)
TO: ADM COMMANDING, HEAVY CAPITAL FLOTILLA
RELAY TO: ALL UNITS, HEAVY CAPITAL FLOTILLA

***** ROUTINE
***** FLEET CONFIDENTIAL E2048
***** STRATEGIC ACTION MESSAGE

FLT ADM QUANDRY, COMMANDING HEAVY CAPITAL FLOTILLA:

  1. THIS MESSAGE CONSTITUTES AN EXERCISE ORDER.
  2. AS OF THE RECEIPT OF THIS MESSAGE, YOU ARE DIRECTED TO PROCEED WITH ALL UNITS UNDER YOUR COMMAND TO THE TAKAVOL (CRESCENT NEBULA) SYSTEM, THERE TO RENDEZVOUS WITH OTHER UNITS OF THE IMPERIAL NAVY. YOUR ARRIVAL IN THE TAKAVOL (CRESCENT NEBULA) SYSTEM MUST OCCUR NO LATER THAN DAY 54 OF YEAR 5919.
  3. UPON ARRIVAL IN THE TAKAVOL (CRESCENT NEBULA) SYSTEM, YOU WILL PLACE YOURSELF UNDER THE COMMAND OF FLT ADM TIRIS DALAEL-ITH-DALASTEL, STRATEGIC READINESS DIVISION.
  4. UNDER THE COMMAND OF FLT ADM DALAEL-ITH-DALASTEL, THE HEAVY CAPITAL FLOTILLA WILL PARTICIPATE IN A SERIES OF WAR GAMES, AGAINST EXPERIMENTAL OPFOR PROVIDED BY OMRD STRATEGIC WEAPONS DIVISION, DESIGNATED IRON MOTHER. THE PURPOSE OF THESE WAR GAMES IS TO TEST FLEET READINESS TO CONTAIN AND CAUTERIZE AN EQUIVALENT-TECHNOLOGY INFESTATION OF BERSERKER PROBES. FURTHER DETAILS WILL BE PROVIDED UPON ARRIVAL.
  5. OPAREA FOR IRON MOTHER IS DESIGNATED AS CRESCENT NEBULA AND ASSOCIATED/INCLUDED VOLUME OF DEEP BLACK.
  6. GOOD HUNTING!
  7. AUTHENTICATION: SILVER GLACIER ORCA SCALPEL WIZARD VOLCANO / 0x99CDB31A8873445D

ADM/FLT CIVÍR VERANTHIDES
FIRST LORD OF THE ADMIRALTY

Trope-a-Day: Pillars of Moral Character

Pillars of Moral Character: Yes, the Imperials too have their own version of that traditional “duty is heavier than a mountain; death is lighter than a feather” proverb.  And could indeed deliver a fine lecture, if needed, on the analog of on and giri – they just call that one mélith.

See also Blue and Orange Morality.

Trope-a-Day: Pieces of God

Pieces of God: Played straight if unusually in an entirely non-supernatural way – inasmuch as the Transcend is a cross between a regular seed AI and a collective consciousness of synnoetic AI soul-shards (see: Touched By Vorlons) grafted into the minds of all of its constitutionals.  So while the greatest concentration of Transcendent processing power is in its dedicated components, its Cirys swarm and synapse moons and unity spires, it has a lot of fragments out there…