Month: November 2015

Trope-a-Day: Excessive Steam Syndrome

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Excessive Steam Syndrome (was: Stanley Steamer Space Ship if you wondered about the alphabetization): Even those reactors that use other principles to extract energy still harness the thermal differential they produce, because it’s there and not to be wasted.

Meanwhile, spacecraft require their own complex cooling infrastructure, and often use cryogenic fuels which will produce plenty of condensation around the piping, and have pressure-release valves as does life support, and there are quench valves on superconducting systems, and so on and so on and basically, there is plenty of water vapor, et. al., to go around to produce this effect when machinery happens to be located within the pressure hull.

At least you only get a little inescapable condensation and vapor (from moisture in the air) unless something’s leaking or popped a safety valve.  In normal operation, virtually all the rest of of this stays on the inside of the tanks and pipes, where it belongs, rather than ruining your entire day the way superheated-steam amputations or being flash-frozen solid by deuterium slush tend to do.

(Also, yes, just like NASA et. al. many planetary starports do use a gagillion gallons of water to sink the heat that launching reaction drives dumps into the pad. Non-potable water has the virtue of being essentially free on many classes of planet.)

 

Trope-a-Day: Standard Sci-Fi Army

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5

Okay, let’s try this again, with much more saving of drafts…

Standard Sci-Fi Army, eh? Well, not sure how much I have to say about that that’s new, because of all the things I’ve already written about the Imperial Legions elsewhere, but let’s see what I do have.

(Actually, first I’m going to register an objection to the trope write-up up front and say that, in actuality a disturbing amount of science fiction, especially the visual kind, does not follow this army standard, because this army standard implies a balanced combined arms approach.

Compare that to, say, Star Trek, whose approach to ground combat involves landing a bunch of starship crewmen with sidearms to play the part of cannon fodder extremely light infantry, or Starship Troopers – the movie, not the book – in which they have actual light infantry but the only military maneuvers they appear to have mastered are the “broken-formation rabble charge”, the “rout” and the “circular firing squad”.

When Star Wars is the best I can think of at depicting realistic army-type military operations on screen, it should be clear that visual SF has a long way to go.)

The Imperial Legions, contrariwise, do follow a balanced combined-arms approach. Leaving aside those things specifically mentioned below, the only huge omissions from their portfolio are artillery units and an air force, both of which are supplied by the Imperial Navy: the former in the form of orbital bombardments by KEWs, and the latter in the form of atmosphere-capable AKVs sortieing from aerospace cruisers in low planetary orbit.

(They are comfortable with this, by and large, because landing a military force planetside when you don’t have orbital superiority is merely an expensive way to get lots of people killed.)

The main body of the Legions contains both infantry and cavalry: light infantry (really regular line mechanized infantry who come with IFVs which they leave behind when it’s time to play light/scout infantry) and heavy infantry (the big guys in the powered armor that lets them punch out buildings); and light cavalry (skimmer-riding “dragoons” and “hussars” who can fight both mounted and dismounted, fast-moving scouts, skirmishers, and raiders) and heavy cavalry (main battle tanks and modular swapout units of similar weight, which cover a lot of specialized territory – see article).  All of these, naturally, come accompanied by plentiful drone support and at least one attached wing of organic close air support.

(The organic close-air support is provided by the G7-BU Sunhawk (imagine the IN SPACE version of the A-10 “Warthog” Thunderbolt II reconceptualized as a tilt-turbine/hybrid rocket) and its smaller cousin the G12-BU Falcon, which can fly like a plane, float like a helicopter, and sting like the giant mass driver that the whole damn airframe is wrapped around.)

A substantial proportion of each of these types are trained as stormtroopers, which is to say, to make orbital drop assaults – and so named because they arrive with the speed of lightning and the sound of thunder, and wreck the crap out of anything that isn’t under deep cover. Yes, even the heavy cavalry. (Hello, Flapjack!)

(Further side note: and where that Super Soldier trope is concerned – hey, this is the Empire. Everyone who passes the first half of the Anvil receives the finest milspec augmentations that the budget will pay for. Quantity may have a quality all its own, but the IL prefer the quality of quality, any day.)

Everyone, including specialized legions, is one of these types first. That’s the legionary way. First you’re a legionary, then you’re something else.

Now, where these specializations are concerned, headquarters and logistics functions are usually provided by other bits of the IMS, (Theater/Battlespace Command and the Stratarchy of Military Support and Logistics, respectively), but various specialized legions built off the same basic platform provide combat engineers, intelligence, guards, field medical services, communications specialists, MPs, siege specialists, sappers, peacekeepers, snipers, saboteurs, recon specialists, special forces, Very Special forces, battle theater preparation specialists, underwater specialists, underoil specialists, subterranean specialists, hunter legions, terror legions, scouts, applied eschatologists, and pretty much any other class of military specialists millennia of experience has come up with.

Not seen: mecha. Because survivability no, and when your AKVs and drones can fly and your skimmers can hover and even your MBTs can at least hop, putting legs on things is really kinda pointless.

Finally, there’s also the wet navy. Technically, the wet navy isn’t part of the Legions, it’s part of the Stratarchy of Military Unification, but it’s the IL that call upon it when they need to deal with water worlds (or oil worlds, etc.), so it’s covered under this trope.

(Note: the rest of this is subject to change as I haven’t done a sophisticated work-up on wet-naval strategy yet.)

It’s rather more limited than it used to be, certainly in terms of that part of it that goes abroad and thus has to be delivered by dropship. That, and the age of the aircraft carrier is long since over, because when the battlespace is full of missiles and orbital weapons, it suffers from the same large, fat target problems as other giant types…

…so a modern wet navy task group tends to consist of three types, in varying proportions:

“Cruisers”, as the “capital ships”, which concentrate on mini-AKV and missile armament and a command-ship role. (Major air offenses being better launched from near orbit.)

“Destroyers”, fast and nimble attack vessels, and indeed that means they’re usually hydrofoils or ekranoplans with mass drivers. The aircraft of the sea.

And submarines, continuing their traditional role of being holes in the water that no-one notices until the no-one in question explodes suddenly for no readily apparent reason.

 

Glossary of Otherwise Known Terms

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Reminded of this by a comment on G+, I thought I’d put together a list for y’all of the various terms used here and there in the Eldraeverse for concepts (mostly, but not universally, sciency) that match up to concepts we have here on Earth, but which for various reasons – often involving different discoverers, perspectives, etc. – obviously don’t have the same name.

(A translation table for which, in addition to clarifying, is also helpful in case anyone needs to look something up…)

Herewith, then, is a quick-reference list:

Imperial Terran
aerobic/anaerobic (do not necessarily refer strictly to oxygen *there*)
Ardinan probability Bayesian probability
Atagavia’s Limit the Bekenstein bound
blue-blotch fever
blue-blotch syndrome		 radiation sickness
boson1 condensate Bose-Einstein condensate
Callaneth mechanics Newtonian (classical) mechanics
Callaneth’s Lemma2 Newton’s Third Law
Chronological Consistency Protection Theorem
(also Block Universe Theory)		 Novikov self-consistency principle, with later quantum-mechanical extensions
clanking replicator Von Neumann machine
classical elements not our four; *there*, the six designated pre-chemistry elements are Air, Fire, Water, Wood, Metal, and Stone
clionomy
cliodynamics		 psychohistory3
consciousness loop Cartesian theater
constellation (refers to clusters of close-linked stargates as well as star patterns)
divided-particle process Penrose process
ecopoesis terraforming
fission cell (small) radiothermal generator
gallé near infrared
gravity well maneuver Oberth effect
Greater Ancíël Whirl the Large Magellanic Cloud
hidden cog (metaphor) invisible hand (likewise)
horizon radiation Hawking radiation
iatropsychics psychiatry (well, sort of)
Indeterminacy Barrier Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
Isif Theorem (not proven *here*; a non-constructive proof that P=NP)
ivén low ultraviolet
kernel4 Kerr-Newman black hole (or, rather, specifically the “industrial-grade” kind)
Laras globule Bok globule
Lesser Ancíël Whirl the Small Magellanic Cloud
libration point6 Lagrange point
Lorith cage Faraday cage
Luminal Limit the speed of light
nuclear magnetic resonance imaging5 magnetic resonance imaging
minimum delta transfer Hohmann transfer
nucleonic device/weapon nuclear device/weapon
overweave virtual private network
powercell rechargeable battery7
rainbow glass trinitite (well, created by the same mechanism, but of somewhat different composition)7
sapphireglass transparent ceramic alumina
Senna’s Belt the Kuiper belt
Seredháïc-class ice miner equivalent of a Kuck mosquito
serís high ultraviolet
(the) Shards8 the Oort cloud
slate tablet (computer)
slugthrower gun; not necessarily firearm, but a KE-based projectile weapon
snaplight glow stick
social disease (not a euphemism for an STI; an epidemic toxic meme, rather)
sophont9 person
sophontology anthropology (only less, y’know, racist10)
Stannic cogitator Babbage engine
Stannic-computable Turing computable
Starfall Arc the Milky Way
sunblade a (weaponized) thermal lance
swarmweave flash mob
sweetmilk honeyed yoghurt drink
Sylithandríël’s Daughters hypothesis Gaia hypothesis (Lovelock, et. al.)
Talith Drive Lemma Tsiolkovsky rocket equation
technecology what the Internet of Things wants to be when it grows up
theobrom (fabbed) hot chocolate drink
synthdrink soft drink (although not all of them are)
tessera Planck granularity
Theory of Relativistics Theory of Relativity
Tiráms manifold Calabi-Yau manifold

Footnotes:

1. I draw the line at renaming uncapitalized particles. We’ll call that a translation artifact.

2. “No credit for partial answers, maggot!”

3. Okay, so this one doesn’t actually exist on Earth, but the question has come up…

4. Which, yes, I got from Atomic Rockets here – their local etymology is appropriate, though, because their chief usage is as the kernels of stargates and of contraterragenesis plants.

5. Some people aren’t scared of the big bad n-word…

6. Which is also a perfectly valid term *here*, yes, but the point is that they don’t call ’em Lagrange points.

7. Although their version is made of stacked superconducting loops.

8. Metaphorically, the shards of the shattered crystal sphere (theory).

9. Yes, even in relatively common usage.

10. “You humans are all racist!”

Trope-a-Day: Stable Time Loop

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Stable Time Loop: The Chronological Consistency Protection Theorem (see: You Already Changed The Past) does appear to permit these kinds of predestination paradoxes (at least, the informational kind; the object paradox may also be possible, but testing it is dependent on finding an object that won’t age during the period of the loop, including in all the aspects that the universe will check that current technology may not be able to).

It is also somewhat limited by the main people who can make use of it for Retroactive Precognition/Retroactive Preparation being the transcendent/weakly godlike artificial intelligences.  Experiments by lesser intellects… well, they don’t actually produce messages reading “YOU ARE NOT SMART ENOUGH TO BUGGER ABOUT WITH THE TEMPORAL CONTINUUM”, but the gist of the results appears to be fairly plain.

Trope-a-Day: You Already Changed The Past

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1

You Already Changed The Past: While extraordinarily limited, time travel does exist in the Eldraeverse – as it must, because so does FTL travel.  This is all you can do with it, however, because the Chronological Consistency Protection Theorem is very firm about that, and the universe is even firmer.

(And if you’re going for an object paradox, you’d better be grabbing something that doesn’t age during the loop.  Said universe will check things that your fleshy senses and quite possibly the technological sensors you’ve invented haven’t thought to look at and indeed can’t perceive.)

 

Things to See, Places to Go (4)

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Teralu Startown: The single-system Teralu polity, in the Magen Exodus, once signed a contract with the Empire to maintain a starport on the populated world of their system, Teralu Actual, making the usual concessions with regard to starport extrality and to freedom of passage. Later, after the coup of 5942, the new Teralu government – now on unfriendly terms with its large neighbor – no longer wished for the arrangement to continue, but were unable to repudiate the contract (good for several millennia); the Empire, as ever, holds what it has.

Hard times, though, were thought to be incoming for Teralu Starport, and for the downport, that turned out to be the case: the new regime had much less use for interstellar commerce and those who engaged in it, and Teralu Down remains today a stripped shell of its former self.

The same, however, cannot be said of Teralu Orbital. Positioned as the Teralu system is along the Mercantile Corridor, and at an intersection of local stargate routes, the ciseflish entrepreneur Rilman min Kinethill rented – at a remarkably low rate – many of the now-unused vast transshipment warehouses of Teralu Orbital, filling them with used freight containers eminently suitable to be cut and refashioned into prefabs, and provided them with independent utilities at his own expense, before offering these volumes for rent at low rates.

Thus, Teralu Orbital now plays host to one of the most flourishing startowns in the inner Worlds, offering in addition to standard starport services everything in the lines of taverns, caravanserais, hotels, flophouses, gambling, trading both speculative and slash, hiring, brawling, negotiable affection, hedonics, junk dealing, street food, scratch medicine, and other such services that a jaded crewsoph’s heart might desire. This is no Nepscian red-market, though: personal security and contract enforcement are vigorously provided by min Kinethill’s chartered mercenary company, the Gray-in-Gray Cloaks. Min Kinethill himself retired from hands-on management some years ago, but maintains ownership of the operation and continues to keep an eye on local affairs from his personal aerostat on Cerise (Banners).

It’s well worth a visit, both to take in the thriving – and often sweltering – atmosphere, and to see the unique architecture created by the local residents. Don’t bother with the planet below, though: the locals are unfriendly, and the local color dull, at best.

– Leyness’s Worlds: Guide to the Ecumene

Trope-a-Day: The Spymaster

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The Spymaster: In the Imperial governance, the people who sit on the Imperial Security Executive, the council that runs Imperial State Security, which is composed of the heads of the five directorates, the admirals in charge of the Shadow Fleet, its military intelligence counterpart, and certain others, whose identity is not available anywhere.  It’s also unique on the organization chart in that the Executive reports directly to the Imperial Couple as well as to its nominal superiors in the Ministry of Harmonious Serenity.

Plenty of other organizations, of course, have their own – even before we get into competing governments.

Trope-a-Day: Split Personality Merge

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Split Personality Merge: Averted.  You don’t try and merge two minds (an operation routinely carried out to remerge forks) while they’re running, seriously.  This is a very complex operation carried out on static mind-states, and while there may be some conflicts in the resultant merged personality, there’s still only one person in there afterwards.

Trope-a-Day: Spare Body Parts

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Spare Body Parts: The poster-people for this are the kaeth, who come from the kind of… robust ecology (see: Had to be Sharp) that makes a selection of extra backup organs very useful indeed. And a special shout-out goes to the myneni, who have a kind of this by default by virtue of forming all their organs ad hoc anyway.

Of course, it’s not like a lot of other species haven’t been merrily engineering redundancy into at least some clades of themselves in the name of extra resilience, starting with auxiliary hearts and working down, even if they can’t do the same sort of holistically comprehensive job…

Trope-a-Day: Space Western

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Space Western: While, not being historically connected to Earth culture, many of the traditional trappings of the Western are absent, the attitude persists throughout much of the Expansion Regions, where central authorities are distant and frontier colonies fairly rugged by necessity, and even in the outback regions of colony worlds closer to the Core.

Darkness Within (9): Miscalculation

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MET 186-23+4

So I’ve been running some numbers.

At a best guess from the nav data available, Gutpunch had 18.5 hours1 to run at standard cruising acceleration, 9.6 standard gravities effective2. That in turn implies that I need something approaching six million m/s of delta V effective to make zero-zero with the Kerjejic stargate.

These are not happy numbers.

Actually, let me rephrase that: these numbers represent a six-species clusterfuck at a Clajdíän clambake.

The candle plan will not work, obviously, hope and head injuries notwithstanding. Samildán could bring his traveling Heaven alongside and hand me a dreadnought-sized fusion torch with all the trimmings, and I couldn’t squeeze 6e6 out of it. That’s why we had to learn to cheat in the first place.

I need a vector-control core. So let’s hope Kirchev parked the cutter facing aft the last time out.

MET 187-4-32

Well, damn.

I have half a cutter. Snapped in two at the shear line, clean as you like. Not, however, the half with the core in it.

I also have two racked tactical observation platforms, neither of which has a core, along with some spare parts racks, tools, and plenty of debris. Everything I could need to build a candle, if that would help.

I need a new plan.

  1. 20 of your Earth hours, for anyone who wants to check my numbers.3
  2. 9 of your Earth gravities.
  3. I always wanted to use one of your Earth “of your Earth”s.

Trope-a-Day: Space Police

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Space Police: There isn’t any overall police service for the Associated Worlds – the closest thing is probably Conclave Security, which does answer directly to the Conclave of Galactic Polities, but whose jurisdiction is limited to just the Conclave Drift itself and its containing star system, and possibly the Operatives of the Presidium, who wield this kind of authority as one-off special agents.

In practice, every polity polices its own space, colonies, and the routes in between.  The Great Powers often augment this with various roving fleets, asserting universal jurisdiction over assorted free-space crimes (piracy and such, usually), providing a kind of rough-and-ready frontier law and order. The loose structure of the Accord on Uniform Security provides for limited extradition and limited cooperation between polities (and Warden-Bastion PPLs), provided that hostilities aren’t, that everyone agrees that whatever happened was in fact some sort of crime, and that everyone’s having a reasonably nice day.

Within polities, of course, situations and law enforcement structures vary.  The Empire, for example, doesn’t have a specific organization devoted to policing space.  In planetary orbit, or among clusters of drifts, the Watch Constabulary has the same jurisdiction it does planetside or within habitats, and in Imperial in-system space, the same as its rangers do in the wilderness – the specialized divisions which operate “outside” are called the Orbit Guard and the Stellar Guard, but functionally, they do not differ from the norm.  Major crimes in in-system space are handled by the Imperial Navy, but that’s functionally no different from the way that the Imperial Military Service planetside has generally been called upon to address riot, insurrection, and brigandage.

(In deep space, law enforcement is also provided by specialist units of the IN, simply because they’re the ones who can get there – and it’s outside all traditional borders anyway. And, of course, this excludes all private-conlegial/PPL bodies…)

Darkness Within (8): Overdue

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FROM: CS UNDERBELT (FIELD FLEET RIMWARD)
TO: FIELD FLEET RIMWARD COMMAND (CS ARMIGEROUS PROPERTARIAN)

*** ROUTINE
*** FLEET CONFIDENTIAL E256
*** OVERDUE

1. CS GUTPUNCH ATTACHED TO TASK GROUP R-4-118 HAS MISSED THREE (3) ROUTINE STATUS UPLOADS AND IS NOW CONSIDERED OVERDUE.

2. CS UNDERBELT AND COHORT PROCEEDING FROM CURRENT LOCATION (PARDERIC SYSTEM) TO CONSTELLATION-EXIT RENDEZVOUS POINT TO PERFORM BACKWARD-SLANTED COURSE SWEEP, STAGGERED-SECTOR SEARCH PATTERN, AS PER STANDING ADMIRALTY INSTRUCTIONS.

3. REMAINDER OF TASK GROUP HAS BEEN ISSUED ORDERS TO PROCEED TO LAST KNOWN LOCATION CS GUTPUNCH TO PERFORM FORWARD-SLANTED SWEEP, OTHERWISE AS ABOVE.

4. MORE FOLLOWS.

5. AUTHENTICATION MORAINE HAMMOCK VAULT SIMMER GOLDEN PAWL / 0x9981ABD43E3ECC22

ENDS.

Trope-a-Day: Space Station

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Space Station: Lots of them, as residence, lab, factory, outpost, city, farm, cageworks, starport, skymall, border station, and just about everything else you can think of by way of uses.  After all, in the modern day, three out of every five Imperial residents lives in space, not planetside.

The gamut runs from the venerable Oculus Station, a by-modern-standards tiny Skylab/ISS style tin-can habitat – large by the launching standards of early space programs, but then, they were using Orion launchers – preserved as a museum, to the Conclave Drift, which at 36 miles long, eight in diameter, and nearly 10 billion tons gross mass is not the largest ever constructed any more, but by population, diversity and reputation (as the seat of the closest approximation to galactic government and an awful lot of its business) is the unchallenged queen of the orbital habitat community.

Surrounded By These

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1

The guards were greenjacks.

For those of you, gentle readers, who aren’t familiar with the term, it’s a gutter-Trade form of the Eldraeic tragrían jaqef (“plant servile”). They’re bioroids, a rough bipedal form hacked together out of freelibs and bootleg genetic sequences hung off a carbon-composite frame, strong and resilient so long as all their chimeric parts stay in approximate sync. They’re also really cheap to produce – a dedicated jackfab and whatever organic sludge you can get your hands on can turn them out by the platoon – and to maintain; their green skin contains a broad-spectrum, high-efficiency photosynthetic ooze, so if you keep them in illuminated environments – but hopefully not around anything that stains – they don’t even have to eat, except for repair raw-material top-ups, and the typical greenjack doesn’t last long enough in use to need them.

This is because greenjacks appeal to exactly the wrong sort of people, for all the above reasons, and for one more: greenjacks are stupid. A useful bioroid mind requires a sophisticated brain and an extensive learning-training period, neither of which is compatible with being churned out quickly and cheaply, and comes with its own “disadvantages”.

All of which is to say that this particular attempt to produce an inexpensive labor force instead gave the greatest gift ever to those certain mentalities that like made-to-order obedient lackeys and dumb thugs, are prone to need replacements fairly often, and who value the aforementioned quantities much more highly than others.

To adventurers, of course, they’re just a amusing dance for a Sulamis afternoon.

– An Expensive Sword, Serril Tsurilen

Trope-a-Day: Space People

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Space People: Well, about three-fifths of everyone, actually.

That would be “about” principally because it’s really hard to determine, say, exactly where one draws a line between people who live on large asteroids in “habitats” and people who live on small moons in “domes”.

And depending on how you want to count things – well, you could count only people who live in starships or city-ships (habitat-dwellers say “Hey!”), or ships and habitats (asteroid-dwellers have an issue to raise), or people who have the key spacer biomods (absolutely everyone without some sort of compatibility problem, since even planet-dwellers find themselves in space enough that the calcium hack, thumb-toe, etc., are now part of the baseline set), or only members of the genuine four-armed sennóris clade (a long way from everyone dwelling in space long-term), or people who live in space-type habitats (includes lots of moon- and actual-planet-dwellers), or people possessing the characteristic shibboleths of spacer culture (although since spacer and groundling cultures have been bleeding into one another for centuries)…

In short: there are Space People, but there’s not a readily denotable boundary between them and everyone else.

Ice is for Endings, Side Note

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When you think about the Cold Ones, it’s actually a remarkable blessing that the nature of the universe is quantized, because that’s what will eventually kill them. Eventually, those tiny energy states and information stores they use will fall below the threshold at which they cannot (because quantum) be subdivided any more to create necessary differentials, and infinity will come to an end – the granularity of the universe being the major limitation of attempting this sort of end-run around finity.

This is, by any reasonable standards, a good thing, because it places an end-point on their existence.

Imagine, for a moment, if the universe was non-quantized and analog. Then there would always be a way to slice things more finely, and get by on smaller and smaller and smaller energy differentials supporting less and less computation, but never zero. However mad and tortured their desperate struggle to hang on to another sliver of existence became, it could still get progressively worse in an infinite number of steps.

To steal a perfectly good way of putting it from a comment by Jenna Moran on Exalted’s Neverborn, whose situation is in many ways similar:

That would mean, of course, that [the universe] can never be [cold enough to kill them]. That would mean, of course, that they are mad not because they are dead gods, but because they are dead dead gods. Dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead, dead gods. Dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead, dead dead gods.

And still endlessly unraveling and unfolding into ever greater death, loss, experience of no longer having experiences, being the names of something that are ever further away from living, and still falling, and still somehow stuck.

(I have your cosmic horror’s cosmic horror right here.)

Trope-a-Day: Spaceship Girl

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Spaceship Girl: Every time a female-presenting digisapience uses a starship as a cybershell, yes.  Of course, they can equally well be the resident operating intelligence of a habitat, or other vehicle (Spacestation Girl), and by no means all present as female (Spaceship Chap?), so it’s also subverted a fair bit.

(As a side note, whatever the gender of the operating intelligence, the gender attributed to the actual ships in question tend to be mixed; eldraeic tradition is that a vessel takes the gender opposite that of its first captain, and so…)

Trope-a-Day: Space Nomads

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Space Nomads: Several kinds, ranging from perpetual wanderers (say, the remnants of the londian), through long-range explorers (say, the spinbrights), to people like the residents of Imperial city-ships, skymalls, empire ships and other large starships, some of which travel with a purpose, and some of which just stuck an engine on their habitat so they could enjoy a change of view from time to time.