Surveillance Drone: Fairly ubiquitous, between the governance (for law enforcement, and externality monitoring, and infrastructure maintenance, and city management AIs, etc.; all – due to the transparency rules – open to general public use), odocorps, private security, edgehunters, newsies, vloggers, lifeloggers, and narcissists.
The largest 3He producer in the System, prior to the opening of the Melíeréan gas mines by Extropa Energy, was undoubtedly White Plains Regolithics, ICC, a joint venture between Arctorr Heavy Industries, ICC, Empire Nucleonics, ICC, and members of the Seléne Commercial Habitation Consortium.
Of course, they did not just mine 3He. The Selénian regolith contains all manner of volatiles, and what is still in high demand everywhere around Seléne and its orbital space? Volatiles. No plutarch worth his metal was going to cede that market entirely to the ice barons of Evershade and the Macroscian Arky. Selling these volatiles to Selénian domes, in addition to delivering mass shipments of partially processed regoslag to the local Atalant Materials, ICC, branches, wildcat smelters, and glassboard fabbers alike were more than enough to assure WPR of profitability even before delivering its intended primary product to Empire Nucleonics customers.
Another key to the profitability of White Plains Regolithics was its use of early autoindustrialism. While not yet fully self-replicating, WPR made use of robotic mobile industrial nodes, controlled at the policy level but not directly teleoperated by a minimal staff of supervisors and field service engineers based in the corporate offices at Silverfall City.
Upon entering a region – guided by equally autonomous resource-scouting microbots – these nodes would manufacture from resources in situ the basic infrastructure needed to exploit that region: a power and communications grid based on solar-to-microwave towers, a transportation framework back to the central WPR facility at Silverfall City, and a sufficient quantity of resource-harvesting robots (most commonly the precursors of today’s ubiquitous foot-long swarmdozers) to deliver the harvested resources back to an in-situ constructed pre-processing node, and thence onwards.
While the mobile industrial node and mobile robots would move onward in an ever-growing swarm to harvest new regions when their task was complete, rather than attempting to relocate or recycle the associated fixed power, communications, and transportation facilities, WPR policy was to leave this infrastructure in situ and sell it, at a discounted rate, to up-and-coming Selénian business concerns. This policy birthed the White Plains Industrial Zone, a sprawling, thriving industrial region spread across the depleted regolith of the southern White Plains – and, not coincidentally, cultivated many new customers for WPR’s, and its parent companies’, services.
– from a student essay on early industrial ecology
Surgeons Can Do Autopsies If They Want: Subverted – yes, there is medical specialization, just as there is specialization in everything else. But given how long people live – and that long-lived people are the majority demographic – it’s amazing how many of those doctors (or engineers, or scientists, or, or, or…) are fully-qualified specialists in several different specialties.
Or, indeed, several different entire fields. “Quantum physicist, knitter, herpetologist, corporate lawyer (specialized in finance), gourmet chef, mercenary sergeant, thoracic surgeon, ‘weave cartoonist, and plumber,” to pluck from the air, is an entirely reasonable and indeed quite mundane resume by local standards.
“A little commented-upon feature of all the uplifted species is their racial pride. After all, while many species believe that they are, in some sense, the Chosen Ones, only this small subset have documented evidence to that effect.”
– from a lecture on comparative sophontology
Super Reflexes: Another one of the many things to go into the standard upgrade build, in the sense of better, faster, etc., nerves. Can, of course, be improved still further if you feel like upgrading your nervous system to milspec, or adding various special cognitive enhancements to run tell analysis and predictive motion routines on everyone in the vicinity, letting you pull off that nifty “see-and-react-to-things-before-they-happen” trick.
(In less deliberately civilized societies, it may be best not to include the “respond automatically and lethally to incoming attacks” option.)
These tactical observation platforms are covered in multiple sensory modules, priced at something over a million esteyn each. That’s not even counting the ones that are too classified to have anything resembling a market price. This I know very well, as they’re part of the ship’s hardware I used to be responsible for. Still am, in a sense.
So, naturally, I’m just ripping them off the truss by chopping through their bolts with the hullcutter, then tossing them into a catch-net. But then, my air supply is already uncomfortably low – except the travelling oxygen – and diminishing, and for that matter, so is my brain. My medichines may not be able to fix the problem, but they can read the symptoms well enough to give me a read on how fast my cognition’s deteriorating, and when they’ll no longer be able to compensate. Ugly methods will have to suffice.
Anyway. I am working on the forward section now, which is basically the central truss of the tactical platform with stuff mounted to it. Most importantly, the piece that’s there already: the platform’s stabilization gyros are built into a navigational unit that’s fixed within the truss.
Problem: these gyros are too small, by the book, for this candle – it’s got too much mass and thrust. The gyros won’t provide big enough correctional forces.
Solution: That’s easy. Overriding the safeties will let me run the gyros much faster, providing higher correctional forces. It’s not going to be a rock-solid ride, but my calculations show that a little less than triple-running them should provide barely adequate moments.
Problem with Solution: Isn’t that pretty far inside the amber degradation zone?
Solution to Problem with Solution: Yes, but it’s not like it has to last the full operational lifespan. It just has to last long enough.
Further Problem: Isn’t that also a short whisker underneath the explosive delamination threshold, exceeding which would cause the gyros to leap out of their casings in a million razor-sharp laminate shards and punch holes in the propellant tank, disembowel you, and not incidentally open your suit to space?
Further Solution: Well, I’m told they calculate these things – and inspect the products – very carefully.
Further Problem: And if they didn’t?
Further Solution: Well, it’s not like it can kill me any deader than sitting here with both thumbs up my ass, can it?
Subspace Ansible: The tangle channel, which involves manufactured entangled (not in the standard quantum sense, note, because we know that doesn’t work; these are ontotechnological devices using the “privileged channels” a long way behind those) particle-pairs. This makes them quite expensive (since they are a consumable resource, one particle per bit transmitted, and have to be shipped there the long way once you separate the ends; if you don’t have one or a stargate, your best option is a lighthugging communications torpedo) at least relative to using light-speed EM communications and relaying them through the stargates, the way most of the non-priority extranet works, but they’re invaluable for priority communications and beyond the reach of the stargate plexus. (They are, for example, the only means of ready communication available to lighthuggers.) And yes, they do work for mindcasting.
(And, yes, they can also let you play interesting games with causality. Just as expected.)
That said, extensive use of caching, prefetching, and AI traffic prognostication makes the extranet delays mostly invisible in practice, as does the ability to engage in pseudo-real-time communication by sending a partial copy of you along with, or as, your message to be able to have a real discussion with the recipient, then reabsorb it when it returns.
From the taking-inspiration-from-other-places department:
Meet Rúz alt-Telithos (later Rúz alt-Silverfall), the Alatian Upland Herder later known, after extensive microgravity and extravehicular training at Oculus Station, as the First Dog Bandal On The Moon – travelling there with the Silverfall Five mission, during the course of which he participated in a number of physiological studies, assisted the astronauts with their work, and greatly enjoyed the ability to leap nearly 30′ from a standing start.
A statue of Rúz stands outside the primary dome airlock leading to Seléne City’s first surface shuttleport.
(…and at some point he appears to have modeled for a magazine cover in a different fictional universe altogether, heh.)
Stronger With Age: Averted. The eldrae, and various other immortal species and immortagen-users, don’t generally get stronger with age, short of grafting in more advanced biomods and other enhancements as technology marches on. (On the other hand, they do generally get more skilled at applying that strength, and remarkably more cunning, devious, and involuted – but like it says, that’s not this trope.)
Streaming Stars: Averted. However incomprehensible the speeds lighthuggers move at, they’re not nearly fast enough – and can’t be, courtesy of the luminal limit – to create noticeable motion parallax. Some blue- and red-shifting and relativistic distortion, yes, once they’re cruising along at the full 0.9c; but no motion parallax.
The side beams are welded to the tank – and still no leaks, or for that matter explosions – and the chunks of hull plating bonded to the beams. For once, that went smoothly. I’ve even cut four extra short chunks of beam and welded them onto what will be the thrust frame near the edges to mount the side-mounting thrusters on, leaving enough space in the center to attach the cutter’s core if I can find it.
I’ve even stripped power cable, data lines, and enough flexpipe to get them rigged to run.
Which makes it time to balance it (it’s enough mass that I’ll have to balance the for’ard section separately). It’s embarrassing if your first candle falls off its tail when you take it out for a near-hab jaunt. Under these circumstances, it would be a little worse than that.
If I was doing this properly, I’d have a clean room, and a torsiometer, and a gradiometer, and a quantized-thrust applicator, and assorted other fancy tools with verniers to tweak, and I’d finish up by carefully placing gold-tungsten washers and balance weights in exactly the right positions such that I could fire her dead-stick and not see more than a milli in a mega drift. If I was building a really fancy candle, I’d go ahead and throw some trim tanks on there while I’m at it.
But I don’t have any of those, so I’m using a more informal engineering technique, namely giving her a good shove along the thrust axis and eyeballing the gross wobble, then planing some mass off the heavy side with a laser torch.
(In theory, the stabilization gyros I’m pulling from the tactical platform should compensate for any deficiencies in this area, but with the extra mass this will have over and above, I don’t want to make them do any more work than they have to. I’ll be running them too close to the delamination redline as it is.)
…I wonder if the Navy would sell me this for a keepsake when I’m done with it? Give it a couple of thousand years, and it’d be nice to tell my hypothetical descendants a few horror stories of how Grandma Isif had to get about the place before the magic transilience drive was invented.
So, it is suggested that I do not understand the fighting words doctrine.
To which I must respond that the problem is that you are thinking of the fighting words doctrine, not the fighting words doctrine. 🙂
Or, to clarify:
Under American law, the fighting words doctrine is a highly circumscribed, restricted list of insults direct that are so very likely to promote an immediate affray that they are not protected by the First Amendment.
Under Imperial law, the fighting words doctrine is a highly circumscribed, restricted list of insults direct that are so very likely to promote an immediate affray that the speaker of them1 does not get to complain, sue over, or initiate criminal proceedings about what happens next, on the grounds that they knew perfectly well what they were asking for and thus consented to the painful and bloody consequences.
And a mutually-agreed-upon ass-beating ain’t a breach of the Empress’s peace, y’see. Unless you insist on involving bystanders, causing property damage, or frightening the horse-analogs.
Strawman Political: Well, of course – but in-world, inasmuch as most of the protagonists come from a culture which believes that politics are what happens to you after your brains fall out, and would largely agree with that. And who tend to think the worst of the assortment of Evil Stereotypes who practice it actively.
See also What Do You Mean It’s Not Political?
Internal Security Records: Vizjen Down
Passenger Terminal, Section C (Concessions)
hinMeira Mercantile
7126/8/8 (starting 8+36:00)
MÉLIS TARQUELIOS (PORT DIRECTOR): — seems to be the trouble, here?
RYSEK hinMEIRA (CONCESSIONAIRE): I want her out of here! Your security guards refused to —
MÉLIS TARQUELIOS: In good time, Sv. hinMeira. I need to hear a report from my personnel first.
JINTH mor-KARIS (SECURITY): The concession operator called us reporting a trespasser. When we arrived, he — requested us to remove Sv. hilKanar, here, from his store.
RYSEK hinMEIRA: And you refused!
JINTH mor-KARIS: You didn’t give us any grounds to remove her.
RYSEK hinMEIRA: She was trespassing!
JINTH mor-KARIS: So you said, but —
MÉLIS TARQUELIOS: Sv. hinMeira, this is a concession space which you lease specifically for the purpose of providing retail services to our passengers. If you allege she was trespassing, that implies that you had previously banned her from your shop for some particular reason. What was it?
RYSEK hinMEIRA: Well, look at her!
MÉLIS TARQUELIOS: Yes?
RYSEK hinMEIRA: She’s a kilpaden.
MÉLIS TARQUELIOS: Yes?
RYSEK hinMEIRA: We don’t serve her kind here. No —
MÉLIS TARQUELIOS: Do we have that on record?
JINTH mor-KARIS: Oh, yes.
MENKA hilKANAR (PAX): Please, I — I don’t want to cause any trouble.
MÉLIS TARQUELIOS: I do apologize, Sv. hilKanar, on behalf of both Vizjen Down and the Imperial Starport Authority, for this unfortunate incident. Please accept my assurances that this is not the policy of ISA, and if you will accompany my assistant here for a moment, all further purchases you desire to make during your layover here will be covered by ISA, by way of further apology and repayment.
As for you, hinMeira, get the hell out of my starport.
RYSEK hinMEIRA: What? You can’t do —
MÉLIS TARQUELIOS: I just did.
RYSEK hinMEIRA: I’m allowed to refuse service to anyone! Your law requires that. So you —
MÉLIS TARQUELIOS: It does. You have that legal right in your own name. Your lease, on the other hand, says in paragraph 31, section c, that while you retain that general privilege you will – as concessionaire and leaseholder working for and within Vizjen Down – specifically not refuse service to anyone on the basis of externally-attributed group membership, as is standard for ISA contract-starports on planets known for their bigoted kveth-lakhras. You just — play that back?
RYSEK hinMEIRA (recording): We don’t serve her kind here.
MÉLIS TARQUELIOS: Her kind. Your own words. It is therefore my distinct pleasure to inform you that you are in default, your lease is null and void, your concession contract is terminated, and you, personally, will vacate my starport with all speed. Is that clear?
RYSEK hinMEIRA: I’ll see you pay for this! I have friends —
MÉLIS TARQUELIOS: Jinth, did that sound like a threat to you?
JINTH mor-KARIS: I would say that sounded like a threat.
MÉLIS TARQUELIOS: Then throw him out of the starport.
JINTH mor-KARIS: Consider it done. Ah — throw him, or throw him?
MÉLIS TARQUELIOS: Use your discretion.
What Do You Mean, It’s Not Political?: It is, I suppose, only in the generic sense of fiction featuring utopias or near-utopias, which is to say, only insofar as it’s therefore automatically a Take That to all those other, lesser, civilizations.
As for more strictly political issues: well, if you’re willing to draw moderately inexact analogies, the Isliar Primarchy is a Take That to traditionalist conservatives, the Magen Corporate to corporatist conservatives, the Annik Sodality to liberals, the Voniensa Republic is one to moderates/statists, the People’s State of Bantral and the Equality Concord to communists (more anarchic and more static, respectively), the Iltine Union to fascists, the Theomachy of Galia to half the Middle East and arbitrarily-selected other religiously-dominated states, Valturak and Nal Kalak to warlordism, the Rim Free Zone to anarcho-capitalists and especially dogmatic Rothbardians, and every single-system backwater polity ever to humanists and Luddites. (Feel free to select whichever combination of acknowledgement and/or ignorance will produce the spin you want on my personal opinions.)
Imperial political scientists clionomists have a The Reason You Suck speech ready for all of these, and by extension, for just about everybody on Earth with a political opinion at all. Which is appropriate, since by and large, that everybody has a loud and profoundly ignorant reality-immune political opinion is one of the major reasons why, to steal a perfectly quote, it would be their considered opinion that “All you of Earth are idiots!“
Kuramesu Drift: A modestly-sized modular drift-habitat located in the Omane (First Expanses) System, at the Solar-Diageri (Omane IV) trailing libration point.
Kuramesu Drift is an independent drift, unaffiliated with any of the polities or law providers of Omane Actual, the freesoil world with which it shares a system. Rather, Kuramesu Drift is chartered to the Microstatic Commission, providing a data haven and negotiation space for the Worlds’ many micronations and small freeholds to play politics out from under the eyes of their much larger cousins. Omane, one link outside the Empire’s border, protected from intimidation by other polities by its position in an isolated loop route only accessible by passing through an Imperial border world – Ionai (First Expanses) – and yet only 13 links from the Conclave Drift by optimal routing, is essentially perfect for these purposes.
Naturally, Kuramesu Drift has a very high density of spies per capita. In fact, gentle reader, you may find it easiest to assume that everyone not an actual delegate or you, yourself, is a spy for someone.
The drift is, however, well worth visiting for reasons other than espionage. The lifestyles of even minor notables ensure that Kuramesu Drift is blessed with excellent shopping districts, banking facilities, and cultural events, including a spintronic symphony orchestra, tholin baths, and microgravity ballet, and the Commission offsets the running costs of the Drift by renting out their facilities to a variety of conferences (especially those seeing an advantage in a location near, but not within, the Empire) and conventions when they are not otherwise in use.
Meanwhile, the Agent’s Rest offers one of the finest polyspecific selections of liquors and other hedonics to be found in the central Worlds. Just don’t ask for a double – everyone’s heard that one already.
– Leyness’s Worlds: Guide to the Ecumene
The Strategist: Much like the long lifespans and engineered genius tends to turn those with a socially focused qalasír into The Chessmaster, they tend to turn those with a military/strategic focus into The Strategist. (Dúréníän would approve. So would Grand Admiral Thrawn.) Can, on occasion, verge on Mary Tzu – being optimized with trans/postsophont technology, they really are that good.
The remass tank is out. With the LOX tank pulled and the rest of the life-support machinery junked, pulling a few bulkhead panels let me into the for’ard maintenance compartment, and thanks to a bit of forethought on the parts of the designers, the fill, drain, and press connectors are all at the ends, so I only had to crawlspace it to unhook the retaining clamps.
Also, Athneél be praised standing, it’s not only holding pressure, but the manual gauges read full-and-high, and still read full-and-high now I’ve kicked and cursed the damn thing out of the cutter, out of the bay, and into free space. Where it’s tethered – it’s the biggest part of the candle, so it might as well be in position.
The first part of the structure is easy enough; there are secondary beams spilling out all over the aft end of this hulk. I can see half-a-dozen from here long enough – well, I’m going to cut four a little longer than the tank, for a start, then weld them onto the sides where the retaining clamps were. That’ll let it stand up to thrust.
If I was building this to last, I’d need to assemble a thrust frame at one end to mount the drives, and another frame opposite it to keep mass off the fuel tank structure when under thrust. As it is, air’s too short to muck about with that, and I do have a hullcutter.
So I’m going to slice two big chunks of hull plating out of the sides of the landing bay, instead. They’re solid enough to do the job, once the beams are bonded to them at each end, and should also help keep the drive radiation from frying me too badly.
I hope.