starship
So, let’s now turn to the topic of sensors, and what exactly is in that CilmĂnár Spaceworks AE-35 “standard navigational sensor suite” built into the majority of current-era starships. There are two primary groups of sensors incorporated into such a suite, referred to as “navigational” and “tactical” – even on
trope-a-day
You Can’t Fight Fate: According to everything known about temporal mechanics, the universe is a block universe – which is to say, while local causality violations are possible (effects can, sometimes, precede causes), global causality violations are not (effects, nonetheless, always have causes). Or to put it another way, while
Kalantha-class free trader
FLIGHT OPERATIONS MANUAL COLD START (PAYLOAD SECTION) CHECKLIST 41-1115 KALANTHA-CLASS FREE TRADER: FLIGHTS 14-22 Islien Yards Flight Dynamics Division Issue 04 APPROVED FOR RELEASE PANEL GLOSSARY CCMS   Flight Commander’s station, communications panel. CINF     Flight Commander’s station, overhead computer panel. CKEY     Flight Commander’s station, computer interface. EAUX    Flight
trope-a-day
Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale: Okay, well, first, disclaimer. I am bound to screw something up here, eventually. Despite my best intentions and dedication to at least trying to run the numbers before committing myself to paper, to err is human, and indeed, to err is probably sophont.
trope-a-day
Science Is Bad:Â Averted, and widely and publically mocked any time someone might consider suggesting it.
Eupraxic Order of Reason
There are two, among those organizations known universally in the Empire, that traditionally wear full-face-hiding masks. The first of these is the Masked Order of the Unnamed, eikone of seals, secrets, and mysteries. The intrigants who serve the Unnamed wear masks of the same serene, beautiful face, anonymous within their
Circle of Silken Flowers
School of Seduction: The Circle of Silken Flowers (see: Platonic Prostitution, Band of Brothels) has its Velvet Academies (which concentrate just as hard on the arts of the salon and many other required topics, of course), and so forth. Â Rather classier, I suspect, than most of the examples given; after
meta
So, I’m a little thrown off my stride today by receiving another e-mail from a reader who is of the opinion that, while okay, maybe not message fiction, but that I need to be more socially conscious in my writing, perhaps a bit less impractically utopian and touching on/
trope-a-day
Scavenger World: Leaving aside companies like Probable Technologies, ICC and their professional xenoarchaeology-for-profit efforts, this is subverted; while there are any number of vultures happy to pick over cemetery worlds to loot them of recoverable goods or materials, or indeed of waiting around worlds about to become such worlds (i.
hospitality
Many of the settlers of Talentar, who would later become dirt farmers and ecopoetic line techs, were drawn from rural areas of Eliéra, seeing an opportunity to apply their sophisticated knowledge of modern agriculture and silviculture to the problems of making this new world blossom. It is from these settlers
trope-a-day
Scars Are Forever: Averted. The self-repair systems of the natural immortals – and included in just about all commercial immortagens – don’t do scarring. No point in living forever if you can break down by degrees, after all. There’s actually a minor cosmetic-medicine industry in arranging for people who want
meta
Reminded of it by seeing it posted on Google+ today, here’s something I’d been meaning to post to the “relevant-to-our-interests” section for a while: the nearest Earth equivalent to one of the old space shanties enjoyed, no doubt, by old spacers and spacehands of the Imperial Merchant Navy